Justice for All (90 page)

At the FBI, reaction was far less restrained. Hoover fumed at the Commission's refusal to adopt the Bureau's reconstruction of the shooting—Hoover never would accept the single-bullet theory—and at its mild rebuke of the FBI's work. With the release of the Commission report, the long and complicated relationship between Warren and Hoover at last came to an end. The two men would never again regard each other with anything more than coldness. Three months after the Warren Commission report was published, Hoover dropped Warren from the Bureau's Special Correspondents' List, a group of trusted Bureau allies entitled to receive regular updates from the FBI. The two then settled into a long standoff, broken only by Warren's announced retirement in 1968. Then Hoover sent along a note and addressed it in their old style, to “Dear Earl.” A staff notation on Hoover's letter made clear, however, that the address was an act of nostalgia, not warmth. Until the time Warren was “deleted” from the correspondents' list in 1964, the notation read, “He was . . . known to the Director on a first-name basis.”
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Public regard for the Commission was short-lived. Some of the early works critiquing the Warren Commission were genuine inquiries intended to raise serious questions about whether the report had solved the murder. Others were unscrupulous, and none more so than the work of Mark Lane, who was at odds with the Warren Commission even before it finished. On Tuesday, February 11, 1963, Marguerite Oswald, the eccentric mother of the assassin, returned for her second day on the witness stand, accompanied by Lane as well as another lawyer, John Doyle. Doyle offered to withdraw if Lane was to represent Mrs. Oswald, and in the confusion over who was her counsel, Warren asked her directly whether Lane represented her. “No sir, he does not,” Mrs. Oswald replied. When Lane protested, Warren gave him little quarter. “Mr. Lane, now really,” the exasperated Warren noted, “either you are here as the attorney for Mrs. Oswald or you are not entitled to be in this room—one of the two.”
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Lane was shown the door.

After Lane wrote articles and held a number of press conferences challenging the Commission and suggesting that he had evidence that would rebut its findings, the panel invited him to testify on his own. Lane appeared twice as a witness, both times engaging the Commission in an infuriating game of cat and mouse. At his first appearance, on March 4, Lane testified that one witness who picked Oswald out of a police lineup as the man she saw shoot Officer Tippit gave Lane a description of the assailant that was inconsistent with Oswald; according to Lane, she had told him the murderer was “short, a little on the heavy side, and his hair was somewhat bushy.”
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The witness was confronted with Lane's statements when she appeared before the Warren Commission, and she denied having met with him or having described Oswald as Lane testified that she had. To back up his version, Lane insisted he had a tape recording of the conversation. In July, the Commission asked him to appear again, paying his way to return from a speaking tour in Europe so that he might supply the tape and clear up the confusion regarding that testimony. Lane appeared but refused to supply the tape.
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Lane similarly alleged that an informant had told him of a potentially important sighting—of Oswald and Ruby together before the assassination. If true, that would contradict Ruby's insistence that they had never met and would bolster the contention that Ruby and Oswald were involved in a conspiracy. Lane was asked to supply the name of that informant during his first appearance before the Commission. He promised to check with the source and see if he could reveal the name; when he returned in July, he was asked again, and this time refused.
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The work by Lane, first in
Rush to Judgment
and later in increasingly attenuated attacks on the Commission, was highly selective in its use and analysis of evidence. Commenting on the witness who saw Oswald fire the shots, Howard Brennan, Lane chose to emphasize Brennan's inconsistency regarding whether Oswald was sitting or standing at the time, rather than to acknowledge that Brennan had testified that he had no doubt about whom he had seen.
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Lane also clipped and excerpted testimony in order to bring out details favorable to his argument while ignoring those that hurt it. Writing of the three men at the Depository window, for instance, Lane questioned why they had not gone upstairs when they heard the shots. “Representative Gerald R. Ford asked [one of the men, Bonnie Ray] Williams, ‘Why didn't you go to the sixth floor?'” Lane wrote. “Williams replied, ‘We just never did think about it.' ”
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The quote is accurate, up to a point. But Williams's next sentence was “Maybe it was because we were frightened.”
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Lane omitted that sentence. The shortened version seemed to suggest that the men had no good explanation for why they did not apprehend the assassin themselves; the full quote made clear that they had a perfectly understandable reason for avoiding a killer. Lane chose the short version because it supported his account.

