“A Religious Event”
Although a suspect in the presidential assassination was arrested within ninety minutes of the shooting and the physical evidence seemed overwhelming, Ruby’s Sunday murder of Oswald stimulated many suspicions and rumors. In the days following Oswald’s death, unfounded but spectacular stories of left-wing and right-wing plots, the complicity of Cuban and Soviet leaders, even speculation about Lyndon Johnson hatching a plan to seize the presidency, swept the country. A Gallup poll taken a week after the assassination showed that only 29 percent of Americans believed that Oswald alone killed JFK.1
To quell the unchecked speculation, government officials announced public investigations into the assassination. On the first business day after the murder, Monday, November 25, Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr declared that Texas would hold a public court of inquiry. With the help of the FBI, Carr planned to question primarily local witnesses and file his findings with a federal commission.2
Lyndon Johnson tentatively approved the Texas commission in conversations with Carr. Since the crime had happened in Dallas, the Carr panel was to include only Texans and no federal officials. Johnson had also decided to release the FBI’s initial report on the assassination the day it was finished, though it would contain raw and largely unsubstantiated data. Nicholas Katzenbach, acting attorney general while Robert Kennedy mourned with his family, worked feverishly behind the scenes to change LBJ’s mind and return control of the investigation to Washington.
The next day, Tuesday, Congress jumped in. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, to widespread bipartisan support, suggested the Senate Judiciary Committee examine the case. By Wednesday, the House vied for the limelight when Congressman Charles Goodell of New York proposed that a joint committee of senators and congressmen investigate the assassination.
Lyndon Johnson silently abandoned his support for the Texas commission and intervened on Friday, November 29, with Executive Order No. 11130, which created a fact-finding panel he hoped would have a “national mandate.”3 The implications of the investigation were far-reaching. There was even a possibility of war if either Cuba or the Soviet Union was found to have sponsored JFK’s death, and Johnson appointed a seven-man panel of distinguished public servants he thought had unimpeachable credentials. Seventy-two-year-old Earl Warren, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was chosen as chairman.*
When Katzenbach and solicitor general Archibald Cox first approached Warren to head the federal panel, he refused. Johnson summoned Warren for a private meeting. “He said there had been wild rumors,” recalled Warren, “and that there was the international situation to think of. He said he had just talked to Dean Rusk, who was concerned, and he also mentioned the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had told him how many millions of people would be killed in an atomic war. The only way to dispel these rumors, he said, was to have an independent and responsible commission, and that there was no one to head it except the highest judicial officer in the country. I told him how I felt. He said that if the public became aroused against Castro and Khrushchev there might be war.
“‘You’ve been in uniform before,’ he said, ‘and if I asked you, you would put on the uniform again for your country.’
“‘I said, ‘Of, course.’
“‘This is more important than that,’ he said.
“‘If you’re putting it like that,’ I said, ‘I can’t say no.’”4
Of the six other panelists, two were ranking senators, John Sherman Cooper, a Kentucky Republican, and Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat. Two were senior House representatives: Congressman Hale Boggs, a Louisiana Democrat and the majority whip, and Gerald Ford, a Michigan Republican. The final members were prominent attorneys—John J. McCloy, former president of the World Bank and high commissioner of Germany after World War II, and Allen Dulles, the CIA’s former spymaster. The members and their mandate were so prestigious that other proposed state and federal investigations promptly gave way to the presidential panel.
The Commission’s powers were broad and virtually unprecedented. It had subpoena power, as well as the right to grant immunity to compel testimony otherwise protected under the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination article. All federal and state agencies were ordered to comply fully with its requests. The Commission’s general counsel was former U.S. solicitor general J. Lee Rankin, and fourteen lawyers comprised a legal staff; under his supervision. There were also twelve investigators. The legal staff divided the case into five general subjects: the assassination’s basic facts; the identity of the assassin; his background and motives; possible conspiracy; and Oswald’s death. The staff attorneys determined the facts and were responsible for draft findings. Major disputes were brought to the attention of the seven commissioners.
