Senator Cooper: “I think that we ought to have a list of the people we want to interrogate.”
Allen Dulles: “I think one who you should see fairly soon…would be [U.S. Secret Service chief U. E.] Baughman.”
Mr. McCloy: “I think we should get that film [Zapruder] in our possession [before] it deteriorates.”*
And so on.
Ultimately, the Commission decided to rely on its own legal staff to direct the efforts of the FBI and other federal investigative agencies, being convinced that since the president had promised it the full cooperation of these agencies, the Commission’s counsel would be able to play a significant role in directing the FBI’s field work, which the evidence clearly shows the Warren Commission largely did (see later text). Accordingly, Rankin was authorized to employ and organize a staff of lawyers (assistant counsels) whose job would be to review, analyze, and evaluate the thousands of pages of investigative reports that were expected. Assistant Counsel Howard Willens, Robert Kennedy’s deputy at the Department of Justice, was in charge of recruiting the staff and forwarding their resumés to Rankin. Eventually, twenty-eight different agencies would send the Commission more than three hundred cubic feet of paper, most of it catastrophically unorganized and unevaluated. It would largely be up to the staff to identify the issues that required verification and further investigation.51
Virtually all conspiracy theorists believe that the Warren Commission did not conduct an independent investigation of the assassination, and instead relied almost exclusively on the FBI’s investigation to reach its conclusions. For example, in Crime of the Century, Michael Kurtz writes, “Rather than conduct its own independent investigation, the commission relied entirely on the FBI report.”52 “The Warren Commission” was “totally reliant on the investigative reports and functions of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI,” wrote Bernard Fensterwald Jr. in his book Assassination of JFK by Coincidence or Conspiracy?53
Indeed, this myth created by the conspiracy theorists has been trumpeted so much that even most Warren Commission supporters have bought into it. “The [Warren Commission],” says anti-conspiracy author Gerald Posner, “was almost entirely dependent on agencies such as the FBI to conduct the actual investigation.”54
Let’s briefly jump ahead to discuss this issue, and then we’ll return to the chronology. Because of the Commission’s supposed subjugation to the FBI, and the assumption by the conspiracy theorists that the FBI (under Director J. Edgar Hoover) could not be trusted to conduct a truthful investigation, critics believe the Warren Commission’s conclusions—that Oswald was the lone assassin and that there was no conspiracy—were compromised. But this is simply an enormous myth that has taken hold and could hardly be more incorrect. First of all, as you’ve just seen, on December 16 the Warren Commission came to the conclusion that it could not rely exclusively on the reports of the FBI and other federal agencies to reach its conclusions. In fact, even before this, on December 13 the Commission obtained the necessary powers to conduct its own independent investigation with the enactment of Senate Joint Resolution 137,55 which empowered the Commission to issue subpoenas requiring the testimony of witnesses and the production of documentary evidence. The resolution also gave the Commission the power to grant immunity and thereby force the testimony of witnesses who invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.56 The Commission never had occasion to grant immunity.
Pursuant to these powers, the Warren Commission, by itself and independent of the FBI, took the sworn testimony of 489 witnesses, many in great depth. (This hardly constitutes relying exclusively on the FBI.) Of these 489 witnesses, 94 testified before one or more members of the Commission itself, and 395 were questioned in depositions by members of the Commission’s staff, with the Commission members not being present. In addition, 61 witnesses gave sworn affidavits and 2 gave statements, for a total of 552 witnesses. More than 3,100 exhibits were received into evidence.57* Although Commission member John McCloy complained early on, and before the taking of any testimony, that the Commission was “so dependent on them [FBI] for the facts,”58if examining 489 witnesses under oath is not conducting an independent investigation, then what is?
If I were the lead prosecutor on a major murder case and I personally interviewed all of the key—and many of the supplementary—witnesses (roughly analogous to the Warren Commission and its staff taking testimony and depositions of the witnesses), and someone denigrated my involvement in the case by saying I relied almost exclusively on the police department (analogous to the FBI) in the case, my response would be to say, “Either you are joking or you are just completely unaware of what took place in this case.”
