by Jim Marrs
On March 16, 1964, three and a half months after its inception, the Warren Commission met again. This three-minute session was to approve a resolution governing the questioning of witnesses by Commission staff members. Only Warren, Cooper, Ford, McCloy, and Rankin attended.
Jack Ruby’s trial had ended on March 14, and at this point the real Warren Commission investigation began. On March 18, Commission staff attorneys flew to Dallas and set up a field station in the offices of US Attorney Barefoot Sanders.
Also in March the “more important” witnesses were called to testify over a period of fourteen days. By April, the number of days spent hearing testimony had dropped to seven.
On April 30, 1964, the Commission met again. Commissioners Ford, Boggs, and Russell were absent. Senator Cooper left the two-hour meeting after only thirty minutes. Though nearly five months had passed, Commissioners were still concerned about the contradictions in the investigative material. The question of Oswald’s involvement with the FBI and CIA remained unresolved.
Cooper expressed his concern over contradictions between the testimony of witnesses to Commission attorneys and news media reports of interviews with the same witnesses.
Conflicts in the Testimony
The questions Cooper raised remain valid today. Only a few assassination researchers have seen fit to study the problems between what some Commission witnesses actually said and what was reported.
If basic conflicts exist in the Warren Commission testimony, then all of it—used as primary evidence in all studies of the Kennedy assassination—must be reevaluated. In fact, a close scrutiny of this issue brings out deeply troubling instances of suppressing evidence and intimidating witnesses.
The first problem with Warren Commission testimony is omissions. Despite what was hailed at the time as one of the most thorough investigations of all time, a review of the Warren Commission’s performance reveals glaring deficiencies.
In their report, commissioners devoted more than a page to a detailed discussion of Lee Harvey Oswald’s pubic hair. In their volumes, several pages were used to reproduce Marguerite Oswald’s tax and house payment receipts, some dating back into the 1930s, and the dental records of Jack Ruby’s mother.
Many other pages were filled with meaningless and irrelevant testimony, such as that of Anne Boudreaux, who never met either Oswald or his mother but did know a woman who once babysat for the infant Oswald; that of Viola Peterman, a former neighbor of Marguerite Oswald’s who had not seen her for twenty-seven years; and that of Professor Revilo Pendleton Oliver, who took up thirty-five pages of testimony to discuss an article he had written that had no bearing on the JFK assassination.
Yet many pertinent witnesses were never asked to tell what they knew. These included:
—James Chaney, the motorcycle policeman closest to Kennedy during the assassination who told newsmen he saw the president “struck in the face” by the final shot.
—Bill and Gayle Newman, two of the bystanders closest to Kennedy at the time of the fatal head shot, who stated that shots came from directly behind them on the Grassy Knoll.
—Charles Brehm, a former US Army Ranger combat veteran and one of the closest bystanders to Kennedy when he was shot.
—J. C. Price, who from his bird’s-eye perch on top of the Terminal Annex building witnessed the entire assassination and then told of seeing a man with a rifle running behind the wooden picket fence on top of the Grassy Knoll.
—Milton Jones, who told the FBI that he was on a Dallas bus that was boarded and searched by Dallas police after Oswald had gotten off, although at that time no one knew that Oswald was a suspect.
—Mary Dowling, a waitress at Dallas’s Dobbs House restaurant who told the FBI that Policeman Tippit had been in the restaurant on November 20, when Oswald was there making a fuss over his food.
—James Simmons, a Union Railroad employee who supported Sam Holland in his contention that shots came from behind the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll.
—Richard Dodd, another railroad employee who told of hearing shots and seeing smoke come from behind the picket fence.
—Alonzo Hudkins, the Houston newspaperman who reported that Dallas officials told him that Oswald was an informant for the FBI.
—Ray Rushing, an evangelist who claimed to have ridden in an elevator at Dallas police headquarters with Jack Ruby about two hours before Ruby murdered Oswald and at a time when Ruby reportedly was at his home.
—Lieutenant George Butler, the Dallas police official in charge of Oswald’s transfer November 24 and who was reported to have been in an extremely agitated condition by newspaperman Thayer Waldo.
—Admiral George Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician who rode in the motorcade, was with Kennedy at Parkland Hospital, rode with Air Force One on the trip back to Washington, was present at the Bethesda autopsy, and received all of the official medical evidence, much of which is now in controversy.
—John T. Stringer and Lieutenant William Pitzer, who photographed and X-rayed Kennedy’s body at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
—James Sibert and Francis O’Neill, two FBI agents who attended Kennedy’s autopsy and made a report that contradicts some of the official conclusions.
—Richard Randolph Carr, a steelworker who reported seeing two men run from behind the Texas School Book Depository and drive off in a Rambler station wagon.