The Warren Commission had its first meeting on December 5, 1963, only two weeks after the assassination, and four days later the FBI presented its five-volume report that summarized the Bureau’s preliminary findings.5 Marina Oswald, the first witness, appeared on February 3, 1964. The Commission and its staff took testimony from 552 witnesses during the next six months.* Warren was so sensitive to possible government abuse that he established strict rules for the questioning of witnesses, including no private interrogations without a stenographer present and no polygraphs. He later regretted that he agreed to Ruby’s insistent pleas for the test, which he referred to as “Big Brother paraphernalia.”
The FBI’s field investigation was, by itself, enormous. It conducted some 25,000 interviews and submitted over 2,300 investigative reports, totaling more than 25,000 pages.6 At the same time, the Secret Service conducted another 1,500 interviews and submitted 800 reports. Though many critics of the Warren Commission acknowledge that a mammoth examination was accomplished in a relatively brief period, they charge the Commission favored witnesses and documents that supported its early conclusion that Oswald alone killed the President. Yet this view underestimates the independence the legal staff had within the Commission’s hierarchy. The staff could call any witness it wanted, and none of its more than 400 requests were ever denied by the commissioners.7
The original deadline of June 30, 1964, turned out to be impractical. LBJ, fearful that rumors might start that he had political reasons for delaying the report, wanted the work finished before the presidential nominating conventions. Warren told the other members, in a January 21 executive session, that it “would be very bad for the country to have this thing discussed” during the coming campaign.8 Tempers often flared during the final months as Warren pushed the probe at a pace that meant fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, for the legal staff. The 888-page final report was released three months late, on September 24, 1964.
Although the Commission had done an extraordinary job of marshaling information and presenting it in a cohesive and organized manner, in only ten months it was not possible to delve into many issues that would later come to the forefront as nagging and persistent problems. Since it was so limited in manpower, the Commission was almost entirely dependent on agencies such as the FBI to conduct the actual investigation. Rankin had referred to “tender spots,” potential embarrassments to the FBI or CIA that might hinder the sharing of information. J. Edgar Hoover was convinced within days of the assassination that Oswald alone had killed Kennedy. He knew, of course, that if Oswald was part of a conspiracy, the Bureau’s reputation would suffer for not having uncovered the plot prior to JFK’s trip to Dallas. Because of his iron-clad control over the Bureau, his feelings on the case colored the work the field agents did. Since Hoover thought the answer to the assassination was straightforward, he believed the Warren Commission could only cause problems by delving into many other areas. The FBI did not treat the Commission as its partner in search of the truth.
“I don’t have any doubt that the FBI viewed the Commission the same way they later viewed civilians requesting documents,” says James Lesar, the nation’s leading attorney in pursuing assassination-related documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The FBI even created files on the Commission’s staff members.* Richard Helms [former CIA director] later admitted that he only told the Warren Commission something if they asked for it. “I am sure the Bureau had the same attitude,” says Lesar. “Basically, any request that comes in from a government commission or a citizen, the Bureau looks at very carefully to see if they can avoid responding. The relationship between the Commission and the Bureau was partly adversarial, because no one wanted to bring that tension out into the open. The Commission gave in to the FBI. In the executive sessions, they said they were going to investigate Hoover, but they knew they wouldn’t.”9
The FBI’s early insistence that Oswald was the lone assassin was actually a sore point with the Commission’s staff. On January 22, 1964, Lee Rankin complained to the commissioners, “They [the FBI] would have us fold up and quit.… They found the man [Oswald]. There is nothing more to do. The Commission supports their conclusions, and we can go home and that is the end of it.”10
The FBI, anxious to downplay its contacts with Oswald, withheld information from the Commission, including Agent James Hosty’s receipt of a note from Oswald. It also deleted Hosty’s name, address, and telephone number, which were in Oswald’s address book, when the information was sent to the Commission staff. The CIA withheld information as well, most critically that the Agency and the mafia had embarked on a joint effort to kill Fidel Castro.
