by Jim Marrs
—The fact that elements of the 49th Armored Division were in the air returning from exercises in Germany on the day of the assassination, available to quell any disturbance caused by the event.
—The revelation that Kennedy’s autopsy was performed by inexperienced Navy doctors who were ordered by higher authorities present not to follow established autopsy procedures, such as examining the president’s clothing and probing his wounds. It was this flawed autopsy that has been most responsible for the continuing controversy over the medical evidence.
—An effort on the part of federal authorities to lock assassination evidence away from the public. President Johnson ordered evidence locked up until the year 2039, while the House Select Committee on Assassinations sealed up its evidence for fifty years. Even the Assassinations Records Review Board of the 1990s, while regaining many records, was not able to secure all government documents.
The loss of the Oswald note while in the hands of the FBI, the premature elimination of military and Secret Service files, and the immediate cleansing of the presidential limousine plainly constitute destruction of evidence.
Evidence altered while in the hands of federal authorities includes the autopsy X-rays and photographs, the General Edwin Walker home photograph, the location of Kennedy’s back wound, the nature of Kennedy’s throat wound, the Dallas police evidence sheet, the location of book boxes in the “sniper’s nest,” and the testimony of FBI official James Cadigan along with that of several key witnesses, such as Phil Willis, Jean Hill, Roger Craig, Julia Ann Mercer, and the reenactment surveyors.
Instances of suppressed evidence include Kennedy’s missing brain, missing bullets, the actual results of spectrographic and neutron activation tests, Oswald’s photographic and optical equipment (including the Minox camera), Oswald’s paraffin test, the third Oswald backyard photograph, the incidents involving Silvia Odio and Yuri Nosenko, and a variety of crucial assassination witnesses, including Bill and Gayle Newman, Charles Brehm, James Simmons, J. C. Price, Beverly Oliver, Ed Hoffman, Dallas policeman James Chaney, and many others.
The intimidation of witnesses runs the full gamut from simple pressure to alter portions of their testimony to strange and unnatural deaths.
Witnesses Charles Givens, James Tague, Phil Willis, Kennedy aides Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers, and former senator Ralph Yarborough were pressured to alter their statements, while others—including Ed Hoffman, A. J. Millican, Sandy Speaker, Acquilla Clemons, and Richard Carr—were threatened into silence.
All of these examples of official misconduct go far beyond any innocent attempt to avoid tarnishing an agency’s reputation. Many of these incidents were obvious attempts to misdirect an impartial investigation and to incriminate Oswald. Persons who conduct such activity in connection with a murder case are legally considered accomplices and subject to the same punishments as the perpetrators.
The government had a strong ally in perpetrating a cover-up in the Kennedy assassination—a national news media that seemed incapable of looking past official pronouncements.
Assassination Coverage
From the moment the Kennedy assassination occurred, coverage of the tragedy involved government manipulation of a news media that appeared only too willing to be manipulated.
The Establishment media allowed themselves to be set up by official leaks and pronouncements about the assassination to the point where later official findings had to be accepted and defended.
In the days following the assassination, Dallas-area newspapers were filled with factual, if contradictory, information—Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade voiced suspicion of a plot, various people told of seeing Oswald and Ruby together prior to Kennedy’s death, and information concerning more than three shots fired from more than one location was published. Outside Texas, however, wire-service reporting was limited to the official version of a lone assassin firing three shots.
Information on Oswald’s procommunist background was leaked by the FBI and transmitted nationwide. Immediately media speculation was turned from whether Oswald acted alone to speculation on his motives.
Despite the occasional insertion of the word “alleged” before the word “assassin,” the entire thrust of news coverage was aimed at Oswald’s guilt. The New York Times proclaimed: EVIDENCE AGAINST OSWALD DESCRIBED AS CONCLUSIVE, while the New York Post simply headlined: ASSASSIN NAMED.
Even the Dallas–Fort Worth papers were not immune to this rush to judgment. The day after the assassination, the Dallas Morning News told readers: PRO-COMMUNIST CHARGED WITH ACT. And the nearby Fort Worth Star-Telegram carried a front-page headline erroneously stating: PARAFFIN TESTS OF OSWALD SHOW HE HAD FIRED GUN.
After Oswald’s death, with no one except his mother to contradict them, the media began going further in their presumption of his guilt. A New York Times headline stated: PRESIDENT’S ASSASSIN SHOT. A Time magazine article combining Oswald’s obituary and biography was titled: THE MAN WHO KILLED KENNEDY.
The presumption of Oswald’s guilt was cemented by the February 21, 1964, edition of Life, which carried one of the infamous backyard photos on its cover with the caption, “Lee Oswald with the weapons he used to kill President Kennedy and Officer Tippit.” This issue was in the hands of the public nearly eight months before the Warren Commission emerged from behind closed doors and proclaimed Oswald the lone assassin.
