Suspicion in Plenty: An anthology of scepticism published in Britain 1963-1973

[Paul Rigby]

In May 1964, the magazine Tit-Bits published what I think was a three-part series in which the patsy's mother was given the services of a sympathetic and distinctly capable ghost-writer.

Tit-Bits, 9 May 1964, pp.23-25

Assassin? No, an American agent

By Marguerite Oswald

My Son Didn’t Kill Kennedy – says Mrs. Marguerite Oswald

Grave doubts have now been cast on the claim that 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John Kennedy last November 22.

Oswald was shot and killed two days later by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. Ruby was convicted of capital murder and has appealed.

Oswald did not have the chance to stand trial, so the truth may never be known. The Warren Commission, set up to inquire into Kennedy’s assassination, is likely to report its findings next month. Meanwhile, the list of discrepancies in the evidence grows.

• Photographs show that the President’s car had travelled 75 yards past the book warehouse from which Oswald is said to have fired. Reports say that the car’s windscreen was shattered by a bullet fired from the front.

• A police bulletin immediately after the shooting said: “All firing appears to come from the from the overpass” – in front of the presidential car. Police were seen chasing two men over this overpass – an incident which has not been mentioned officially since.

• The three doctors who tried to save President Kennedy’s life in hospital reported that a bullet had entered his neck just under the Adam’s apple.

• Only after being interviewed by the F.B.I. did the doctors reverse their opinion to say that the throat wound was an exit wound.

• Dallas police originally described the murder weapon as a 7.65 mm Mauser. But it was reported to be a 6.5 mm Italian carbine after the F.B.I. discovered that Oswald had bought such a rifle from a mail order firm.

• Firing from a rifle usually leaves gunpowder on the hands and face, but paraffin tests conducted on Oswald were negative for his face.

• The shooting took place between 12.30 and 12.31 p.m. Oswald is said to have hidden the weapon, walked down four flights of stairs, bought a soft drink, talked to policeman and walked four blocks to catch a bus for a ride through congested streets before stepping off and hailing a taxi.

But at 12.45 – a maximum of 15 minutes after the shooting – he was known to be in his apartment, four miles from the scene of the murder.

Now a new voice is added to the chorus of doubts – that of Oswald’s mother. Here is her personal story. She tells of her anguish – and her fight to clear her son’s name.

Assassin? No, an American agent

I know that my son, Lee Harvey Oswald, is innocent. Since his and President Kennedy’s tragic deaths, I have lived in a state of shock. I have cut myself off completely from my past – the quiet, respectable life of a nurse – to dedicate myself to a single cause. It is one which mothers throughout the world will understand: to prove my son’s innocence.

I am an old woman – 55. I am not highly educated. I have not travelled. I no longer have friends. I never had influential connections. And I have lost my job. But nothing will get me down. I will not let myself be intimidated by anyone. I will use for my crusade what little money I earn by writing my story. I will try to find out the truth on my own – if my country’s government will not.

I am now convinced that my son fell into a trap, that he has been slandered, victimised, betrayed. The American Press is supposed to be free and mindful of its high duties and responsibilities. But it does not even bother to check on “news” supplied by the police, or mere rumour, but prints it all undigested.

Abroad, too, all kinds of things are published. It seems that nobody cares to try to distinguish between what might be true and mere flights of fancy.

The French magazine Paris Match, for example, had no excuse for publishing a cover photograph of my son holding a rifle, captioned: “With this photo, there is no more mystery about Dallas.”

What impertinence! What a crime, to insult the memory of a dead boy in this way!

In Texas millions of men own rifles and revolvers. Millions of men have themselves photographed holding guns. Hunters, ex-servicemen, detectives…

No one denies that Lee had a gun. But the fact that he had himself photographed with a rifle does not mean that he used it to kill the President of the United States. On that basis, hundreds of thousands of men could be guilty of the crime.

There is no proof that this was the rifle used to kill Kennedy. No proof, even, that it is of the same type as the gun used by the assassin. My son was an intelligent boy. If he had been planning to use a certain gun for a political crime, he would not have arranged to be photographed with it first. Nor if he had already used it to take a shot at a general, as they are saying now.

In such circumstances, Lee would have had the sense to destroy the weapon.

