Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  In his sworn testimony before the HSCA on November 8, 1977, Warren Commission assistant counsel Norman Redlich was asked, “What were the real objectives of the Warren Commission?”

  He responded, “Perhaps I can best answer that by repeating what [Warren Commission general counsel] Mr. [J. Lee] Rankin said when he convened the staff of the Warren Commission for the very first meeting [January 30, 1964]…He said, ‘Gentlemen, your only client is the truth.’ Those were his opening words of that talk.”

  Question: “Was it an objective of the Warren Commission to allay public fears?”

  Redlich: “I never considered that as an objective. That was not put to me other than in the context of the fact that there were a great many doubts about what had happened, there was great concern about what had happened, and of course to the extent that we could find all of the truth about the assassination, we would be allaying public fears. I always felt that that was a by-product of the principal objective which was to discover all the facts.”

  Redlich went on to say that Chief Justice Earl Warren also spoke to the staff at this first meeting and his remarks were the same in their tenor as Rankin’s, among other things telling the staff they were to “leave no stone unturned” in pursuing their investigation.209

  It is nothing short of mind-boggling that even though the proponents of the belief that the Warren Commission wasn’t interested in uncovering the truth about a foreign conspiracy in the assassination can’t cite one stitch of evidence, not one statement from any member of the Commission or its staff, and surely not one fragment of common sense to support their theory, nevertheless this nonsensical notion, untethered to anything but itself, continues to exist, hearty and hale, to this very day, even among the intellectual elite. This is why, just four years ago, Warren Commission assistant counsel Burt Griffin felt constrained to say on national television, “The accusation that we had a predetermined idea to find that there was no conspiracy…is completely false. Let me say to you—the one thing I wanted to do was find a conspiracy. I was a thirty-two-year-old lawyer. I had political ambitions. If I could have found [a conspiracy and] that Oswald didn’t do it, I’d have been the senator from Ohio, not John Glenn.”210 And this wasn’t true only of himself, he felt. As he told the HSCA, “It was certainly the feeling that I had of all of my colleagues that we were determined, if we could…to find a conspiracy. I think we thought we would be national heroes…if we could find something that showed that there had been something sinister beyond what appeared to have [happened].”211 Warren Commission assistant counsel David Slawson told me that he and his fellow assistant counsels were always “alert to the possibility of a conspiracy and looked for one, but at no time can I remember when anyone on the staff was saying they found any evidence of a conspiracy.”212

  How did all this unbelievable nonsense about the Warren Commission not wanting to investigate and uncover a conspiracy get started? From a clumsily written memorandum (referred to earlier) from Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to President Johnson’s press secretary, Bill Moyers, on November 25, 1963, just three days after the assassination, and before the Warren Commission was even formed. (Katzenbach remained the acting attorney general until December 4, when RFK, who had gone to Florida with his wife shortly after the assassination to mourn his brother’s death, resumed his duties at the Department of Justice.) The conspiracy theorists, predictably, have cited the memorandum out of context. Let’s take the original dean of distortion, conspiracy theorist Mark Lane. (See discussion of Lane later in text.) In his book Plausible Denial, he quotes Katzenbach saying in the memo that the “public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large”; that “speculation about Oswald’s motivation” be “cut off”; and “we need something to head off speculation or congressional hearings of the wrong sort.”213 The implication is clear. Katzenbach didn’t want all of the facts of the assassination to be known. They should be suppressed. But Lane, naturally, doesn’t tell his readers that the very first words of Katzenbach’s memorandum read, “It is important that all of the facts surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination be made public.”* Katzenbach, a World War II bomber pilot and Rhodes scholar, later goes on to say in the memo that “facts have been mixed with rumor and speculation. We can scarcely let the world see us totally in the image of the Dallas Police when our President is murdered. I think this objective may be satisfied by making public as soon as possible a complete and thorough FBI report on Oswald and the assassination.” You can’t suppress evidence of a conspiracy if you release “all of the facts” to the American people. It was obvious that Katzenbach believed (and he, of course, was correct) that there was no evidence at that time, nor has any surfaced since, supporting the rumor of a Communist conspiracy, and the best way to dispel that rumor with the American public was by releasing all of the true facts then known.214

