by J. W Lateer
One can easily divide the rabid anti-Communists of the 40s and 50s between 1) the China Lobby (who lost out to Mao), 2) the Catholic Church (which was threatened by Communism in southern Europe, Latin America and Vietnam), 3) the White Russians and their eastern European and Tsarist friends (who were ousted by the Soviet Bolsheviks) and 4) the thousands of anti-Castro Cubans who had been dispossessed by Castro. It is no accident that the White Russians and the anti-Castro Cubans have most frequently been accused of complicity in the Kennedy assassination by the majority of authors. The other two were different. The China Lobby had become defunct by 1963 because China was obviously lost to the Communists without any hope of redemption. The final group, the Catholic Church has never explicitly been accused by any authors on the assassination. That apparently is because its role was limited to a background one, with the only actual Catholic activist conspirators being Senator Thomas J. Dodd, and possibly William F. Buckley and his close friend E. Howard Hunt of the CIA.
By far the most politically powerful group of those I have mentioned was the Catholic Church. And the person generally considered to be the most prominent Catholic in the U.S. was Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy.
There is no separating Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Kennedy patriarch,. Kennedy entertained McCarthy at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod. McCarthy dated Kennedy’s daughters. Joseph P. Kennedy arranged for Robert F. Kennedy to be hired as assistant counsel on McCarthy’s committee. It has been claimed by some historians that Robert F. Kennedy working for McCarthy’s committee was a temporary fluke. It is claimed that RFK quickly learned how bad McCarthy was.
The truth is entirely different. Although RFK resigned from McCarthy’s committee after six months, he was quickly hired back as counsel to the minority Democrats. RFK was only absent from McCarthy’s committee for a few months during the period of 1952 to 1959. The fact that RFK was the counsel for the minority Democrats isn’t all that significant. As we shall see, McCarthy’s committee (as well as the related Senate Internal Security Subcommittee) was stacked with right-wing rabid anti-Communist Democrats.
Near the time of McCarthy’s death, McCarthy’s committee morphed into the McClellan committee. The McClellan committee focused on corruption in labor unions. What most people don’t know is that the rabid anti-Communists on the McCarthy-McClellan Committee were mostly interested in investigating Communists in labor unions.
So as McCarthy’s anti-Communist slander campaigns began and raged on, the Kennedy family was involved up to their ears in the entire situation. And it is a straight line, repeat, a straight line from McCarthyism to the JFK assassination.
Chapter 22
JFK and the Rogue Committees of Congress
To understand the JFK assassination, one must have a working understanding of the way committees of Congress operate. As mentioned before, the committee system of Congress was operating as if on steroids from 1946 until 1964.
For almost as long as there has been a Congress, there have been committees of Congress. When the first Congress came into session, Committees were used to study and recommend legislation. At first there were ad hoc committees. These were the most functional of the various types of committees in carrying out the overall program of the Congress as a whole.
These ad hoc committees avoided the problem of the committees of Congress becoming miniature legislatures unto themselves. This situation soon changed. Because of the need of particular expertise in legislating, standing committees soon became necessary.
Well before the 1950’s, there had been a succession of Congressional Committees investigating Communism and other unpopular political causes.
In 1918-19, there was the Overman Committee which was a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It started by investigating possible sedition by German sympathizers in World War I, and then moved to investigating Communist elements in the U.S. The activities of this committee contributed to a very early scare surrounding Communism in 1919.
In 1930, the Fish Committee was expressly devoted to investigating Communists and Communist groups in the U.S. In this cause, the Committee investigated the ACLU and Communist presidential candidate William Z. Foster.
Next came the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, which lasted from 1934 to 1937. This was a House Committee which began by focusing on foreign propaganda. They investigated a famous rumored plot to overthrow the U.S. Government by a fascist cabal.
Though never completely substantiated, according to a book by Allen Weinstein et. al. called The Haunted Wood, Congressman Samuel Dickstein was receiving $1250 per month from the Soviet NKVD (spy agency) which wanted more information about fascist and anti-Communist groups from the Committee.
After this came the Dies Committee which operated from 1938 to 1944. The Dies [rhymes with lice] Committee was chaired by conservative Texas Congressman Martin Dies. Its mission was to investigate disloyalty and subversive activities of citizens and government employees, either Communist or fascist. One party investigated by the Dies Committee was the Soviet inspired American Youth Congress, an affiliate of the Commintern from Russia. The Dies Committee was noteworthy for two facts. First, it pioneered the practice of, basically, libeling and slandering people to intimidate and suppress individuals or opinions which they considered subversive. Second, this committee began to collect huge amounts of information on many thousands of people. It filled 600 file cabinets with cards. These cards were used to investigate people who applied for employment or for other purposes.
HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities replaced the Dies Committee from 1938 to 1975. It is HUAC with which most Americans are familiar.
