FUROR OVER WARREN REPORT GROWS IN VOLUME
By Arthur Maglin
The new wave of controversy over the Warren Commission's report on the assassination of President Kennedy is growing steadily sharper. Upholders of the Warren Report are now decidedly on the defensive. Former supporters of the Warren Commission's work have begun to join in the call for a reopening of the case.
The present situation in the United States was summed up by columnist Jimmy Breslin in the New York World Journal Tribune, November 21: "Today, an enormous amount of the American people feel the Warren Report is anything from a sloppy, incomplete job right out to a blatant cover-up filled with outright lies. At the very best, most view the Warren Report as a narrowly prepared document. The government, which issued the report, is looked on with suspicion."
Among the most significant of the Warren Report's growing list of critics is Life magazine. Life, a publication with one of the largest circulations in the United States, had formerly been one of the staunchest supporters of the official line on the assassination. Now, in its November 25 issue, Life presents the view that it isa matter of reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating the president. (Other critics have argued that the commission failed to prove that Oswald was involved at all.)
Life examines in detail the question of where the shots that killed President Kennedy and wounded Texas' Governor John Connally came from. It concludes that the evidence about the timing and direction of the shots leads to the reasonable doubt that one man could have fired the shots. In the course of its examination of the evidence concerning the direction of the bullets, Life quotes Governor Connally's wife on how the crucial evidence of the governor's shirt and suit coat was handled by the official investigators:
"tAs a matter of fact,' says Mrs. Connally, ‘it was almost two months before any of the investigators showed any interest in examining John's clothing. When he went into surgery they gave me his tie, trousers and socks in a paper bag. We finally located John's shirt and suit coat,which we were concerned about because of the wallet and personal papers in his breast pocket, in Congressman Henry Gonzales' clothes closet in Washington.
my told the Secret Service and I guess the FBI that I had the clothes, but nobody seemed interested. After about seven weeks I took John's shirt -- it was all smeared with his flesh and blood, and dipped it in cold water several times to try and preserve it. Someone finally came to pick up his clothes. I think the Commission said his shirt was useless as evidence because it had been "laundered." But I never laundered it, I just soaked it in cold water.'"
in commenting on various recent books critical of the Warren Report, Life says:
"The most nearly objective book so far is Inquest by Edward Jay Epstein. It started out as a master's thesis in political science. Epstein, then a graduate student at Cornell, conceived it simply as a study of a government investigating body at work. In interviewing Warren Commission members and staff, he found bureaucratic bungling, hasty research to meet a deadline and a tendency to tailor evidence to fit a preconceived notion of Oswald's sole guilt. Epstein's own speculations. on the assassin-— ation are open to question. But his report on the workings of the Commission is enough by itself to throw doubt on the Commission's conclusions."
Life ends its article with a call for reopening the case:
"One conclusion is inescapable: the national interest deserves clear resolution of the doubts. A new investigating body should be set up, perhaps at the initiative of Congress. In a scrupulously objective unhurried atmosphere, without the pressure to give reassurance to a shocked country, it should re-examine the evidence and consider other evidence the Warren Commission failed to evaluate."
Another mass-circulation magazine, Esquire, in its December issue, carries articles by two of the most prominent critics of the Warren Commission, Edward Jay Epstein and Sylvia Meagher. Epstein reviews several theories concerning the assassin-~ ation and Sylvia Meagher offers details of what a new investigation into the assassination ought to look into.
Another surprising development in the assassination controversy is Harrison E. Salisbury's second thoughts expressed in a book-review article in the November issue of The Progressive. Salisbury, who is assistant managing editor of the New York Times, was originally one of the Warren Report's most vigorous defenders. Now, Salisbury calls for reopening the c»se. He writes:
"I began this review by citing my own conviction immediately after the assassination that Oswald was the killer -- a lone killer. My belief in this explanation was strengthened -- not weakened -- by the Warren report. I still hold to that belief:
“"But the interesting, shrewd (and sometimes unfair) analysis by Edward Jay Epstein, in Inquest, of the methods, procedures, and internal ‘checks and balances' within the Warren Commission convinces me that there are questions -- some of them of major importance -- which must be answered. And the exhaustive, stimulating Cand sometimes prejudiced) reinvestigation by Mark Lane in Rush to Judgment establishes half a dozen areas which must be reexamined." —
.In addition to all the written criticism the Warren Report has been receiving, | considerable critical comment has been aired over television and radio by such prominent reinvestigators of the Dallas events. as Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg, Leo Sauvage, Edward Jay Epstein, Penn Jones and David Welsh.
Writing in Ramparts magazine's November issue, Welsh assesses the effect the revived assassination controversy has been having in Washington:
"The Warren Commission was appointed by Lyndon Johnson, was responsible to Johnson and respected a lawyer-client relationship with Johnson. It was truly 'the President's Commission’. A nationally syndicated columnist for the Hearst newspapers recently had an interview with Lyndon Johnson. He asked if it were true that Warren had been reluctant. to head the Commission. Johnson replied in the affirmative. Warren, he said, had sent a note through an intermediary that he would not accept the gob. ‘But I ordered him to,' said the President.
