Reclaiming History (3 page)

And if the conspiracy to kill Kennedy was as obvious as conspiracy theorists want us to believe, how then could the Warren Commission members have had any confidence that the conspiracy’s existence would not have surfaced in the future? Moreover, if we adopt the cover-up theory, did all seven Commission members, on their own, decide to suppress the truth? Or was there a ringleader or architect of the cover-up, like Warren? If the latter, how was he able to get the other six members (and, necessarily, a significant number of the Commission’s assistant counsels and staff) to go along with his nefarious scheme? Indeed, not knowing what their response might be, wouldn’t he have been deathly afraid to even approach them with such a monumentally base and criminal proposal? The whole notion is too ridiculous to even contemplate. Adding a touch of humor to it all, as Commission member Gerald Ford said, “The thought that Earl Warren and I would conspire on anything is preposterous.”
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A concomitant fact that’s obvious but never mentioned is that if the Warren Commission covered up for those it knew to be responsible for the assassination, it would necessarily also be guilty of falsely accusing Oswald and framing him for Kennedy’s murder. But would any sane individual actually believe this?

Don’t these conspiracy theorists know what all sensible adults have learned from their own personal lives? That it’s almost impossible to keep a secret? Even a small one? Yet here, with not one, but two massive conspiracies, not one word, one syllable, has leaked out in over forty years. As I told the jury in London, “I’ll agree that three people can keep a secret. But only if two are dead.” Making the proposition of containing a secret in the Kennedy case even more implausible than it already is, anyone with knowledge of a Kennedy conspiracy who came forward could expect to receive very large sums of money from the media. And if we’re to believe the conspiracy theorists, not only were the multitudinous conspirators so incredibly efficient that they never once did anything wrong that revealed, even remotely, their existence, but not one of them has become disgruntled and wants to strike a bargain with the authorities (most likely immunity from prosecution for his testimony against the others), no ex-wife or mistress has decided to get even by talking, and not one of the members of the conspiracy or the cover-up has wanted to clear his conscience on his deathbed.

The point should be made that even if a sense of honor and duty were not the primary motivating factors in the Warren Commission’s work, simple self-interest would naturally have induced its members not to try to cover up the existence of a conspiracy if, in fact, they found one. As Commission assistant counsel David Slawson, whose area of responsibility, along with William T. Coleman Jr., was to determine if there was a conspiracy, told me, “We were all motivated to find something unexpected, such as other gunmen or a hidden conspiracy.
It would have made us heroes
. But these hopes gradually disappeared as the evidence that it was just Oswald rolled in.”
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(Kenneth Klein, assistant deputy chief counsel for the later HSCA, said essentially the same thing in his article, “Facts Knit the Single Bullet Theory”: “Since the validity of the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin rested firmly on the validity of the single-bullet theory, the staff members of the Select Committee would have been thrilled to have disproved it. To have done so would surely have led to fame and fortune. Only one thing prevented us from doing so, the evidence.—Goodby fame. Goodby fortune.”)
²⁵
*
Slawson, by the way, a Harvard Law School graduate who just recently retired as a professor of law at the University of Southern California, not only was a supporter of Jack Kennedy when he ran for president in 1960, but got to know him and worked on his campaign, his Denver law office actually allowing him to spend a substantial portion of his time working for Kennedy instead of for the firm. That’s one more reason why the position of conspiracy theorists—that someone like Slawson would deliberately turn a blind eye to the existence of a conspiracy—is absurd on its face.