“It’s a serious point,” says former staff lawyer Burt Griffin, now a judge. “I don’t know if anyone will ever get the answer. I am not convinced, as I look back on it now, that Lee Rankin did not know about the CIA conspiracies to kill Castro. I don’t have any evidence, but as I look back on the failure to bring us together to speculate, he never encouraged us to think speculatively, and the way Rankin operated with his door always closed, maybe he knew something and it was this secret. Only Johnson, obviously, the Chief Justice, Allen Dulles, and Bobby Kennedy knew about the CIA plots against Castro. Its disclosure would have had very important implications. It might have allowed us to say something reasonably definitive about Oswald’s motive. It would have put a new dimension on his Cuban activities and opened new areas of exploration. The fact that we could not come up with a motive for Oswald was a great weakness in the report.”11
CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite summarized the concern of many when he noted that the FBI and CIA, by withholding information that later became public, “weakened the credibility of the Warren Report.”12 But beyond the problems caused by its tug-of-war with the investigative branches, the Commission created many of its own difficulties. At the time, the Commission wanted to use the autopsy photos and X rays as the best evidence of how the President was shot, but the Kennedy family refused to release them. Warren feared that if the Commission had the photos, they might be leaked to the press, and as a result he was hesitant to pressure Robert Kennedy on the matter. But Howard Willens, a staff attorney, had worked for Robert Kennedy and persisted to obtain them. In June 1964, RFK allowed only Warren and Rankin to review them. In his memoirs, Warren wrote, “[T]hey were so horrible that I could not sleep well for nights.” None of the other commissioners or staff ever saw the autopsy photographs or X rays, nor did the panel utilize independent forensics experts.* Reproduced in the final report are schematic drawings of the President’s neck and head wounds, but both were made by an artist who was unfamiliar with the autopsy and never saw the photographs. The artist’s sketches were based upon Drs. Humes and Boswell’s original measurements of the wounds.13 Those drawings were mistaken in the placement of both entry wounds, and that later developed into a significant issue for the conspiracy press. 14†
In other areas, the Commission’s work seemed to stop just short of thoroughness. In replicating the firing of the Carcano, and figuring trajectory angles, the Commission used FBI tests that had a platform at the incorrect height when compared to the sixth floor of the Book Depository. The tests also calculated the minimum firing time and accuracy by shooting at stationary targets as opposed to a moving one such as Oswald had faced.
The Commission did not have the technology in 1964 to positively establish the single-bullet theory. But unless one bullet caused the wounds to both Governor Connally and President Kennedy, the Commission could not figure out how Oswald could have fired the three shots within the approximately five seconds they mistakenly allotted to him. Though advances in neutron activation and photographic and computer techniques now confirm that the theory is correct, the Commission had no way of being certain the single bullet was viable. The members were almost evenly split in their feelings about the theory, and Senator Russell threatened not to sign a final report that absolutely concluded the single bullet was correct.15* They fought over the right adjective to use to describe the probability that the single bullet was right. McCloy suggested “persuasive” evidence, while Russell wanted “credible” evidence, and Ford pushed for “compelling.”16 The Warren Commission Report settled on “There is very persuasive evidence.” This type of compromise opened more doors to critics.
Few of the witnesses who contradicted the official version of events testified before the Commission. If they had been examined, their testimony would have been explainable, but because the Commission ignored them, critics had ammunition for future claims of deliberate omission. Also, the Commission underplayed Jack Ruby’s underworld associations and did not effectively portray him as the unbalanced and volatile person he was, leaving itself open to criticism that it had failed to pursue the Ruby clues because it feared where those might lead.
Since all the commissioners had full-time careers that entailed substantial responsibilities, they could only spend part of their time at the hearings. Senator Russell had the poorest attendance record, hearing only 6 percent of the testimony. Only three of the seven commissioners heard more than half the testimony.17
But the most controversial aspect of the Commission’s work may be its conclusion about the possibility of any conspiracy. The final report stated, “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.”18
“There is no question Oswald was the shooter, and Oswald was the lone shooter,” says former staff lawyer Burt Griffin. “We were wrong, in my opinion, in issuing the statement that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. That was the wrong statement. I frankly was very critical of using that language. There is plenty of evidence in the testimony and the documents that could lead a reasonable person to pursue a conspiracy theory. There is nothing that then establishes a conspiracy theory, but there is plenty there that would allow a reasonable person to speculate about a conspiracy theory. Statements like that sweeping ‘no conspiracy’ one does a disservice to our overall work. I think I was in a minority of one on that statement.”19
Despite its shortcomings, early reviews in the United States generally lavished praise on the Warren Report. In Europe, however, where political conspiracies and government changeovers by violence are an integral part of much longer histories, the Commission’s work was viewed as the official, sanitized version. Many leading European commentators questioned its conclusions without ever reading the report.
