American History Revised (70 page)

Had the attack on the
Liberty
been a “tragic accident” as the Israelis claimed, one would expect Israel to pay full reparations and issue a heartfelt apology, not a bland statement of regret. Such was not the case. The Israelis stonewalled every step of the way and steadfastly refused to pay reparations to the families of the seventy-four sailors and officers who died. Then when it did, it offered only a paltry $1.54 million … then reduced it to $1.25 million (all from a nation that received hundreds of millions every year in U.S. aid). U.S. State Department officials were extremely annoyed. Finally, after a year of nitpicking and haggling, Israel issued a check for $3.3 million. Lest anyone get the wrong message, Israel issued a statement denying it had any legal liability for “death and material damage resulting from the attack,” and that it had paid the $3.3 million only because it was “motivated by humanitarian considerations relating to the economic hardship suffered by the families of the deceased.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk went ballistic, calling Israel’s posture “totally unacceptable.” Still unresolved was the issue of compensation for the injured sailors. It took another year of haggling before Israel issued a second check, for $3.6 million. The United States also wanted compensation for the massive damage to the
Liberty;
Israel refused and made a counteroffer of $100,000, which the United States took as an insult. The issue remained unresolved for years and might have been forgotten had it not been for the miracle of compound interest. Because of interest, the $7.6 million repair bill had grown to double digits and was noted on the annual claims report of money owed by foreign governments submitted to Congress. Congressmen started asking lots of questions. In 1980 Israel settled its $17.1 million bill for $6 million, payable in three annual installments of $2 million.

This 1967 tragedy is now a mere footnote in American history. However, it deserves to be remembered in the context of when Israel launched a massive attack on Beirut in 2006 in retaliation for the kidnapping of two soldiers. Compared to the 2006 provocation to Israel, the 1967 provocation to the United States yielded restraint, not war. One of the landmark
traits of the Cold War was that the United States and the Soviets, with plenty of battleships and nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean eyeing every move like cornered cats ready to pounce, remembered the lessons of World War II and declined to bite at the provocations of a minor player. Said Richard Nixon in one of his televised addresses to the nation in 1973, “When the action gets hot, keep the rhetoric cool.”

There is an old slogan, “It isn’t my enemies I fear, it’s my friends.” Big nations eyeing each other warily think twice, three times, four or five times before engaging in hostilities. Small nations are much more prone to act recklessly.

1979
One doesn’t think of a rock drummer, living quietly in Ohio and reading an adult magazine on a hot summer day, as the man who cracked open America’s most notorious crime case. But stranger things have been known to happen.

First, some background. In 1975, in an effort to resolve the lingering question of who killed JFK, Congress authorized a new investigation. Already the assassination had been subject to extensive investigations by five different groups, each acting independently—the Secret Service, the Dallas Police Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the Warren Commission—all of which had reached the same conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. But with government credibility at an all-time low after the Watergate cover-up, and many people expressing doubts about the Warren Report, Congress decided another investigation was in order. Enter the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

For three years the twelve-member HSCA labored over thousands of pages of evidence and sworn testimony, and was on the verge of unanimously arriving at the same conclusion as before. Then suddenly, out of the blue, two weeks before the findings were to be released, a new piece of evidence cropped up that had everyone confused. It was a police Dictabelt recording on which it sounded as if four shots had been fired. If true, that meant there had to be more than one assassin.

Now, the cardinal rule in any investigation is
verify.
Virtually everyone present at the assassination in Dealey Plaza had stated they heard only three shots. So when a police motorcycle tape recording appeared that might suggest four shots, the logical next step would be to have the policeman listen to the tape and verify that it came from his motorcycle’s radio. For reasons that are inexplicable, this was never done. The committee declined to hear his eyewitness testimony, stating it was more interested in the technical analysis by acoustics “experts.” After reviewing the tapes and acoustics experts’ interpretation claiming that four shots was “a 95 percent
probability,” the committee at the last minute amended its report. It stated it had no hard evidence of any conspiracy, but that given the possibility of four shots, there “probably” had been a conspiracy, though it was “unable to identify the other gunmen or the extent of the conspiracy.” The committee specifically excluded the obvious suspects such as Russia, Cuba, and the Mafia. The best it could do was attribute the conspiracy to several individuals, identities unknown.

The media immediately went into a frenzy. Conspiracy buffs had a field day. Countless books and videos claiming conspiracy made their authors rich.

Enter the drummer. It was July 1979, several months after the HSCA report had been released. When Steve Barber came home and opened his monthly issue of the adult magazine
Gallery
and something fell out, he had a surprise: not a stunning pinup, but a plastic flexi-disc recording of the Dictabelt evidence. Being a “sound junkie,” he plugged the tape into his tape recorder and became mesmerized. “I played this thing to death,” he said, “just trying to hear the gunshots and hear for myself what they really said was 95 percent evidence of conspiracy.”