  In his testimony before the HSCA on September 21, 1978, and in an earlier deposition on August 4, 1978, Katzenbach conceded that his memo was not “artistically [i.e., artfully] phrased,” going on to say to Congressman Christopher Dodd, who was questioning him, “Perhaps you have never written anything that you would like to write better afterwards, Congressman, but I have.” Mr. Dodd: “You won’t get me to say that.” Katzenbach, in his testimony, rejected the notion that conspiracy theorists have drawn from his memo that the Warren Commission was a self-fulfilling prophesy, and he put more emphasis where he acknowledged it should have been put in the memo. He said his state of mind was that

  if you are going to conclude, as the Bureau [FBI] was concluding, that this was not part of a conspiracy, that there were no confederates, then you had to make that case, with all of the facts…Now, if there was a conspiracy…you put those facts out. But if you were persuaded Oswald was a lone killer, you had better put all of the facts out…I think my basic motivation was the amount of speculation both here and abroad as to what was going on, whether there was a conspiracy of the right or a conspiracy of the left or a lone assassin or even in its wildest stages, a conspiracy by the then vice president to achieve the presidency, the sort of thing you have speculation about in some countries abroad where that kind of condition is normal. It seemed to me that the quicker some information could be made available that went beyond what the press was able to uncover and what the press was able to speculate about was desirable in that state of affairs…That was the advice I was giving Moyers and…the president.

  Katzenbach said, “I thought that everything had to be done that would give public opinion all over the world confidence that the true facts had been revealed, that everything was out on the table, whether they were difficult facts or whether they were not, that they be made public and not subject to later discovery.”215

  In a little-known internal FBI memorandum from Assistant FBI Director Alan Belmont to William Sullivan, the director of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, written on the very same day (November 25) as the now infamous Katzenbach memo, Belmont says, “The Director [Hoover] advised that he talked to Katzenbach who had been talking to the White House relative to the report that we are to render in the Oswald case. It is Katzenbach’s feeling that this report should include everything which may raise a question in the minds of the public or the press regarding this matter.”216 In my opinion, Katzenbach comes out as clean as a hound’s tooth on this matter, and it is ironic that someone who the record shows championed the cause of complete openness in the investigation would be the one the conspiracy theorists have accused of promoting secrecy and suppression.

  But even if, just for the sake of argument, the most sinister inference is drawn from Katzenbach’s memo, and the conspiracy theorists are correct that he was urging a suppression of the true facts in the assassination, it is ridiculous in the extreme to presume that Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general who, as indicated, was running the attorney general’s office during the period that RFK was immobilized by gr
ief, would be in a position to actually determine and dictate the conduct of the FBI and the independent Warren Commission in the future. This sinister inference bears no relationship to common sense or reality.

  And yet, none other than Gary Cornwell, the intelligent and savvy deputy chief counsel to the HSCA (Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey’s number-one man) wants us to believe just that. He says, “Katzenbach and those acting with him decided that it was more important to get on with the business of running the government and to quash the rumors than it was to find the truth or to tell the American public what the truth was.” Cornwell goes on to say that because of this, “the tragic legacy of the Warren Commission is that we will in all probability always have to live with doubt about the questions that we want real answers to.”217

  It should be noted that since the FBI is under the jurisdiction of the attorney general’s office (Department of Justice), and Katzenbach was Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s chief deputy, if Katzenbach wanted the facts of the assassination to be suppressed (i.e., although he’s working right under the brother of the slain president, he wants to help ensure that the president’s alleged murderers are not brought to justice), wouldn’t this objective of his more likely be achieved if the FBI kept jurisdiction over the assassination? Instead, it is well documented that Katzenbach, very early on, urged President Johnson to appoint an independent, blue-ribbon commission to investigate the assassination. As the HSCA said, “Officials at [the Department of] Justice, notably Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, were instrumental in creating the Warren Commission, in effect transferring the focus of the investigation from the FBI to a panel of distinguished Americans.”218

  The notion that the Warren Commission wouldn’t seek the truth about the president’s murder because of national security reasons is so far out that in Katzenbach’s long testimony and deposition, of the hundreds of questions asked him, only one indirectly touched on this issue. When he was asked, “How big a role in the thinking of yourself and those who were making decisions at those levels of government during 1963 was the consideration that any investigation should be possibly forgone if it had the possibility of creating additional rumors?” he responded, “It never entered my mind or anybody elses that I ever talked to. This was the president of the United States who had been assassinated. Not only would the government want to know everything they could about it, but so would the public and so would the world.”

  Moreover, as far as the allegation that our nation’s leaders decided to suppress the truth about a foreign conspiracy in the assassination, Katzenbach testified, “Everybody appeared to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone fairly early.”219 (The facts that the murder weapon was a twelve-dollar mail-order rifle, that Oswald had to fend completely for himself in escaping from the scene of the crime, that he was a completely unstable malcontent, among many other things, pointed clearly in that direction immediately.) Therefore, there wouldn’t have been any reason for the thought of suppressing the truth to enter the minds of our nation’s “leaders,” no motivation for them to contemplate such an outrageous course.

  Except for the moments right after the assassination when no one knew who the killer or killers were or whether a massive domestic or international conspiracy was involved, the closest reference to national security being an issue is a February 17, 1964, memo to the file (far, far less known than the Katzenbach memo) by Warren Commission assistant counsel Melvin Eisenberg about the first meeting, on January 20, 1964, that Chief Justice Warren had with his staff. Eisenberg quotes Warren as telling his staff that when President Johnson first asked him to head up the investigation (November 29), Warren said that the president spoke “of rumors of the most exaggerated kind…circulating in this country and overseas. Some rumors went as far as attributing the assassination to a faction within the Government wishing to see the presidency assumed by President Johnson. Others, if not quenched, could conceivably lead the country into a war which would cost forty million lives. No one could refuse to do something which might help to prevent such a possibility.” Of course, there is nothing in Warren’s address to his staff about suppressing the truth to avoid a war. Indeed, as indicated earlier, Eisenberg goes on to say that Warren “emphasized that the Commission had to determine the truth, whatever that might be.” Naturally, as with his surgery on the Katzenbach memo, Mark Lane, in Plausible Denial, told his readers only about the “war” part of the Eisenberg memo, deleting all reference to Warren telling his staff they had to find the truth whatever it might be.220

  And Lane makes no reference in his book to a January 21, 1964, “Memorandum for the Record” by another Warren Commission assistant counsel, Howard Willens, about the same subject meeting Warren had with his staff, in which he writes that Warren “stated that the President had instructed him to find out the whole truth and nothing but the truth and that is what he [Warren] intended to do.”* It bears repeating what Liebeler told me—that “from the beginning we were all after the truth, and there were no limitations on that. We could do whatever we wanted to do.”221

  What is elliptical in Katzenbach’s and Warren’s reference to “rumors” is they obviously were referring to rumors “which had no evidence to support them.” The conspiracy theorists have converted Katzenbach’s and Warren’s desire to squelch rumors that had no basis in fact into Katzenbach’s and Warren’s desire to suppress the facts of the assassination. But how could Katzenbach and Warren have known way back then that they had to spell out that only false rumors, rumors without a stitch of evidence to support them, had to be squelched for the benefit of the American public? How could they have known back then that there would actually be people like Mark Lane who would accuse men like Warren, Congressman Gerald Ford, Senator John Cooper, and so on, men of unimpeachable stature, honor, and probity, of getting in a room and all deciding to deliberately suppress, or not even look for, evidence of a conspiracy to murder the president (thereby jeopardizing their reputation and legacy and making them criminal accessories after the fact), or that there would be intelligent, rational, and sensible people of the considerable stature of Michael Beschloss and Evan Thomas who would decide to give their good minds a rest and actually buy into this nonsense?

  Another assertion that has been made over and over again by conspiracy theorists is that Jack Ruby’s killing of Oswald prevented this nation from ever finding out the truth about the assassination,* and concomitantly, Oswald’s unavailability was an inherent weakness of the Warren Commission. Indeed, even the Warren Commission has given a partial nod to this view. “After Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby,” the Commission wrote, “it was no longer possible to arrive at the complete story of the assassination through normal judicial procedures during a trial of the alleged assassin.”222

  But the assertion that Oswald’s death precluded us from finding out the truth presupposes that Oswald had something to tell us other than precisely why he killed Kennedy. (I mean, we could scarcely have more evidence of the fact that he did kill Kennedy.) It also necessarily presupposes that he acted with others. If he did not—and there is no evidence that he did—then his death does not diminish at all the total relevant knowledge we already have about the assassination.

  Actually, and ironically, because of the laws concerning the admissibility of evidence, chances are we learned more about the assassination because Oswald was killed. For instance, all trial lawyers know that just because a statement is hearsay does not, perforce, make it unreliable. Hearsay is simply any oral or written statement (or conduct, when intended as a substitute for words) made outside of court (i.e., not from the witness stand at the present proceeding) that is offered into evidence to prove not merely that the statement was made, but that it was true. Although there are twenty-two recognized exceptions to the hearsay rule, if Oswald had not been killed and had been prosecuted, a great amount of inadmissible hearsay that was published by the Warren Commission, much of it true and very relevant, would not have
been received into evidence at his trial.

  Also, although Marina Oswald offered a great amount of very incriminating evidence against her husband in her testimony before the Warren Commission, because of the marital privilege (which Oswald would have had a right to invoke), Marina would not have been able to testify at Oswald’s trial,† for example, about Oswald’s attempt to murder General Walker, or to his use of the alias A. Hidell, or about his leaving $170 and his wedding ring behind for her on the morning of the assassination. She wouldn’t have been able to identify the backyard photos or the light-gray jacket of his found in the parking lot near the Tippit murder scene, or furnish so much other testimony and evidence at his trial. And there is much other evidence that was presented to the Warren Commission and published that would not have been admissible at any trial of Oswald. As pointed out in the May 1965 New York University Law Review, “The Commission was not inhibited by an elaborate system of evidentiary rules, or procedural restraints, [and] its area of inquiry was not circumscribed.”223

  Show me a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t believe that Jack Ruby silenced Oswald for the mob. In fact, the majority of American people believe this. Well, Ruby wasn’t killed and he was brought to trial for murdering Oswald, wasn’t he? Yet virtually nothing we didn’t already know came out at Ruby’s trial. In fact, Ruby never even testified at his trial, and Oswald, like so many other criminal defendants, may not have testified at his trial either. And let’s not forget that even assuming, just for the sake of argument, there was a conspiracy, in over three years before Ruby’s death, he never said a word implicating anyone else in the alleged conspiracy.224 And Ruby was a notorious blabbermouth. Oswald always played things pretty close to the vest, and those who had personal contact with him believe that he never would have confessed. U.S. postal inspector Harry D. Holmes, who interrogated Oswald, said, “I don’t think Oswald would have ever confessed. He was that adamant.”225 Dallas detective L. C. Graves, whose right arm was locked inside Oswald’s left arm at the moment Ruby shot Oswald, said, “If Ruby hadn’t shot Oswald, I doubt seriously if much more would have been clarified. I don’t think Oswald would have ever confessed to anything.226