Reclaiming History (90 page)

There is an additional reason why the Beschloss-Thomas position has no merit. It would apply only, if at all, if the Warren Commission believed or suspected that Russia was behind the assassination—that is, the whole notion
necessarily presupposes Russia’s guilt
, or at least a belief in it.
*
But of all the alleged conspirators behind Oswald’s act, Russia was the very least suspected by the Warren Commission and all other sensible people. And this opinion of Russia not being involved was, as Max Frankel wrote, formed
almost immediately after the assassination
. So even if we assume, just for the sake of argument, that the Warren Commission, at the beginning, wanted to suppress the truth about the assassination to prevent a war with Russia (I mean, no one was pointing the finger at Sweden, Portugal, or Chile, were they?), once it became obvious
very early on
that Russia would never have committed such a reckless act as to kill our president, and there was absolutely no evidence of this, what conceivable reason would the Warren Commission have for
thereafter continuing to suppress the truth for the ten months of its existence
?—which is exactly what Beschloss, Thomas, and others are alleging. Was the Commission also trying to suppress the truth that far more suspected bogeymen like the CIA, organized crime, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and so on, were involved? But if so,
what type of war would such suppression help prevent
? A civil war in this country? You know, half the country thinking it was okay for the CIA, for instance, to murder Kennedy, the other half opposed to it? The silliness is numbing.

Not only are the representative allegations of Beschloss and Thomas that the Warren Commission wasn’t interested in investigating the possibility of conspiracy irrational on its face, but as indicated, they have absolutely no evidence to support it. The evidence supports, 100 percent, these two statements made by the Warren Commission: “The Commission has investigated each rumor and allegation linking Oswald to a conspiracy which has come to its attention, regardless of source.”
²⁰⁷
And, “Based upon the investigation…the Commission concluded that there is no credible evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Examination of the facts of the assassination itself revealed no indication that Oswald was aided in the planning or execution of his scheme. Review of Oswald’s life and activities since 1959, although productive and illuminating the character of Lee Harvey Oswald, did not produce any meaningful evidence of a conspiracy. The Commission discovered no evidence that the Soviet Union or Cuba was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”
²⁰⁸

In his sworn testimony before the HSCA on November 8, 1977, Warren Commission assistant counsel Norman Redlich was asked, “What were the real objectives of the Warren Commission?”

He responded, “Perhaps I can best answer that by repeating what [Warren Commission general counsel] Mr. [J. Lee] Rankin said when he convened the staff of the Warren Commission for the very first meeting [January 30, 1964]…He said, ‘Gentlemen, your only client is the truth.’ Those were his opening words of that talk.”

Question: “Was it an objective of the Warren Commission to allay public fears?”

Redlich: “I never considered that as an objective. That was not put to me other than in the context of the fact that there were a great many doubts about what had happened, there was great concern about what had happened, and of course to the extent that we could find all of the truth about the assassination, we would be allaying public fears. I always felt that that was a by-product of the principal objective which was to discover all the facts.”

Redlich went on to say that Chief Justice Earl Warren also spoke to the staff at this first meeting and his remarks were the same in their tenor as Rankin’s, among other things telling the staff they were to “leave no stone unturned” in pursuing their investigation.
²⁰⁹

