Reclaiming History (2 page)

When the Warren Commission released its 888-page, 296,000-word report on September 24, 1964, a national poll showed that only a minority of Americans (31.6 percent) rejected the conclusion of the Commission that Oswald had acted alone.
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But through their torrent of books, radio and TV talk shows, movies, college lectures, and so on, over the years the shrill voice of the conspiracy theorists finally penetrated the consciousness of the American people and actually succeeded in discrediting the Warren Commission Report
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and convincing the overwhelming majority of Americans that Oswald either was a part of a high-level conspiracy or was just a patsy framed by some exotic and elaborate group of conspirators ranging from anti-Castro Cuban exiles to organized crime working in league with U.S. intelligence. Although I had commenced my work on the case with a completely open mind, I found there was absolutely no substance to their charges and that they have performed a flagrant disservice to the American public. Dissent is what makes this country the great nation that it is, but this was not responsible dissent. This was wanton and reckless disregard for the facts of the case.

Throughout the years, national polls have consistently shown that the percentage of Americans who believe that there was a conspiracy in the assassination usually fluctuates from 70 to 80 percent, down to 10 to 20 percent for those who believe only one person was involved, with about 5 to 15 percent having no opinion. The most recent Gallup Poll, conducted on November 10–12, 2003, shows that a remarkable 75 percent of the American public reject the findings of the Warren Commission and believe there was a conspiracy in the assassination. Only 19 percent believe the assassin acted alone, with 6 percent having no opinion.
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It is the ambitious objective of this work to turn the percentages around in the debate. If I can even come close to doing so I will feel I have achieved something meaningful. Such an objective, after all, is not misplaced when the Kennedy assassination is perhaps the most important murder case ever, arguably altering the course of American as well as world history.

It should be added that the millions of Americans who have been hoodwinked into buying into the conspiracy illusion don’t believe that Oswald conspired with some other lowly malcontent like himself to assassinate the president. Instead, though most don’t clearly articulate the thought in their mind, they believe that Oswald was merely the triggerman for organized crime, a foreign nation, or conspirators who walked the highest corridors of power in our nation’s capital—people or groups who eliminated Kennedy because his policies were antithetical to their interests. Such a belief, gestating for decades in the nation’s marrow, obviously has to have had a deleterious effect on the way Americans view those who lead them and determine their destiny. Indeed, Jefferson Morley, former Washington editor of the
Nation
, observes that Kennedy’s assassination has been “a kind of national Rorschach test of the American political psyche. What Americans think about the Kennedy assassination reveals what they think about their government.”
¹⁶

Nineteenth-century French statesman and author Alexis de Tocqueville noted a characteristic of the American body politic that he felt boded well for America: its capacity for self-correction. But in the Kennedy assassination, we’ll soon be approaching the half-century mark, and the substantial majority of Americans still erroneously believe that their thirty-fifth president was murdered as a result of a high-level conspiracy.

M
y professional interest in the Kennedy assassination dates back to March of 1986 when I was approached by a British production company, London Weekend Television (LWT), to “prosecute” Lee Harvey Oswald as the alleged assassin of President Kennedy in a proposed twenty-one-hour television trial to be shown in England and several other countries, including the United States. I immediately had misgivings. Up to then, I had consistently turned down offers to appear on television in artificial courtroom settings. But when I heard more of what LWT was contemplating, my misgivings quickly dissolved. Although this could not be the real trial of Oswald, inasmuch as he was dead, LWT, working with a large budget, had conceived and was putting together the closest thing to a real trial of Oswald that there would likely ever be, the trial in London being the only “prosecution” of Oswald ever conducted with the real witnesses in the Kennedy assassination. Through painstaking and dogged effort, LWT had managed to locate and persuade most of these original key lay witnesses, many of whom had refused to even talk to the media for years, to testify in the television trial of Oswald. There would be absolutely no script whatsoever (Mark Redhead, the LWT producer for the project, said to me, “I assure you, there will be no script. The script will be your yellow pad, which I’ve been told you have a love affair with”), and no actors would be used. Lucius Bunton, a highly respected U.S. district judge for the Western District of Texas, would preside over the trial. And a real jury, selected from the jury rolls of the Dallas federal district court, each having served on a federal jury in Dallas in 1985,
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was to be impaneled to hear the case, completely free to vote whichever way the jurors pleased on the issue of whether Oswald was guilty or not guilty.
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Gerry Spence, about whom the great trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams once said, “If I ever got in trouble, I’d want Gerry Spence to defend me,” and who had emerged as the leading criminal defense lawyer in America, had been selected to oppose me and represent Oswald.