Later, Life devoted much of its October 2, 1964, issue to coverage of the just-released Warren Report. Rather than assigning a staff member to evaluate the report, Life editors chose Representative Gerald Ford, himself a Commission member, to review his own work.
In that same issue, a still frame from the Zapruder film depicting Kennedy’s rearward fall at that moment of the head shot was substituted with an earlier frame that gave no indication of the direction his head moved.
One Life editor, Ed Kearns, was later asked about the changes. He told assassination researcher Vincent Salandria, “I am at a loss to explain the discrepancies between the three versions of Life which you cite. I’ve heard of breaking a [printing] plate to correct an error. I’ve never heard of doing it twice for a single issue, much less a single story. Nobody here seems to remember who worked on the early Kennedy story.”
On September 27, 1964, the Warren Report was released to near-unanimous praise from the national news media, the primary source of public information. The New York Times even went to the expense of publishing the entire report as a supplement to its September 28 edition. The paper then published both a hardcover and paperback edition of the report in collaboration with Bantam Books and the Book of the Month Club.
Two months later, the Times again sought to lead the public’s understanding of the assassination by helping publish The Witnesses, consisting of “highlights” of Warren Commission testimony. After studying this publication, assassination researcher Jerry Policoff wrote:
The selection and editing of testimony for this volume showed a clear understanding of that evidence which supported the Warren Commission findings and that which did not. Testimony which fit into the latter category was edited out in a manner which could hardly have been accidental. . . . In short, a volume purporting to be an objective condensation of relevant testimony compiled by America’s “newspaper of record” was little more than deliberately slanted propaganda in support of the Warren Commission Report.
Respected researcher Sylvia Meagher complained, “The Witnesses, therefore, was one of the most biased offerings ever to masquerade as objective information. In publishing this paperback, The Times engaged in uncritical partisanship, the antithesis of responsible journalism.”
By 1966, so much controversy had been generated by researchers critical of the Warren Report that Richard Billings, then Life’s associate editor in charge of investigative reporting, was ordered to look more closely at certain aspects of the assassination, particularly the “single-bullet” theory.
After analyzing the Zapruder film, Billings’
s staff concluded that the one-bullet theory was untenable and, in its November 25, 1966, issue, Life called for a new investigation.
However, another part of Time-Life Corporation, Time magazine, in its November 25, 1966, issue editorialized against the “phantasmagoria” of Warren Commission critics and concluded, “There seems little valid excuse for so dramatic a development as another full-scale inquiry.”
Asked about these conflicting editorial postures, Hedley Donovan, editor in chief of both Time and Life, responded, “We would like to see our magazines arrive at consistent positions on major issues, and I am sure in due course we will on this one.”
This reconciliation occurred two months later when Billings said he was told by a superior, “It is not Life’s function to investigate the Kennedy assassination.” Similar admonitions have been echoed in newsrooms throughout America over the intervening years. Billings’s investigation was terminated and the November 25 article, which was to have been the first of a series, became the last.
The one television network that continually backed the Warren Commission version of the assassination was CBS, where newsman Dan Rather served as one of the anchors on assassination reports since 1967. Rather was one of the only news reporters who managed to see the Zapruder film in the days following the assassination and falsely reported at the fatal head shot his head “went forward with considerable violence.”
In a 1967 assassination documentary, CBS conducted a series of tests designed to prove that Oswald could have fired his rifle in the time established by the Warren Commission. When these tests essentially failed to support this contention, narrator Walter Cronkite nevertheless reported, “It seems reasonable to say that an expert could fire that rifle in five seconds. It seems equally reasonable to say that Oswald, under normal circumstances, would take longer. But these were not normal circumstances. Oswald was shooting at a president.”
Cronkite’s mistake was the same as that of the Warren Commission and later the House Select Committee on Assassinations—a presumption of Oswald’s guilt guided his interpretation.
Of course, a presumption of Oswald’s innocence would have led investigators into a confrontation with government agencies, the military, big business, and powerful politicians.
Therefore, the major news media have been content to let sleeping assassination conspiracies lie, compounding this timidity by characterizing anyone who dared look hard at the case as a “buff,” “fantasist,” “theorist,” or “sensationalist.” In the Dallas area, for instance, diligent reporters were warned off the assassination story by superiors despite a continuing spate of new developments and information.
Early on there was some excuse for this pathetic media track record. News reporters in the early 1960s were used to getting their information from official sources and did not suspect that these same sources might lie to them. Questioning the word of J. Edgar Hoover was tantamount to blasphemy.
When news reporters from all over the world descended on Dallas, they were at the mercy of local and federal authorities. They didn’t know the city or its leaders and they didn’t know how to talk to its residents. So the bulk of reporters waited in the police station for the next official pronouncement.
