Reclaiming History (91 page)

Except for the moments right after the assassination when no one knew who the killer or killers were or whether a massive domestic or international conspiracy was involved, the closest reference to national security being an issue is a February 17, 1964, memo to the file (far, far less known than the Katzenbach memo) by Warren Commission assistant counsel Melvin Eisenberg about the first meeting, on January 20, 1964, that Chief Justice Warren had with his staff. Eisenberg quotes Warren as telling his staff that when President Johnson first asked him to head up the investigation (November 29), Warren said that the president spoke “of rumors of the most exaggerated kind…circulating in this country and overseas. Some rumors went as far as attributing the assassination to a faction within the Government wishing to see the presidency assumed by President Johnson. Others, if not quenched, could conceivably lead the country into a war which would cost forty million lives. No one could refuse to do something which might help to prevent such a possibility.” Of course, there is nothing in Warren’s address to his staff about suppressing the truth to avoid a war. Indeed, as indicated earlier, Eisenberg goes on to say that Warren “emphasized that the Commission had to determine the truth,
whatever that might be
.” Naturally, as with his surgery on the Katzenbach memo, Mark Lane, in
Plausible Denial
, told his readers only about the “war” part of the Eisenberg memo, deleting all reference to Warren telling his staff they had to find the truth whatever it might be.
²²⁰

And Lane makes no reference in his book to a January 21, 1964, “Memorandum for the Record” by another Warren Commission assistant counsel, Howard Willens, about the same subject meeting Warren had with his staff, in which he writes that Warren “stated that the President had instructed him to find out the whole truth and nothing but the truth and that is what he [Warren] intended to do.”
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It bears repeating what Liebeler told me—that “from the beginning we were all after the truth, and there were no limitations on that. We could do whatever we wanted to do.”
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What is elliptical in Katzenbach’s and Warren’s reference to “rumors” is they obviously were referring to rumors “which had no evidence to support them.” The conspiracy theorists have converted Katzenbach’s and Warren’s desire to squelch
rumors
that had no basis in fact into Katzenbach’s and Warren’s desire to suppress the
facts
of the assassination. But how could Katzenbach and Warren have known way back then that they had to spell out that
only
false rumors, rumors without a stitch of evidence to support them, had to be squelched for the benefit of the American public? How could they have known back then that there would actually be people like Mark Lane who would accuse men like Warren, Congressman Gerald Ford, Senator John Cooper, and so on, men of unimpeachable stature, honor, and probity, of getting in a room and all deciding to deliberately suppress, or not even look for, evidence of a conspiracy to murder the president (thereby jeopardizing their reputation and legacy and making them criminal accessories after the fact), or that there would be intelligent, rational, and sensible people of the considerable stature of Michael Beschloss and Evan Thomas who would decide to give their good minds a rest and actually buy into this nonsense?

A
nother assertion that has been made over and over again by conspiracy theorists is that Jack Ruby’s killing of Oswald prevented this nation from ever finding out the truth about the assassination,
*
and concomitantly, Oswald’s unavailability was an inherent weakness of the Warren Commission. Indeed, even the Warren Commission has given a partial nod to this view. “After Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby,” the Commission wrote, “it was no longer possible to arrive at the complete story of the assassination
through normal judicial procedures
during a trial of the alleged assassin.”
²²²

But the assertion that Oswald’s death precluded us from finding out the truth presupposes that Oswald had something to tell us other than precisely
why
he killed Kennedy. (I mean, we could scarcely have more evidence of the fact that he
did
kill Kennedy.) It also necessarily presupposes that he acted with others. If he did not—and there is no evidence that he did—then his death does not diminish at all the total relevant knowledge we already have about the assassination.