Nothing like this had ever been done before on television (re-creations of real trials invariably being with scripts and actors), and LWT had ambitiously started at the top of the hill with the Kennedy assassination. Originally, the trial was to be held in Dallas, but fearful of the media circus it felt sure the trial would inevitably create, LWT quietly jetted everyone to England for a trial in a London courtroom that was an exact replica of a Dallas federal courtroom.

The historical importance of the trial was immediately apparent to Spence and me. Unlike their appearances before the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), where they testified in a non-adversarial context and were not cross-examined, the key witnesses in the assassination would now be exposed to cross-examination—the greatest legal engine ever invented, one legal scholar wrote, for the discovery of the truth. And as a London paper later wrote, “Witnesses who had thought they were in for an anxiety free, all-expense paid trip to London reeled out of the witness box after being subjected to sustained barrages of cross-examination.”
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I proceeded to set aside everything I was doing, and seven days a week immersed myself completely in the prosecution of the case, virtually insulating myself from the outside world. For close to five months, I averaged between 100 and 120 hours per week, my only break being when I would visit my elderly parents for two hours each week. The reason for this effort was simply that the task was monumental. The Warren Commission in 1964 and the HSCA, which reinvestigated the assassination for over two years in the late 1970s, had wrestled with the complexities of the case, trying to come to grips with its seemingly endless issues.

In preparing for the trial in the average murder case, even a complex one, for the most part all a prosecutor has to look at, in terms of reading, are the police reports, coroner’s report, witness statements, and the transcript of the preliminary hearing. And the only person raising issues against him is the defense attorney. But here, in preparing for trial, I was dealing with the forty massive official volumes of small print on the case (the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission plus the one-volume Warren Report, which summarizes the Commission’s findings, and the twelve volumes of the HSCA together with the one-volume HSCA Report, which likewise is a summary of the HSCA findings) and the hundreds of issues raised by countless Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists in their articles and books. Plus, all the new material gathered by the LWT staff, a very competent and dedicated group of people ably led by producer Mark Redhead and executive director Richard Drewett. Redhead actually traveled to several countries working on the case. LWT’s two chief researchers for the docu-trial were Kerry Platman and Richard L. Tomlinson, each of whom did an excellent, highly professional job.

With both the Warren Commission and the Select Committee, the areas of inquiry had been compartmentalized, separate groups of lawyers being assigned to work on specific parts of the case only—for example, the identity of President Kennedy’s assassin, the basic facts of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald’s background, Jack Ruby’s killing of Oswald, possible conspiratorial relationships, and so on. But working alone, I had to know as much of the entire case as possible. And having the burden of proving Oswald’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, I could not afford to say to myself, “Well, this is only a television trial. I’ll just ignore this issue.” If I had been so cavalier, I knew the issue I ignored could be utilized by the defense to raise a reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind. After all, the issue was no longer whether or not Oswald murdered Kennedy, one of the two main issues the Warren Commission dealt with. The issue now was different. Even if the jury ultimately came to believe from the evidence that Oswald murdered the president, would they believe it
beyond a reasonable doubt
? Because if they didn’t, the verdict would still have to be not guilty. As in any criminal case, the defense in London never had any legal burden to prove Oswald’s innocence or even to present a coherent or plausible alternative account of what happened. To prevent a conviction, it was enough for Spence to plant a reasonable doubt in the minds of one or more jurors. Playing on this reality, Spence would later tell the London jury, “There is only one truth in this case, and this is that nobody knows the truth.”