The argument that even if the Warren Commission did independently and thoroughly investigate the assassination by taking testimony and depositions of key and secondary witnesses, the FBI still controlled the investigation by informing the Commission members whom they should examine under oath, is, for the most part, invalid. Indeed, before the FBI even started interviewing witnesses, the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department were interviewing key witnesses in the case. And the media, with their unprecedented scrutiny of the case, were locating and reporting on witnesses to the event in Dealey Plaza and related circumstances. And, of course, witnesses themselves were coming out of the woodwork reporting their stories to the authorities. To suggest that without the FBI the Warren Commission wouldn’t have known whom to talk to is ludicrous. Even without the aforementioned sources, let’s take a representative witness like George Senator, Jack Ruby’s roommate whom the Warren Commission examined under oath in considerable depth. I don’t know how Senator came to the attention of the Warren Commission. The FBI may have informed the Commission of Senator’s existence. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that the FBI did not inform the Commission of Senator’s existence. All seven Commission members, General Counsel J. Lee Rankin, and his fourteen assistant counsels were distinguished lawyers. Though most didn’t have substantial trial experience, any lawyer, civil or criminal (in fact, any rational person, lawyer or not), would know that if they are investigating any event, it is imperative that they interview all witnesses who might have knowledge about an issue relevant to the case. Does anyone really believe that if the FBI had not informed the Warren Commission of Senator’s existence, the Commission (with members like Earl Warren, a former district attorney and attorney general of the state of California) and the assistant counsels (like Joseph Ball, one of the most experienced trial lawyers in the land; Arlen Specter, a former assistant DA in Philadelphia; Albert Jenner, a former special assistant attorney general of Illinois; Burt Griffin, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Ohio; and Frances Adams, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney in New York and police commissioner of New York City, etc.) would not have sought to find out, on their own, what people were closest to Ruby and knew him well (which would include Senator as well as Ruby’s key employees at his club, and his sisters and brothers) and then taken their testimony or had them interviewed? Please. Let’s not get foolish.
And whom did the Commission rely on the most in writing its famous Warren Report? The FBI’s interviews of witnesses or its own examination of these and other witnesses? The official record is clear that for the most part the Commission based its report on its examination of the witnesses, not FBI reports.59 As the Commission stated, “In addition to the information resulting from these [federal] investigations, the Commission has relied primarily on the facts disclosed by the sworn testimony of the principal witnesses to the assassination.”60
And the Commission didn’t limit itself to taking testimony, which would alone immunize it from the total-reliance-on-the-FBI argument. Its staff went beyond this, going out into the field, mostly in Dallas. Assistant Warren Commission counsel Joseph Ball said, “As lawyers we investigated the case thoroughly. We got some leads as to who to talk to from the FBI. But we went into the field, we talked to every witness that we reported on. We too
k depositions. We took people before the Commission. We handled this like we would handle…any lawsuit.”61 As Assistant Counsel David Belin wrote, “In the middle of March [1964], Joe Ball and I flew to Dallas to conduct our initial field investigation…The first evening there, I telephoned Rabbi Silverman (Ruby’s rabbi) and arranged to see him the following Friday night.”62 As just part of his investigation, Arlen Specter said he “sent ahead a list of witnesses whom I wanted to see at” Parkland Hospital, then went “to Parkland Hospital…and I interviewed…some 20-odd witnesses” there.63 Does this sound as if the Warren Commission relied exclusively on the FBI? In fact, by the end of March, most of the assistant counsels had arrived in Dallas to conduct their field investigation with respect to witnesses they would eventually take sworn testimony from.64 “At Chief Justice Earl Warren’s insistence,” Assistant Counsel Joseph Ball said, “every witness [called before the commission] was privately questioned…by commission counsel…before being called to testify.”65
