Reclaiming History (86 page)

“Exactly,” Dulles confirmed.
¹²⁵

The commissioners, following a suggestion by Warren, decided to approach the problem from two sides: ask Hoover to investigate, and conduct their own inquiry into the matter. They decided on this course despite their fear that in the process they might anger Hoover. The reason for their fear was simple.
At this very early point
, the Commission was almost totally dependent on the FBI for its investigation. But it became clear to Commission members that they could either, in Senator Russell’s words, “just accept the FBI’s report” on the Oswald-FBI informant issue, “or else we can go and try to run down some of these collateral rumors.”

Representative Boggs: “I think we must do the latter.”

Senator Russell: “So do I.”

Warren: “I think there is no question about it.”

Acknowledging the “awkward” nature of this two-pronged approach, Commission member John McCloy said, “But as you [referring to Rankin] said the other day, truth is our only client…I don’t think that we [can] recognize that any door is closed to us…in the search for the truth.”

Representative Boggs: “[We] have got to do everything on earth to establish the facts one way or the other. And without doing that…everyone of us is doing a very grave disservice.”
¹²⁶

Highly illustrative of the Warren Commission’s state of mind vis-à-vis not accepting and being limited by the FBI’s investigation is this exchange at the January 27, 1964, executive session:

Rankin: “Part of our difficulty…is that…they [FBI] have decided that no one else was involved [in the assassination].”

Russell: “They have tried the case and reached a verdict on every aspect.”

Boggs: “You have put your finger on it.”

Rankin: “Yes…They decided the case, [but] we are going to have maybe a thousand further inquiries that we say the Commission has to know…before it can pass on this.”

McCloy: “Yes…it isn’t only who killed cock robin…We have to go beyond that.”
¹²⁷

During the long discussion of the Oswald informant issue by Commission members, this amusing dialogue arose:

Dulles observed that one reason he didn’t believe Oswald was working for the FBI in any type of paid capacity was that “this fellow [Oswald] was so incompetent that he was not the kind of fellow that Hoover would hire…He was so stupid. Hoover didn’t hire this kind of stupid fellow.”

McCloy responded: “I wouldn’t put much confidence in the intelligence of all the agents I have run into. I have run into some awfully stupid agents.”

Dulles: “Not this irresponsible.”

McCloy: “Well, I can’t say that I have run into a fellow comparable to Oswald but I have run into some very limited mentalities both in the CIA and FBI. [Laughter]”
¹²⁸

Coincidentally, on the very same day (January 27) that the Commission was in session, its office received a letter from Hoover stating that “Lee Harvey Oswald was never paid any money for furnishing information [to the FBI] and he most certainly never was an informant of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
¹²⁹
This did not satisfy the Commission, however, and the next day Rankin met personally with Hoover and asked him to conduct a further inquiry into the rumor.
¹³⁰
On February 6, 1964, Hoover wrote a letter accompanied by his affidavit under penalty of perjury stating that search of FBI records showed that Oswald had never been an informant.
¹³¹
However, a letter from Hoover to Rankin on February 27, 1964, acknowledged for the first time that Jack Ruby “was contacted by an Agent of the Dallas Office [of the FBI] on March 11, 1959, in view of his position as a night club operator who might have knowledge of the criminal element of Dallas…He expressed a willingness to furnish information along those lines. He was subsequently contacted on eight occasions between March 11, 1959, and October 2, 1959, but he furnished no information whatever and further contacts with him were discontinued.” Hoover said that, as was the case with Oswald, “Ruby was never paid any money, and he was never at any time an informant of this Bureau.”
¹³²

For its part, the Warren Commission, which had decided to conduct its own investigation, ended up doing very little. The HSCA said the Commission “quizzed” Hudkins. But it didn’t. The citation the HSCA gives for its assertion that the Warren Commission quizzed Hudkins is an interview of Hudkins by the Secret Service on December 17, 1963, almost a month and a half
before
the Warren Commission’s executive session on January 27 in which the Commission concluded it had to conduct its own investigation into the matter. Hudkins told Secret Service agent Lane Bertram that Allen Sweatt of the Dallas sheriff’s office had told him that it was his opinion Oswald was an FBI informant.
¹³³
(See the FBI conspiracy section for a fuller discussion.) Also, on the evening of January 24, Secret Service inspector Thomas Kelley told Warren Commission general counsel F. Lee Rankin that Hudkins was “not very reliable” based on previous unfounded reports that he had furnished to the Secret Service.
¹³⁴
However, the only affirmative things that the Warren Commission is known to have done on its own to get to the bottom of the Oswald informant issue was to conduct an independent review of FBI files, which uncovered no evidence that Oswald was an informant,
¹³⁵
and to have the Internal Revenue Service do an audit on Oswald’s income on the assumption that if the FBI had been paying Oswald money the IRS might discover unaccounted-for income.
¹³⁶
No unaccountable income was found.
¹³⁷

