LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  Under J. Edgar Hoover’s guidance, the men Johnson appointed include two notable subgroups, the the Eastern Troika and the Southern Gentlemen. The Troika—John McCloy, Allen Dulles and Gerald Ford—was the dominant group, comprised of men who had a personal stake in the outcome and were arguably affirmatively involved in the plot (though in Ford’s case, “unwittingly”). The Southern Gentlemen group–John Sherman Cooper (KY), Hale Boggs (LA), and Richard Russell (GA)—was marginalized by the Troika and fooled into believing that their objections would be recorded as such when the full report was published; as it turned out, that was only a device used by the majority to swindle them into signing the report since the dissenting opinions were never published.

  The first order of business was in the selection of the general counsel who would report to Earl Warren. Rather than allow Chairman Warren to designate his own choice, Warren Olney III, as soon as Hoover and Katzenbach got wind of it, they mounted an offensive campaign through commissioners Gerald Ford and John McCloy. Hoover simply despised him because he was too much of a liberal; Katzenbach felt that he was too much of a maverick and could not be controlled. After a brief discussion, Warren agreed to withdraw his name from further consideration. McCloy just happened to have a short list of alternative choices on hand, one of which was J. Lee Rankin who was nominated, seconded, and voted unanimously as the commission’s general counsel.209 From then on, with assurance that everyone down the line in both agencies and the commission members were finally “on board” with the real agenda and mission, and that there were no “mavericks” around to spoil the process, the Johnson-Hoover objective to contain and direct the course of the investigation was complete.

  The arrogance of most of the staff of the Warren Commission, even those taking fairly routine testimony and statements, is reflected in this statement from Senator Yarborough, given to Jim Marrs, author of Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy: 210

  A couple of fellows [from the Warren Commission] came to see me. They walked in like they were a couple of deputy sheriffs and I was a bank robber. I didn’t like their attitude. As a senator I felt insulted. They went off and wrote up something and brought it back for me to sign. But I refused. I threw it in a drawer and let it lay there for weeks. And they had on there the last sentence which stated: “This is all I know about the assassination.” They wanted me to sign this thing, then say this is all I know. Of course, I would never have signed it. Finally, after some weeks, they began to bug me. “You’re holding this up, you’re holding this up” they said, demanding that I sign the report. So I typed one up myself and put basically what I told you about how the cars all stopped. I put in there, “I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings but for the protection of future presidents, they should be trained to take off when a shot is fired.” I sent that over. That’s dated July 10, 1964, after the assassination. To my surprise, when the volumes were finally printed and came out, I was surprised at how many people down at the White House didn’t file their affidavits until after the date, after mine the 10th of July, waiting to see what I was going to say before they filed theirs. I began to lose confidence then in their investigation and that’s further eroded with time.

  Modified Testimony

  Testimony by many eyewitnesses, whether innocent bystanders who happened to have chosen this relatively sparsely populated area to watch the motorcade or by some of the local or federal officials accompanying President Kennedy would change quickly to “fit the pattern” that was quickly established by the plotters. Perhaps the plotters knew enough about psychology to anticipate that, immediately after the assassination of the president, most of the eyewitnesses would become affected by “post traumatic stress disorder.” Depending upon their psychological makeup, it would render many of them unconfident of their own recollection of the events they experienced firsthand. The degree to which an individual might react is arguably less related to their intelligence or education than their general emotional state at the time. According to the Mayo Clinic, “Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a type of anxiety disorder that’s triggered by a traumatic event. You can develop posttraumatic stress disorder when you experience or witness an event that causes intense fear, helplessness or horror. Many people who are involved in traumatic events have a brief period of difficulty adjusting and coping. But with time and healthy coping methods, such traumatic reactions usually get better. In some cases, though, the symptoms can get worse or last for months or even years. Sometimes they may completely disrupt your life. In these cases, you may have posttraumatic stress disorder.”211 Among the typical reactions to PTSD are the following:

  • Loss of self-esteem

  • Feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, and/or guilt

  • Difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions

  • Withdrawal from friends and activities once pursued

  • Persistent thoughts of death

  The aggregate (or overtime, cumulative) effect of these symptoms would certainly make some people less confident in their own recollections of what they witnessed. It would uniquely explain the following nearly immediate revisions to original statements made by a number of witnesses, in most cases to reject the initial reactions in favor of a scenario that had been preestablished and immediately swung into play. This might explain why many of the eyewitnesses traveling with JFK, those who were the most emotionally attached to him, were among those who quickly adopted the “official story” in place of their own memory.