It is nothing short of mind-boggling that even though the proponents of the belief that the Warren Commission wasn’t interested in uncovering the truth about a foreign conspiracy in the assassination can’t cite one stitch of evidence, not one statement from any member of the Commission or its staff, and surely not one fragment of common sense to support their theory, nevertheless this nonsensical notion, untethered to anything but itself, continues to exist, hearty and hale, to this very day, even among the intellectual elite. This is why, just four years ago, Warren Commission assistant counsel Burt Griffin felt constrained to say on national television, “The accusation that we had a predetermined idea to find that there was no conspiracy…is completely false. Let me say to you—the one thing I wanted to do
was
find a conspiracy. I was a thirty-two-year-old lawyer. I had political ambitions. If I could have found [a conspiracy and] that Oswald didn’t do it, I’d have been the senator from Ohio, not John Glenn.”
²¹⁰
And this wasn’t true only of himself, he felt. As he told the HSCA, “It was certainly the feeling that I had of all of my colleagues that we were determined, if we could…to find a conspiracy. I think we thought we would be national heroes…if we could find something that showed that there had been something sinister beyond what appeared to have [happened].”
²¹¹
Warren Commission assistant counsel David Slawson told me that he and his fellow assistant counsels were always “alert to the possibility of a conspiracy and
looked for one
, but at no time can I remember when anyone on the staff was saying they found any evidence of a conspiracy.”
²¹²

How did all this unbelievable nonsense about the Warren Commission not wanting to investigate and uncover a conspiracy get started? From a clumsily written memorandum (referred to earlier) from Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to President Johnson’s press secretary, Bill Moyers, on November 25, 1963, just three days after the assassination, and
before
the Warren Commission was even formed. (Katzenbach remained the acting attorney general until December 4, when RFK, who had gone to Florida with his wife shortly after the assassination to mourn his brother’s death, resumed his duties at the Department of Justice.) The conspiracy theorists, predictably, have cited the memorandum out of context. Let’s take the original dean of distortion, conspiracy theorist Mark Lane. (See discussion of Lane later in text.) In his book
Plausible Denial
, he quotes Katzenbach saying in the memo that the “public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large”; that “speculation about Oswald’s motivation” be “cut off”; and “we need something to head off speculation or congressional hearings of the wrong sort.”
²¹³
The implication is clear. Katzenbach didn’t want all of the facts of the assassination to be known. They should be suppressed. But Lane, naturally, doesn’t tell his readers that the very first words of Katzenbach’s memorandum read, “It is important that
all of the facts
surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination be made public.”
*
Katzenbach, a World War II bomber pilot and Rhodes scholar, later goes on to say in the memo that “facts have been mixed with rumor and speculation. We can scarcely let the world see us totally in the image of the Dallas Police when our President is murdered. I think this objective may be satisfied by making public as soon as possible a
complete and thorough
FBI report on Oswald and the assassination.” You can’t suppress evidence of a conspiracy if you release “all of the facts” to the American people. It was obvious that Katzenbach believed (and he, of course, was correct) that there was no evidence at that time, nor has any surfaced since, supporting the rumor of a Communist conspiracy, and the best way to dispel that rumor with the American public was by releasing all of the true facts then known.
²¹⁴

In his testimony before the HSCA on September 21, 1978, and in an earlier deposition on August 4, 1978, Katzenbach conceded that his memo was not “artistically [i.e., artfully] phrased,” going on to say to Congressman Christopher Dodd, who was questioning him, “Perhaps you have never written anything that you would like to write better afterwards, Congressman, but I have.” Mr. Dodd: “You won’t get me to say that.” Katzenbach, in his testimony, rejected the notion that conspiracy theorists have drawn from his memo that the Warren Commission was a self-fulfilling prophesy, and he put more emphasis where he acknowledged it should have been put in the memo. He said his state of mind was that

if
you are going to conclude,
as the Bureau
[FBI]
was concluding
, that this was not part of a conspiracy, that there were no confederates,
then
you had to make that case, with all of the facts…Now, if there was a conspiracy…you put
those
facts out. But if you were persuaded Oswald was a lone killer, you had better put all of the facts out…I think my basic motivation was the amount of speculation both here and abroad as to what was going on, whether there was a conspiracy of the right or a conspiracy of the left or a lone assassin or even in its wildest stages, a conspiracy by the then vice president to achieve the presidency, the sort of thing you have speculation about in some countries abroad where that kind of condition is normal. It seemed to me that the quicker some information could be made available that went beyond what the press was able to uncover and what the press was able to speculate about was desirable in that state of affairs…That was the advice I was giving Moyers and…the president.