Steve Barber, being a trained musician, had better ears than the acoustics experts. During the six-second period where the experts said there were four shots, Barber picked up the barely audible words “Hold everything secure … ” and figured out that these must be the same words spoken by a second police officer on a different channel, one minute later: “Hold everything secure until the homicide and other investigators can get there….” In other words, what he was hearing was the recording not of one motorcycle but of two motorcycles! What sounded like four shots in Dealey Plaza might possibly be a crossover of sounds, from two different sources.

For the HSCA, the discovery of
two
motorcycles on the recording was most embarrassing. The committee’s chief legal counsel had already gone on record as saying that if the Dictabelt evidence turned out to be flawed, he would change his mind about the existence of a conspiracy. Fair enough, but nobody likes being made a fool. Furthermore, it is common among smart people that they don’t change their minds easily; instead they use their keen intellect to rationalize new reasons why they were always right. The chief counsel dug in his heels and clung to his confidence in his technical experts.

In 1982, at the request of Congress, the National Academy of Sciences conducted a thorough review of the Dictabelt recordings. Known as the Ramsey Report, after its chairman, the Harvard professor and Nobel Prize–winning physicist Norman Ramsey, the NAS investigation began with the analysis offered by Steve Barber and had the policeman listen to the tape. The policeman denied that all the sounds came from his Dictabelt. Utilizing more-sophisticated
technology, Ramsey found several acoustic errors in the HSCA experts’ report and blasted the HSCA for its lack of professionalism: the HSCA had been totally wrong in its interpretation of the evidence. There was no fourth shot from “the grassy knoll.” Only three shots were on the recording (the alleged “fourth shot” was a different sound recorded a mile away and one minute later—and wasn’t even a gunshot).

Alas, what should have been a media bombshell turned out to be a dud. The press paid no attention. Technical scientific reports do not make for exciting media copy, especially coming three years after a much more interesting story.

In 1991, a movie came out by Oliver Stone,
JFK
, based on—there is no kinder word for it—a pack of lies.
*
Observed Brent Staples of the
New York Times
, “Historical lies are nearly impossible to correct once movies and television have given them credibility. The children of the video will swallow
JFK
whole.” Said one historian, “The assassination has become part of the entertainment industry.” Added another, “It wasn’t a handful of cranks that drew the country into the conspiracy camp. It was the mainstream media.” Certainly the media never reported the background and details fully—“the story behind the story” of the HSCA deliberations and how it flip-flopped at the last minute. Such laziness, in a story as important as a conspiracy to assassinate a president, carried a high price. Said Warren Commission counsel David Belin in a scathing denunciation of the media: “If priority to misrepresentations and deceit goes so far as to infiltrate our school system with the virus of lies, the present course of the electronic media poses a clear and present danger for the future of democracy in America.”

Nonetheless, the media juggernaut carried on. Observed the historian Gerald Posner:

In other words, the American public was being duped by a sensationalist-hungry press. In most countries, England for example, misrepresenting evidence is considered perjury and the
Today
show producers could find themselves in jail. But not in America, where a “free” press is sacrosanct.

Alarmed about the
JFK
movie and other media fabrications, Congress took an unprecedented step in order to clear the record. It created the Assassination Records Review Board to examine all the government records related to the assassination, declassify them as fully as possible, and release them to the public. Little publicity attended this honorable effort, but millions of pages of documentation released in 1994 gave all conspiracy advocates the information they needed to embellish their cases. None were forthcoming. To the contrary, in these files, available for all to see and put the case to rest, is the Ramsey Report, confirmed by an extensive study in 2003 by independent researcher Michael O’Dell. Also in 2003, there finally appeared a quality piece of journalism when ABC News aired its own investigation. Titled
Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination—Beyond Conspiracy
, it concluded that the sound recordings on the police Dictabelt could not have come from Dealey Plaza and that the police officer was correct in his claim that he was nowhere near the scene when his microphone picked up the mysterious sounds.

The HSCA’s last-minute change had been an error, a classic case of a professional investigation suddenly gone awry at the eleventh hour (or, as one historian put it, not “the eleventh hour—no, make it one minute to midnight!”). Admitted one congressman ruefully, “We rushed to our conclusions … We did a great job up to the last minute.” Had the HSCA checked out the Dictabelt issue more thoroughly and stuck to its original conclusion, many conspiracy theories never would have seen the light of day.

Such national trauma is unlikely to happen again. Nowadays, should an assassination occur, investigators have access to sophisticated technologies such as computer and laser-assisted simulations, digital enhancement of photographs, spectrographic analysis of acoustic impulses, and neutron-activated analysis of bullet fragments. All these tools have been used in recent years, and have confirmed the findings of the Warren Report. Yet to this day, 70 percent of Americans still believe there was a conspiracy.