But is the photograph genuine?

Damaging

After his return from Russia, my son was very thin. In his photograph, he is fat. I have talked with experts, who say the photograph is a fake. My son's head has been stuck on someone else’s body.

I am his mother. But I never saw that photograph before – and he used to send me all the snaps he took, or that were taken of him.

His wife Marina never spoke of it in the time we lived together after my son was arrested.

She told me everything. We talked non-stop going over every little thing, but she never mentioned that photograph.

But now, many months later, she is supposed to have sold a photograph like this, so damaging to her husband and father of her infant children.

Marina is a foreigner, the product of a Communist upbringing, but I don’t believe her capable of doing such a thing.

The police went through all her belongings, as they did mine, and seized all the photographs. Why, then, if that one existed, was it not made public immediately?

Why wait months? Why wait for the moment when grave doubts were being expressed in the privacy of the government commission set up to inquire about President Kennedy’s death?

Why wait for the moment when new evidence which would clear my son had just come to light? Why wait till just after I had won my first great victory – of at last having a lawyer to defend my son’s memory before the Commission of Inquiry presided over by Judge Earl Warren, the Chief Justice?

Our family is a family of good, loyal, honest Americans. We have never clashed with the law. Lee had no police record. I myself have never taken part in politics, or talked politics with my children. Ours was a quiet, ordinary life – like that of millions of other Americans.

All my children were and are patriots. All three volunteered for military service. My eldest son is in the Air Force and has been for 14 years.

Proof

When Lee was 16, he tried to enlist in the Marines. I think that alone is striking proof that these things being written about him now are false: that at 15 he was going around with Marxists, that he was a Red, an admirer of Karl Marx, and so on.

That episode also goes to far to support my own theory about what happened in Dallas and the part Lee really played…

I believe he was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, sent first to Russia, then to Dallas. And I believe that his mission in Dallas was to infiltrate the ranks of subversive organisations and perhaps – who knows? – to uncover a plot against Kennedy.

At 16 and while still a student, my son was a member of the Aviation Cadet Corps – a pupil plot in the American Air Force.

A boy must be a patriot to be accepted into the Cadet Corps. He must also show the moral and physical qualities of the future officer.

The government would not have chosen Lee as a future pilot if he had been regarded as anti-American, dangerous or even unbalanced.

I have carefully kept to myself a photograph of Lee in his Air Force Cadet uniform. I publish it now as proof that he was a cadet and to show that this has been carefully hushed up by the police.

One evening, Lee came home in uniform, accompanied by an American officer. That officer told me that Lee was a boy who should be in his country’s service, being alert, educated and loyal; that America needed him, and that I should let him enlist in the Marines.

I hesitated for a long time. After all, what mother wants her child to leave her, perhaps to be sent overseas to some danger-spot?

I talked it over with other members of the family. At last I agreed.

Fortunately, the military authorities did not. They ruled that since Lee was well under the age limit, he must wait at least six months.

Lee did not give up his plan to enlist. He brought home an enormous volume, the Marines Training Manual, and learned it by heart. So much so that I teased him a bit and used to call him “the general.” But I was very proud of him.

At the same time Lee was studying the manual he was reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

Trust

But this was only after making contact with the Marines and while he was a pupil air pilot, attending all the Cadet Corps meetings. It was then that he got hold of Das Kapital.

To be an American is to be proud of American freedom.

I don’t ask my children questions. I trust them. I didn’t ask Lee why he was reading this book. I was sure, any way, that he had been told to study it by the military authorities supervising his training.

Now that I think things over, I am sure that the Marines already planned to make young Lee a special agent. They must have told him to prepare himself by studying not only the manual, but also Communist literature. I am told that this is standard procedure with the Central Intelligence Agency.

Lee never told me that he worked for an espionage service. Nor did I ask him.

But since when does a secret agent tell his mother what he is really doing? Did the parents of U.2 pilot Gary Powers, shot down over Russia, know what their son’s work was?

It is true that no one has come forward to say that Lee was an agent. But isn’t it the rule of all secret services not to acknowledge their own?

It is possible that even now Lee’s superiors stay silent in order to hunt down the guilty.

This belief of mine is just a theory. But it is one which fits the facts. It is also as likely to be correct as all the others put forward about my son.