Katzenbach said, “I thought that everything had to be done that would give public opinion all over the world confidence that the true facts had been revealed, that everything was out on the table, whether they were difficult facts or whether they were not, that they be made public and not subject to later discovery.”
²¹⁵

In a little-known internal FBI memorandum from Assistant FBI Director Alan Belmont to William Sullivan, the director of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, written on the very same day (November 25) as the now infamous Katzenbach memo, Belmont says, “The Director [Hoover] advised that he talked to Katzenbach who had been talking to the White House relative to the report that we are to render in the Oswald case. It is Katzenbach’s feeling that this report should
include everything
which may raise a question in the minds of the public or the press regarding this matter.”
²¹⁶
In my opinion, Katzenbach comes out as clean as a hound’s tooth on this matter, and it is ironic that someone who the record shows championed the cause of complete openness in the investigation would be the one the conspiracy theorists have accused of promoting secrecy and suppression.

But even if, just for the sake of argument, the most sinister inference is drawn from Katzenbach’s memo, and the conspiracy theorists are correct that he was urging a suppression of the true facts in the assassination, it is ridiculous in the extreme to presume that Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general who, as indicated, was running the attorney general’s office during the period that RFK was immobilized by grief, would be in a position to actually determine and dictate the conduct of the FBI
and
the independent Warren Commission in the future. This sinister inference bears no relationship to common sense or reality.

And yet, none other than Gary Cornwell, the intelligent and savvy deputy chief counsel to the HSCA (Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey’s number-one man) wants us to believe just that. He says, “Katzenbach and those acting with him decided that it was more important to get on with the business of running the government and to quash the rumors than it was to find the truth or to tell the American public what the truth was.” Cornwell goes on to say that because of this, “the tragic legacy of the Warren Commission is that we will in all probability always have to live with doubt about the questions that we want real answers to.”
²¹⁷

It should be noted that since the FBI is under the jurisdiction of the attorney general’s office (Department of Justice), and Katzenbach was Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s chief deputy, if Katzenbach wanted the facts of the assassination to be suppressed (i.e., although he’s working right under the brother of the slain president, he wants to help ensure that the president’s alleged murderers are not brought to justice), wouldn’t this objective of his more likely be achieved if the FBI kept jurisdiction over the assassination? Instead, it is well documented that Katzenbach, very early on, urged President Johnson to appoint an independent, blue-ribbon commission to investigate the assassination. As the HSCA said, “Officials at [the Department of] Justice, notably Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, were instrumental in creating the Warren Commission, in effect
transferring
the focus of the investigation from the FBI to a panel of distinguished Americans.”
²¹⁸

The notion that the Warren Commission wouldn’t seek the truth about the president’s murder because of national security reasons is so far out that in Katzenbach’s long testimony and deposition, of the hundreds of questions asked him, only one indirectly touched on this issue. When he was asked, “How big a role in the thinking of yourself and those who were making decisions at those levels of government during 1963 was the consideration that any investigation should be possibly forgone if it had the possibility of creating additional rumors?” he responded, “It never entered my mind or anybody elses that I ever talked to. This was the president of the United States who had been assassinated. Not only would the government want to know everything they could about it, but so would the public and so would the world.”

Moreover, as far as the allegation that our nation’s leaders decided to suppress the truth about a foreign conspiracy in the assassination, Katzenbach testified, “Everybody appeared to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone fairly early.”
²¹⁹
(The facts that the murder weapon was a twelve-dollar mail-order rifle, that Oswald had to fend completely for himself in escaping from the scene of the crime, that he was a completely unstable malcontent, among many other things, pointed clearly in that direction
immediately
.) Therefore, there wouldn’t have been any reason for the thought of suppressing the truth to enter the minds of our nation’s “leaders,” no motivation for them to contemplate such an outrageous course.