In the U.S., the honeymoon for critical acceptance was short-lived. By the time the Warren Commission published its report in September 1964, a network of amateur sleuths was prepared to check its accuracy against the research they had compiled since the day of the murder. An eclectic mixture of people across the country, many of whom were admitted leftists and were suspicious that a Communist was blamed for the murder in a right-wing city, had independently begun collecting everything printed on the subject. They also interviewed eyewitnesses and others connected to the case. Each soon carved out a specialty. As they heard about one another, some began sharing information and ideas. Mary Ferrell, a Dallas legal secretary, started a card file on Oswald’s background. Raymond Marcus, who ran a small retail sign business, began a newspaper file about the direction of the bullets. Vincent Salandria, a Philadelphia lawyer, collected newspaper articles that discussed police agencies that might have been involved in the assassination. Marjorie Field, the wife of a Beverly Hills stockbroker, saved everything that appeared in The New York Times. Josiah Thompson, an assistant philosophy professor specializing in the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, began studying ballistics and firearms to better understand what had happened in Dealey Plaza. Shirley Martin, an Oklahoma housewife, drove to Dallas, with her four children, to interview witnesses. Sylvia Meagher, an administrator at the World Health Organization, started a clipping file on anything that contradicted the Dallas police’s version. Lillian Castellano, a Los Angeles bookkeeper, pursued the government and media with her belief that the President was shot from the front by an assassin hidden in a storm drain near the car. David Lifton, a Los Angeles student, focused on the foliage at Dealey Plaza, who hid in it, and whether it was all real or moved in as part of the plot.
Professor Josiah Thompson said their work was an “obsession” and that “there’s a fantastic way in which the assassination becomes a religious event. There are relics, and scriptures, and even a holy scene—the killing ground. People make pilgrimages to it.”20 This burgeoning amateur network supplied the original basis for challenging the Warren Report. These researchers not only shared their work with each other but, anxious to gain a public hearing for their findings, provided it freely to journalists and other professionals.
The earliest books focused on apparent contradictions and unanswered questions in the report, such as the misidentification of the rifle found at the Depository as a Mauser instead of a Mannlicher-Carcano, or whether the man photographed standing in the doorway of the Depository during the assassination was Lee Oswald or his co-worker Billy Lovelady. Although the issues raised now seem rudimentary, they were the first to undermine the authority the press had bestowed on the Warren Commission.
None of the early critics created a cogent alternate account to compare to the one set forth of Oswald acting alone. The books accomplished their goals if they merely raised doubts about the official version. Their view was that a cover-up of key information had taken place, by the FBI, the CIA, or others in the federal government, and the general tenor was that the extreme right had probably hatched the plot. The rumors of Soviet or Cuban complicity were never popular with the critics, since they figured it made no sense for the U.S. government to cover up evidence if it pointed to the guilt of Communist regimes. Many of the books acknowledged they did not have the answers, and called for a new investigation.
In its own reexamination of the case in the late 1970s, the House Select Committee investigated the first generation of critics and found their work wanting in terms of fairness and accuracy. Robert Blakey, the Select Committee’s chief counsel, said that many early critics “had special axes to grind. As a result of our investigation, the Committee found that ‘criticism leveled at the Commission … [was] often biased, unfair and inaccurate … [and] … the prevailing opinion of the Commission’s performance was undeserved.’”21
Thomas Buchanan, an American Communist living in Europe, wrote Who Killed Kennedy? based on press accounts, and published it before the Warren Report was even in print.22 The FBI, which studied Buchanan’s work, concluded he was responsible for “false statements, innuendoes, incorrect journalism, misinformation, and … false journalism,” and that his book stated as facts items “which the Commission’s investigation has disproved completely.”23 A German leftist, Joachim Joesten, published a vitriolic book also based on newspaper accounts, Oswald: Assassin or Fall-guy?, but its questions were answered when the Commission’s report was released.24
In 1966, Harold Weisberg published Whitewash, the first in-depth attack on the Warren Report.25 Weisberg, who later published another five books on the case, was a former Senate investigator who had been dismissed for possibly leaking information to the press. Robert Blakey said his “rhetoric was so obscure, his arguments so dependent on accusation rather than logic, the effect of [his] work was to make complex issues confusing.”26
That same year, the first major commercial success for a Commission critic was Rush to Judgment, by New York attorney Mark Lane.27 Dan Rather, of CBS, dubbed Lane “the gadfly of the Warren Commission,” but Governor John Connally called him a “journalistic scavenger.”28 Lane, a former New York State legislator associated with some prominent left-wing causes, had represented Marguerite Oswald. He unsuccessfully argued with the Commission to be allowed to represent the deceased Oswald at the hearings and to be permitted to cross-examine the witnesses who appeared. Reportedly, Rush to Judgment has sold more than a million copies in various editions.