It was before the HUAC committee that freshman Congressman Richard M. Nixon made his name by attacking State Department official Alger Hiss for being a Communist. Hiss had been one of FDR’s top advisors at the conference with Stalin at Yalta, where many accused FDR of handing over Eastern Europe to the Soviets. Because of this, Hiss was forbidden to ever work again for the State Department.
Hiss was also prosecuted and found guilty of perjury. The Hiss case was still heavily used by conservatives as of 1963 when they were emphasizing the threat of Communism. We will see the Hiss case pop up again just before the JFK assassination in the case of Otto Otepka. There was a rumored threat making the rounds in Washington during the Kennedy Administration that there would be an attempt to actually bring Alger Hiss back to the State Department. This threat may have pushed some conservatives over the edge regarding their reaction to the JFK assassination and their attitude about the cover-up.
One of the big HUAC controversies was with regard to Jack Ruby. In an FBI document dated November 24, 1947, it was disclosed that Jack Ruby was working around that time as an informant for Congressman Nixon. Because of this relationship, Nixon requested that Ruby not be required to testify before HUAC. History doesn’t record the exact nature of Ruby’s activities on behalf of Nixon. But this connection seems to disprove the argument that Ruby was just a sentimental strip-club owner who wore his heart on his sleeve, etc.
In analyzing the JFK assassination one of the most important question in the judgment of your writer is why all the members of Congress remained silent about the JFK assassination. It wasn’t until the House formed the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977 that Congress openly showed any interest as to who killed Kennedy. Millions of Americans probably wondered why Congress was indifferent, even though they, as elected officials would not be immune to assassination. This silence and cover-up seems potentially suicidal on the part of any elected official who might have enemies, which every member of the Congress would have.
To address this question of Congressional silence, the reader should try to understand the hostility between Congress and the Executive in the period from 1945 to 1963.
Starting in 1945, their was a push to limit the powers of the presidents. And one of the members of Congress who worked the hardest to expand the powers of Congressional Commit
tees was Congressman Everett Dirksen of Illinois. Everett Dirksen was a member of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) on the very day of the JFK assassination. And we will show that SISS had complicity in the JFK assassination, or at the very least, was active in the cover-up – even before the fact.
According to Neil MacNeil, in Dirksen: Portrait of a Public Man, Dirksen, in 1943 wanted to expand the powers of Congressional Committees. He worked to establish a Committee on Congressional Reorganization. His motive was to curtail the inroads made by the Presidency against the powers of Congress. Again, citing MacNeill at page 72, Dirksen wanted Congressional Committees to have on staff those who had worked in the various departments. The idea was that the Congressional staff person would be something of an informant to the Congress, who would betray bureaucratic secrets or motives of the leadership of their former executive department.
One could argue, of course, that departments of the executive branch should not have anything to hide from the Congress in the first place. But as we shall see in later chapters, especially in the case of Otto Otepka of the State Department, the Congressional Committees used these “informants” to try and set the priorities and agenda of the executive departments whenever they disagreed with that department. Senator Joe McCarthy, to cite an extreme example, openly invited each and every employee in the executive branch who had differences with their bosses to contact him, and he would step in.
Dirksen biographer MacNeil, at p. 116, stated “within himself he harbored an inherent animosity toward the executive branch of government as such … he had [felt] like many Senators, that somehow their election by the people gave them an automatic superiority to all members of the executive branch, save only the President, who was elected too.”
It is difficult to separate the rise of the Congressional Committees and the global spread of Communism. In 1946, not only did the Congress grant its committees the ability to hire professional staff, but the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 also stated that the records of the committees became the property of the committee so they could more easily hide their activities from the public.
It seems apparent today, that the entire gearing up of Congressional Committees was because of the perceived threat of Communism. But in 1946 and 1947, two other important things took place. One was the creation of the CIA in 1947. The other was the merger of the Secretaries of War and the Navy into one cabinet position, Secretary of Defense. We will see over the next pages how all three of these decisions led inexorably toward the assassination of President Kennedy.
What most people never consider is that the Warren Commission was nothing more or less than the fourth Congressional Committee in the line of SISS, HUAC and Joe McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations or PSI.
In their book Committees in Congress, by Christopher J. Deering and Steven S. Smith, published by Congressional Quarterly, the authors deal with two very interesting facts. First, at page 26 they list seven different eras or periods in the history of Congressional committees, beginning in 1789. The fourth such period is called, according to the authors, the period of “Committee Government.” This period lasted from 1947 to 1965 and followed the enactment of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946.
For our purposes there are two noteworthy items which appear in this 1946 Act. First, committees were for the first time allowed to hire professional staff. They were allowed 4 such staff. Second it is specified that the records of each committee are the property of the Congress and of the committee. This is contrary to the normal policy of, for instance, state government, where all public records are generally available to the public and the press, with only specific exceptions. Deering and Smith also state that this 1946 Act “consolidated Congress’ oversight powers within the respective committees.”