There are countless such examples of distortion and selectivity in Lane's work. Warren would never forgive Lane for his dodging during the hearings or his exploitation of the assassination. The chief justice complained about Lane to friends and colleagues,
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and in his memoirs, treated him with disgust. Refusing even to name him, Warren said he believed most Commission critics were unconvinced by the Commission's conclusions because Oswald had not received a public trial. Warren sympathized with those critics, but he had no patience for “those who wrote or lectured for money while deliberately using false hypotheses.”
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Lane's writing preyed on the public thirst for a larger explanation of Kennedy's death, on those whose great and admired leader was above being murdered by such an insignificant assassin. Others joined him, offering a mélange of theories stubbornly at odds with one another—Communists and anti-Communists, CIA critics and defenders, supporters and opponents of American foreign policy all claiming Oswald was in league with their enemies to kill the president. Addressing as they did that psychological need, the conspiracy buffs had claimed the field from the Warren Commission by the end of the 1960s and they held it for more than thirty years.

That sustained attack on the Commission was greeted with silence from Warren, who insisted that the report stand on its own and who urged that the Commission members not dignify the critics with a reply. Warren held his tongue even when Jim Garrison, a showboating New Orleans district attorney, launched a highly public investigation of what he claimed was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Garrison charged a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, in connection with the assassination. There was, Garrison claimed, “an infinitely larger number [of people involved in the conspiracy] than you would dream,”
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among them Texas oilmen, Cubans, the FBI, and the CIA. Before he was through, Garrison would suborn perjury, override the warnings of his top deputies, and intimidate witnesses; he would accuse Bobby Kennedy of impeding his investigation, attempt to bribe at least one witness, and file patently false criminal charges against his critics.

Once, when questioned about the investigation during a trip to Tokyo, Warren ventured cautious skepticism about Garrison's probe. Garrison leapt to the chance to tangle with Warren and responded in Garrison fashion: “The heavy artillery whistling in from Tokyo means that everything is in place, all the infantry lined up and the lull is over.” Garrison said his staff had reviewed the Warren report and concluded that it was a “gigantic fraud, quite possibly the largest in terms of effort and scope and effect ever perpetuated on the planet.” As if that weren't enough, Garrison added that the “fairy tale” concealed the true nature of Kennedy's assassination “for political reasons.”
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The FBI monitored Garrison's comments and passed them along to Warren, but Warren refused to engage in a running debate with a self-promoting prosecutor. The chief justice, according to the FBI, “wanted to skirt this issue very carefully due to the possibility the case might some day come before the Supreme Court.”
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Garrison never again received the satisfaction of a comment from Warren. It took two years for Garrison to build his public case against Shaw, and the jury took less than an hour to acquit him. Shaw was bank- rupted by the prosecution. He never recovered his fortune or health.
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Garrison's prosecution was a shameless affront to the truth, and it had profound consequences, not just in the shortened and maligned life of Clay Shaw but also in the development of conspiracy theory. Before it, those inclined to find that Oswald had been helped generally regarded the government inquiry, including the Warren Commission, as incompetent or duped. After it, conspiracy believers would tend to cast the Warren Commission as a participant in the assassination or its cover-up. That was due to Garrison, whose case amounted to nothing and whose pursuit of it damaged not just humans but history as well.

Warren encouraged the other members of the Commission not to engage their critics, and though Ford published a book about the investigation—to Warren's irritation—the Commission and its staff largely followed Warren's lead.
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Without the Commission there to defend itself, the conspiracy theories continued to prosper. By the mid-1970s, Congress was drawn back into the inquiry, convening a House Select Committee on Assassinations. Established in 1976 and reconstituted the following year, the Select Committee was charged with investigating whether government agencies had provided full disclosure to the Warren Commission; in its final report, the Committee supported the Warren Commission in virtually all its essential findings, but the Select Committee highlighted areas where the FBI and CIA had failed the Commission, and the Committee introduced one new, important allegation that ultimately proved untrue.