We were poor. I had to work very hard...

Tit-Bits, 16 May 1964, pp.8-9 & 31

The Truth About Lee’s Moscow Trip

By Marguerite Oswald

I was born 55 years ago in New Orleans, where jazz came from. It is the most Latin city in America, which no doubt explains why all our family are romantics. My father was of French origin. His name was Jean Claverie. He was one of the first tram driver in the city.

My mother was of German origin. Her name was Dora Stucke. When I was very small, I loved singing. I had a good voice and was soloist in the church choir. I completed high school, then went straight back to work as secretary to a lawyer.

In 1929, at 21, I married Edward J. Eic, a porter. He deserted me while I was expecting my first child, John Edward – today a senior NCO in the regular Air Force. We were divorced in 1932.

The following year, I married Robert Edward Lee Oswald, an insurance man of Irish origin. Our first son was born Robert, who now works for a brick and cement factory.

Hero

My husband made me very happy. But not, alas, for long. He died of a heart attack in August 1939, some days before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. I was pregnant again at the time.

The child, whom I named Lee Harvey, was born on October 18, 1939. The name Lee is an Oswald family one, in memory of General Lee, commander-in-chief of the Southern armies in the Civil War, a hero of every patriotic American. That shows how much we are attached to our traditions.

It was not easy for a woman on her own to bring up three small children in wartime. But I managed it and my little ones never wanted for anything.

Lee was always intelligent which caused some jealousy among the neighbours.

In 1945 I married again, to Edwin A. Ekdahl. He was an engineer in Boston – so we had to leave New Orleans.

Divorce

The Press has made a good deal out of my many moves, but these always arose from family needs.

The two elder boys were sent to a military college. Lee stayed with me.

My third marriage ended in divorce in 1948 and I went to New York to be near my son Edward, who was stationed there.

We were poor. I had to work very hard.

Lee was not unhappy, but he missed the South. He felt stifled among the skyscrapers. He was bored in class, where the other pupils were so much less advanced.

My son was fascinated by the zoo and used to play truant to go there.

He was taken back to school by the truant officer and lectured. But he still stayed out.

Again he was caught and this time he was taken before a judge and sent to a training centre for six weeks.

I had him back at last and was advised to take him home to the South. That is why we went back to New Orleans. Lee didn’t play truant again there and easily won his high school diploma.

No one told me he had been given a psychiatric examination or that he had been classed as “dangerous.”

The whole thing has been made up, to bolster the “case” against him.

If it is true, why did they let me have him back? Why was he not sent for treatment? How is it that this medical history was not studied before they accepted him as a pupil pilot? Since when do the Marines accept “unbalanced” men as volunteers? When Lee reached 17, he enlisted at once. He was sent to a camp where he specialised in electronics and aviation.

The Commandant of the Marines sent me a magnificent certificate, telling me that I should be proud to be his mother. Lee was always happy to be in the Marines. His letters were full of enthusiasm. When he came home on leave he always wore his uniform. Each time he repeated how proud he was to be a Marine.

Promoted

He sent me money from time to time and presents from foreign countries he visited – the Philippines and Japan.

If he was in any trouble while in the Service, I never heard of it. The Marines, who sent me his honour diplomas, did not tell me of any of the supposed bad conduct on Lee’s part. He was, in fact, promoted corporal.

The newspapers have spread another legend: that my son won a medal as a champion rifle-shot.

What nonsense! It was not my son, but his battalion which won the medal. It was awarded to them all, as a team. There is nothing to show that Lee was an especially good shot.

At this time, I was an overseer in a sweet factory at Fort Worth, Texas.

A big glass jar fell on me and I had to have hospital treatment. All this was expensive and I was not insured. I had to sell my furniture. I was destitute. In September, 1959, Lee came home. He had been given a discharge on compassionate grounds because of my sickness. I was living in dreadful conditions.

“We shall have to move somewhere else,” I told Lee.

“We’ll talk about it again tomorrow morning,” he said. But next morning he told me: “Mother, I’ve come to a decision. I’m going to work on a cargo boat and try and get into the export and import business.

“I can’t hope to earn more than 35 dollars (about £12 10s) a week here.”

