Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (101 page)

Meanwhile in Dallas, a reenactment of the assassination, using surveyors, a limousine, and stand-ins for Kennedy and Connally, was conducted
in Dealey Plaza on May 24.

Opening the June 4 meeting, Representative Ford denounced news
reports that the Commission had already concluded that Oswald alone was
responsible for the assassination as "obviously false" since the Commission had not yet reached any conclusions. (Only Warren, Ford, McCloy,
Dulles, and Rankin attended this meeting.) In criticizing news media
speculations regarding Commission conclusions, Representative Ford stated:
"In my judgment, somebody somewhere is planting or leaking these
stories. "

Warren suggested making a statement to the media that while the taking
of testimony was nearing an end, the Commission had not yet discussed
any final conclusions.

On June 17, it was announced that Commission hearings were completed. On June 30, it was reported that the final report would not be
issued until after the Republican National Convention set to begin on July
13.

Minutes of a Commission executive session held on June 23, 1964,
were withheld from the public by the National Archives with the following
explanation:

.. . matters that are ... specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive Order to be kept secret in the interest of national
defense or foreign policy and are in fact properly classified pursuant to
such Executive Order.

The immense pressure to hurry up the investigation and close down the
Commission may have accounted for the fact that five of the senior
attorneys-Adams, Coleman, Ball, Hubert, and Jenner-returned to their
private practices and made virtually no contribution in writing the final
report.

On July 9, 1964, commissioners Dulles and McCloy met with three
psychiatrists who had been asked to develop a psychological profile on
Oswald. During the seven-hour meeting, the psychiatrists went over complex psychological conjectures regarding Oswald's motives, but their interpretations of his thinking were severely limited due to the fact that first, they were operating under the assumption of Oswald's guilt and, second,
the material studied was based on Commission and FBI reports, which
undoubtedly were one-sided. Even though the psychiatrists spent hours
detailing their theories, they also cautioned against putting too much
confidence in their psychological speculation since they had not had the
opportunity to interview Oswald personally.

Dr. Howard P. Rome of the Mayo Foundation (connected with the Mayo
Clinic) told commissioners:

As far as I am concerned, this is highly conjectural. It is purely
speculative. I see it as being of no use to anyone beyond a staff level to
help perhaps clarify your approach to the record. I should think it would
be most unrealistic to use this in any way. I think you would be laughed
right out by the public with this high-spun fantasy of inferences based
on second- and third-hand hearsay information.

Yet in its final report the Warren Commission did use the psychiatrists'
report to underscore the case against Oswald as a lonely and troubled man.
And the public did not laugh them off. After all, the Warren Commission
represented some of the most prestigious men in the nation.

Dulles suspected the truth of the matter when, during a discussion of
whether or not to present the psychological material in the final report, he
opened this dialogue with Commission counsel Albert Jenner:

DULLES: But nobody reads. Don't believe people read in this country.
There will be a few professors who will read the record . . .

JENNER: And a few newspaper reporters who will read parts of it.

DULLES: The public will read very little .. .

In its final report, the Warren Commission made no specific reference to
the psychiatric panel. Yet portions of the report presented ideas that
originated with the doctors. In the report, after fully detailing Oswald's
difficulty with human relationships, his discontent with the world, his
search for personal truth and a place in history, his censure of certain
aspects of American life and his professed commitment to Marxism,
commissioners wrote: "Out of these and many other factors which may
have molded the character of Lee Harvey Oswald there emerged a man
capable of assassinating President Kennedy."

With its investigation winding down and most of the senior attorneys
gone, the job of writing the Warren Commission Report fell to Assistant
Counsel Norman Redlich and staff member Alfred Goldberg. Redlich was
a law professor at New York University School of Law and Dr. Goldberg
(a Ph.D.) was a historian for the U.S. Air Force Historical Division.

When Goldberg told Warren it was impossible to complete the report by
mid-July, the deadline again was moved hack, this time to August 1. Through August, Goldberg and Redlich continued to rewrite the report's
chapters-some as many as twenty times-and the deadline was moved
back into September.

The Commission, well aware of the ever-nearing November presidential
election, reportedly received increased pressure from Johnson aide McGeorge
Bundy to hurry up and publish the report.

On September 4, galley proofs of the final report draft were circulated
among commissioners and staffers for last-minute comments. Two days
later, a dissatisfied Liebeler submitted a twenty-six-page memorandum
highly critical of the "Identity of the Assassin" chapter. It had to be
revised again.

On September 7, commissioners Russell, Cooper, and Boggs-still
unsatisfied with the inevitable conclusion of Oswald's guilt-traveled to
Dallas to reexamine Marina Oswald. Under questioning, she changed
significant aspects of her story, prompting even more rewriting of the
report.

The final Warren Commission session was on September 18, 1964, less
than ten days before its final report would be issued to President Lyndon
Johnson. According to the National Archives, no transcripts of this important final meeting exist. However, the minutes of the meeting show that
great concern was being voiced to Chief Counsel Rankin that material
within the report not conflict with its summary and conclusions chapter.

On September 24, 1964, the Warren Commission's report was submitted to President Johnson by Chief Justice Warren with the introduction:

Dear Mr. President:

Your Commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy
on November 22, 1963, having completed its assignment in accordance
with Executive Order No. 11130 of November 29, 1963, herewith
submits its final report.

The report was signed by all seven commissioners although Senator
Russell refused to sign until the wording regarding the single-bullet theory
was softened to indicate the idea was only a probability.