Lane’s attack on the Commission was an admitted brief for the defense by a skilled advocate. Using only the evidence that buttressed his arguments, he persuasively argued that the Commission’s work was seriously flawed. And while he was careful in his book about whom he accused and about the scope of the conspiracy he said he had discovered, in his dozens of college lectures and radio and television appearances he went much further, charging complicity at the highest levels of government. The Select Committee concluded: “Lane was willing to advocate conspiracy theories … [without checking] them, [and his] … conduct resulted in public [misperception … ].” Blakey said he was “the best example of a critic who fit the Committee’s ‘unfair and inaccurate’ description …”29 Walter Cronkite, in a four-part 1967 CBS documentary, concluded there were a number of examples in Lane’s work of “lifting remarks out of context to support his theories. Perhaps the most charitable explanation is that Mark Lane still considers himself a defense attorney … [whose] duty is not to abstract truth but to his client [Oswald].”30*
A rash of books appeared on the heels of Lane’s success. Philosophy professor Richard Popkin, in The Second Oswald, was the first to use mistaken sightings of Oswald to develop the theory of an imposter.31 Raymond Marcus, the owner of the retail sign business, published The Bastard Bullet, an attack on the single-bullet theory.32 Leo Sauvage, a professional journalist, wrote The Oswald Affair, which raised more questions about the Commission’s evidence-gathering.33 In his self-published Forgive My Grief, Penn Jones, Jr., the editor of a small Texas newspaper, introduced the issue of “critical” witnesses who were supposedly dying mysteriously.34*
Despite their differences, those books were uniformly virulent attacks on the Warren Commission, and their advocacy often diminished their effectiveness. At their best, the critics had only exposed the Commission as incompetent, but they had not established it was wrong in its conclusions.
1966 also saw the publication of Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest, which was originally his master’s thesis at Cornell.35 Temperate in tone, it was a careful study of the inner workings of the Commission. Relying on fresh documents, as well as interviews with five of the commissioners and twelve members of the legal staff, Epstein charged the Commission had sought the “political truth” rather than the factual truth about the case. A “central question” that bothered Epstein was that the FBI’s report to the commissioners indicated the bullet that struck the President in the neck/shoulder only penetrated a short distance and did not exit, whereas the autopsy and the Commission concluded that it was the single bullet that went on to wound Connally. When Epstein raised the problem, it appeared valid since the autopsy photos and X rays were still locked away. It was an issue that festered until the House Select Committee’s forensics panel reviewed all the autopsy X rays and photographs and confirmed that the FBI report was simply mistaken.
Since Epstein had academic credentials, appeared to make an objective examination, and drew moderate conclusions, his book was critically accepted as an important one.† Inquest prompted the mainstream press to reexamine its favorable conclusions about the Warren Report. As a result, a series of critical articles through 1966 and 1967 cast further doubt on the Commission’s credibility.36
Authors like Lane and Epstein were assisted by an informal alliance of self-appointed researchers, whom writer Calvin Trillin dubbed “the buffs” in a 1967 New Yorker article.37 “You can compare this to a company that has a public relations program,” said David Lifton in 1967, “and a research and development program. The two puncture points at the top—what gets public notice—are Lane’s book and Epstein’s book. The ‘R&D’ program is being done by a bunch of amateurs.”38 David Lifton and Marjorie Field had provided Buchanan material for his book. Shirley Martin had sent copies of her taped interviews to Lane. Sylvia Mea-gher did the index for Inquest, and reviewed Sauvage’s book.