—Marvin Robinson, a motorist in Dealey Plaza who corroborated deputy sheriff Roger Craig’s claim that Oswald entered a westbound Rambler station wagon in front of the Depository minutes after the assassination.
The omission of these people’s testimony appears to go far beyond inefficiency or oversight. It seems rather to support the charges by Warren Commission critics that the panel avoided information that conflicted with their preconceived determination that Oswald was the lone assassin.
Conclusions reached by the Warren Commission—particularly the single-bullet theory—were contradicted by medical evidence, the witnesses, and governor John Connally. Therefore, the Commission chose to simply ignore them.
Some witnesses the Commission questioned, either directly or by deposition, have told researchers and news reporters that their testimony was altered. Others simply shrugged off their superficial questioning. Railroad supervisor Lee Bowers later said, “I was there to tell them only what they asked and when they wanted to cut off the conversation, I figured that was the end of it.”
Witnesses Butch Burroughs, Jean Hill, Phil Willis, Orville Nix, James Tague, and others have stated that their testimony as presented by the Commission did not accurately reflect what they said.
While every Commission witness had the opportunity to review his or her testimony for accuracy, as far as can be determined, few took advantage of the offer. As one person put it, “I trust you.”
One Warren Commission witness voiced her complaints to the FBI. Nancy Powell, better known as Ruby stripper Tammi True, talked to agents in August 1964. In their report, the agents stated:
Mrs. Powell complained that she did not feel that her testimony had been recorded accurately in the deposition. It was explained to Mrs. Powell that persons, while conversing, give meaning to their words through voice inflections, and that reading the words without inflections sometimes gives different meaning to the words which was not meant. . . . At that time she stated to me that the deposition as written was not acceptable to her, particularly in the area where she was questioned relative to Jack Ruby and to any part that Ruby may have played in the assassination. . . . Mrs. Powell stated it would be impossible for her to make corrections in the deposition as written because to make her testimony “sound right I would have to change the questions of [Commission attorney Burt] Griffin.”
Witness Sam Holland was one of the few to attempt to correct his Warren Commission testimony. Holland told author Josiah Thompson he and his attorney attempted to correct the transcript. “We red marked . . . red penciled that statement from beginning to end because ther
e were a lot of errors in it,” he recalled. Holland said apparently his corrections were lost somewhere along the line, because “the statement that I made, as well as I remember, isn’t in context with the Warren Commission.” He told Commission critic Mark Lane, “The Warren Commission, I think, had to report in their book what they wanted the world to believe. . . . It had to read like they wanted it to read. They had to prove that Oswald did it alone.”
Ronald Fischer, one of the bystanders who saw a man in the sixth-floor window in the minutes preceding the assassination, later said he almost got into a fight with a Commission attorney who was trying to get him to change his story. In an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 1978, Fischer said assistant counsel David Belin tried to intimidate him: “[Belin] and I had a fight almost in the interview room over the color of the man’s hair. He wanted me to tell him that the man was dark-headed and I wouldn’t do it. [Oswald’s hair] doesn’t appear to me in the photographs as light as the man that I saw and that’s what Belin was upset about. I see it now, but I didn’t see it at the time.”
Roger Craig, the Dallas deputy sheriff who claimed to see Oswald escape in a station wagon, years later wrote about his experience with the Warren Commission: “Combine the [harassment at his work] with the run-in I had with Dave Belin, junior counsel for the Warren Commission, who questioned me in April, 1964, and who changed my testimony fourteen times when he sent it to Washington, and you will have some ideas of the pressure brought to bear.”
Julia Ann Mercer, the woman who claimed to have seen Jack Ruby behind the wheel of a truck in Dealey Plaza about an hour and a half before the assassination, subsequently told investigators for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison that the FBI altered several key portions of her statement and that even her signature was forged on a Dallas County sheriff’s report that supported the altered FBI documents.
Phil Willis, who took a series of photographs of the assassination, was surprised when he was asked only to give a deposition rather than to testify. He told this author:
This guy came to Dallas and took my deposition. He took down only what he wanted to hear. I tried to tell him about the shots and the echoes but he wasn’t interested. He just seemed to want to get it over with. The Warren Commission never subpoenaed any photographer. They weren’t interested in talking to me or Zapruder. It seems strange to me. It’s not much of a way to conduct an investigation.
Willis’s daughter, Linda Pipes, also witnessed the assassination. She said, “I very much agree [with Willis] that shots came from somewhere else other than the Depository. And where we were standing [across Elm from the Depository], we had a good view. . . . [Representatives of the Warren Commission] talked to me later, but they didn’t seem to be investigating very thoroughly.”