The next day I protested mildly: “Lee, I can earn a few dollars looking after children. We can make a good life together.”

He said: “No mother, I’ve made up my mind.”

On the third day, we said goodbye.

I do not believe that he decided overnight, just like that, to go to Russia. He must have received an order.

My son was a soldier. It was as a soldier and his mother that we parted. He had left me 100 dollars (about £36).

A week later, he wrote from New Orleans that he had joined a ship sailing for Europe.

It was not until November 1959, that I learned from the newspapers that my son was in Moscow and that he wanted to renounce American nationality.

I borrowed some money and went to Washington to find my son’s address. I wrote to him.

He replied: “Mama, I beg you, send me some money.” By return of post I sent him a cheque for 20 dollars (about £7).

Problems

But what had happened to the large sum of money he was given when he was demobilised?

He wrote me again in June, 1961, to tell me that he had married.

After that, his letters were more frequent. He told me about his life, his wife, the baby that was born to them, the little everyday problems.

He asked for books, shaving-soap, razor-blades. But he sent me presents, too – a shawl, statuettes, many photographs. He never mentioned politics or his plans.

One of the legends told about him now is the story of his having written a threatening letter to Governor Connally of Texas, who was wounded when President Kennedy was shot.

In fact all he wanted was that the Marine Corps’ decision to expel him dishonourably should be revoked.

Opinions

Lee had been dishonourably discharged. Whether or not he went to Russia after that was his own business. Nor should ex-soldiers be penalised for their political opinions. Lee was just standing up for his rights.

At last he wrote asking me to help him return to Texas. I did what I could, but without success.

How did he raise his fare back? It was, of course, the American Embassy in Moscow which gave him the money and his passport. That is understandable if Lee was an agent.

It seems that the Russian Government has passed my son’s dossier to the American Government. I have not been allowed to see it.

I intend to go to the Russian Embassy myself, to claim it from them. I am sure it will show that the Communists had discovered Lee was an American agent.

My son, his wife, and his little girl came to live with me for more than a month after their return.

Marina Nikolaevna Pruskova is a pretty and charming girl. I always got on well with her. It is not true that our relations were strained or that this was why Lee went to live elsewhere.

Foreigner

Certainly, Marina always remained a “foreigner” to me – a woman from the unknown, a citizen of a country enemy to mine, a girl who was born, grew up and was educated under the Communist regime.

Either everything we have been told about Communism and Russia is a big lie or one ought to be wary or a woman who is wholly the product of Soviet culture.

Marina has never denied the Russians or renounced Communism. She was born in Archangel, but brought up in Leningrad, where she studied. Her father and mother are dead, but she has an uncle, once a colonel in the Red Army, now retired.

She went to university and has a degree in pharmacy.

She met my son at a dance. They were married six weeks later.

I must here deny two more legends. The first is that Lee learned Russian because he was a Marxist. He learned Russian during his service in the Marines. His teachers belonged to the Army. The course was part of Army training.

The second is that Lee did not want Marina to learn English. It would be ridiculous for a husband to forbid his wife to learn the language of the country she was living in. The fact is that Marina did not speak English well, but she could make herself understood.

Marina said that she loved Lee deeply, wanted never to leave him, wished only to devote herself to her child.

Still it’s true there were moments when she spoke of going back to Russia. Once I saw her with a black eye. “Lee did it,” she said.

Lee and Marina brought me gifts from Russia. There was a camera and a little transistor radio.

Lee told me that he adored his wife. He was not earning much, but he bought her a gold ring with a ruby – the ruby is Marina’s birth-stone. She had brought a pair of ruby ear-rings from Russia.

Lee spent a lot of time with his baby, fed her, told her stories. He was a good father.

I did not see Lee and Marina again for nearly a year. He had a job at last, in a factory. Marina wept with joy. “Thank God, Lee’s working,” she said to me.

Why the separation? Well, that’s how life is. Lots of married children live far away from their mothers. It may be, too, that as an agent entrusted with a dangerous mission Lee did not want to involve his mother. Or explain to her why he did what he had to do.

[Paul Rigby]

A rare review of Nerin Gun's early contribution to the literature on the case:

News of the World, 5 July 1964, p.6

Kennedy: Will the Truth Be Told?