Why do political science scholars label this period “Committee Government?” It is apparently because they feel Congressional Committees of that era were in charge of the Government. One thing is certain. The power of Congressional Committees has never been anywhere near what it was in this 18-year period.
Going further in the analysis of Deering and Smith, the general principle is that structure of committees and their procedures is determined by the political environment in the U.S. as it existed at the time. For instance, when Liberal Democrats where predominant in the 1970’s, the Democratic Party as an entity had much more influence with lawmaking than the heretofore powerful committee chairmen in Congress.
Conversely, when Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich had his day in the mid-1990’s, major adjustments and reforms were put in place to please the more conservative mood of the electorate, especially with regard to budgeting and Federal deficit spending. Deficits were anathema to the Republicans of that decade.
It is very tempting to put a puzzle in place surrounding the ascendancy of the elderly Southern “mossback” committee chairman of that 18-year period. With the U.S. squaring off against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, “invulnerable” Southern conservative chairmen were handed the keys to the government because our country felt it needed hatchet men to fight off Communism.
According to this theory, true fighters of Communism simply would not be found among ordinary elected officials. Leaders like Adlai Stevenson and Eleanor Roosevelt just couldn’t be allowed to have much power if the Soviets were to be contained or hopefully defeated.
The reader will see, as we move forward, that the employment of unelected professional staff for the first time in the Congressional committees had a direct effect on the power of the “safe” Southern committee chairmen such as Richard Russell of Georgia and James O. Eastland of Mississippi. In fact, one could go as far as to say that the almost unlimited access men like Joe McCarthy had to professional staff and investigators was a deliberate purpose of the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act. It made possible both the Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities committees, just to name two.
But the most important fact revealed in the book by Deering and Smith, is that various types of Congressional committees (including many out-of-the-ordinary committees) are still considered by political scientists as being Congressional committees. These committee types include ad hoc committees, congressional subcommittees, conference committees, task forces, joint committees, select committees, special committees, summit committees and commissions.
Summit committees are defined as including members from the executive branch. Commissions, an example of which was the Warren Commission, are defined as more formal bodies created by statute or executive order. Unlike other committees, commissions can include persons from outside the government, or as in the case of the Warren Commission, a member of the judiciary. Implicitly, to qualify as a committee of Congress, Senators and Congressmen would still be in the majority which they were, of course, in the Warren Commission.
The majority of SISS in 1963 consisted of Thomas Dodd (D. CT), James Eastland (D. MS), Olin Johnson (D. SC), Sam Ervin (D. NC), John McClellan (D. AR) Everett Dirksen (R. IL), and Roman Hruska (R. NE). All seven of those men were conservatives. There was a majority of five from the South. There was not one Liberal Democrat. There were only two moderates, both Republicans: Kenneth Keating (R. NY) and Hugh Scott (R. PA). The above was true even though, according to Gilbert C. Fite, the biographer of Richard Russell, there had been a tidal wave of liberal Democratic Senators that swept into office in the 86th Congress in 1958. In 1958 when Thomas Dodd was first elected to the Senate, the Democrats were blessed with a 65-35 majority in the Senate. Yet there were only eleven former Confederate states, which would provide only 22 Senators, not all of whom were conservative Democrats. In these states there were a few southern liberals like Ralph Yarbrough of Texas, a Democrat and William Fulbright of Arkansas. And even many Republicans were considered liberal back at that time.
So what was the situation with SISS and the Warren Commission, regarding their support in Congress as a whole? To ask this in another way, what was the s
ize of the right-wing conservative element in the Congress?
For comparison, let’s use a similar example of a comparable issue. This would be the vote by conservatives against the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The sentiment towards this treaty in some ways tracked the attitudes which SISS held towards JFK. And looking back to the specific time in question, some considered the Test Ban Treaty to be a litmus test on a politician’s tolerance toward Communism and the Soviet Union. Some writers also imply that the issue of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty precipitated the fatal dislike of some in the Congress for JFK.
The vote against the treaty featured only 19 negative votes. Even the arch anti-Communist Senator Thomas J. Dodd switched sides and voted in favor. The last die-hard opponents of the Treaty included right-wing ideologues like Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond. So why was there so much support for SISS and the Warren Commission with a mostly Liberal Congress? In the opinion of this author, it was because the ultra-right faction of the Congress was deliberately empowered to operate as the hatchet-men in their opposition to and hopefully destruction of the Red Menace. Their mission, no matter how distasteful, was accepted as a necessary evil by the liberals of the day.
Note:
On the subject of the flood of liberals resulting from the elections of 1958, see Richard B. Russell, Jr. Senator From Georgia (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies) (2002) by Gilbert C. Fite.
Chapter 23
Senator Pat McCarran and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
Senator Pat McCarran Begins The SISS Committee