There was no equivalent of the conspiracy network to support the Warren Report. When the Commission disbanded, the members failed to arrange to defend their work or answer questions. Although a few books were published in support of the report, they had little impact in slowing the critical onslaught. Gerald Ford’s Portrait of the Assassin was the first pro-Commission book, published in 1965.39 However, it consisted largely of reprints of testimony from the Commission’s volumes and did not answer any of the early critiques. By 1967, Charles Roberts, in The Truth About the Assassination; Richard Lewis, in The Scavengers; and John Sparrow, in After the Assassination, wrote slim volumes that contributed little new information about the case; Lewis’s book was largely a hard personal attack on the critics themselves and their motivation.*
Those pro-Warren Commission writers felt compelled to defend almost everything the Commission had done, and therefore weakened their own effectiveness. But they were overshadowed in 1967 by the publication of two significant books, both written by graduates of the buff network, that added to the growing mistrust of the Commission. In Six Seconds in Dallas, Josiah Thompson tried to determine what happened at Dealey Plaza by focusing on ballistics, trajectory angles, medical evidence, and eyewitness testimony. Thompson had an advantage since he was the first conspiracy writer who had studied the original Zapruder film, and his book was the first to include drawings of critical frames.* His book focused exclusively on how the assassination of the President physically happened, and he did not bother with other issues. Ruby was mentioned only once and Tippit not at all. Thompson concluded there was a cross-fire in Dealey Plaza from shooters perched in the Book Depository, on the grassy knoll, and in the Records Building on Houston Street.
The second book that further damaged the Commission was Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact.40 Meagher probably knew the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission hearings and exhibits better than any other critic. A year earlier, she had published an index to all twenty-six volumes. It was received as an important contribution for research since the volumes originally had only a name index, making it almost impossible to work effectively with the more than 1 million-plus words.* Her book concentrated on any testimony or exhibits that raised doubts about the final report. Meagher was a committed leftist, and her politics are clear throughout the book. She admitted that when JFK’s death was announced, and before Oswald was arrested, she derisively told her co-workers, “Don’t worry … you’ll see, it was a Communist who did it.” When Oswald was taken into custody and she heard of his pro-Castro activities and his Russian wife, she knew he was “framed.” In Accessories, she charged that large numbers of the Dallas police were members of “right-wing extremist organizations,” and spoke derisively of the forces behind the assassination, including “American Nazi thugs.”41 Meagher fueled the speculation about Penn Jones’s list of mystery deaths by stating “the witnesses appear to be dying like flies.” Her invective about the Commission was as harsh as that of anyone since Lane’s Rush to Judgment.
Subsequent events, however, had significant impact on the development of the post-Warren Commission review of the assassination. On July 4, 1967, Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act (FOIA). It was revolutionary legislation that allowed private citizens to apply for the release of federal government files, even including those maintained by the FBI, CIA, and other sensitive organizations. The government agencies could only refuse to release the documents if they fell under privacy or security exemptions that were set forth in the law. Since its inception, and a subsequent amendment in 1974, over a million pages of documents have been released about the Kennedy assassination. However, the federal agencies were initially very reluctant to comply with FOIA, and researchers were often forced to resort to lawsuits to win the release of even the simplest documents.
“I think the FBI’s attitude was that they hated the Freedom of Information Act from the very beginning,” says James Lesar, whose pro bono lawsuits for documents relating to the Kennedy case, many on behalf of Harold Weisberg, have been responsible for prying more sensitive material out of the government than those of anyone else. “The FBI was originally so against the idea of FOIA that it classified early FOIA requestors as a ‘100 file,’ a domestic subversive. They also tried to make the process unpleasant. One of the little things they did at first was to provide you with atrocious copies. They would wait for the copy machine to run low or something, and provide terrible copies. But they eventually wearied of that.”
The FBI was repeatedly unmasked for lying to those who filed FOIA requests. “For instance,” Lesar recalls, “one ploy was that they said they had to search all their files page by page, because they had no index. And all the while they had a 48,000-card index in the Dallas field office. Technically, FBI headquarters [in Washington] didn’t have the index.*
“In other instances, they would say there wasn’t anything in the field offices that wasn’t also kept in headquarters, that the field offices just had duplicates of what was in headquarters. That’s been proven false in several cases. The originating field office can maintain as much as four times as many documents as headquarters.”