During my examination of the evidence in preparation for the trial, I found that virtually every piece of evidence against Oswald maddeningly had some small but explainable problem with it. However, two things became obvious to me: One was that Oswald, an emotionally unhinged political malcontent who hated America, was as guilty as sin. Based on the Himalayan mountain of uncontroverted evidence against Oswald, anyone who could believe he was innocent would probably also believe someone claiming to have heard a cow speaking the Spanish language. Secondly, there was not one speck of
credible
evidence that Oswald was framed or that he was a hit man for others in a conspiracy to murder the president. I meticulously examined every major conspiracy theory that had thus far been adduced, and although there were a few (a precious few) that at first blush seemed plausible, upon sober scrutiny they did complete violence to all conventional notions of logic and common sense. Though there are some notable exceptions, by and large the persistent ranting of the Warren Commission critics, some of whom were screaming the word
conspiracy
before the fatal bullet had even come to rest, came to remind me, as H. L. Mencken said in a different context, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.

The hard-core conspiracy theorists believe not only that there was a massive conspiracy to kill the president, but that the Warren Commission learned about this conspiracy, and, as pawns of the U.S. government, entered into a new conspiracy to cover it up. “The Warren Commission engaged in a cover-up of the truth and issued a report that misrepresented or distorted almost every relevant fact about the crime,” Howard Roffman writes in his book,
Presumed Guilty
.
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Gerald D. McKnight, a professor of history, no less, writes that the Warren Commission members were “men intent on deceiving the nation.” Just in the area of the president’s autopsy alone, he says, “the Commission sanctioned perjury, connived at the destruction of the best evidence, boycotted key witnesses, and deliberately and knowingly suppressed material medical records and legal documents.”
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There were “two conspiracies,” conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs confidently asserts. “One was the conspiracy to kill the president. The second conspiracy was the conspiracy to cover up the first conspiracy,” the second conspiracy being committed by “officials high within the U.S. government to hide the truth from the American public.”

One of the first purveyors of this silliness was New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. During his investigation of Clay Shaw for the president’s murder, he said that “the United States government—meaning the present administration, Lyndon Johnson’s administration—is obstructing the investigation…It has concealed the true facts, to be blunt about it, to protect the individuals involved in the assassination of John Kennedy.”
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The promotional literature for conspiracy theorist Carl Oglesby’s 1992 book,
Who Killed JFK?
, likewise reflects this commonly held belief of the conspiracy community, which it accepts as a mosaic truth: “In this clear, readable book, prominent assassination researcher Carl Oglesby proves that JFK must have been killed by a conspiracy, not a lone gunman. Even scarier, he knows that the U.S. government has been,
and still is
covering up that conspiracy.” If we’re to believe Oglesby, our current federal government (as well as all previous ones since 1963) is engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the truth in the assassination.

Apparently, then, such distinguished Americans as Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senators John Sherman Cooper and Richard B. Russell, Representatives Gerald Ford and Hale Boggs, former CIA director Allen Dulles and former president of the World Bank John J. McCloy (the members of the Warren Commission), as well as the Commission’s general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, a former solicitor general of the United States, and fourteen prominent members of the American Bar (assistant counsels to the Commission), people of impeccable honor and reputation, got together in some smoky backroom and
all
of them agreed, for some ungodly reason, to do the most dishonorable deed imaginable—give organized crime, the CIA, the military-industrial complex, or whoever was behind the assassination, a free pass in the murder of the president of the United States. And in the process, not only risk destroying everything they had worked for—their reputation and legacy to their families—but expose themselves to prosecution for the crime of accessory after the fact to murder. Ask yourself this: would Earl Warren, for instance, risk being remembered as the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court who was an accessory after the fact to the murder of this nation’s president, one who disgraced himself, his country, and the highest court in the land? The mere asking of the question demonstrates the absurdity of the thought. As political columnist Charles Krauthammer put it, it is preposterous to believe that “Earl Warren, a liberal so principled that he would not countenance the conviction of one Ernesto Miranda [of
Miranda v. Arizona
fame] on the grounds that police had neglected to read him his rights, was an accessory to a fascist coup d’etat.”
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Indeed, why would any of the members of the Warren Commission and their staff stake their good reputation on a report they prepared which they knew to be fraudulent?
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