By Gerard Fairlie

Dr. Malcolm Perry was restfully munching salmon croquettes in the canteen of the parkland Memorial Hospital. It was shortly before one o’clock on a lovely sunny afternoon.

He was standing in for Dr. Shires, the resident head of surgery, who had taken the day off. Dr. Perry, Dr. Shire’s assistant, was meditating with an inward smile that when he himself managed a day off the weather was never so good.

The hospital loudspeaker abruptly sprang to life, “Stat for Dr. Shires.”

Dr. Perry found himself a little irritated. He moved over to pick up the telephone.

“Mary, you’re crazy,” he said. “Can’t one even eat something in peace…?”
“President Kennedy is dying. Stat. He has just been brought into Casualty.”
All lethargy left Dr. Malcolm Perry. He moved fast down a flight of stairs.

Hopeless

The doctors of Parkland Hospital are accustomed to the sight of gunshot wounds. Apparently Texans are a little apt to shoot each other.

But on reaching Casualty, where staff doctors were already at work, Dr. Perry almost flinched. Kennedy was still on the stretcher, since it was feared to move him to the operating table.

There was blood on the stretcher and in great quantities on the floor. Perry noticed a young woman in a pink dress, which was blood-stained, standing perfectly still against the wall. Her eyes were fixed on her dying husband’s face.

She stayed there all the endless, hectic minutes that the team of 14 doctors – who hurried to join in the fight for the President’s life – sweated at the hopeless task in the stifling glare of the arc-lights.

The doctors stood back, beaten. Jacqueline Kennedy said “Call a priest.” Father Huber was waiting. He administered the conditional last rites, those accorded by the Roman Catholic Church when a person is incapable of receiving the full rite of final absolution.

Last time

Then they all left the room, briefly leaving Jacqueline alone for the last time with her husband.

This scene is superbly described in a new book just written by Nerin E. Gun called Red Roses From Texas (Muller, 25s.).

Quite a few books have reached me on the subject of President Kennedy’s assassination, presumably timed to profit from the publicity which is bound to attend the publication of the Warren Commission’s report due shortly.

This is the Commission set up by the new President Johnson within days of the crime, to investigate its quite incredible features. These books are nearly all so biased against the American secret services and the famous F.B.I. that they defeat their own object.

But Red Roses is refreshingly impartial. Nerin Gun is careful to quote only from the results of his own investigations, and the known facts.

Inevitably he does ask disturbing questions, because I doubt whether even the most ingenious whodunnit has ever posed such a mystery as does this dreadful crime.
There is too much room for the most demoralising doubts.

Could it have been an American political action? Could it have been Cuban-inspired? Could it have been, perhaps, the just the impulsive, insane action of a lunatic?

Was the ex-marine, ex-Communist Lee Harvey Oswald the actual murderer? Or just a dupe? Was he in his turn shot by night club owner Jack Ruby, in full view of the television cameras, on orders “from above” to shut him up forever?

Could Oswald have been a secret agent? It’s not impossible. He might have been on the trail of the intending assassins...

Mystifying

And, perhaps more mystifying than anything, Gun asks: “Why did Earl Warren, after studying secret documents, declare publicly, ‘Probably certain facts in this affair will never be made public in our generation.’? This was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the first magistrate, chairman of the nation’s ad hoc commission – and the man entrusted by President Johnson with the task of investigating the assassination.”

Unless the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is seen to emerge when the Warren Commission reports, the whole American nation risks standing convicted of cowardice in the eyes of the rest of the world.

As often happens, the victim has suddenly been hailed, perhaps hysterically because of reaction to the crime, as the greatest of American Presidents.

The author of this fascinating and brilliantly written book is wise to write: “We ought not to anticipate the verdict of history. It will not be possible for a long time to make a true evaluation of his uncompleted work. Let us, for the moment, just note that on this Friday morning of his journey to Dallas, he was under fire for many reasons. The Republican group in the Senate had recently published a statement which called his presidency the worst since Harding’s.”

Patriotic

That is what I like about this book.

Although obviously an admirer of Kennedy, Gun is not afraid to give the other side. Although obviously a patriotic American, Gun is not afraid to state and face the haunting questions.

His fair mind adds greatly to the points he makes.