In July 1964, Specter said he traveled “to the West Coast to track down some matters relating to Ruby on some individuals we hadn’t been able to locate earlier.”66 Some members of the staff even traveled outside the United States. On April 8, 1964, Assistant Counsels William Coleman Jr., W. David Slawson, and Howard P. Willens flew to Mexico City, where for seven days they investigated Oswald’s stay in Mexico City, being briefed by and asking questions of not just the Mexico City station of the CIA, but the FBI office in Mexico City and the Mexican federal authorities who conducted their own investigation of the case. When the Mexico City daily La Prensa reported on April 9 that “three investigators of Kennedy case” had come to Mexico City, they weren’t referring to the FBI, but to Warren Commission assistant counsels.67
Although the assistant counsels did most of the field and grunt work, Commission member John McCloy would later say that the Commission members themselves dug in. “We went [over to] Dealey Plaza,” McCloy said, and walked it “foot by foot. We…visited…the boarding house that Oswald had lived in; retraced, step by step, [Oswald’s] movements from the School Book Depository to the point at which he was apprehended in the theater. We chased ourselves up and down the [Book Depository] stairs, and timed ourselves. I sat in the window and held the very rifle…and sighted down across it [and] snapped the trigger many times…We had a car moving at the alleged rate. Well, I can go on. But I’m trying to give you the…fact that we did, assiduously, follow [the] evidence, and work out as best we could our own judgments in relation to it.”68 Indeed, the chief justice himself went up to the sniper’s nest, and with a stopwatch, per Arlen Specter, who was present, “made the long walk…from the window…down one corridor and up another and over to the dimly lighted steps where he descended four flights to the second floor to see if he could get to the Coke machine within the time” Oswald had available to meet Officer Marrion Baker, “and he made it.”69
And at one point, all seven commissioners traveled to Dallas and, among other things, stood on the fifth floor of the Book Depository Building where the three young black men were at the time of the assassination, and conducted a test wherein a cartridge shell was dropped to the floor directly above them and “all the commissioners heard a sound which they…concluded…was the sound of a shell which had fallen to the floor.”70
In addition to taking testimony and personally interviewing witnesses, the Warren Commission double-checked the FBI’s scientific work, as assistant Warren Commission counsel Wesley J. Liebeler pointed out in his testimony before the HSCA: “The work the FBI did on the physical evidence, the ballistics work, the fingerprint work, the hair and fibers work, that sort of thing, in many, if not in all cases, was checked by independent criminal laboratories.”71 Just two examples: Warren Commission assistant counsel Melvin A. Eisenberg sent a latent right index fingerprint and latent left and right palm prints found on book cartons in the sixth-floor sniper’s nest to New York City Police Department detective Arthur Mandella, a fingerprint expert in the department’s Bureau of Criminal Identification, and Mandella, after comparing the latent prints with finger and palm print exemplars of Oswald, concluded that the latent prints belonged to Oswald, the same conclusion reached by the FBI’s fingerprint expert, Sebastian Latona.72 And in addition to FBI firearms expert Robert Frazier, the Warren Commission employed Joseph D. Nicol, a firearms expert who was the superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation for the state of Illinois, to examine the bullet fragments found at the assassination scene and the whole bullet found at Parkland Hospital to see if they matched up with bullets test-fired from Oswald’s Carcano rifle. Nicol’s conclusion, the same as Frazier’s, was that they did.73
In fact, in some very important areas, the FBI did no work at all. For example, the Commission’s wound ballistics experiments, conducted to determine critical issues like whether the bullet that struck Kennedy in his upper right back could have physically been the same one that caused all of Governor Connally’s injuries, were handled by the Wound Ballistics Branch of the U.S. Army Chemical Research and Development Laboratories at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.74 And who conducted the all-important tests to determine if Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was a sufficiently accurate weapon to have accomplished what the Warren Commission believed Oswald accomplished on the day of the assassination? Not the FBI, but the Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch of the Department of the Army.75
Indeed, Warren Commission assistant counsel David Belin even employed private investigators at various points to cross-check information and give an independent evaluation.76