Oswald’s brother Robert noticed and commented in his book, Lee:
It seemed to me that the police, who should be conducting a careful investigation to discover just what had happened and how deeply Lee might be involved, had instead surrendered to the mob of reporters, photographers and television cameramen. I knew that these men from the newspapers, magazines and television networks were workingmen, just like I was, and I could not blame them for carrying out their assignments. But I could and did blame the Dallas Police Department for its failure to retain any control over the situation. The most casual remark by any of the investigators or police officers was broadcast to the world immediately, without any effort being made to determine whether it was somebody’s wild speculation, a theory that deserved further investigation or a fact supported by reliable evidence.
Independent investigating was virtually nonexistent. The few reporters who dared investigate moved on quickly to another topic after realizing the power arranged against them.
Author Leonard Sanders was a young reporter in the Dallas area at the time. He told this author that he discontinued investigating the assassination after becoming convinced that his telephone was tapped and his movements monitored.
In the late 1970s, Dallas Morning News investigative reporter Earl Golz was actually ordered not to write about the Kennedy assassination again. This order was later ignored in the wake of revelations made public by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. This author once was told not to write any more about the Kennedy assassination as it was “upsetting people at the Petroleum Club,” a private club for persons connected to the oil industry.
In this type of atmosphere, it is no wonder that the public remains confused about the facts of Kennedy’s death.
As researcher Jerry Policoff wrote, “The Kennedy Assassination cover-up has survived so long only because the press, confronted with the choice of believing what it was told or examining the facts independently, chose the former.”
Sensing a power shift at the highest levels of government and commerce, the major news media—like other official segments of American society—simply failed to function properly in response to the assassination of President Kennedy.
The normal police function was subordinated to pressure from the federal government. The usual legal precautions to protect against wrongful conviction, such as a presumption of innocence until proven guilty, cross-examination of evidence and witnesses, and the securing of defense counsel for the accused, were bypassed in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The possibility of wrongdoing at the top of this nation’s political structure panicked otherwise honest leadership in local, state, and federal government. Major business leaders, sensing the enormity of what had happened, kept their peace.
Never had the old saying “Who will watch the watchers?” carried more meaning.
What essentially began as a plot by a few fearful and greedy men grew into a full-scale palace revolt—a national coup d’état aided by the business, banking, industrial, media, and defense communities that played no active role in the plot. The results of this revolt were accepted by the “status quo”—the Establishment—after the fact.
The seventeenth-century courtier Sir John Harington, inventor of the flush toilet, summed it up when he wrote the oft-repeated epigram:
Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
A Likely Scenario
Since so much information concerning the plot to kill Kennedy has been destroyed, altered, or masked by false leads, it remains impossible to state with authority details of the plan. Even those involved were probably not informed of every aspect of the plot.
However, there is enough information available today to begin to construct a likely scenario of what happened.
Because of his family’s great wealth, John F. Kennedy was incorruptible by bribes and when his father suffered a stroke, all control over him was lost. By 1963, it had become quite clear that Kennedy was determined to be his own man. Speaking to the United Auto Workers on May 8, 1962, Kennedy proclaimed:
I know there are some people who . . . believe that the President of the United States should be honorary chairman of a great fraternal organization and confine himself to ceremonial functions. . . . But that is not what the Constitution says. And I did not run for President of the United States to fulfill that office in that way. . . . I believe it is the business of the President to concern himself with the general welfare.
He also was the only president since Franklin Roosevelt who was an intellectual. Kennedy had a rich sense of history and a global outlook. With Mary Meyer, he had gained an idealistic vision of making the world more peaceful and less corrupt. In other wor
ds, he really believed he was president and he set out to shake up the status quo of Big Banking, Big Oil, Big Military-Industrial Complex with its powerful intelligence community, and Big Organized Crime, which had gained deep inroads into American life since Prohibition.
There is also the argument that Kennedy was opposed to Israel’s development of nuclear weapons and was demanding inspections of Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant, a position that alienated powerful Zionists.
The new directions being taken by the young president provoked serious talk against him within many groups—organized crime, the anti-Castro Cubans, the CIA, business and banking, the oil industry, and even the military. There were many connections among all these groups—particularly in Operation Mongoose, the secret war against Castro. Once word of this pervasive anti-Kennedy feeling reached the ears of certain members of the southwestern oil and business communities, secret meetings were held where money was raised. Tacit approval was given by the ruling financiers of Wall Street, where Council on Foreign Relations members led by David Rockefeller had railed against Kennedy’s economic policies. A consensus was reached that Kennedy was a threat and had to go.
From this point on, there would be no further contact between the individuals who initiated the plot and those who carried it out. Consequently, there is little likelihood that the originators of the plot will ever be identified or brought to justice. However, the broad outlines of the plot can be discerned by diligent study of all available assassination information.
There remain numerous ties among all of these powerful factions. It is now well documented that the mob and the CIA worked together on many types of operations, including assassination. The various US intelligence services were closely interwoven, and in some cases, such as the National Security Agency, were superior to the FBI and CIA.