At about three o’clock in the early morning of that disastrous day last November, Mrs. Jeanne Dixon suffered a nightmare. The author writes: “She at once telephoned the White House and asked for the Secret Service. ‘You must warn the President – he’s going to be killed tomorrow. Don’t let him go to Dallas. My visions are always right. I foresaw his election, and Rockefeller’s marriage…He must be warned at once.’

“The officer on duty, furious at having been awakened, is reported to have not even thanked her and gone back to sleep on his sofa.”

The United States, and the world, waits for the Warren Commission’s conclusions. It would seem – in view of the spate of words being written prejudging the issues – that it may already have taken too long in its deliberations. But I’m quite sure that Red Roses From Texas is fair comment.

[Paul Rigby]

Labour Monthly, January 1964, pp. 1-15;

Notes of the Month: After Kennedy

Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long

Shakespeare

By R. Palme Dutt

December 10, 1963

President Kennedy’s murder has thrown a sudden fierce light on the realities of the world in which we live, beneath all the smooth, polite façade of ‘Western civilization.’ This murder was a political act. Its consequences may reach far. The murder of an Archduke in Sarajevo at one end of Europe and the murder of the silver-tongued orator of socialism, Juares, at the other, inaugurated the first world war. The murders of Liebknecht and of Rosa Luxembourg immediately after the first world war, and of Rathenau in the succeeding years, presaged the downward slide of the Weimar Republic into Nazism. The murders of the last independent French Foreign Minister Barthou and King Alexander of Jugoslavia heralded the appeasement of Nazism. What will prove the sequel to Kennedy’s murder? It is no wonder that concern and anxiety is shared in many countries among wide circles of the people far beyond those sharing his political outlook.

The piece to follow concludes with one of the great sentences of this, or any other, assassination's literature:

"The warning is clear: like a Sultan surrounded by his Mamelukes, the titular ruler of U.S.A. is to continue to know he must not go too far."

A line as true for Ronald Reagan as John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Labour Monthly, November 1964, pp.499-503, & 506-509

The Warren Report

By Ivor Montagu

Legend already relates that when Chief Justice Earl Warren agreed to accept the Chairmanship of the Kennedy Enquiry Commission he wept. He had good reason. Just as others had good reason to press him to undertake it. It is interesting to speculate what would have been the reception of its report had the Commission been headed by another of its members – for instance Alan Dulles, the Central Intelligence Agency chief whom Kennedy let go after the Bay of Pigs, or McCloy, ex-High Commissioner in Germany, or either of the racist Democratic Senators (from Georgia and Louisiana) or the Goldwaterite Republican. ‘But Brutus is an honourable man.’ Or so said Marc Anthony when he was commenting upon another murder by conspiracy. In that case, Julius Caesar. In this, the truth itself. As it is, because of Brutus, the conspiracy has got off to a fair start. Not so fair as the reader of the British press, with its unanimous hooflick nowadays in response to any ‘moo’ of the Washington sacred cow, might imagine however. The headline in the New York Times on the day following publication (September 29) reads: ‘WARREN FINDINGS SATISFY OFFICIALS IN WEST EUROPE: MUCH OF PUBLIC SCEPTICAL.’ Just so.

The main impact of the report is its voluminousness. It is a real bucket of brainwash. 718 often repetitious pages (1), a list of 552 witnesses, innumerable staff, a score or so of volumes of testimony promised ultimately – who, after this, would be ungrateful enough to doubt the thoroughness with which the job was done. The old army sweat will easily recognise this technique. It was called he was hauled before the C.O., ‘blinding him with science.’ And the job? To divert attention from the source that stood out as most obviously to be accused.

In the January issue of this magazine, before ever the Commission got down to work, the editor outlined the case, the obvious pointers to C.I.A., F.B.I. and the Dallas police, that the world had seized upon and that these agencies of national and local government had to answer. Cumulatively it was damning (2). Every one of the counts that he enumerated is confirmed in the report. And much more. The sins of omission, the sins of commission, the facts that arouse suspicion.