Actually, and ironically, because of the laws concerning the admissibility of evidence, chances are we learned more about the assassination
because
Oswald was killed. For instance, all trial lawyers know that just because a statement is hearsay does not, perforce, make it unreliable. Hearsay is simply any oral or written statement (or conduct, when intended as a substitute for words) made outside of court (i.e., not from the witness stand at the present proceeding) that is offered into evidence to prove not merely that the statement was made, but that it was true. Although there are twenty-two recognized exceptions to the hearsay rule, if Oswald had not been killed and had been prosecuted, a great amount of inadmissible hearsay that was published by the Warren Commission, much of it true and very relevant, would not have been received into evidence at his trial.

Also, although Marina Oswald offered a great amount of very incriminating evidence against her husband in her testimony before the Warren Commission, because of the marital privilege (which Oswald would have had a right to invoke), Marina would not have been able to testify at Oswald’s trial,
†
for example, about Oswald’s attempt to murder General Walker, or to his use of the alias A. Hidell, or about his leaving $170 and his wedding ring behind for her on the morning of the assassination. She wouldn’t have been able to identify the backyard photos or the light-gray jacket of his found in the parking lot near the Tippit murder scene, or furnish so much other testimony and evidence at his trial. And there is much other evidence that was presented to the Warren Commission and published that would not have been admissible at any trial of Oswald. As pointed out in the May 1965
New York University Law Review
, “The Commission was not inhibited by an elaborate system of evidentiary rules, or procedural restraints, [and] its area of inquiry was not circumscribed.”
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Show me a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t believe that Jack Ruby silenced Oswald for the mob. In fact, the majority of American people believe this. Well, Ruby wasn’t killed and he was brought to trial for murdering Oswald, wasn’t he? Yet virtually nothing we didn’t already know came out at Ruby’s trial. In fact, Ruby never even testified at his trial, and Oswald, like so many other criminal defendants, may not have testified at his trial either. And let’s not forget that even assuming, just for the sake of argument, there was a conspiracy, in over three years before Ruby’s death, he never said a word implicating anyone else in the alleged conspiracy.
²²⁴
And Ruby was a notorious blabbermouth. Oswald always played things pretty close to the vest, and those who had personal contact with him believe that he never would have confessed. U.S. postal inspector Harry D. Holmes, who interrogated Oswald, said, “I don’t think Oswald would have ever confessed. He was that adamant.”
²²⁵
Dallas detective L. C. Graves, whose right arm was locked inside Oswald’s left arm at the moment Ruby shot Oswald, said, “If Ruby hadn’t shot Oswald, I doubt seriously if much more would have been clarified. I don’t think Oswald would have ever confessed to anything.
²²⁶

These realities throw into question the conventional belief that the murder of Oswald prevented us from finding out the whole truth about the assassination.

The Other Investigations

Succumbing to the never-ending and lurid cries of the Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists that there was a conspiracy and cover-up in the Kennedy case, over the years there have been three investigations on very limited areas of the assassination and one complete reinvestigation. In February 1968, a panel of four medical experts appointed by Attorney General Ramsey Clark reexamined the photographs and X-rays from the Kennedy autopsy and confirmed the Warren Commission’s finding that President Kennedy was struck by two bullets, both fired from behind.
²²⁷

In 1975, President Ford set up a commission under the leadership of Nelson Rockefeller to determine whether any domestic activities of the CIA exceeded the agency’s statutory authority and to make appropriate recommendations. Although it was not specifically part of its charge, the Rockefeller Commission did look into allegations that the CIA participated in the assassination of President Kennedy, concluding, after investigating several allegations, that “there was no credible evidence of any CIA involvement.” The Rockefeller Commission also reviewed the medical evidence, and again substantiated the earlier findings that President Kennedy had been struck by only two bullets, both fired from the rear.
²²⁸

In 1976, a select committee of the Senate under the leadership of Senator Frank Church was directed to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities. Book V of its final report is dedicated to issues generated by the assassination and the Warren Commission’s investigation. The Church Committee
*
was critical of the response of both the FBI and the CIA to the original investigation, concluding that “the investigation of the assassination was deficient, and that facts which might have substantially affected the course of the investigation [particularly the CIA efforts to assassinate Castro] were not provided the Warren Commission.” However, the committee said it wanted to emphasize that it had “not uncovered any evidence sufficient to justify a conclusion that there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.”
²²⁹