_ "The Hearst reporter asked if the President had read the recent books about the Kennedy assassination. No, Johnson replied, but an aide had given him a full report. | ek ;
“"tWhat do o you think?’ asked the columnist.
"The President looked down for a moment, knitted his brow, then fixed his doe eyes on the reporter and said:
"tWarren's in trouble.'"
The reaction of the Warren commissioners to the assassination controversy has been varied. The November 22 New York Times quotes the head of the commission, Chief Justice. Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court, as saying: "I was a district attorney in California for 12 years, and I tried a number of murder cases [an average of 15 a year -- N.Y... Times]. If I.were still a district attorney and the Oswald case came into my, jurisdiction, given the same evidence I could have gotten a conviction in two days and never heard about the. case again."
The Times article deals at length with the present feelings of ‘another commission member, Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia. Russell now says that he had some criticisms of the Warren Report when it was being written. His so-called "criticisms" reflect his rabidly anti-Communist political disposition.We quote in full what the Times says about Russell: —
The Associated Press reported yesterday that Senator Russell had recently told The Atlanta Journal he was not fully satisfied with the report, and had prepared dissents that led to revisions in the final version. —
“One was an objection to original wording that said categorically that there had been no conspiracy involved. Senator Russell was quoted as saying Justice Warren ‘finally took that part and rewrote it himself' because 'Warren was determined he was going to have a unanimous report.'
"The final version said ‘the commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.' Ruby killed Oswald two days after Mr. Kennedy's assassination.
"Senator Russell was further quoted as saying he did not feel assured that the Soviet Union had provided all available information on Oswald's stay there from 1959 to 1962. Further, he was quoted as not being satisfied that all facts about Oswald's Cuba-related activities had been brought out.
"Senator Russell, the report went on, said he agreed with Governor Connally, 'a deer hunter', in rejecting the theory of a single bullet wounding both the Governor and the President.
"He was also described as dubious about the value of testimony by Oswald's wife, Marina, who said under his questioning that she believed her husband was trying to shoot Governor Connally -- not the President -- although she added, 'I have no facts whatsoever.'
"Nevertheless, Senator Russell was reported to have said, despite his own lingering dissatisfaction, that any group of honorable men, given the same evidence, would have come to the same conclusions as the Warren Commission did."
A worse right-wing entry into the assassination controversy has been presented to television viewers in the form of a so-called documentary called "Hitler in Havana." This program was presented at the behest of Patrick J. Frawley, Jr., president of Eversharp, Inc., in behalf of Schick safety razor blades. Frawley and the Eversharp company frequently finance right-wing projects.
Columnist Jack Gould of the New York Times, wrote in the October 28 issue of that paper that through this pseudo-documentary "the affluent element of the extreme right wing makes a striking anti-Communist rallying cry out of the Kennedy assassination."
Gould gives this description of "Hitler in Havana":
"With inflammatory words and pictures but no pretense to hard documentation, the program invited the conclusion that Premier Fidel Castro, through use of propaganda, aroused Lee Harvey Oswald to violence and therefore was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy.
"After newsreel scenes of the murder of the President, the program went on to contend that Communist influences in this country wanted 'to get a grip on the minds of a minority of American youngsters and convert them into carbon copies of Lee Harvey Oswald.'"
By contrast, the Goldwaterite National Review carried a much less frenzied opinion about the assassination controversy in its September 6 issue. National Review has Francis Russell, author of a right-wing book on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, review two books on the assassination. Russell writes:
"Lee Harvey Oswald's fantastic appearance on television after the assassination, and his even more fantastic television-viewed murder by Jack Ruby were the stuff of which myths are made -- and the myths were not long in coming. In spite of Oswald's checkered Communist background, the Left will-to-believe in a right-wing conspiracy was stronger than the facts.
"So, the expatriate Thomas Buchanan invented. his Mr. X, a Texas millionaire who had arranged to do away with Kennedy in order to protect. that Texas bill of rights, the oil depletion allowance. Leo Sauvage in France saw the killing as a conspiracy of police, gangsters and assorted right-wingers. The German-born Joachim Joesten imagined a league of death that included the FBI, the CIA, the Army and the by-now-inevitable oil millionaires. From the other side of the 'nut' spectrum the John Birch Society also saw government officials as involved in the assassination, made necessary after Kennedy showed signs of reneging on his 'Communist' past. In the Birch version . Secretary McNamara was already making arrangements for the funeral a week before the President was killed. "
Francis Russell says later on in his article:
"I must admit to having picked up these two books critical of the Commission and its findings ~~ Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest and Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment -- with the irritated feeling that two dissenters were engaged in a process similar to that of challenging the Sacco ballistics evidence. I finished by absorbing certain of .. the au*hors' doubts, and certainly doubts as to the adequacy of the task performed by the. Warren Commission. "
In his concluding paragraph, Francis Russell joins the call for reopening the investigation:
"In many such examples, including the mystery of the photographs made of the Depository sixth-floor window at the very moment of the crime, it seems to me that Lane has proved his point against the Commission. It just did not do its job properly. Senator Ted Kennedy was interviewed after the Epstein book appeared. He said he had not read the Warren Report but he was convinced from other sources that Oswald alone and without other assistance was his brother's killer. Certainly the resources of the Kennedy family are large enough for them to have investigated amply on their own, and no doubt they have done.so. I think Senator Kennedy is right. The contradictions and apparent enigmas can be resolved. There is probably a rational explanation for the throat wound, for the time sequences shown by the Zapruder film, for the pseudo-Oswald and other questions raised by Mr. Lane. What is needed now is a commission to investigate the Warren Commission and its findings."