Warren Commission members had been aware of one act of FBI cover-up. A page from Oswald's address book contained the name and number of James Hosty, an FBI agent, but it was not included when the book was forwarded to the Commission in December 1963. Commission staff members discovered the omission and pressed the FBI on it. They were told the FBI had removed the page because the bureau did not consider that page evidence; reprimanded by the Commission staff, the FBI then provided the page.
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Although Redlich and others were annoyed by the clumsy attempt to shield Hosty from embarrassment, it was a blunder without larger implications. It was, the Select Committee concluded, “regrettable,” but “trivial in the context of the entire investigation.”
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The Warren Commission knew all that, but what it did not know was that Hosty had also received a note from Oswald about two weeks prior to the assassination. After Oswald's murder by Ruby, Hosty destroyed the note at the direction of his supervisor.
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The note reportedly warned Hosty to stay away from interviewing Marina Oswald, but when Oswald was murdered, Hosty's supervisor suggested tossing the note out, since there could be no trial. Its destruction was a bracing reminder of how far the FBI would go to protect itself, even at the expense of the whole truth.

The CIA's withholding was of a different sort. After the calamitous failure at the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy resolved to dispose of Castro's regime. Jack put his most trusted adviser, Bobby Kennedy, in charge of supervising the secret effort from his post as attorney general. In that capacity, Bobby Kennedy applied his singular talents to developing plans to overthrow Castro, plans that were to be carried out by the CIA and that included assassination as an option. Years later, Lyndon Johnson, then retired, would refer to the CIA's willingness to entertain assassination as a tool as “Murder Inc.,” and it provided Castro with a motive to do the same to his American counterpart. Those plans were never revealed to the Warren Commission—Kennedy declined Warren's invitation to appear before the Commission and ducked Warren's question to him about whether there was additional material that might shed light on the investigation (Kennedy's reply indicated only that no such material was within the Department of Justice, which Warren had not asked, while not volunteering that such information might be elsewhere). Allen Dulles had been director of Central Intelligence; he never informed the Commission. Ford and Russell had knowledge of CIA covert activities, though perhaps not assassination plans; they, too, remained silent.
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When information regarding the CIA's role in plotting to kill Castro first came to Rankin's attention in 1975, he was outraged. “We were assured that they would cooperate fully and give us everything that would have any bearing on the investigation,” Rankin told Committee investigators. “Now apparently they didn't.”
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That said, the hostility between the Kennedys and Castro was no secret—the Bay of Pigs was an internationally public act. As a result, while the CIA was not as forthcoming as the Commission staff would have liked, its withholding did not deprive the Commission of any meaningful insight into possible motive by Castro. Anyone inclined to believe that Castro might have been behind the assassination knew from the newspapers that he might want Kennedy dead. The CIA's reticence thus must be considered in the context of its Cold War mandate. It divulged what it believed to be germane, and it protected its secrets beyond that. Secrecy may not be attractive. In the mindset of the Cold War, however, it was expected.

The deceptions by the FBI, by contrast, were of real consequence. And since the Warren Commission had relied in large measure on the work of that agency, much of the remaining faith in the Warren Commission came tumbling down with those revelations. That process was accelerated by another finding of the Select Committee, albeit a hotly contested one even within the panel itself—namely, that acoustical evidence suggested that there was a fourth shot fired in Dealey Plaza that afternoon. Since Oswald only fired three times (a finding the Select Committee endorsed), that meant a second gunman and thus a de facto conspiracy. At the same time, the Select Committee abandoned the long-held notion in conspiracy circles that Kennedy had been hit by a bullet fired from the grassy knoll. The committee agreed with the Warren Commission that three shots had come from the Book Depository, fired by Oswald, that one missed, one struck Kennedy through the throat and then hit Connally, and one hit Kennedy in the head, killing him. The fourth shot, according to the committee, missed altogether. In the years since, the acoustical evidence for that shot has been repudiated, in part by enhancements to the Zapruder film that strengthen the single-bullet theory and also by subsequent scientific studies of the acoustical evidence itself.
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The Warren Commission findings in that area have only grown stronger.