Reclaiming History (5 page)

When Jim Garrison says in his book,
On the Trail of the Assassins
,
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that Lee Harvey Oswald “was a notoriously poor shot” with “an abysmal marksmanship record in the Marines,” unknowledgeable readers would probably accept this if they didn’t have volume 11 of the Warren Commission. U.S. Marine Corps Major Eugene D. Anderson testified that Marine Corps records show that on December 21, 1956, Oswald fired a 212 on the range with his M-1 rifle, making him a sharpshooter.
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†

When conspiracy theorist Walt Brown tells the readers of his book,
Treachery in Dallas
,
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what most theorists say, that Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was a “piece of junk” that “lacked accuracy,” how would a reader know that although it wasn’t the best of rifles, Ronald Simmons, the chief of the Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch of the Department of the Army, said that after test-firing Oswald’s rifle forty-seven times, he found it was “quite accurate”; indeed, he said, as accurate as “the M-14” rifle, the rifle used by the American military at the time?
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The conspiracy theorists are so outrageously brazen that they tell lies not just about verifiable, documentary evidence, but about clear, photographic evidence, knowing that only one out of a thousand of their readers, if that, is in possession of the subject photographs. Robert Groden (the leading photographic expert for the conspiracy proponents who was the photographic adviser for Oliver Stone’s movie
JFK
) draws a diagram on page 24 of his book
High Treason
of Governor Connally seated
directly in front
of President Kennedy in the presidential limousine and postulates the “remarkable path” a bullet coming from behind Kennedy, and traveling from right to left, would have to take to hit Connally—after passing straight through Kennedy’s body, making a right turn and then a left one in midair, which, the buffs chortle, bullets “don’t even do in cartoons.” What average reader would be in a position to dispute this seemingly commonsense, geometric assault on the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory? (The theory is a sine qua non to the Commission’s conclusion that there was only one gunman, and the same bullet that hit Connally had previously hit Kennedy.) But, of course, if you start out with an erroneous premise, whatever flows from it makes a lot of sense. The only problem is that it’s wrong. The indisputable fact here—which all people who have studied the assassination know—is that Connally was
not
seated directly in front of Kennedy, but to his left front. Though President Kennedy was seated on the extreme right in the backseat of the limousine, Connally was in a jump seat situated a half foot from the right door.
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Moreover, at the time Connally was hit, the Zapruder film, unlike Groden’s diagram, shows he was turned to his right.
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Additionally, the jump seat was three inches lower than the backseat.
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Therefore, because of the alignment of Connally’s body vis-à-vis Kennedy’s, it was virtually inevitable that a bullet traveling on a downward trajectory and passing on a straight line through soft tissue in Kennedy’s body (as both the Warren Commission and HSCA concluded) would go on to strike Connally where it did.
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But again, how would average lay readers know that Groden had deliberately altered reality to mislead them? (Groden declined a request by the defense to testify at the trial in London and thus avoided being cross-examined.)

I am unaware of any other major event in world history which has been shrouded in so much intentional misinformation as has the assassination of JFK. Nor am I aware of any event that has given rise to such an extraordinarily large number of far-fetched and conflicting theories. For starters, if organized crime was behind the assassination, as many believe, wouldn’t that necessarily mean that all the many books claiming the CIA (or Castro or the KGB, and so on) was responsible were wrong? And vice versa? Unless one wants to believe, as Hollywood producer Oliver Stone apparently does, that they were
all
involved. I mean, were we to believe Mr. Stone, even bitter enemies like the KGB and the CIA got together on this one. Indeed, at one time or another in Mr. Stone’s cinematic reverie, he had the following groups and individuals acting suspiciously and/or conspiratorially: the Dallas Police Department, FBI, Secret Service, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, CIA, KGB, Fidel Castro, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, organized crime, and the military-industrial complex. Apparently nobody wanted President Kennedy alive. But where did all these people meet to hatch this conspiracy? Madison Square Garden?