The most important recent development concerning the evidence in the Kennedy case was the turning over to the National Archives by the Kennedy family of autopsy X-rays and photographs. A November 1 dispatch to the New York Times says:
"Photographs and X-rays taken of President Kennedy's body at the autopsy after his assassination were turned over to the National: Archives yesterday by the Kennedy family.
"This was disclosed tonight by the Justice Department, which said that under an agreement with the family the 65 X-rays, color slides and black and white negatives would be available to Federal law-enforcement agencies.
"However, for the next five years access by scholars and other unofficial investigators will be granted only with the consent of the family."
‘Later the article goes on to say:
"The department spokesman, who asked not to be identified, said tonight that the action was prompted in part by several recent books that expressed doubt about the Warren Commission's conclusions. :
"A-rash of-recent books and articles have questioned the commission's conclusion that a single bullet from the rifle of Lee Harvey Oswald passed through the President's body and struck Gov. John B. Connally Jr. of Texas."
Further on the Times reports:
"According to the spokesman, use of the photographs and X-rays will be restricted as follows:
_ Nae Access will be immediately granted to law-enforcement officials of all Federal investigative agencies. ; a so . .
"__ No public display or release will be permitted.
"__-For the next five years access by scholars and other unofficial investigators will be grantéd only with the specific consent of the Kennedy family. After five years, the family will permit qualified pathologists and other medical experts to study the items. : :
"Mese limitations will remain in effect throughout the lifetimes of Mrs. Kennedy, the late President's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P.. Kennedy, and the President's two brothers and sisters and his’ two children." .°° — a, ve
The restrictions on the examination of the photographs by unofficial investigators have tended to increase suspicion of the Warren Report. At his November 4 press conference President Johnson was asked about "why this material is still not available to competent nongovernment investigators." It is clear from the full answer that Johnson tried to duck the question: .
“. "Well first I think it's been available to the Warren Commission any time it wanted to see it. Second, I think it's available.'to any official. body now. Third, ZI think that every American can understand the reasons why we wouldn't want to have the garments and the records and everything paraded out in every sewing circle in the country to be exploited and used without serving any good or official purpose.
"And it is my understanding ~- all this took place while I was away [on his Far East tour -- A.M.] -- but it's my understanding that there's never -- most of this has been over in the archives, stored, all the time. It's always been available to the Warren Commission or the Government, the Justice Department, the F.B.I., to the late beloved President's brother, the Attorney General, during the period the Warren Commission was studying this thing and I certainly would think he'd have a very thorough interest in seeing that the truth was made evident and I believe he did have.
"And I think that he and the F.B.I. and the entire Government made available everything that the commission wanted and I think they made a very thorough study. I know of no evidence that would in any way cause any reasonable person to have a doubt about the Warren Commission, but if there is any evidence brought forth, I'm sure that the commission and the appropriate authorities will take action that may be justified."
The New York Times reported another reaction to the turning up of the X-rays and photographs, the whereabouts of which previously had been unknown, in its November 21 issue. The following quotation from the Times also contains some other interesting notes on the assassination controversy:
"In a taped 'Youth Wants to Know' interview over WABC-TV yesterday, Mr. Lane proposed that such a commission [of prominent and respected individuals not connected with the government to reinvestigate the assassination ~- A.M.] get full Government support, with power of subpoena and power to punish witnesses for contempt. He said it should not have members associated with the Government.
"Mr. Lane also reported he had written to the late President's brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Democrat of New York, asking permission to examine X-rays and photographs taken during the autopsy on the President.
"The New York lawyer asserted Senator Kennedy had not yet responded, but said:
"tT know Robert Kennedy sent a message to Professor [Hugh] Trevor-Roper, who wrote the introduction to my book, in which he said to keep up the good work.'
"Professor Trevor-Roper, a historian, reached last night in Oxford, England, said, 'No such message from Robert Kennedy has ever been received by me.'
"Mr. Lane could not be reached for further comment, nor could Senator Kennedy or spokesmen for him."
In any case, the only concerted effort to counter the critics thus far made public has been that of two teams of researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles Law School under the direction of Wesley J. Liebeler. Liebeler was a key man on the Warren Commission's legal staff. He says that the study had been prompted by two books: Inquest by Edward Jay Epstain and Rush to Judgment by-Mark Lane. Lane's book has been on the nonfiction best-seller list for about three months. It is now at the top of the list. The publisher recently reported that there were 195,000 copies in print. Bo
So, the American people are now confronted with a wide-open "credibility gap" and one that gets wider all the time. Suspicion falls on the Warren commissioners, the FBI which did most of its investigative work, and on the president who appointed the commission. : .
HANOT