  House Speaker Tip O’Neill revealed in his autobiography five years after the assassination:212

  I was surprised to hear [Presidential aide Kenneth] O’Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence. “That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” I said. “You’re right,” he replied. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.” Dave Powers [another Kennedy aide] was with us at dinner that night, and his recollection of the shots was the same as O’Donnell’s.

  James Altgens, photographer of the Associated Press, wrote in an AP dispatch immediately after the assassination, “At first I thought the shots came from the opposite side of the street [i.e., the knoll]. I ran over there to see if I could get some pictures.” His story quickly changed, and he eventually told the Warren Commission that he thought the shots came from behind the presidential limousine (i.e., the direction of the Depository). “I did not know until later where the shots came from.”213

  The testimony of Mr. Altgens inadvertently reveals the tactics of the commission lawyers in obfuscating and redirecting testimony when they realized that it was heading in the wrong direction:

  Mr. ALTGENS: There was utter confusion at the time I crossed the street. The Secret Service men, uniformed policemen with drawn guns that went racing up this little incline and I thought …

  Mr. LIEBELER: [quickly changing the subjects of “Secret Service men”] When you speak of the ‘little incline’ that means the area—the little incline on the grassy area here by this concrete structure across Elm Street toward the School Book Depository Building, is that part of Dealey Plaza too over in here, this concrete structure, or is Dealey Plaza only the name ascribed to this area here between Elm Street and Commerce Street?

  The colloquy over the technical definition of what constituted Dealey Plaza served only to move the dialogue away from the mention of Secret Service men on the grassy knoll. This technique would be repeated over and over again in the direction other testimony would take whenever the discussion turned too closely to concepts not congruent with the official direction to be pursued:

  Richard Dodd and James Simmons, railroad workers who witnessed the assassination from their position on the triple overpass, both complained that the information they provided to FBI agents was changed by the ag
ents in their report to the Warren Commission:214

  • Dodd told Mark Lane in a filmed interview that he told federal agents that “the shots, the smoke came from behind the hedge on the north side of the plaza” (i.e., the “Grassy Knoll”). The FBI agents incorrectly reported that Dodd “did not know where the shots came from,” (CE 1420).

  • The FBI agents reported that “Simmons advised that it was his opinion the shots came from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository Building.” (CE 1416). Simmons has contradicted the FBI report, saying, “It sounded like it came from the left and in front of us towards the wooden fence. And there was a puff of smoke that came underneath the trees on the embankment … It was right directly in front of the wooden fence … as soon as we heard the shots, we ran around to [behind] the picket fence … There was no one there but there were footprints in the mud around the fence and footprints on the two-by-four railing on the fence.”215

  Another witness, J. C. Price, also reported that his statements to the FBI were completely reversed before being submitted by the FBI to the Warren Commission (19 H 492). These three witnesses were only a few of the many whose words were turned around into statements that supported a lie. There were a number of similar reports by other railroad workers on the overpass (including Nolan H. Potter, Clemon E. Johnson, Walter L. Winborn, and Thomas J. Murphy), all of whom stated that shots were fired from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. These witnesses were never called to give testimony; instead of their truths, the FBI converted their statements into lies, which were then combined into a single grand lie, and that became the foundation upon which the Warren Commission figuratively built its house. It would begin crumbling almost immediately.

  The willingness of the Warren Commission to accept indirect, incorrect statements based upon unsworn hearsay from FBI reports rather than direct, sworn testimony of witnesses is clear and convincing evidence of how the commission used deliberate distortion to achieve its mission; the product of this subterfuge was that this official “Presidential Commission” not only allowed false information to be entered into the public record, it aggressively promoted it as the primary instigator. That the FBI excised all reports of gunshots from the knoll proves conclusively the unstated mission of the “president’s commission” to avoid a truthful accounting of events in favor of the preordained verdict of Oswald, alone, as the assassin. Even two police officials would later make statements contradicting what they stated originally:

  • Jesse Curry, the Dallas chief of police, broadcast over his car radio, “Get a man on top of that triple underpass and see what happened up there,” immediately after the shots were fired. Yet by the very next day, he told reporters from the New York Times that although he was driving the lead car of the motorcade, he “could tell from the sound of the three shots that they had come from the book company’s building near downtown Dallas.”216

  • Bill Decker, the Dallas sheriff, was riding with Curry in the lead car, and according to the police transcript, Decker called over Curry’s radio, “Have my office move all available men out of my office into the railroad yard to try to determine what happened in there and hold everything secure until Homicide and other investigators should get there.” When Decker testified to the Warren Commission, he did not reveal, nor was he ever asked, where he thought the shots came from.217

  The immediate and widespread effort to reform eyewitness’s testimony, documented over and over again by the early researchers cited previously, was only the first of the inconsistencies and anomalies to emerge after the publication of the Warren Report. The enormous scale of distortion that soon became obvious to most people with a minimally critical mind was the catalyst which created the most doubt in the public mind about the findings of the commission.