The Warren Commission has been attacked for decades by the critics for conducting a highly biased investigation of the assassination. Yes, the Commission was biased against Oswald, but only
after
it became obvious to any sensible, reasonable person that he had murdered Kennedy. Actually, that fact was clearly evident within hours of the assassination. Among other things, law enforcement learned that the apparent murder weapon, a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building—later confirmed to be the murder weapon by firearm tests—had been traced back to Oswald; that forty-five minutes after the assassination Oswald murdered Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, and shortly thereafter tried to shoot his arresting officer; and that during his interrogation he told one provable lie after another—such as claiming he never owned a rifle—showing an unmistakable consciousness of guilt. With evidence like this
already
in existence against Oswald on the very first day that the Warren Commission started its work on the case, how could the Commission possibly not start out with at least the working hypothesis of Oswald’s guilt? And of course, all of the evidence that the Commission gathered thereafter only served to confirm this original hypothesis.

One of the most common arguments made by critics of the Warren Commission—even by those few who do not impute dishonorable motives to the Commission members—is that it was acting under intense political and societal pressure to reach a conclusion in the case and that it was very rushed in its investigation. This is one reason why, they say, the Commission reached an erroneous conclusion. But this is invalid criticism. The Commission had nine months, far more than enough time to reach a conclusion that was obvious to nearly everyone involved in the investigation within days—that a nut had killed Kennedy, and he had himself been killed by another nut, with the possibility of a conspiracy being highly implausible. If the president weren’t the victim, a normal investigation of a murder with the same set of facts and circumstances as this one could be wrapped up by any competent major city police department in a few weeks, with the prosecution being a rather short one. The Warren Commission, in addition to having one hundred times the investigative manpower and resources of a local police department, took, as indicated, nine months. As Warren Commission member John McCloy said, “The conclusions [we reached] weren’t rushed at all…[They were] arrived at in our own good time.”
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It should be noted that the completely natural and almost humanly unavoidable bias of the Warren Commission against Oswald, as one piece of evidence after another kept pointing ineluctably to his guilt, did not prevent it from conducting an extremely thorough, almost microscopic investigation of the assassination.
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Nor did it militate against its being willing to examine, even seek out, any evidence that would controvert this bias. As David Belin, assistant counsel for the Warren Commission, said about himself and his colleague Joseph Ball (the two Warren Commission lawyers whose job was to answer the sole question of who killed President Kennedy, not other, related areas of inquiry), “Ball and I were always looking for something that might shed new light on the assassination. Could it be that Oswald was not the assassin? Could it be that if Oswald was the assassin, one or more people were involved? Could it be that Oswald merely aided the assassin, or that he unwittingly aided someone else?”
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Though the Warren Commission perhaps should have considered the possibility of a conspiracy more than it did, contrary to popular belief it did conduct a fairly extensive probe into the issue of whether or not any person or group was behind Oswald’s act. Apart from a great number of references to the possibility of a conspiracy in the multiple volumes of the Commission, and many sections in the Warren Report itself that, by definition, inferentially dealt with the issue (e.g., discussion about grassy knoll witnesses), the report contains a 131-page chapter (by far the longest chapter in the report) dealing exclusively with the issue of conspiracy. The Commission asserted that it “has investigated each rumor and allegation linking Oswald to a conspiracy which has come to its attention, regardless of source.”
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Indeed, one very long June 1964 document, titled “Oswald’s Foreign Activities: Summary of Evidence Which Might Be Said to Show That There Was Foreign Involvement in the Assassination of President Kennedy,” wasn’t even included in the Warren Commission volumes. The authors of the document (a memorandum from Assistant Counsels W. David Slawson and William Coleman to the Warren Commission) noted that “
one of the basic purposes
of the [Warren] Commission’s investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy is to determine whether it was due in whole or in part to a foreign conspiracy,” and concluded that “there was no foreign involvement” in Kennedy’s murder.
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One of the key pieces of documentary evidence that conspiracy theorists cite as proof that the Warren Commission
only
had an interest in presenting a case against Oswald, and had no interest in ascertaining whether there was a conspiracy, is a January 11, 1964, “Memorandum for Members of the Commission” from Commission chairman Earl Warren in which he sets forth a “tentative outline” that was prepared, he said, by Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin to aid in “organizing the evaluation of the investigative materials received by the Commission.” Since by January 11, a month and a half after the assassination, it was very obvious that Oswald had killed Kennedy, subdivision II of the memorandum was titled “Lee Harvey Oswald as the Assassin of President Kennedy.” Under this subdivision were subheadings like “Brief Identification of Oswald [Dallas resident, employee of Texas School Book Depository, etc.]”; “Movements [of Oswald] on November 22, 1963, Prior to Assassination”; “Entry into Depository”; “Movements after Assassination until Murder of Tippit”; and so on. I respectfully ask, what other way was there for “organizing the evaluation of the investigative materials” when the investigative materials (i.e., evidence) all dealt, of necessity (since the evidence that had already been gathered all pointed to Oswald as the killer of Kennedy), with Oswald? To give Oswald an alias? Or mention some third party who was
not
identified in the investigative materials as the chief suspect? Moreover, the Warren Commission critics don’t mention that Warren, to allow for the fact that the investigation might take the Commission in different directions, wrote, “As the staff reviews the [investigative] materials, the outline will certainly undergo substantial revision.” Perhaps most importantly, what the critics usually fail to mention is that subdivision II H reads, “Evidence Implicating Others in Assassination or Suggesting Accomplices.”

