CIA-FBI ACCUSED OF CONCEALING FACTS IN KENNEDY ASSASSINATION
By Arthur Maglin
It is now about three and a half years since President Kennedy was assassinated, yet the controversy over who killed him is more current than ever. The May 8 New York Post reported the latest development:
"District Attorney Jim Garrison plans to seek a full-scale Senate inquiry into the Central Intelligence Agency's role in the Warren Commission's investigation of the Kennedy assassination the New Orleans States-Item reported today.
"The New Orleans DA claims the CIA and the FBI cooperated in concealing facts behind the assassination of President Kennedy from both the Warren Commission and the American public.
"Garrison said he would take steps later that week to convince the Senate of the need for a full-scale investigation."
The article goes on later to say that "In an exclusive interview with Garrison, the States-Item quoted him as saying that the CIA kmew all along that the Warren Commission's report. was completely untrue in its conclusion that Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.
"Garrison's latest statement corroborated a States-Item report Friday [May 5] that his investigation had turned up mounting evidence of CIA involvement in Kennedy's death.
"He asserted that the intelligence agency duped the commission by flooding its members with a torrent of irrelevant information in order to obscure the truth.
"Garrison said Oswald was not a Communist, as he was depicted by the Warren Commission, but actually was an undercover man working closely with anti- Castro organizations in New Orleans and Dallas, using his Communist background as a cover for his real activities."
Very few people in the United States believe the official version of the assassination any more. The doubt that the American people had pretty generally felt all along did not take an acute form until last year. During 1966 a number of factors came together to sharpen this disbelief. Among these factors were:
(1) Beginning in the spring a number of well-documented books critical of the Warren Report were issued by major publishing houses. Previously, the subject had been considered too hot to handle.
(2) The appearance of a moderately favorable review of Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest written by Richard N. Goodwin in a summer issue of Book Week gave the critics of the Warren Report their first real taste of respectability. Richard Goodwin was an important aide to President Kennedy and is well known as an adviser to Senator Robert Kennedy.
(3) Perhaps the most important factor was the growing distrust of the Johnson administration and all its works, among which the Warren Commission figures prominently. This distrust of the govern~ ment in power stems directly from the unpopularity of the war in Vietnan.
Once started, the controversy proved unstoppable. By the end of 1966 outright upholders of the conclusions of the Warren Commission were decidedly on the defensive. More and more bourgeois publications and personalities began calling for a reopening of the investigation. In January of this year the Gallup Poll reported that only 36 percent of the American people believed the main contention of the Warren Report, that Oswald had killed the President acting on his own.
The bourgeois press entered the controversy on the side of the critics with the apparent aim of containing the criticisms. Such publications as Life and The Saturday Evening Post found it far easier to believe that Oswald may have had help than to believe that Oswald may not have been guilty of shooting Kennedy. For if Oswald is innocent that means that the Warren Commission framed him, either purposely or accidentally. But after what was billed as the most extensive criminal investigation in the nation's history it wouldn't really matter too much whether they convicted the wrong man through bureaucratic blundering or moral. bankruptcy. The exposure of either alternative would have the guaranteed effect of sharply re~ ducing public confidence in the official investigative agencies, the official system of justice, and in the federal government generally. So, from a bourgeois point of view, if one must criticize the commission, it is a wiser course to limit oneself to criticizing it for not sufficiently probing into questions that leave open the possibility that Oswald may have had help.
It is quite clear what the real interest of the bourgeois press in calling for a new investigation was. It was often stated quite explicitly. They wanted public confidence to be restored and they wanted serious critics of the Warren Conmission silenced.
On February 20 of this year a reinvestigation of the assassination was announced, though not the federal one that leading sections of the bourgeois press had asked for. The announcement came from James Garrison, the now wellknown district attorney of New Orleans. The bourgeois press has given extensive coverage to Garrison's probe, although with a uniform tone of skepticism.
The New Orleans developments bring up the important question of the inherent dangers for the American radical movement in any government-sponsored inquiry into the assassination. Many U.S. radicals have proceeded as if they thought that a new investigation held out no dangers for the left, but could only serve to expose the right. However, the bourgeoisie can never be relied upon to expose itself, nor can it be relied upon not to utilize a new investigation of the Kennedy case to launch an attack on the left. The capitalist class has, after all, had hundreds of years experience at inventing so-called "left-wing conspiracies." As a matter of fact, that appeared to be what the ruling class had in mind immediately after Kennedy was assassinated. Fortunately, after a few days they reversed thenselves and decided not to press a witchhunt.
In any case, revolutionary socialists will not and cannot support any new government inquiry into the Kennedy case, because revolutionaries can place no confidence in the capitalist judicial system or the capitalist police. This applies to poth the federal and local situations. Socialists demand that the federal government and all local officials open all the files and release all the facts so that the American people can get at the truth.
This simple demand, which the bourgeois critics of the official version of the Kennedy assassination have studiously avoided, centers on a simple undenied fact. Namely, that the U.S. government is suppressing a large amount of material admittedly relevant to the case. According to Earl Warren himself, some of this material might not be released until the year 2039.
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