As early as January 21, 1964, we see Chief Justice Earl Warren saying in a Warren Commission executive session, “One of the important things in our investigation is to be able to trace every dollar that we can in the possession of Oswald…because we don’t know where his money came from. There is no evidence of any affluence or anything of that kind…but we ought to know as far as we can every dollar that came into his possession and every dollar he spent, and we have taken that up with the [Department of the] Treasury and they have assigned two of their top-flight investigators to run that matter down.”77
Perhaps nothing is reflective of the Warren Commission’s independent state of mind more than General Counsel Rankin’s oral request to Director Hoover on February 24, 1964 (unquestionably, on a sensitive matter such as this, with the knowledge and consent of Earl Warren and the other Commission members), which was memorialized in an internal FBI memorandum to Hoover on February 24, 1964, asking that the FBI “set up coverage of Marina Oswald’s activities.”78 “Coverage,” of course, includes wiretaps. Per FBI agent James P. Hosty, “against the FBI’s advice” the bureau acceded to the Warren Commission’s request and sought and secured a wiretap warrant, Marina’s phone being tapped and her living quarters bugged by the FBI from February 29, 1964, to March 12, 1964. (FBI special agent Robert Gemberling, a supervisor in the Dallas FBI office at the time, testified before the HSCA that “no information gleaned from either of these [two] sources” contained anything pertinent to the assassination.)79 According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., RFK’s biographer, as attorney general, RFK “authorized…an undisclosed number [of wiretaps] in 1964 at the request of the Warren Commission.”80
In addition, and pursuant to the Warren Commission’s request, the bureau set up round-the-clock physical surveillance of Marina, and its reports back to the Warren Commission were captioned “re: FISUR [code name for physical surveillance] of Marina Oswald.”81
Very importantly (and as previously indicated) a healthy part of the FBI’s investigation was being directed by the Warren Commission. The FBI was constantly being besieged by the Commission with requests that the agency do all manner of things. For instance, the FBI, in a tone suggesting that the Warren Commission was being too demanding, said that just in the period between February 21 and March 5, 1964, “the General Investigative Division has a total of nine pending requests from the President’s Comm
ission.” A few examples: “A three page request for technical and other related information concerning the rifle used in the assassination. This request is very extensive and requires the obtaining of original documents of numerous items, such as shipping documents, invoices, bills of lading, etc. This request also requires technical examination by our Laboratory as well as extensive work by our Dallas Office”; “[a request] that we obtain copies of Immigration and Naturalization Service records of Jack L. Ruby’s parents, Joseph and Fannie Rubenstein. Also, that we obtain all available records of toll calls made by Ruby, his three brothers and four sisters and twelve persons known to have been in contact with Ruby between September 26, 1963 and November 22, 1963”; “[a request] that this Bureau initiate a full scale background and intelligence investigation of Michael Paine and his wife, Ruth Paine…and of George and Jeanne De Mohrenschildt”; and so on.82
Examples of the Warren Commission directing the FBI in the investigation are too numerous to cite. Here are two more to illustrate just how detailed that direction was. The reenactment of the assassination was conducted by the FBI in Dallas on May 24, 1964, with the assistance of the Secret Service. But the Warren Commission staff not only requested the reenactment, but in Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin’s May 7, 1964, letter to FBI Director Hoover making the request, he instructed the FBI, in detail, as to everything that had to be done, telling Hoover where the limousine should be placed on Elm for each shot. For instance, in part II of his letter, he writes, “the third shot was fixed at a particular frame in the Zapruder film (frame 313), as well as a particular frame in the other two films (frame 24 of the Nix film and frame 42 of the Muchmore film). A car should be placed at the point which we believe to be the approximate location corresponding to these frames and then photographed from the point where the three cameramen were standing to establish the accuracy of this location. Distances should be measured from this point to the various points described in part I, and angles and distances established between this point and the assassination window to establish the view which the assassin had when he fired the third shot.” Directions like this—even the direction that all of the many points referred to in parts I and II of his letter should be “mapped on a survey” and “trigonometric readings should be taken” to determine distances and angles—run throughout the letter.
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