Even if the evidence up to January 11, 1964, the date of the subject memorandum, had not pointed only to Oswald, and even if there was no reference to a possible conspiracy in the tentative outline, the best way to judge the work of the Warren Commission on this point is not by what the Commission wrote or said, but by what it did. (One of my favorite sayings is “Your conduct speaks so loudly I can’t hear a word you are saying.”) And we will see that the Commission’s conduct throughout the investigation clearly shows that its members only had
one
objective, to discover the truth of what happened.

In addition to the aforementioned long chapter on conspiracy, many sections of the Warren Report deal with the conspiracy issue. For instance, in the thirty-one-page appendix XII to the report, the Commission responds to 126 speculations and rumors, some dealing expressly with the allegation of conspiracy, most dealing in one way or the other with the allegation. Appendix XIV deals with Oswald’s finances in great detail, showing he was not in possession of money from an unknown source. And certainly the long biography of Jack Ruby and an analysis of the polygraph test he took,
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in many places expressly, and in virtually all places at least implicitly, address themselves to the conspiracy issue.

It has to be noted that after the FBI became the chief investigative agency of the Warren Commission, no fair and sensible person could ever accuse the bureau of conducting a superficial investigation. It was exceedingly thorough. As Tom Bethell, who was in charge of the research for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation and prosecution of Clay Shaw for the assassination of President Kennedy, has written, “Garrison’s investigators were quietly impressed by the speed and thoroughness of the FBI’s inquiry…It turned out that the FBI, far from having done a poor job, had very thoroughly interviewed anyone and everyone with the most tangential relationship to the assassination.”
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Just two examples, among so many, of the FBI investigating the issue of conspiracy, examples that no book pushing the conspiracy theory would ever dream of mentioning. The enigmatic fellow with a checkered history who sat next to Oswald on the bus that transported Oswald to Mexico in September 1963, an extremely peripheral figure, was the subject of an investigation into his identity and background that remarkably generated ninety-nine pages in an FBI report.
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Also, the FBI obtained not only all records of toll calls made by Jack Ruby, but also those of his three brothers and four sisters, and twelve other persons known to have been in close contact with Ruby between September 26 (when it was reported in the newspapers for the first time that Kennedy would be in Dallas on November 22) and November 22, 1963.
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This had nothing directly to do with Oswald killing Kennedy, and everything to do with a possible conspiracy.