Russell's dissension and skepticism of the report's conclusions may
have been the topic of the September 18 meeting for which the transcripts
are missing. Russell told researcher Harold Weisberg that several of the
commissioners voiced doubts about the Commission's conclusions at that
meeting and he was "shaken" by the discovery that the record of these
doubts was missing.

The Warren Commission Report was made public on September 28,
1964, with the news media voicing virtually unanimous praise and support
for the document.

Upon receiving the report from Warren, President Johnson's only comment was: "It's heavy."

Today it is intriguing to note that Johnson had refused to answer
questions from his own Commission. According to Newsweek, August 15,
1966: ". . . a list of questions [concerning the assassination] for him was
in fact prepared and submitted to Johnson's confidant, Abe Fortas. Fortas
returned a veto of the idea." Instead, both Johnson and his wife submitted
unsworn statements.

Johnson's action prompted Commission attorney David Belin to comment in later years:

... if we could interrogate Mrs. Kennedy, whose husband has died
before her eyes, there is no reason why President Johnson should not be
examined in the same manner as every other witness [since] there was
some speculation from abroad, however outlandish, that he might have
had some indirect connection with the Dallas tragedy.

Two months after the Warren Commission Report was released with
widespread publicity praising its thoroughness and conclusions, twenty-six
volumes of Commission testimony and exhibits were quietly made public.
It was only after years of diligent study that individual researchers finally
were able to document the gross inconsistencies between these twenty-six
volumes of material and the Commission's report. And by then they were
largely ignored except by a few low-circulation periodicals. No one was in
a position to receive new or clarified information regarding the assassination since-having completed its work on September 28-the Warren
Commission had disbanded.

Researcher Sylvia Meagher, who, in Accessories After the Fact, produced a meticulous dissection of the Commission and its conclusions,
stated:

One of the most reprehensible actions of the Warren Commission is that
it disbanded the moment it handed over its Report, leaving no individual
or corporate entity to answer legitimate questions arising from demonstrable misstatements of fact in the Report.

After carefully researching both the activities and the conclusions of the
Warren Commission, Meagher-who has never been successfully challenged in her assertions of the Commission's incompetence-wrote:

Study has shown the Report to contain (1) statements of fact which are
inaccurate and untrue, in the light of the official Exhibits and objective
verification; (2) statements for which the citations fail to provide authentication; (3) misrepresentation of testimony: (4) omission of references
to testimony inimical to findings in the Report; (5) suppression of
findings favorable to Oswald; (6) incomplete investigation of suspicious
circumstances which remain unexplained; (7) misleading statements resulting from inadequate attention to the contents of Exhibits; (8)
failure to obtain testimony from crucial witnesses; and (9) assertions
which are diametrically opposite to the logical inferences to be drawn
from the relevant testimony or evidence.

After reviewing Warren Commission meeting transcripts in the mid-1970s,
author Tad Szulc wrote:

If the investigation was as inadequate and incompetent as is suggested
by the Commission's own internal documents, once Top Secret and now
declassified, it IS lemphasis his] legitimate to question the specific
conclusions of the report. The transcripts of the Commission's executive
sessions, staff memoranda . . . and other internal documents reveal the
Commissioners to be consumed by doubts and fears; troubled by their
own ignorance; suspicious of the investigatory work performed for them
by the FBI and the CIA; lacking clear direction; worried about a
competing inquiry in Texas; and finally suffering from a stunning lack
of confidence in their own ability to produce a report that would be
credible to the American people, the world, and, for that matter,
credible to themselves. . . . So many of [their] doubts apparently were
not resolved that the impression emerges from the private discussions
among the Commissioners that, in the end, the Report was the only
possible compromise they could produce-in terms of their knowledge
and their conscience.

In the years following the release of the Warren Report, condemnation
of its work and conclusions has only grown more widespread.

In 1976, the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, while claiming not to have
found evidence of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, nevertheless concluded:

The Committee has . . . developed evidence which impeaches the
process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination, and by which they provided information
to the Warren Commission. This evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient and that facts which might have
substantially affected the course of the investigation were not provided
the Warren Commission . . . Why senior officials of the FBI and the
CIA permitted the investigation to go forward, in light of these deficiencies, and why they permitted the Warren Commission to reach its
conclusions without all relevant information is still unclear. Certainly,
concern with public reputation, problems of coordination between agencies, possible bureaucratic failure, and embarrassment and the extreme
compartmentation of knowledge of sensitive operations may have contributed to these shortcomings. But the possibility exists that senior officials in both agencies made conscious decisions not to disclose
potentially important information.

As has been demonstrated, in most cases, "potentially important information" meant any information that did not add to the evidence of
Oswald's guilt.

The sins of the Warren Commission, the FBI, and the CIA go far
beyond simple omission for face-saving purposes.

Senator Richard Schweiker, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee's subcommittee that looked at the agencies' performance during the
Warren Commission investigation, told newsmen in 1976 that both the
CIA and the FBI deliberately lied to the Commission about significant
assassination issues.

His charge was supported by statements from former Texas attorney
general Waggoner Carr-whose own investigation was usurped by the
Warren Commission-who told the Houston Chronicle in 1975: "All of
the records were in the hands of the two agencies [the FBI and CIA] and,
if they so desired, any information or files could have been destroyed or
laundered prior to the time the Commission could get them.

Schweiker added that lies from the agencies, coupled with the numerous
deficiencies seen by his panel, invalidated the Warren Commission's
conclusions. He bluntly reported:

I think the Warren Commission has, in fact, collapsed like a house of
cards. And I believe the Warren Commission was set up at the time to
feed pablum to the American people for reasons not yet known, and that
one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at
that time.