Reclaiming History (92 page)

With the climate of the times already heated by the CIA–organized crime–Castro revelations and particularly the showing of the Zapruder film on network television, the Downing-Gonzalez bill (House Resolution 1540) creating the HSCA passed in the House by a vote of 280 to 65 on September 17, 1976. Downing became the chairman of the HSCA, with Gonzalez heading up the subcommittee on the assassination of Kennedy. (There was a separate subcommittee on Martin Luther King’s assassination. No reinvestigation of RFK’s assassination was authorized.)

In early October 1976, Downing appointed Richard A. Sprague as chief counsel to the HSCA (the person literally in charge of the investigation). Although Sprague was originally recommended to the HSCA by, of all people, Mark Lane, Downing selected him from a list of six candidates. Sprague was a very prominent and well-respected former prosecutor from Philadelphia who had worked there as the first assistant district attorney under former Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter when Specter became district attorney of Philadelphia. Sprague had no preconceived biases about the assassination and appointed, as his chief deputy (on the JFK side of the HSCA), Robert Tanenbaum, the leading prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office at the time. Together, Sprague and Tanenbaum were prepared to launch a no-holds-barred, in-depth criminal investigation of the assassination, for which their backgrounds made them both eminently qualified.

But things started to unravel when Downing retired from the House a few months later (January 1977) and was replaced by Gonzalez as chairman of the HSCA on February 2. No one seems to know for sure why Gonzalez and Sprague didn’t get along, but their relationship quickly degenerated into ad hominem attacks, almost all of them by Gonzalez, who apparently resented the fact that although he was chairman, the other eleven members of the House select committee listened to and respected Sprague more on matters of HSCA policy, resulting in a charge by Gonzalez that Sprague was deliberately usurping his, Gonzalez’s, authority. Indeed, when Gonzalez fired Sprague on February 10, the other eleven committee members defied Gonzalez and signed a letter directing Sprague to disregard Gonzalez’s order and remain in his post, which he did. The letter said that Gonzalez “did not have the power unilaterally to discharge Mr. Sprague. It is only the committee which has this power.” And the committee wanted Sprague to stay.
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Gonzalez and Sprague also locked horns over Sprague’s proposed $6.5 million funding request, which Gonzalez felt was bloated, and was determined to trim substantially. The feuding became so bitter that Gonzalez eventually resigned his chairmanship on March 2, 1977, calling Sprague “an unconscionable scoundrel who was insubordinate and insulting, not to mention disloyal.” Gonzalez had his supporters, such as Representative Thomas O’Neill Jr., the Speaker of the House, and Representative Jim Wright of Texas, the latter saying that “unless Henry can be prevailed upon to continue as chairman, the House probably will not vote to continue the investigation.”
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But a new chairman, Louis Stokes (D-Ohio), was named to take Gonzalez’s place on March 9.
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There were other problems. One was that while all this was going on, since the HSCA had, like all congressional committees, officially expired with the end of the congressional term in which it was created (in this case, just over two months later on January 3, 1977, when the 94th Congress ended), a new resolution had to be passed to reconstitute the committee. In view of the fact that the predecessor resolution (HR 1540) had passed rather easily, the new resolution on January 4 should have likewise passed easily, but this time there seemed to be more resistance from Congress. Many in Congress, in addition to Gonzalez, had already been upset with Sprague’s proposed December 9, 1976, $6.5 million budget
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(for the way Congress spends more money on far less serious matters, seemingly, a reasonable request), believing it was excessive. Also, the internal warfare that they had witnessed had soured some.