As Warren Commission staff member Richard M. Mosk, a lifelong Democrat, said, “I was a young private sector lawyer, just out of the military, and I certainly had no incentive to cover up anything. Indeed, my father, Stanley Mosk, then California attorney general, was instrumental in running President Kennedy’s 1960 campaign in California and was close to the Kennedy family.”
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In his memoirs, Chief Justice Earl Warren, after pointing out that his commission uncovered “no facts upon which to hypothesize a conspiracy,” and that separate investigations by the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, Secret Service, and Departments of State and Defense could not find “any evidence of conspiracy,” wrote, “To say now that these [agencies], as well as the Commission, suppressed, neglected to unearth, or overlooked evidence of a conspiracy would be an indictment of the entire government of the United States. It would mean the whole structure was absolutely corrupt from top to bottom, not one person of high or low rank willing to come forward to expose the villainy, in spite of the fact that the entire country bitterly mourned the death of its young President.”
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*

The late CBS news commentator Eric Sevareid, commenting on the members of the Warren Commission being men of unblemished reputation and high national standing, observed eloquently, “The deepest allegiance of men like Chief Justice Warren, or John McCloy, does not lie with any president, political party, or current cause—it lies with history, their name and place in history. That is all they live for in their later years. If they knowingly suppressed or distorted decisive evidence about such an event as a presidential murder, their descendants would bear accursed names forever. The notion they would do such a thing is idiotic.”
²⁸

Yet the conspiracy theorists are convinced that even before the Warren Commission, the whole purpose of President Lyndon Johnson establishing it was to whitewash what really happened, either because he was complicit himself or because he was fearful that if it came out that Russia or Cuba was behind the assassination, it might precipitate a nuclear war. But this ignores the fact that the Warren Commission (five of whose members were Republican, unlikely candidates to cover up anything, much less a murder, for a Democratic president) wasn’t even LBJ’s idea. As far as is known, Yale Law School’s Walt Rostow first suggested it to LBJ’s press secretary, Bill Moyers, in a telephone conversation on the morning of November 24, 1963, the day after the assassination. (“My suggestion is that a presidential commission be appointed of very distinguished citizens in the very near future. Bipartisan and above politics,” Rostow told Moyers.) Almost concurrently, the
Washington Post
, lobbied by LBJ’s own Justice Department (particularly Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach), let it be known to the White House that it favored the idea also.

LBJ, in fact, was originally strongly opposed to the idea, saying it was “very bad” and the inquiry into the assassination should be a “state matter” handled by the attorney general of the state of Texas with only the assistance of the FBI. “[We can’t] start invading local jurisdictions,” he said before he was eventually persuaded by some members of his staff, cabinet, and Congress that a presidential commission would be the most appropriate and effective way to investigate the assassination. LBJ was so opposed to the idea that he called FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the morning of November 25, asking Hoover to use “any influence you got with the
Post
” to discourage it from pushing the appointment of a presidential commission in its editorials. Hoover responded, “I don’t have much influence with the
Post
because I frankly don’t read it. I view it like the
Daily Worker
[a Communist publication].”
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Conspiracy theorists can find little comfort in the finding of the HSCA that President Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”
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Nowhere did the HSCA conclude that any of the groups frequently mentioned by the theorists, such as the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, organized crime, Cuban government, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and so on, were involved in any conspiracy to kill the president. To the contrary, the select committee specifically concluded just the opposite, that they were “not involved.”
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For example, the HSCA said, “Based on the Committee’s entire investigation, it concluded that the Secret Service, FBI, and CIA were not involved in the assassination.”
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The sole basis for the HSCA’s conclusion that there was a conspiracy was its contested and far less-than-unanimous belief that in addition to the three shots it determined that Oswald fired from the Book Depository Building (two of which, it concluded, struck the president), there was a “high probability” that a fourth shot, which it said did not hit the president,
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was fired from the grassy knoll. If such were actually the case, a conclusion of conspiracy would be compelled—unless one drew the unrealistic inference that two people, acting totally independently of each other, just happened to try and kill the president at the same place and moment in time.

