The Kennedy Half-Century (28 page)

In what critics charged—accurately or not—was yet another attempt to protect the FBI’s reputation, Hoover launched his own selective investigation into the Kennedy murder and, at LBJ’s behest, sent the Warren Commission a copy of the bureau’s final report less than a month after the assassination.
¹⁰
It concluded that Oswald had been the lone gunman and that no conspiracy existed. The report also “determined” that Oswald had fired three shots from the Texas School Book Depository—the first, it said, had hit JFK in the back, the second had injured Governor Connally, and the third had shattered the president’s skull. Many assassination researchers over the decades have disputed Oswald’s role, while others have supported the FBI’s assertion in this regard, but the bureau’s rushed conclusion about the three bullets is almost universally regarded as wrong today. Interestingly, although the Warren Commission “asked that the bureau’s report not be made public until it had a chance to review it,” newspapers quickly printed that the FBI had effectively quashed rumors of a conspiracy.
¹¹

With the flawed FBI report as its starting point, the Warren Commission launched its own rushed investigation of the JFK assassination beginning in February 1964. Acting on President Johnson’s instructions, Earl Warren urged the commission to complete its work before July, when the presidential campaign would likely heat up. Over the next six months, the commission recorded the testimony of 552 people, “examined thousands of documents,” and held fifty-one sessions. Commission members skipped many of the meetings. Senator Russell, for example, attended only five of the fifty-one; John
McCloy showed up for sixteen. The hard work was assigned to assistants like Arlen Specter, who invented the “single bullet theory” to reconcile apparently indisputable facts that emerged in the course of the Warren investigation, including the reality that Oswald or any marksman needed a certain number of seconds to fire a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle repeatedly within the elapsed time of the shooting.
¹²
Specter and his colleagues had screened the publicly unseen amateur home movie shot by businessman Abraham Zapruder in Dealey Plaza, which cast grave doubts on the validity of the FBI report.
¹³
It showed Governor Connally groaning in agony less than two seconds after Kennedy was shot in the back. The commission realized that no marksman, however skilled, could fire two shots within two seconds from a bolt-action rifle. Specter’s single bullet theory—which asserted that the bullet striking JFK’s back continued on, cleanly, through Kennedy’s throat to cause all of Connally’s wounds—neatly resolved the dilemma.

Other Warren Commission staffers investigated the Jack Ruby case and concluded that Ruby had impulsively killed Oswald in a fit of pique. Other pieces of the assassination puzzle were similarly assembled into the overall pattern—some easily and others with difficulty. The time pressures guaranteed that all of the evidence would not be gathered and sifted, and many key witnesses were not even interviewed. Gerald Ford was so anxious to close the case that he changed the description of the president’s back wound so that it would comply with Specter’s single bullet theory.
¹⁴
Ford would later insist that he was simply trying to make the report “more precise.” But confidential files released in 2008 show that Ford had also opened a back channel to the FBI at the beginning of the investigation. At a December 1963 meeting, he told the assistant director of the FBI, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, that two members of the commission did not believe that JFK had been shot from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository. Ford assured DeLoach that these members’ dissenting views “of course would represent no problem.” He also promised to keep the FBI informed on the inner workings of the investigation.
¹⁵
Until his death, Ford insisted publicly and privately that the Warren Commission was right and that he had never seen any evidence to dissuade him.
¹⁶

Commission member and former CIA director Allen Dulles coached at least one CIA official on how to handle the commission’s inquiries. On April 11, 1964, Dulles met with Agent David E. Murphy to discuss the allegations surrounding Oswald’s true affiliations: had Oswald been recruited by the CIA or the KGB, as some were claiming? Dulles advised Murphy to deny both charges categorically in order to end the debate quickly. Dulles also knew about the CIA-sponsored assassination attempts on Castro, about which the commission was never told. Of course, it is possible that Dulles was simply trying to protect the agency he loved, but his witness tampering and refusal
to share critical information with fellow commissioners casts further doubt on the investigation.
¹⁷

On September 24, 1964, the Warren Commission presented its final report to the president of the United States. Johnson released a letter of appreciation later that day: “The commission, I know, has been guided throughout by a determination to find and tell the whole truth of these terrible events. This is our obligation to the good name of the United States of America and to all men everywhere who respect our nation—and above all to the memory of President Kennedy.”

Like the FBI, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald and Ruby had committed their crimes without help or encouragement from anybody else. While some prominent journalists such as CBS’s Walter Cronkite were privately skeptical, news organizations generally did not question the findings. This was an era very different from today, when columnists and publishers were often the government’s lapdogs.
¹⁸
In editorials, the nation’s newspapers were overwhelmingly deferential. For example, Marquis Childs, a syndicated columnist, described the report as “a monument to patient sifting and analysis of fact, rumor, suspicion and wild conjecture.” Childs also reminded his readers that no one had “come forward with any solid evidence that others participated with Oswald in the crime.”
¹⁹

Childs’s views were in the majority at first. Most Americans initially accepted the conclusions of the Warren Report. After it was released, only 31 percent of the public still believed that JFK had been the victim of a conspiracy, exactly half of what the percentage had been in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Remarkably, although it would not be known for many years, Senator Russell and the new president of the United States were two of the remaining skeptics, as they admitted during a recorded phone conversation:

JOHNSON: Well, what difference does it make which bullet got Connally?

RUSSELL: Well, it don’t make much difference. But … the commission believes that the same bullet that hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well, I don’t believe it!