Finally, in late 1976, a major effort to address and resolve remaining problems in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy raised by conspiracy theorists and Warren Commission critics was mounted by the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). (The committee also reinvestigated the murder of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.) The scope of the select committee’s investigation in 1977–1979 was essentially unlimited, except by the inevitable budgetary considerations. It was free to reinvestigate any aspect of the assassination it chose. The HSCA’s major contribution was to subject the existing physical evidence to searching scientific analysis, often with techniques unavailable to the Warren Commission fifteen years earlier. All of this added many more volumes to the extensive record, filled in some of the gaps, answered many questions, and refined interpretations of the existing evidence.

The swift acquittal of Clay Shaw in New Orleans in 1969
†
had dealt the conspiracy movement a severe blow (see conspiracy section). How then did it happen that just eight years later Congress decided to reinvestigate the Kennedy assassination with primary emphasis on the issue of whether there was, indeed, a conspiracy? In addition to the Watergate scandal in 1972–1974, which introduced America as never before to criminal malefaction in the highest corridors of our government, there were two events, it would appear. One was the sensational revelation of the Church Committee in 1975–1976 that the CIA had actually conspired with organized crime to kill Castro. If the CIA not only plotted to murder Castro, but worse, had gotten in bed with organized crime to do so, the thinking among many was that maybe all these allegations about a conspiracy to kill Kennedy by the CIA and organized crime had some merit. But the publicity about the Church Committee findings had a short shelf life for the average American, who may have read an article or two about it in the newspaper or heard about it on the evening news. And, after all, it is quite a leap from conspiring to kill a foreign dictator to conspiring to kill the president. If there had only been the Church Committee finding of CIA–organized crime complicity to kill Castro, and the withholding of this plot from the Warren Commission, it is not at all certain that the HSCA would have come into existence.

What almost assuredly put the reinvestigation movement over the top was the first showing of the Zapruder film (which was not authorized by
Life
magazine or the Zapruder family) to the American people on ABC on the evening of March 6, 1975.
*
Since the Geraldo Rivera–hosted show
Goodnight America
was on network television, a vast audience of everyday Americans saw, for the first time, the president’s violent head snap to the rear, ostensibly indicating a shot from the front, not the rear where Oswald was supposed to be. As conspiracy theorist Jim DiEugenio puts it, “The effect of this public showing of the Zapruder film was, in a word, electrifying. The day after, the Kennedy assassination was topic number one in bars and barber shops across America. The case was back on the front burner,”
²³⁰
the
New York Times
noting the “widespread response” the show had “generated.”
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It was conspiracy theorist Robert Groden’s pirated copy of the Zapruder film that had been shown on the ABC network, and Groden around that time was showing the film on a lecture tour with comedian Dick Gregory on college campuses, the most familiar cradle for dissent in contemporary America. He hit pay dirt at the University of Virginia. Andy Purdy, who would go on to become an assistant counsel for the HSCA, was a senior law student at the university who co-chaired the committee that invited Groden to speak at the Charlottesville campus. Purdy said that the large student audience (including himself) was captivated and swayed by Groden’s presentation. In the audience that night was the son of Congressman Thomas Downing (D-Va.). Purdy, Downing’s son (Dickerson), and a few other law students arranged for Groden to show the congressman the Zapruder film at his office in Washington, D.C., on April 15, 1975. Purdy said Downing, who had never seen the film before, was deeply troubled by it (“The Zapruder film really shook me,” Downing would later recall) and arranged for Groden to show the film to over fifty of his congressional colleagues, most of whom, per Purdy, were equally troubled.
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Downing decided to lead the charge in the House of Representatives (eventually joining forces with Congressman Henry Gonzalez [D-Texas], who already had a bill, which was foundering and going nowhere) to reinvestigate all three assassinations in the 1960s, those of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr.