Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  These realities throw into question the conventional belief that the murder of Oswald prevented us from finding out the whole truth about the assassination.

  The Other Investigations

  Succumbing to the never-ending and lurid cries of the Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists that there was a conspiracy and cover-up in the Kennedy case, over the years there have been three investigations on very limited areas of the assassination and one complete reinvestigation. In February 1968, a panel of four medical experts appointed by Attorney General Ramsey Clark reexamined the photographs and X-rays from the Kennedy autopsy and confirmed the Warren Commission’s finding that President Kennedy was struck by two bullets, both fired from behind.227

  In 1975, President Ford set up a commission under the leadership of Nelson Rockefeller to determine whether any domestic activities of the CIA exceeded the agency’s statutory authority and to make appropriate recommendations. Although it was not specifically part of its charge, the Rockefeller Commission did look into allegations that the CIA participated in the assassination of President Kennedy, concluding, after investigating several allegations, that “there was no credible evidence of any CIA involvement.” The Rockefeller Commission also reviewed the medical evidence, and again substantiated the earlier findings that President Kennedy had been struck by only two bullets, both fired from the rear.228

  In 1976, a select committee of the Senate under the leadership of Senator Frank Church was directed to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities. Book V of its final report is dedicated to issues generated by the assassination and the Warren Commission’s investigation. The Church Committee* was critical of the response of both the FBI and the CIA to the original investigation, concluding that “the investigation of the assassination was deficient, and that facts which might have substantially affected the course of the investigation [particularly the CIA efforts to assassinate Castro] were not provided the Warren Commission.” However, the committee said it wanted to emphasize that it had “not uncovered any evidence sufficient to justify a conclusion that there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.”229

  Finally, in late 1976, a major effort to address and resolve remaining problems in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy raised by conspiracy theorists and Warren Commission critics was mounted by the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). (The committee also reinvestigated the murder of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.) The scope of the select committee’s investigation in 1977–1979 was essentially unlimited, except by the inevitable budgetary considerations. It was free to reinvestigate any aspect of the assassination it chose. The HSCA’s major contribution was to subject the existing physical evidence to searching scientific analysis, often with techniques unavailable to the Warren Commission fifteen years earlier. All of this added many more volumes to the extensive record, filled in some of the gaps, answered many questions, and refined interpretations of the existing evidence.

  The swift acquittal of Clay Shaw in New Orleans in 1969† had dealt the conspiracy movement a severe blow (see conspiracy section). How then did it happen that just eight years later Congress decided to reinvestigate the Kennedy assassination with primary emphasis on the issue of whether there was, indeed, a conspiracy? In addition to the Watergate scandal in 1972–1974, which introduced America as never before to criminal malefaction in the highest corridors of our government, there were two events, it would appear. One was the sensational revelation of the Church Committee in 1975–1976 that the CIA had actually conspired with organized crime to kill Castro. If the CIA not only plotted to murder Castro, but worse, had gotten in bed with organized crime to do so, the thinking among many was that maybe all these allegations about a conspiracy to kill Kennedy by the CIA and organized crime had some merit. But the publicity about the Church Committee findings had a short shelf life for the average American, who may have read an article or two about it in the newspaper or heard about it on the evening news. And, after all, it is quite a leap from conspiring to kill a foreign dictator to conspiring to kill the president. If there had only been the Church Committee finding of CIA–organized crime complicity to kill Castro, and the withholding of this plot from the Warren Commission, it is not at all certain that the HSCA would have come into existence.

  What almost assuredly put the reinvestigation movement over the top was the first showing of the Zapruder film (which was not authorized by Life magazine or the Zapruder family) to the American people on ABC on the evening of March 6, 1975.* Since the Geraldo Rivera–hosted show Goodnight America was on network television, a vast audience of everyday Americans saw, for the first time, the president’s violent head snap to the rear, ostensibly indicating a shot from the front, not the rear where Oswald was supposed to be. As conspiracy theorist Jim DiEugenio puts it, “The effect of this public showing of the Zapruder film was, in a word, electrifying. The day after, the Kennedy assassination was topic number one in bars and barber shops across America. The case was back on the front burner,”230 the New York Times noting the “widespread response” the show had “generated.”231

  It was conspiracy theorist Robert Groden’s pirated copy of the Zapruder film that had been shown on the ABC network, and Groden around that time was showing the film on a lecture tour with comedian Dick Gregory on college campuses, the most familiar cradle for dissent in contemporary America. He hit pay dirt at the University of Virginia. Andy Purdy, who would go on to become an assistant counsel for the HSCA, was a senior law student at the university who co-chaired the committee that invited Groden to speak at the Charlottesville campus. Purdy said that the large student audience (including himself) was captivated and swayed by Groden’s presentation. In the audience that night was the son of Congressman Thomas Downing (D-Va.). Purdy, Downing’s son (Dickerson), and a few other law students arranged for Groden to show the congressman the Zapruder film at his office in Washington, D.C., on April 15, 1975. Purdy said Downing, who had never seen the film before, was deeply troubled by it (“The Zapruder film really shook me,” Downing would later recall) and arranged for Groden to show the film to over fifty of his congressional colleagues, most of whom, per Purdy, were equally troubled.232 Downing decided to lead the charge in the House of Representatives (eventually joining forces with Congressman Henry Gonzalez [D-Texas], who already had a bill, which was foundering and going nowhere) to reinvestigate all three assassinations in the 1960s, those of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr.

  With the climate of the times already heated by the CIA–organized crime–Castro revelations and particularly the showing of the Zapruder film on network television, the Downing-Gonzalez bill (House Resolution 1540) creating the HSCA passed in the House by a vote of 280 to 65 on September 17, 1976. Downing became the chairman of the HSCA, with Gonzalez heading up the subcommittee on the assassination of Kennedy. (There was a separate subcommittee on Martin Luther King’s assassination. No reinvestigation of RFK’s assassination was authorized.)

  In early October 1976, Downing appointed Richard A. Sprague as chief counsel to the HSCA (the person literally in charge of the investigation). Although Sprague was originally recommended to the HSCA by, of all people, Mark Lane, Downing selected him from a list of six candidates. Sprague was a very prominent and well-respected former prosecutor from Philadelphia who had worked there as the first assistant district attorney under former Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter when Specter became district attorney of Philadelphia. Sprague had no preconceived biases about the assassination and appointed, as his chief deputy (on the JFK side of the HSCA), Robert Tanenbaum, the leading prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office at the time. Together, Sprague and Tanenbaum were prepared to launch a no-holds-barred, in-depth criminal investigation of the assassination, for which their backgrounds made them both eminently qualified.

  But things started to unravel when Downing retired from the House a few months
later (January 1977) and was replaced by Gonzalez as chairman of the HSCA on February 2. No one seems to know for sure why Gonzalez and Sprague didn’t get along, but their relationship quickly degenerated into ad hominem attacks, almost all of them by Gonzalez, who apparently resented the fact that although he was chairman, the other eleven members of the House select committee listened to and respected Sprague more on matters of HSCA policy, resulting in a charge by Gonzalez that Sprague was deliberately usurping his, Gonzalez’s, authority. Indeed, when Gonzalez fired Sprague on February 10, the other eleven committee members defied Gonzalez and signed a letter directing Sprague to disregard Gonzalez’s order and remain in his post, which he did. The letter said that Gonzalez “did not have the power unilaterally to discharge Mr. Sprague. It is only the committee which has this power.” And the committee wanted Sprague to stay.233

  Gonzalez and Sprague also locked horns over Sprague’s proposed $6.5 million funding request, which Gonzalez felt was bloated, and was determined to trim substantially. The feuding became so bitter that Gonzalez eventually resigned his chairmanship on March 2, 1977, calling Sprague “an unconscionable scoundrel who was insubordinate and insulting, not to mention disloyal.” Gonzalez had his supporters, such as Representative Thomas O’Neill Jr., the Speaker of the House, and Representative Jim Wright of Texas, the latter saying that “unless Henry can be prevailed upon to continue as chairman, the House probably will not vote to continue the investigation.”234 But a new chairman, Louis Stokes (D-Ohio), was named to take Gonzalez’s place on March 9.235

  There were other problems. One was that while all this was going on, since the HSCA had, like all congressional committees, officially expired with the end of the congressional term in which it was created (in this case, just over two months later on January 3, 1977, when the 94th Congress ended), a new resolution had to be passed to reconstitute the committee. In view of the fact that the predecessor resolution (HR 1540) had passed rather easily, the new resolution on January 4 should have likewise passed easily, but this time there seemed to be more resistance from Congress. Many in Congress, in addition to Gonzalez, had already been upset with Sprague’s proposed December 9, 1976, $6.5 million budget* (for the way Congress spends more money on far less serious matters, seemingly, a reasonable request), believing it was excessive. Also, the internal warfare that they had witnessed had soured some.

  And finally, Sprague himself unwittingly contributed partially to his ultimate departure. His budget included funding for polygraphs (a very valuable investigative tool used by virtually every major law enforcement agency in the country), voice stress evaluators (an investigative tool almost universally rejected by U.S. law enforcement as a worthless gimmick), and, what most frightened several members of Congress, miniature phone recording devices. Sprague wanted to secretly wire HSCA investigators with these mini-recorders while interviewing witnesses and then subject their responses to the psychological stress evaluator. Representative Don Edwards (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, said that this “would constitute intentional invasions of the most fundamental rights of Americans. I believe the use of these techniques by a committee of Congress to be wrong, immoral, and very likely illegal.”236 Congressman Frank Thompson (R-N.J.), the chairman of the House Administrative Committee, said that Sprague had “run amok.”237

  Sprague’s state of mind was that if there had been a conspiracy to murder the president, there was no need to treat the alleged perpetrators gently. But the sense in Congress among civil libertarians was that while they wanted to get to the bottom of the assassination, they didn’t want to do so by a bare-knuckle fight, and in the face of criticism, Sprague announced that his committee would not use the mini-recorders or stress evaluators. But the assault on Sprague continued when the media started resurrecting controversies surrounding Mr. Sprague’s handling of a few cases during his many first-rate years with the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, which he characterized as a campaign “to smear” him without foundation.238