JOHNSON: I don’t either.
²⁰

Ironically, in its rush to tamp down the rumors surrounding the assassination, the Warren Commission guaranteed the perpetuation of conspiracy theories for years to come. In the early 1960s, the public was thought incapable of handling the truth. Rather, it had to be spoonfed a convenient, calming version of events. Americans were never told about the government’s
efforts to murder Fidel Castro and other world leaders, which many might have seen as sufficient motive for a revenge killing. Nor did the public know about Washington’s relationships with the Mafia, Oswald’s full history, or many other things that might have had a direct bearing on the events of November 22, 1963.

Instead, the Warren Commission gave everyone a sanitized, abbreviated version of the assassination. The public was condescendingly told to accept the official account without subversive, unpatriotic questioning. The commission laid the groundwork for the cynicism that became deeply rooted in the late 1960s and the 1970s—a profound distrust of the “official” government story about anything. Instead of being viewed as authoritative, government pronouncements became mocked as deceitful propaganda from the Ministry of Truth. The pattern became unmistakable. Assassinations, which became frighteningly common, were always carried out by lone gunmen, according to the government. The bloody Vietnam conflict, sold by Washington as a winnable war against international Communism, unfolded in a fog of deception, with leaders knowing privately that the war was likely to be lost. The Watergate scandal and resulting investigations revealed the treachery of many at the top as nothing had done before. The effective suspension of the Bill of Rights by the CIA and the FBI became apparent. The Warren Commission was their prologue, the first damaging government whitewash of the 1960s. In the movie
Men in Black
, Tommy Lee Jones’s character explains to his partner that the MIB division is above the law, and its purpose is to protect the public from knowing that Earth is constantly threatened by alien life forms. “There’s always an Arquillian battle cruiser or a Korilian death ray or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out life on this miserable planet,” Jones says. “The only way these people get on with their happy lives is they do not know about it.” This is not so far removed from the motivation that spawned and shaped the Warren Commission.
²¹

The inadequacies of the Warren Commission left the door wide open for conspiracy theories of all sorts, and they have flourished in the half century since November 22, 1963. The proportion of Americans who believe in a JFK assassination conspiracy has skyrocketed. In 2003 an ABC News poll showed that a whopping 70 percent of Americans reject the Warren Commission’s basic finding of a lone gunman.
²²
The same survey found that 68 percent think Washington orchestrated a cover-up.
²³
This number is not merely composed of the predictable antiestablishment crowd from the hinterlands; Americans who are suspicious of the Warren Report include representatives of the Beltway powerful. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that she “read the Warren Commission report, every analysis of it, every challenge to it as time passed … I even took the opportunity to ask Senator Specter about it.”
²⁴

Countless books, television specials, newspaper articles, and Internet sites claim to know the truth about the assassination. The Mafia, the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, pro-Castro Cubans, LBJ, the Secret Service, the Soviets, Texas oil millionaires—all have been implicated. Kennedy scholar William Lester recently unearthed a letter from JFK to the CIA, written ten days before the assassination, requesting information on UFOs. The
Daily Mail
in Great Britain asked, “Was JFK killed because of his interest in aliens?”
²⁵

Americans are understandably confused by the flood of contradictory information and disinformation. Many have thrown up their hands in despair and decided we will never know the truth about the events in Dallas. Even some honest experts who have devoted many years of their life to studying the Kennedy assassination are puzzled. They keep putting the pieces together, but always find some that don’t fit. Dallas’s own Jerry Dealey, a lifelong assassination researcher and descendant of Dealey Plaza’s namesake, can rattle off every detail of that day. At the end of a long tour of key Dallas sites and an intense discussion, Dealey sighed, then admitted, “I know everything about the assassination, except what really happened.”
²⁶

And yet we do understand a good part of the story. For example, any fairminded observer can conclude that both the Dallas police and, far more important, the federal government botched the most important murder investigation of the twentieth century. Anyone who had watched a few episodes of
Perry Mason
by 1963 knew that the authorities were supposed to cordon off the crime scene and restrict the handling of evidence, even for everyday crimes. Yet in response to the shooting of the president of the United States, the Dallas police kept Elm Street open and allowed the general public to roam freely across Dealey Plaza, taking pictures and potentially hunting for souvenirs. Billy Harper, a young medical college student, found a piece of JFK’s skull lying in the grass between Elm and Main Streets. (Fortunately, Harper reported his gruesome discovery to the authorities.) The Dallas police removed a bag that Oswald had allegedly used to conceal his rifle before it could be photographed. The cartridge cases found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository were carelessly tossed into a single envelope without identifying the precise location where each was picked up.

And why was the chief suspect in the president’s murder paraded in front of the press? Journalists in 1963 were sometimes allowed to interview murder suspects before they went to trial, but this wasn’t a garden variety homicide. A good many people swarming police headquarters in the forty-eight hours after the assassination were not required to show press credentials. Any determined person could have smuggled in a gun and shot Oswald. While carried
out openly at the request of the news media to prove Oswald wasn’t being mistreated (as rampant rumors had wrongly suggested), the accused assassin’s transfer from the city to county jail in a crowded basement was just one of many opportunities for the disaster that happened on Sunday, November 24.
²⁷
Some Dallas police officers and supervisors seemed more like Keystone Kops than well-trained law enforcement professionals.
²⁸

A police division in a midsized city might be excused some inability to handle unexpected world-class mayhem. The White House and its investigatory agencies had no such defense in the months following the assassination. The new president made it clear from the start that he wanted a short, superficial inquiry that neatly buttoned up the messy matter of how he had become chief executive. The FBI and the CIA appeared to be more determined to cover their tracks and make sure they weren’t blamed for missteps than to get to the bottom of what happened in Dallas.