It cannot be said that these accused were totally disregarded. The former head of one – Allen Dulles – sat actually on the Commission. The gathering of facts was completely – or in effect completely (3) - entrusted to the second, the F.B.I. That neither was linked to the crimes in any way is concluded from the assurances of their chiefs. The assurance of Mr. McCone. The assurance of Mr. J. Edgar Hoover. Both gentlemen, through their subordinates, were kind enough to produce files. The CIA found no blameworthy association of Oswald with the CIA. The FBI found no blameworthy association between him and the FBI. Again and again, when a piece of evidence is cited that points in these directions we are told that the FBI found no confirmation. Exactly. There was no cross examination. When relatives of the bumped-off Lee Harvey Oswald asked to appoint counsel to represent him, they were refused. Half-way through, the Commission got cold feet about this and appointed a respected officer of the Court (who hardly ever bothered to attend), a distinguished Goldwaterite, to advise them whether they were being fair. How one would have liked to hear Lawrence Preston, or even Perry Mason, have a go at this sort of thing.

From the beginning of course, the Commission assumed that U.S. agencies cannot frame, cannot fake evidence, cannot lie. Behind them were Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, Hoffa, the Presidential assurances about the U2, Adlai Stevenson’s assurances to the United Nations about the Bay of Pigs. The ink was scarcely blotted on the confessions about the pretended incidents in the Bay of Tonking. But this was its assumption. It remarks firmly that after the releases and pictures and allegations about Lee Harvey Oswald it would have been impossible to ensure a fair trial because of the assumptions any possible jury would make. And then it makes the same assumptions its own whole point of departure in a trial in which his voice was silenced.

Its starting point and its end: not only that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, but that he did it alone. This ‘alone’ was vital. Some people may wonder why, after the careful construction of threads tying Oswald to the U.S.S.R., to Communists, Trotskyists, Cuba, etc., someone changed his mind and the ‘alone’ version, followed by the Commission, was followed instead, from within an hour or two of his arrest. Someone was sensible. These threads were altogether too thin and must snap under any weight. It was too dangerous to have any live accused whose counter-attack might smash the whole thing. After all, the Reichstag Fire Trial was not without its lesson. To prove the Communists guilty, the prosecution revealed evidence that Van der Lubbe could not have done the job alone. As nothing could implicate the Communists, the Nazis pointed at themselves and all the efforts nowadays to whitewash them are bound to fail. How much handier to have bumped off Van der Lubbe on the spot, instead of merely drugging him, and then had a posthumous enquiry commission with Goering as a member and the Gestapo in sole control of collecting evidence.

To reach their preordained conclusion, the Commission had to do some splendid wriggling. The student of the report will notice three outstanding features. First, that when there is any conflict of evidence the Commission threads itself neatly through it, adopting anything consistent with its theory, dismissing as ‘mistaken’ anything that contradicts it. The doctors who first examined Kennedy thought he was shot from the front. Easy, they were mistaken. Some witnesses thought the shots heard were fired from the depository, some from the bridge. Easy, the first were right, the second wrong. Contradictions in time and identity alike are solved by this convenient formula. However, sometimes this wears a little thin. Witnesses who saw Oswald in inconvenient places were mistaken in their recognition – they had seen T.V. pictures of him and this vitiates their evidence. But on the other hand, in their conclusion the Commission claim that nine witnesses saw Oswald kill Tippett or run away after his murder. It becomes a little ingenuous of them to ignore (what they admit later in their text) that the same reservation applies to these. Sometimes they make downright mistakes. One awkward identification of Oswald is dismissed because the ‘Oswald’ seen got drunk, and Lee Harvey, the Commission says, did not drink. But the report later describes an incident in which he did, most thoroughly. (Incidentally, a tantalising reference occurs (p.628) to ‘the English language edition of the Daily Worker,’ allegedly read by Oswald. One would like to know more about this paper.)