  Commission Staff’s Efforts to Publish Voluminous Report

  Its decision to publish a 912-page book just before the 1964 presidential election, followed afterward by twenty-six more volumes and fifty thousand more pages of documents, was designed to show the public that the investigation was thorough and complete; in truth, this was done to obfuscate the fact that they had explored only one very narrow lead, effectively excluding all others. In order to “paper the files,” the staff was, evidently, instructed to include thousands of pages of extraneous material having nothing to do with the pertinent issues. This effort apparently led to someone gathering miscellaneous debris collected during the course of the “investigation.” Some examples of this are legendary:

  • Three pages devoted to David Belin’s efforts to elicit from Mrs. Barbara Rowland that she got As and Bs in high school and that her husband had fudged his high school grades to her when they were courting since she later saw one of his report cards and noted that it had some Cs on it; also included was a review in minute detail his entire work history.218

  • Jack Ruby’s mother’s dental records from 1938, including a comment from the dentist that “patient states she has teeth but not wearing them.” Evidently, at least someone on the staff had a rather perverse sense of humor to have gratuitously included such a document obviously intended to disparage Jack Ruby’s mother, Fannie Rubenstein. But this was not the only instance of the commission’s staff attacking the integrity of completely innocent American citizens.

  • Finally, among many other such irrelevant files, there is yet another enigmatic item buried in the thousands of pages, which relates to a nail file purportedly owned by Lee Oswald’s mother.

  It may be that the real reason these items were included was that someone was trying to leave a clue that the entire report was thrown together in such haste that everything in it is suspect. Or they were merely following orders from on high to publish every single item in the commission’s files—even the round ones beneath every desk. Yet there were many relevant facts which the commission decided to ignore in its report, some already noted; another was the fact that two of its attorneys (Coleman and Slawson) went to Mexico City and listened to the CIA tapes of the Oswald imposter. However, no mention of this detail was anywhere to be found in the final report or any of the twenty-six volumes of hearings and witness depositions.219

  The lack of a conclusive verdict and the virtual impossibility of ever attaining one is obviously an indisputable fact of life for anyone attempting to evaluate this case. But the question of when, if ever, we will have actually reached the finality of the “case closed” situation must ultimately be measured against the proven facts that much of the evidence at the time, and subsequently thereafter, was destroyed, altered, or fabricated. This alone should serve as the “proof” of the fallacy of the “lone assassin” myth and with it the entire conclusion of the Warren Commission Report. In retrospect, the one singular and spectacular success of the Warren Commission Report is arguably that it succeeded in buying enough time to ensure that enough evidence would disappear or be “fixed,” the key players would die off either naturally or otherwise, and the cloud of confusion left in its wake would make a real and convincing verdict forever impossible.

  Presenting the Warren Report to the President

  (and the Skeptical Nation)

  The presentation of the Warren Report to President Johnson was celebrated by newspapers and news magazines throughout the United States and the world as the end of a long and arduous task conducted by a large staff of lawyers and their assistants who completed their charge in record time and whose work, once and for all time, resolved the “crime of the century.” None of this was really “new” news since Hoover had seen to it that the FBI reports had already been leaked to the press months before followed by periodic leaks of other materials to keep the nation’s thirst for more knowledge about it quenched and to prepare it for a preordained verdict. Unfortunately, time and a steady outpouring of inconsistencies, anomalies, and obvious lies would prove those assertions not only incorrect but outrageously baseless. The release of the original report was timed to coincide with a cover page article in Life magazine on October 2
, 1964. The introductory piece was written (at least his name was listed as the author) by Gerald Ford, one of the members of the commission; the lead paragraphs said,220

  The most important witness to appear before the Warren Commission in the 10 months we sat was a neat, Bible-reading steam fitter from Dallas. His name was H. L. Brennan and he had seen Lee Harvey Oswald thrust a rifle from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository and shoot the President of the United States.

  In the shock and turmoil that followed, Brennan had headed for a policeman and given him a description of the man he had seen in the window. The police sent out a ‘wanted’ bulletin based on that description. About half an hour later, as police interrogated the assembled employees of the Depository, the manager, noting that Lee Harvey Oswald was missing, had checked the personnel files for Oswald’s address and description. The police then issued their second wanted bulletin based on the new information. After this second bulletin was issued, Officer J. D. Tippit stopped Oswald on the street and Oswald shot him dead.

  The two descriptions differed in some details—although Brennan later identified Oswald in a police lineup—and it was this discrepancy which set off the first of the countless rumors concerning the President’s assassination: namely, the story that two men were involved.