The FBI was not alone in its dislike of FOIA. “The CIA, NSA, military intelligence,” says Lesar, “were all very close to the FBI in their distaste for FOIA. However, they have much better tools to fight FOIA requests, because they have national security and the compromise of sensitive sources as strong reasons for withholding information.”
The attitude of government agencies toward FOIA prompted suspicion about motives, especially since researchers sometimes had to fight for apparently innocuous documents. “The problem is that the FBI has generally fought everything to the hilt, even if nobody could see any relevancy to it,” says James Lesar. “Sometimes, they do it in subjects at which there is nothing at stake.”42 Harold Weisberg was in litigation with the FBI for over a decade regarding the release of the spectrographic tests conducted on the curbstone at Dealey Plaza that was chipped by a bullet fragment. Although the Warren Commission discussed and relied on the results of the Bureau’s spectrographic test in its final report, the FBI steadfastly refused to give Weisberg the underlying data. To many, that obstinacy added to the growing public perception that the government had something to hide in the Kennedy case. But to Lesar it does not necessarily indicate cover-up as much as the bureaucratic mindset for agencies like the FBI. “The basic overall strategy,” says Lesar, “assuming there is one, is that the FBI is trying to drive up the cost of getting information, making it so difficult that you don’t want to do it again. I tend to think it’s part of their overall litigation strategy. At times, they do it for political reasons, but other times it is part of their effort to resist disclosure, no matter what is being requested. Government officials seem to live in constant terror. In general, the government’s only interest in its records occurs when somebody asks for them, and at that point they go into paralysis. They suspect that somewhere there must be something that spells trouble. It’s just part of their psychology. It’s built into them.”
Nevertheless, the Freedom of Information Act gave added impetus to the effort to extend the examination into the assassination. In spite of the difficulties encountered by those using FOIA, the momentum against the Warren Commission led to the introduction in 1966 of a congressional resolution to reexamine the case.43 Yet the passage of FOIA and the new resolution were overshadowed by another event that had started in July 1966, which temporarily electrified the critics and the nation. Jim Garrison, the flamboyant New Orleans district attorney, convinced there were suspects in his city who had been part of a conspiracy to kill JFK, had launched the first official investigation into the assassination since the Warren Commission.
* The panel’s official name was The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. However, almost immediately it was referred to as the Warren Commission.
* Only 94 personally appeared before any commissioners. The largest number, 395, were questioned by the legal staff; 61 supplied affidavits; and 2 gave statements (WR, p. xiii).
* The extent to which the FBI was ready to investigate staff members is apparent in the case of Norman Redlich, a New York University law professor who, after Rankin, was the senior attorney on the legal staff. In February 1964, Redlich was publicly assailed for his membership on a civil-liberties panel and for having co-authored an article with a Communist sympathizer. Actually, Redlich had never worked with the other author, but a magazine had merged their two separate articles together and given them joint credit. Yet the FBI still conducted a full field investigation of Redlich, including interviews with his vacation neighbors in Vermont, the elevator operators in his New York apartment building, and even the obstetrician who had delivered him.
* The Commission did call in outside experts for both ballistics and fingerprints.
† In 1967, former commissioner John McCloy told CBS News, “I think that if there’s one thing that I would do over again, I would insist on those photographs and the X rays having been produced before us. In the one respect, and only one respect there, I think we were perhaps a little oversensitive to what we understood as the sensitivities of the Kennedy family against the production of colored photographs of the body” (“The Warren Report,” CBS News, Part IV, June 28, 1967).
* The three commissioners who had the most difficulty with the single-bullet theory, Russell, Cooper, and Boggs, were also the three who had the least contact with the probe, attending on average only 25 percent of the hearings among them.
* Harold Weisberg believes Lane is interested only in self-promotion and money, and says that Lane largely “cribbed” from his book Whitewash. Assassination researcher David Wrone told the author, “I took every footnote in his Rush to Judgment. There’s 4,500 of them. I checked them against the text and so forth, for accuracy, fidelity, and all of that.… His chapter on Perrin, [Nancy] Perrin Rich, who was Jack Ruby’s nightclub lady—I mean, that’s a terrible one.… She gave three separate and distinct accounts of the assassination that are mutually exclusive. And he selected the one that fit his scenario. The woman is disturbed. This is an outrage. One time I was going to do a smallish book on Lane, but I thought, you don’t honor slime.”
