Authors: Oliver Stone,L. Fletcher Prouty
This meant that, somehow, someone had either caused the FBI to change the sequence or had caused
Life
magazine to arrange the pictures in an order to make it appear that the President’s head had been struck from the rear—from the direction of the lone gunman’s sixth-floor lair, and not from the front, where the actual killer had been.
This crafty reversal of the photographic sequence reveals that the case was carefully monitored by skilled agents who could control certain key activities of the bureaucracy (the military and Secret Service), the Warren Commission (including its staff assistants), and the news media, which have remained under this control since that date.
But perhaps the most incredible aspect in this plot to murder the President, to take over control of the administration of the U.S. government, and to cover up any related actions for as long as necessary, is the ability of the conspirators to reach as far as the chief justice of the United States in order to lend credence to the cover-up scenario.
Nothing reveals the extent of this control more than the following words from a January 27, 1964, meeting of the newly created Warren Commission. The members were discussing the problems they foresaw in having to deal with the Secret Service, the FBI, and the state of Texas, where the murder trial should have taken place.
John McCloy, a member of the commission, said of one such problem, “I can see the difficulty with that [differences between the Secret Service account and the report from the FBI], but on the other hand, I have a feeling we are so dependent upon them [the FBI and the Secret Service] for our facts.”
J. Lee Rankin, the commission’s general counsel, said, “Part of our difficulty in regard to it [the murder] is that they [the FBI and the Secret Service] have no problem. They have decided that it is Oswald who committed the assassination. They have decided that no one else was involved. They have decided.”
Sen. Richard B. Russell then said, “They have tried the case and reached a verdict on every aspect.”
Congressman Hale Boggs agreed: “You have put your finger on it.”
With reference to the thousands of “further inquiries” the commission would have to make, Rankin said he assumed the response from the FBI and Secret Service would be “Why do you want all that? It is clear.”
As you will recall, in the Hoover memorandum of November 29, 1963, the new President, Lyndon Johnson, said the murderer was Oswald. Hoover concurred and stated there were three shots. Those two men had decided. Setting up the Warren Commission after that was itself a mere gesture. The Warren Commission did not investigate what had happened; it merely took prepackaged, precooked data and published its prescribed report, as it had been ordered to do.
Going back to the meeting of the Warren Commission on January 27, Senator Russell gave his view of the probable response from the FBI and the Secret Service: “You have our statement. What else do you need?”
McCloy then offered his version of what the FBI and the Secret Service would say: “We know who killed Cock Robin.”
Those statements illustrate the troubled climate under which the members of the Warren Commission operated.
The commission was created by executive order on November 29, 1963, the same day Hoover and Johnson met to discuss how the investigation would be handled. A first get-together of the commission took place on December 5, 1963. Official hearings began on February 3, 1964. The commission received a five-volume report from the FBI on December 9, 1963, and another report from the Secret Service on December 20, 1963.
Of particular interest is the fact that during the November 29 meeting between President Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, Johnson told his good friend and longtime neighbor that, in Hoover’s words, “he wanted to get by just with my [Hoover’s] file and my report.”
An important result of the announcement of the formation of the Warren Commission was the derailing of a planned independent congressional investigation of the assassination. Johnson told Hoover on November 29 that he wanted to “tell the House and Senate not to go ahead with the investigation.”
Waggoner Carr, the Texas attorney general, and Preston Smith, the lieutenant governor of Texas, were two of Johnson’s first visitors after he became President. The visit occurred on November 24. It would be interesting to know whether they decided then not to hold a trial for the murder of Kennedy, even though it was committed in Texas. It should be noted that at almost the exact time Johnson, Carr, and Smith were conferring in the White House, Jack Ruby (Rubenstein) shot Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas Police Department headquarters, a murder shown on nationwide TV.
According to Hoover, in the November 29, 1963, memorandum, the Dallas “chief of police admits he moved Oswald in the morning as a convenience and at the request of motion picture [television] people who wanted daylight.”
Only essential police and the TV crews were permitted at headquarters—yet somehow Jack Ruby gained entrance. Hoover’s words in the memorandum about this tense scene are important:
[Ruby]. . . knew all of the police officers in the white-light district. . . that is how I think he got into police headquarters. I said [to Johnson] if they [police] ever made any move, the pictures did not show it, even when they saw him [Ruby] approach and he got right up to Oswald’s stomach; that neither officer on either side made any effort to grab Rubenstein—not until after the pistol was fired.
This is no place to examine all of the evidence available of this skillfully managed killing of a President, but it may be clear from the examples provided here that the Warren Commission’s “findings” would be more accurately labeled a “contrived scenario.”
If we have come to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was made the “patsy” for the murder of the President, we must consider again the atmosphere under which the men on the Warren Commission operated. They had been selected and appointed by the President, after a discussion with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
During that discussion, as related in Hoover’s November 29, 1963, memorandum, Johnson stated, “I [Hoover] was more than head of the FBI—I was his brother and personal friend. . . he did want to have my thoughts on the matter to advocate as his own opinion.”