And finally, Sprague himself unwittingly contributed partially to his ultimate departure. His budget included funding for polygraphs (a very valuable investigative tool used by virtually every major law enforcement agency in the country), voice stress evaluators (an investigative tool almost universally rejected by U.S. law enforcement as a worthless gimmick), and, what most frightened several members of Congress, miniature phone recording devices. Sprague wanted to secretly wire HSCA investigators with these mini-recorders while interviewing witnesses and then subject their responses to the psychological stress evaluator. Representative Don Edwards (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, said that this “would constitute intentional invasions of the most fundamental rights of Americans. I believe the use of these techniques by a committee of Congress to be wrong, immoral, and very likely illegal.”
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Congressman Frank Thompson (R-N.J.), the chairman of the House Administrative Committee, said that Sprague had “run amok.”
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Sprague’s state of mind was that
if
there had been a conspiracy to murder the president, there was no need to treat the alleged perpetrators gently. But the sense in Congress among civil libertarians was that while they wanted to get to the bottom of the assassination, they didn’t want to do so by a bare-knuckle fight, and in the face of criticism, Sprague announced that his committee would not use the mini-recorders or stress evaluators. But the assault on Sprague continued when the media started resurrecting controversies surrounding Mr. Sprague’s handling of a few cases during his many first-rate years with the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, which he characterized as a campaign “to smear” him without foundation.
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In a four-hour meeting on the evening of March 29, 1977, the day before Congress was scheduled to vote on whether the HSCA should be reconstituted,
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Sprague and Tanenbaum met with Stokes and Congressmen Richardson Preyer, Walter E. Fauntroy, and Christopher Dodd, all members of the JFK subcommittee, in Stokes’s office. Tanenbaum recalls that the congressmen specifically asked Sprague not to resign, to stay on. “These were good people,” Tanenbaum says, “and they were willing to fight for Sprague,” but it was equally obvious to everyone in the room, Tanenbaum added, that they felt the resolution the next day might not pass if Sprague stayed.
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“Dick [Sprague] took the high road and resigned,” Tanenbaum says, and it was clear the congressmen felt “unburdened.”
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The
New York Times
quoted another (unnamed) participant at the meeting in Stokes’s office as saying the group had concluded that with Sprague remaining as chief counsel, they were about twenty-five votes short of the majority needed to reconstitute the committee and prevent it from going out of business the next day. Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., who was not present, said that “with Sprague resigning, they [the committee] claim it means 40 more votes.” Walter E. Fauntroy (D-D.C.) said that the allegations that had weakened Mr. Sprague had “absolutely no basis in fact” and added that Sprague’s resignation to allow the investigation to continue “in my judgment merits the Congressional Medal of Honor.”
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The next day, March 30, 1977, House Resolution 433 passed after a sharp debate on a vote of 230 to 181, officially reconstituting the HSCA for a term to expire on January 3, 1979. Among other things, opponents of the close-to-two-year extension claimed the committee had come up thus far with nothing but hearsay. Supporters argued that terminating the committee at this point would convince the American public that a cover-up was going on.
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When Stokes asked Tanenbaum to become the new chief counsel, Tanenbaum, if possible, took an even higher road than Sprague by declining this prestigious position out of loyalty to Sprague, who had brought him aboard and who had even urged him to accept. Further, with Tanenbaum’s background and investigative style being almost a carbon copy of Sprague’s, he anticipated having the same problems Sprague had with Congress. But he agreed to stay on until a new chief counsel was named.
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A week and a half later, on April 10, Stokes appointed Alvin B. Hayes, a lawyer on the sixty-four-member staff of the HSCA, to serve as interim chief counsel while the committee sought a permanent replacement for Sprague.
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The committee’s real work did not get underway until June 20, 1977, when G. Robert Blakey, a forty-one-year-old Cornell law professor who was a former prosecutor from 1960 to 1964 in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Department of Justice under Robert Kennedy, was appointed chief counsel and staff director.
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Blakey was well known in federal law enforcement circles for being the chief author, in 1970, of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (widely referred to as RICO), which gave the FBI and Department of Justice new tools to effectively combat organized crime.
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(Blakey was later described by William G. Hundley, chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, as having “perhaps the finest analytical mind of the some sixty competent lawyers” in his section.)
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The committee accompanied its appointment of Blakey by placing a gag order on its investigation. Blakey, quoting the words of Thomas Dewey when he was appointed as a special prosecutor to investigate organized crime in New York City, told the media at a news conference that “in general, it is my belief that a talking prosecutor is not a working prosecutor.” The
Washington Post
reported that former Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg “had turned down earlier overtures” to become chief counsel, although Representative Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said that “Blakey was our principal choice.”
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Thirteen candidates for the position were interviewed and HSCA chairman Louis Stokes said that he picked Blakey.
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The committee recognized from the outset that it had to operate under finite constraints of time and resources. The Warren Commission, as indicated, spent over $10 million in its ten-month existence. The HSCA, by contrast, spent about $5.8 million, although it operated, at varying levels of intensity, for about thirty months, from mid-September 1976 to the end of March 1979, the last seven months of which were mostly used “to write the final report, edit the drafts, check the galleys, print up the hearings, clear everything through agencies, and get [all the volumes] printed.”
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The Warren Commission employed some four hundred people; the select committee about two hundred and fifty,
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and that was for an investigation of two assassinations separated by five years, with no common links.

In order to fulfill its mandate, the committee identified four main issues to be addressed with respect to the Kennedy assassination. First, who was or were the assassins? Second, did they have any aid or assistance either before or after the assassinations? Third, did the agencies and departments of the U.S. government adequately perform their duties and functions in collecting and sharing information before the assassination and in investigating the president’s murder? Fourth, and finally, given the evidence the committee uncovered, was the amendment of existing legislation or the enactment of new legislation appropriate?
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Of paramount concern was the prevailing view of the public. The select committee knew from a Gallup Poll that 80 percent of the American people believed that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone. Since it was clear that many Americans believed that agencies of the federal government itself were implicated in the assassination, the committee felt a keen responsibility to determine the facts and present detailed evidence on that score. Committee members knew that the credibility of the American government was at stake.
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Although their objectives were the same, the select committee’s work was substantially different from that of the Warren Commission. For the most part it had to deal with evidence that was already fifteen years old. (Despite the already vast and steadily growing literature on the assassination, very little new evidence had turned up since the first investigation in 1963 and 1964.) That evidence fell naturally into three categories: forensic evidence still amenable to scientific investigation, the recollections of the events by witnesses who were still alive and available in 1978–1979, and documentation in the files of governmental agencies. In the committee’s judgment, the most reliable of these was the forensic evidence—autopsy, firearm and ballistic, handwriting, fingerprint, photographic, acoustical, and so on. The HSCA proceeded to hire highly credentialed national experts in each of the subject forensic fields, who subjected all of the scientific evidence
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to a thorough review and testing that often produced fresh insights and interpretations. “A major focus of our investigation was science,” Blakey would later recall. “We figured that the witnesses were now only repeating stories…While witness testimony was in stone, we figured the science had progressed in the years since the Warren Commission. We hoped to take advantage of that progress. That is where we put our main emphasis. It paid off.”
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Blakey knew, of course, that his committee was not set up to bring the murderers of Kennedy and King to trial and convict them; that was not the function of a congressional committee. He also realized that the trail was not just cold now. “It had been trampled into a state of confusion by amateur sleuths,” he wrote later, “witnesses had died, and the memories of those who were still around had been altered by secondhand perceptions (witnesses, too, read the conspiracy books) and dimmed by the passage of time; and evidence had been misplaced or destroyed.” He decided, given his limited resources, to concentrate “primarily on the hard data of science and technology.”
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