  In a four-hour meeting on the evening of March 29, 1977, the day before Congress was scheduled to vote on whether the HSCA should be reconstituted,* Sprague and Tanenbaum met with Stokes and Congressmen Richardson Preyer, Walter E. Fauntroy, and Christopher Dodd, all members of the JFK subcommittee, in Stokes’s office. Tanenbaum recalls that the congressmen specifically asked Sprague not to resign, to stay on. “These were good people,” Tanenbaum says, “and they were willing to fight for Sprague,” but it was equally obvious to everyone in the room, Tanenbaum added, that they felt the resolution the next day might not pass if Sprague stayed.† “Dick [Sprague] took the high road and resigned,” Tanenbaum says, and it was clear the congressmen felt “unburdened.”239‡

  The New York Times quoted another (unnamed) participant at the meeting in Stokes’s office as saying the group had concluded that with Sprague remaining as chief counsel, they were about twenty-five votes short of the majority needed to reconstitute the committee and prevent it from going out of business the next day. Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., who was not present, said that “with Sprague resigning, they [the committee] claim it means 40 more votes.” Walter E. Fauntroy (D-D.C.) said that the allegations that had weakened Mr. Sprague had “absolutely no basis in fact” and added that Sprague’s resignation to allow the investigation to continue “in my judgment merits the Congressional Medal of Honor.”240

  The next day, March 30, 1977, House Resolution 433 passed after a sharp debate on a vote of 230 to 181, officially reconstituting the HSCA for a term to expire on January 3, 1979. Among other things, opponents of the close-to-two-year extension claimed the committee had come up thus far with nothing but hearsay. Supporters argued that terminating the committee at this point would convince the American public that a cover-up was going on.241 When Stokes asked Tanenbaum to become the new chief counsel, Tanenbaum, if possible, took an even higher road than Sprague by declining this prestigious position out of loyalty to Sprague, who had brought him aboard and who had even urged him to accept. Further, with Tanenbaum’s background and investigative style being almost a carbon copy of Sprague’s, he anticipated having the same problems Sprague had with Congress. But he agreed to stay on until a new chief counsel was named.242 A week and a half later, on April 10, Stokes appointed Alvin B. Hayes, a lawyer on the sixty-four-member staff of the HSCA, to serve as interim chief counsel while the committee sought a permanent replacement for Sprague.243*

  The committee’s real work did not get underway until June 20, 1977, when G. Robert Blakey, a forty-one-year-old Cornell law professor who was a former prosecutor from 1960 to 1964 in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Department of Justice under Robert Kennedy, was appointed chief counsel and staff director.244 Blakey was well known in federal law enforcement circles for being the chief author, in 1970, of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (widely referred to as RICO), which gave the FBI and Department of Justice new tools to effectively combat organized crime.245 (Blakey was later described by William G. Hundley, chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, as having “perhaps the finest analytical mind of the some sixty competent lawyers” in his section.)246 The committee accompanied its appointment of Blakey by placing a gag order on its investigation. Blakey, quoting the words of Thomas Dewey when he was appointed as a special prosecutor to investigate organized crime in New York City, told the media at a news conference that “in general, it is my belief that a talking prosecutor is not a working prosecutor.” The Washington Post reported that former Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg “had turned down earlier overtures” to become chief counsel, although Representative Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said that “Blakey was our principal choice.”247 Thirteen candidates for the position were interviewed and HSCA chairman Louis Stokes said that he picked Blakey.248

  The committee recognized from t
he outset that it had to operate under finite constraints of time and resources. The Warren Commission, as indicated, spent over $10 million in its ten-month existence. The HSCA, by contrast, spent about $5.8 million, although it operated, at varying levels of intensity, for about thirty months, from mid-September 1976 to the end of March 1979, the last seven months of which were mostly used “to write the final report, edit the drafts, check the galleys, print up the hearings, clear everything through agencies, and get [all the volumes] printed.”249 The Warren Commission employed some four hundred people; the select committee about two hundred and fifty,250 and that was for an investigation of two assassinations separated by five years, with no common links.

  In order to fulfill its mandate, the committee identified four main issues to be addressed with respect to the Kennedy assassination. First, who was or were the assassins? Second, did they have any aid or assistance either before or after the assassinations? Third, did the agencies and departments of the U.S. government adequately perform their duties and functions in collecting and sharing information before the assassination and in investigating the president’s murder? Fourth, and finally, given the evidence the committee uncovered, was the amendment of existing legislation or the enactment of new legislation appropriate?251* Of paramount concern was the prevailing view of the public. The select committee knew from a Gallup Poll that 80 percent of the American people believed that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone. Since it was clear that many Americans believed that agencies of the federal government itself were implicated in the assassination, the committee felt a keen responsibility to determine the facts and present detailed evidence on that score. Committee members knew that the credibility of the American government was at stake.252