The commission members were appointed immediately following this Johnson-Hoover conversation—the very same day, as a matter of fact. It was said that they had a clear charter to investigate and to solve this terrible crime. The commission was authorized by Congress to use subpoena powers. The members, all listed here, were experienced in the pathways of supergovernment:
Chief Justice Earl Warren; former Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles; Congressman (later President) Gerald R. Ford; Congressman Hale Boggs (who later mysteriously disappeared in a light-plane crash in Alaska); Sen. Richard B. Russell; Sen. John Sherman Cooper; John J. McCloy, former president of the World Bank.
As a note of interest:
If any men, in or out of public life, could have solved this murder, these seven men should have been able to do so. But they did not. In blunt language, as we have said throughout this work, they didn’t even try. Why not? What power structure was so strong that it could emasculate a presidential commission?
A presidential commission is not a court of law, and its processes are not a reasonable substitute for a court. The Warren Commission was given subpoena power, but for some reason it did not use the time-honored adversarial process of cross-examination. The fact that Walter E. Craig, president of the American Bar Association, had been asked to attend the hearings and to “advise the commission whether in his opinion the proceedings conformed to the basic principles of American justice” and that he was “given the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses” had little, if any, bearing on the course and outcome of the commission’s work. Craig never took advantage of this opportunity to cross-examine witnesses.
The commission never really considered the possibility that anyone other than Oswald, by himself, had committed the crime.
The President was murdered in Dallas, Texas. By law, the crime of murder must be tried in the state where it is committed. It remains to be tried today. There is no statute of limitations on the crime of murder.
Why hasn’t the case been tried? Oswald is dead, but that does not preclude a trial. He is as innocent of that crime as anyone else until a court of law has found him guilty. Given the available evidence, no court could convict him. These experienced men on the Warren Commission, particularly the chief justice of the United States, had to have known that. The least they could have done was to order that a trial be held in Texas.
Why did Texas authorities permit the removal of Kennedy’s body from Texas? Why did they not hold an official autopsy? Why did Dr. James Humes, the man who did an autopsy at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, burn his original notes? The answers to these questions, and to so many others like them, are, unfortunately, quite obvious. Anyone who came in touch with this case became shrouded under the cloak of secrecy that has covered it for decades. Even now, countless thousands of records are locked away.
At this point many of us ask, “Who are the people who set up this crime? Who shot the President, and who has been able to maintain the cover-up for three decades?”
To these questions, there are at least two responses, each on a different yet complementary level. First, “Who?” We shall never know. Throughout history, there is adequate evidence to accept the existence of an almost mythical and certainly anonymous power elite. Buckminster Fuller does his best to describe it; Winston Churchill used the term “High Cabal”; Dr. Joseph Needham, of Cambridge University and a great China scholar, wrote that the Chinese recognize the existence of a power elite that they refer to as “the Gentry.” In the case of the Kennedy murder, there has been no way to pierce its cloak of anonymity, because neither the government of the state of Texas nor the federal government will take positive legal action.
Second, “Who fired the shots and who covered up the crime?” Lyndon Johnson came as close as anyone has when he said that “we had been operating a damn Murder Inc.” These are the skilled professionals. We shall never discover who they are. The “cover story” is another thing. It has been a masterpiece, all the way from the Lee Harvey Oswald role to statements made by high officials today. One thing we must understand is that the cover story has its band of actors. Many of these actors came from the Cuban exile groups in Miami and New Orleans and were prepared in the huge Operation Mongoose infrastructure that was established ostensibly to eliminate Fidel Castro. Any who are alive today are shielded by the mantle of the cabal.
The entire plot may be likened to a play, a great tragedy. There are the authors. They created the plot, the scenario, the time, the characters, and the script. Then there are the actors who carried out the scenario as mercenaries. In this case they would have been a band of skilled men who do such things regularly on a worldwide basis for money and protection. In the ultimate sense, they are expendable.
There are colonies of such experts that are maintained by certain governments, or by select instrumentalities of governments, and by other powers. They are used for such activities regularly.
Who can command the absolute power sufficient to create such a scenario, and who can put it into operation? The following items will serve to illustrate the extent of the power these people wield.
The murder of President Kennedy and its accompanying pageantry was witnessed, on film, TV, radio, and in print, by hundreds of millions around the world. David Lawrence, writing in the
New York Herald
Tribune
on November 26, 1963, observed, “Thanks to the inventions of man, instantaneous communication throughout the world has been made possible. No such wide coverage on the same day, simultaneously with the occurrence of a news event, has been achieved in the past.”
This was true, of course, with respect to the communications capability, but was the information that traveled around the world the truth of legitimate news, or was it more like a mixture of real news items and orchestrated propaganda that had been prepared and written even before the crime took place?
For those of us who just happened to be in far-off Christchurch, New Zealand, for example, the Kennedy assassination took place at seven-thirty on the morning of Saturday, November 23, 1963.
As soon as possible, the
Christchurch Star
hit the streets with an “Extra” edition. One-quarter of the front page was devoted to a picture of President Kennedy. The remainder of the page was, for the most part, dedicated to the assassination story, from various sources. Who were those sources, and how could so much intimate and detailed biographic information about Oswald have been obtained instantaneously? The answer is that it wasn’t obtained “instantaneously.” It had to have been prepared before the crime, and like everything else, prepackaged by the secret cabal.