Lane has said that if only 10 percent of his footnotes were accurate, that would still mean the Warren Commission had serious problems (January 25, 1967, UCLA Student Union address). Warren Commission staff attorney Wesley Liebeler said, “It’s just incredible to listen to him. He talks for five minutes, and it takes an hour to straighten out the record.”
* Popkin later claimed to have “cracked the case” by uncovering “zombie assassins” programmed by the CIA. Marcus became convinced he could see four to five assassins in the photos of foliage at Dealey Plaza Jones later self-published another three books on the assassination, as well as a conspiracy newsletter. He developed a theory that on November 21 in Dallas, Richard Nixon met with J. Edgar Hoover and oil tycoons as part of an “assassination staff” (Truth Letter, Vol. II, No. 11, February 15, 1970). Eventually, Jones argued that John Connally, President Johnson, the FBI, the CIA, the Dallas police, and the news media were all part of the conspiracy.
As for the supposed mystery deaths of key witnesses, it has become one of the entrenched myths in the Kennedy assassination. See Appendix B, “The Non-Mysterious ‘Mystery Deaths,’” for a detailed discussion.
† However, Epstein did have his critics. Six months after Epstein published Inquest, Professor A. L. Goodhart wrote an article in The Law Quarterly Review that cast doubts on the quality of his work. Wesley Liebeler, a staff attorney on the Commission, was infuriated that one of his internal memos that criticized “the writing of the report” was misused by Epstein to challenge the conclusions of the investigation. Joseph Ball, another staff attorney, said Epstein spoke to him only once, for ten minutes in a hotel lobby, and that the quotations attributed to him were “wrong or false.” The Goodhart article was also critical of Epstein for having taken remarks of general counsel J. Lee Rankin out of context to imply the Commission was ready to squash any evidence that Oswald had been an FBI informant.
* In later years, the most energetic defender of the Warren Commission was former staff counsel David Belin. Belin wrote two books defending the Commission’s work and its conclusion that Oswald acted alone. He also served on the Rockefeller Commission’s re-examination of the case in the 1970s. Belin, through many articles, lectures, and debates with critics, was virtually the lone public voice for the Commission by the 1980s.
* Critics other than Thompson had to rely on the poor reproductions of still frames of the Zapruder film in Volume XVIII of the hearings of the Warren Commission. Life magazine had purchased the exclusive rights to the film for a reported $150,000, and Thompson had worked as a consultant to Life on the film. He later tried to purchase the right to use reproductions of several frames in his book, but Life refused to sell him the rights, so he had drawings recreated from memory. Life sued for copyright infringement. In a landmark case, a New York court held that Thompson’s drawings were “fair use” of the film, and that he was even entitled to reproduce actual frames from the film in his paperback edition (Time Inc. v. Bernard Geis Associates, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of N.Y. No. 67 4736, appellate decision, 293 Federal Supplement 130). In 1975, Life gave the film back to the Zapruder family instead of donating it to the National Archives. As a result, the Zapruder family, in recent years represented by Henry Zapruder, Abraham’s son, has sold use rights for books, documentaries, and films at significant fees, sometimes for tens of thousands of dollars.
* Because it is the only index of its kind, Meagher’s has been used extensively, even by the House Select Committee in its reinvestigation. However, the author, in reading the twenty-six volumes, made a new card index and compared it to Meagher’s publication. Her subject index reflects her bias that Oswald was innocent. For instance, under her listing for Oswald’s potential for violence, Meagher does not find a reference until Volume II, and lists a total of only twenty-three incidents in the volumes that relate to that subject. The author, however, discovered the first supporting reference was in the first volume, and there were more than fifty citations just in the fifteen volumes of testimony. There are quite a few other examples in which Meagher’s index underplays evidence that incriminates Oswald but meticulously lists references that tend to exonerate him or raise doubts. That prejudice is critical since the index was marketed as a scholarly undertaking and is universally used by researchers. It means those who use the index are following each other in making the same mistakes and unwittingly ignoring evidence that buttresses the Commission’s conclusions.
* Researchers did not discover the existence of the card index until Weisberg sued for the Dallas field office files in 1978, and the index was disclosed in 1980 (Interview with James Lesar, December 1, 1992).