I
n late January, the Warren Commission staff met with FBI and Secret Service experts and viewed for the first time what was to become the single most critical piece of physical evidence in the whole investigation: the twenty-five seconds of 8-millimeter color film shot by a Dealey Plaza spectator to the motorcade, Abraham Zapruder. There was no audio on the film, so it was impossible to time the shots exactly, but it seemed, after a cursory examination, that two of the shots may have come too close together to have been fired by Oswald’s bolt-action rifle, the one found in the Texas School Book Depository Building. These initial doubts were based largely on the apparent reactions of President Kennedy and Governor Connally as seen in the film. (See Zapruder film section later in the text.)

The hearings formally opened on February 3, 1964, at 10:35 a.m. with the testimony, through two interpreters, of Marina Oswald. Rankin himself handled the interrogation and began by asking Lee Oswald’s widow if she wanted to correct anything she had told FBI agents in the many interviews they had had with her to date. She did.

“Yes, I would like to correct some things because not everything was true,” she told the Commission. “It is not just that it wasn’t true, but not quite exact.”

She couldn’t at that point recall any specific instances, “but perhaps in the course of your questioning if it comes up I will say so.”
¹³⁸

The veracity of Marina Oswald was viewed as imperative by the Commission since she was in a unique position to shed light, directly or indirectly, on her husband’s motivations and guilt, she being the only witness to most of Oswald’s life from the time she met him in Minsk to the night before the assassination. As such, the Commission was heavily dependent on her testimony.

According to author Edward Jay Epstein, the Warren Commission staff counsel did not believe Marina was a credible witness. He said senior assistant counsel William Coleman wanted her subjected to a more rigorous examination and had prepared a “trappy deposition” for her, and threatened to resign when Rankin said that the Commission members had decided they believed her and saw no need to question her further.
¹³⁹
But when I spoke to Coleman, he said, “You know, this was many years ago, but I can tell you without any hesitation that I never at any time threatened to resign from the Commission. That’s just not true. As to the first matter, I don’t recall at all that I was dissatisfied with Marina Oswald’s testimony and had prepared a trappy deposition for her. The reason it makes no sense is that my assigned area was the possibility of a foreign conspiracy, and Marina’s testimony didn’t really go to that issue. Furthermore, I had tremendous respect for those who questioned Marina, like Rankin and Warren, and I can’t even imagine thrusting myself into the matter with a so-called ‘trappy deposition’ for her. Where did Epstein get this? Certainly not from me.”
*
When I asked Coleman whether the majority of the Commission members and staff thought Marina was lying, he replied, “No, not at all. The strong consensus, and I was a part of that consensus, was that she was telling the truth. But after her first four days of testimony, there were several assistant counsels who wanted to ask further questions of Marina, not because they felt she was lying but because there were areas that hadn’t been gone into or needed further clarification or amplification.”
¹⁴⁰

The overwhelming consensus in the conspiracy community is that Marina Oswald was not a truthful witness. This perception started mostly because of a very ill-advised statement by one of the Commission’s most distinguished assistant counsels, Norman Redlich, who said in a February 28, 1964, memorandum to General Counsel Rankin, “We cannot ignore, however, that Marina Oswald has repeatedly lied to the [Secret] Service, the FBI, and this Commission on matters which are of vital concern to the people of this country and the world.”
¹⁴¹
These loose and incorrect words have been seized upon by Warren Commission critics to rebut Marina’s devastating testimony against Oswald. The Warren Commission staff, as indicated, consisted of very bright lawyers who graduated from the nation’s finest law schools. Most of them, however, did not have trial lawyer backgrounds
*
and, hence, were unaware how extremely common it is for even truthful witnesses to give inconsistent, contradictory, and incorrect testimony. And witnesses, of course, flat-out lie all the time on the witness stand. The late Francis L. Wellman, a distinguished member of the New York Bar, once observed, “Scarcely a trial is conducted in which perjury does not appear in more or less flagrant form.” In fact, perjury is so common that instead of being surprised by it, seasoned prosecutors expect it.