Phil Willis summed up his experience in a 1988 British TV interview: “All they wanted to know was that three shots came from the Book Depository. That’s all that got into the Warren Commission [Report]. . . . I’m certain that at least one shot came from the right front. I’ll stand by that to my grave!”
Recall that Chester Breneman and Robert West, the two Dallas surveyors who in May 1964 produced the height and distance figures for the Commission’s reenactment of the assassination, reported their figures “at odds” with the figures the Warren Commission published. The consequence of these altered numbers was to make the controversial single-bullet theory more plausible by simply moving back the time when both Kennedy and Connally were wounded.
The experience of former Texas senator Ralph Yarborough also sheds light on the manner in which the Commission allowed key witnesses to be handled. The fact that Yarborough was riding beside Lyndon Johnson in the motorcade may explain his treatment in the summer of 1964. He described it this way:
After I wrote them, you see, a couple of fellows 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.
Yarborough also was shocked to find that all vital assassination information was sent to President Johnson before it ever went to the Warren Commission or even attorney general Robert Kennedy.
Perhaps one of the most shocking statements regarding treatment at the hands of the Warren Commission came from witness Jean Hill. Fearful to speak out for years, Hill came forward in the spring of 1986 and told her story to a group of assassination researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington.
After witnessing a rifleman firing from the Grassy Knoll and immediately being grabbed by two men who claimed to be Secret Service agents, she was advised by friends in the Dallas Police Department to keep quiet about what she knew. Even after she received a subpoena to appear before the Warren Commission, the same friends urged that she not go to Washington. She recalled, “They seemed to feel that there might be some danger if I was to leave Dallas. They told me I wouldn’t come back.”
After Hill refused to go to Washington, Commission attorney Arlen Specter sent FBI agents to take her to make a deposition. She recalled that experience for this author:
The FBI took me to Parkland Hospital. I had no idea what I was doing there. They escorted me through a labyrinth of corridors and up to one of the top floors of Parkland. I didn’t know where we were. They took me into this little room where I met Arlen Specter. He talked to me for a few minutes, trying to act real friendly, then this woman, a stenographer, came in and sat behind me.
He had told me that this interview would be confidential, then I looked around and this woman was taking notes. I reminded him that the discussion was to be private and he told the woman to put down her notebook, which she did. But when I looked around again she was writing. I got mad and told Specter, “You lied to me. I want this over.” He asked me why I wouldn’t come to Washington, and I said, “Because I want to stay alive.” He asked why I would think that I was in danger and I replied, “Well, if they can kill the president, they can certainly get me!” He replied that they already had the man that did it and I told him, “No, you don’t!”
He kept trying to get me to change my story, particularly regarding the number of shots. He said I had been told how many shots there were and I figured he was talking about what the Secret Service told me right after the assassination. His inflection and attitude was that I knew what I was supposed to be saying, why wouldn’t I just say it. I asked him, “Look, do you want the truth or just what you want me to say?” He said he wanted the truth, so I said, “The truth is that I heard between four and six shots.” I told him, “I’m not going to lie for you.” So he starts talking off the record. He told me about my life, my family, and even mentioned that my marriage was in trouble. I said, “What’s the point of interviewing me if you already know everything about me?” He got angrier and angrier and finally told me, “Look, we can make you look as crazy as Marguerite Oswald and everybody knows how crazy she is. We could have you put in a
mental institution if you don’t cooperate with us.” I knew he was trying to intimidate me. I kept asking to see that woman’s notes, to see what she was putting down. I knew something was not right about this, because no one who is just taking a deposition gets that involved and angry, they just take your answers.
He finally gave me his word that the interview would not be published unless I approved what was written. But they never gave me the chance to read it or approve it. When I finally read my testimony as published by the Warren Commission, I knew it was a fabrication from the first line. After that ordeal at Parkland Hospital, they wrote that my deposition was taken at the US attorney’s office in the Post Office Building.
Even Kennedy’s own people were not immune to such pressures. In 1975 a CIA liaison told congressional investigators that two of Kennedy’s aides, Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers, initially said shots came from other than the Depository, but later changed their story after being warned by J. Edgar Hoover or one of his top aides that such testimony would only arouse public passions and could lead to an international incident. Both O’Donnell and Powers denied this story when it appeared in a Chicago newspaper column. But the story was confirmed in 1987 with the publication of former House speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill’s book, Man of the House. He related:
I was never one of those people who had doubts or suspicions about the Warren Commission’s report on the president’s death. But five years after Jack died, I was having dinner with (former JFK aide) Kenny O’Donnell. . . . I was surprised to hear O’Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots 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 was with us at dinner that night, and his recollection of the shots was the same as O’Donnell’s. Kenny O’Donnell is no longer alive, but during the writing of this book I checked with Dave Powers. As they say in the news business, he stands by his story.