The basis for this fourth-shot conclusion was an acoustical analysis of a police Dictabelt recording from Dallas police headquarters containing sounds, the HSCA believed, from a police motorcycle in Dealey Plaza whose radio transmitting switch was stuck in the “on” position. HSCA acoustic experts thought that the sounds heard on the tape were probably those of four gunshots. However, as is discussed in considerable depth in an endnote, this fourth-shot conclusion has been completely discredited and proved to be in error by subsequent analyses of the Dictabelt. In 1982, twelve of the most prominent experts in ballistic acoustics in the country were commissioned by the National Research Council to reexamine the Dictabelt. The panel found “conclusively” from other concurrent and identifiable background noise on the Dictabelt that the sound which the HSCA experts believed to be a fourth shot actually occurred “about one minute after the assassination,” when the presidential limousine was long gone down Stemmons Freeway on its way to Parkland Memorial Hospital. In fact, knowing I could rebut it, Gerry Spence did not even bother to introduce the fourth-shot Dictabelt evidence at the trial in London.

When one removes the Dictabelt “fourth shot” from the HSCA findings, all that is really left is the HSCA’s conclusion that Oswald killed Kennedy, and the fact that the committee found no evidence of any person or group having conspired with Oswald, the identical findings of the Warren Commission. But the conspiracy theorists are in even worse shape with the HSCA findings than with those of the Warren Commission. Their tired allegation that the Warren Commission, because of a bias or under instructions going in, suppressed evidence of a conspiracy, obviously cannot be applied to the HSCA, which concluded (erroneously, we now know) that there
was
a conspiracy. Indeed, to
support
its conclusion of a conspiracy and establish its credibility, any bias the HSCA might have had would have been in the opposite direction—to look for and reveal evidence of a conspiracy, not suppress it.

What kept me up working until three o’clock every morning in my study preparing for the London trial was the knowledge that this would be the first real opportunity for a national television audience to see why the Warren Commission ultimately concluded that Oswald was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
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Other than the massive media coverage of the assassination back in 1963 and early 1964, previously, in books and on television, all that the public had heard in depth was the persistent and jackhammer message of the conspiracy theorists and Warren Commission critics. By and large, then, all that the vast majority of the public had heard, as of 1986, was the conclusion of the Warren Commission, not the basis for that conclusion. True, the basis for the Commission’s conclusion was available, but how many Americans had purchased the twenty-seven volumes put out by the Warren Commission? This realization impelled me to make sure I was as prepared at the trial as I could possibly be.

I organized and prepared the prosecution of Oswald in the same way I had done with the many other murder cases I had prosecuted in my career at the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, among other things interviewing my witnesses to the point where several told me they were more prepared than when they had testified before the Warren Commission. And through my interviews, a few new pieces of damaging circumstantial evidence against Oswald surfaced.

The defense was also hard at work. I learned that Spence had two lawyers in his Jackson Hole, Wyoming, law firm working full-time on the case assisting him, and near the end LWT dispatched its chief researcher on the case, who had a doctoral degree in history, to Spence’s home to live and work with him there for three weeks. Spence said, “I worked as hard in preparation for this trial as if I had defended Lee Harvey Oswald in the flesh.”
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Indeed, anyone watching the trial on television could tell from Spence’s and my intensity that we were very serious. It was the same with the jury. Jack S. Morgan, who had just finished sitting on a Dallas federal jury a few weeks before LWT called him to sit on the London jury, became the foreman of the jury in London. As he says, “All of us jurors in London felt a strong responsibility to reach the correct decision as to Oswald’s guilt or innocence. We gave our best in our discussions and balloting, just as we would have had Oswald been tried in Texas before us. The whole concept of this court case was presented to us in such a way that the judge, lawyers and jurors considered it a real trial. It was the only one that Mr. Oswald would get, so we needed to be accurate in sifting through the facts to determine the truth.”
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The trial in London had all the earmarks and reality of an actual trial. The courtroom was packed, the witnesses were sworn to testify to the truth, and there was a real judge and jury listening intently to their testimony and observing their demeanor on the witness stand. Although Oswald, the defendant, was of course not present and could not testify, it has to be noted that he was not present at the Warren Commission hearings either, and at the hearings he had no real lawyer representing his interests or cross-examining witnesses who testified against him, as he did in London with Spence. I might add that even if Oswald had been alive and prosecuted, he, like so many defendants in criminal trials, might very well have elected not to take the stand and subject himself to cross-examination. For example, Jack Ruby never testified at his trial.