Redlich was a very bright and highly respected professor at New York University School of Law at the time he was appointed to the Warren Commission staff, but he had never been inside a courtroom, at least as a trial lawyer,
†
and therefore didn’t have any framework of reference for the inconsistencies in some of Marina’s testimony; hence, he erroneously concluded she had “repeatedly lied.” Yet it should be noted that Redlich made his observation about Marina near the start of the Commission’s investigation in February of 1964, and even Redlich would later conclude that “based upon everything that I knew,” by “the time we were finished with our investigation, I would find her a credible witness.”
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I am very familiar with Marina’s testimony, and I can say that based on the known record, she was every bit as consistent and truthful in her testimony as ninety-eight or ninety-nine out of a hundred witnesses during a trial. In fact, in view of her circumstances, she was surprisingly consistent and truthful. Here’s someone who, in 1964, testified for more than
six days
before the Warren Commission, her testimony in the Commission volumes consuming 215 pages. The pages are small print, so this translates to at least 500 pages of typical courtroom transcript. In addition, she was interviewed in depth, over and over again (an unbelievable
forty-six
times
before
her Warren Commission testimony) by the FBI and Secret Service. In 1978, she gave an additional 201 pages of testimony to the HSCA, and was interviewed in great depth by HSCA investigators. When you couple this prodigious, virtually unprecedented amount of interviews and testimony with the fact that at the time of her Warren Commission testimony she was but twenty-two years old, had a natural and instinctive desire to protect her husband as much as she reasonably could, was highly insecure living as an expatriate in a foreign country whose popular president had been murdered by her late husband,
*
and was operating under the substantial handicap of not speaking or understanding English and had to communicate through an interpreter (Chief Justice Warren describing her testimony as “laborious because of the interpreter”), it’s absolutely remarkable she did as well as she did.
¹⁴³
With typical witnesses at a trial giving just one-tenth of the vast amount of testimony Marina gave, I can guarantee you I normally would find many, many more examples of inconsistencies and discrepancies in their testimony than were present in Marina’s.

When I first read Redlich’s remark, I asked myself what was he referring to specifically? Such a question apparently also entered the mind of HSCA counsel Kenneth Klein, and when he asked Redlich, the latter answered, “Now, I have tried to recollect any specific matter that I may have had in my mind, and I have to say that I do not recall anything specific. It may have been, and one would have to go back into the investigatory report, it may have been that at first she may not have told the truth in connection with the attempted killing of General Walker. I am really just surmising she may have been asked if Oswald ever engaged in violence, and she may have at first said, ‘No,’ and then [she] brought out the fact about the General Walker shooting.”
¹⁴⁴
Although Redlich is unclear in his memory, what
is
very clear is that the first time Marina was asked,
under oath
, about the attempted murder of General Walker, she readily acknowledged her husband’s attempt to kill Walker.
¹⁴⁵
†

The following represent the type of inconsistencies in Marina Oswald’s statements and testimony, as set forth by the HSCA: “Marina Oswald was subsequently questioned by the FBI about the [backyard] photos. She said they were taken at the Oswald home on Neely Street in Dallas, in the backyard. But Marina gave two different versions of when the pictures were taken. She first told the FBI it was in late February or in early March 1963…Nevertheless, in an FBI interview made after her initial appearance before the Warren Commission she said that the first time she ever saw the rifle was toward the end of March. She recalled taking the photos seven to ten days thereafter, in
late March
or early April. [Boy, that’s serious stuff. But I don’t remember what tie I wore yesterday, and am sometimes off by more than an entire year in trying to recollect the date of an event.] Other evidence available to the Warren Commission supported her later version.” And: “Marina Oswald, in addition to giving two different versions of when the backyard pictures were taken, gave different versions of the number of pictures taken. At first she testified that she took one picture. She later testified that she took two pictures.”
¹⁴⁶
(Wow. Again, this is serious stuff.)