On one crucial question let us examine the Commission’s treatment of the question whether it was possible for a man like Oswald to fire the shots and hit the President. This is a clear example of its method. It knows that there is a great question whether one man with such a rifle could accurately have fired the number of shots available in the given time. So first it is anxious to minimise the number of shots. After a lot of weighing and microscopic examination of the bullets (and no explanation of the interval before traces of bullets were looked for on the ground) it concludes that the number must have been three or four and plumps for three. After analysing the evidence of times shots were heard and wounds were seen it comes to the conclusion that if, of the three bullets fired, two hit Kennedy and one hit Governor Connolly the time necessary would have been 4.8 to 5.6 seconds. But this is inconvenient because it comes too close to the time taken for these shots in their tests. So they have the magnificent idea that if one shot missed, and if this was not the middle one but the first or third, the time evidence could be held to give up to 7.1 or even 7.9 seconds. Accordingly in their report they not only state it as a possibility, that one shot hit both Kennedy and Connolly, but conclude it as a fact, loading a headline THE SHOT THAT MISSED, although this is absolutely contrary not only to Connolly’s impression but to the insistent evidence of Connolly’s wife, also in the car, who is determined it was after Kennedy was hit that she heard the shot that hit her husband. The Commission argue that this is perfectly consistent with their conclusion because sound does not travel instantaneously. According to the distance it gives, the sound would have reached Mrs. Connolly in about 1/6th of a second. (This is not one of the figures in the generous avalanche of technical data.)

Next, they take a rifle found in the book depository and arrange for three expert shots to try to shoot three targets arranged at intervals corresponding in angle and distance to the positions of the Presidential car in the probable interval of time. They succeed, but dangerously near the minimum. But why in the tests where the targets not moving? And, above all, why experts? The evidence the Commission itself cites shows that Oswald’s ability was nowhere near the expert’s. ‘Expert’ is the top category of three. Oswald in the marines had two tests. One gave him a bare two marks above the minimum for the second category. The other (later) placed him well down in the third (the lowest). The Commission’s comment on this latter test is characteristic. Without a shred of evidence it suggests that at the time it might have been raining. And yet now two, possibly all three of his shots were hits. Why do the tests with experts? They quote evidence from Oswald’s wife, that he had practised a dry run (loading and unloading) apparently with this rifle. They have no testimony that he ever fired a single practice shot with it. They argue that his task of aiming anew for each shot was made easier because the car was going down a slope of 3 degrees. The height of the building is one of the relevant figures omitted. But the distances are given, the minimum height for the sixth floor is not hard to gauge from the photographs and trigonometry shows this special pleading pretty weak.

The second feature: that the main sustaining evidence against Oswald has been provided by his wife – who, of course, could not have been made to testify against him at all had this been a trial. The evidence of the other parties is thin and contradictory, doubtful recognitions, selected assumptions, behaviour without rhyme or reason. It is entirely the testimony of Marina, the Russian-born wife, that puts flesh and blood on the flimsy skeleton. Marina, who speaks no English, who first declared her disbelief in her husband’s guilt, who was placed, in effect, incommunicado by the F.B.I as soon as the crime was committed and who the Commission triumphantly boasts in its conclusions, has now changed her view. Marina, against whom, as is clear from the report, the U.S. authorities have a clear case whenever they like to press it, for false statement on her immigration form. The Commission are faced with a problem: how to account for Oswald, with a complete absence of any violence on his previous record, having suddenly taken to assassination. So Marina comes to the rescue with a story that he earlier tried to shoot General Walker. How this marksman, capable of accurate shots from an unfamiliar stance in a few seconds against a moving target came then to miss a sitting target, in a location that, according to the report, he had previously prepared and studied, and with all the time in the world at his disposal, is not even discussed by the Committee. It is Marina, too, who helps to whitewash the most damning document admitted by the Committee; the notation of a local F.B.I. officer’s name and address in Oswald’s notebook. Explanation: the F.B.I. made a routine call on the woman with whom Marina was staying, told her Oswald was a suspicious character and left his name and address so she could report to him on his activities. So the woman promptly gave the name and address to Marina who gave it to Oswald who wrote it in his notebook. Really, there seems no limit to the credulity expected of the public by the Commission and the F.B.I.

The third remarkable feature is the amount of space devoted to psychologising Lee Harvey Oswald. Or perhaps it is not remarkable considering the role played in contemporary U.S. society by the psychologist as a sort of sorcerer or medicine man. The Commission is desperately anxious to discover a motive for this man, who never spoke against Kennedy, had no grudge against Kennedy, suddenly deciding on his own to shoot Kennedy. They even, in one place, suggest (while declaring themselves not convinced) that it was because he had just heard his wife running down his sexual ability in the presence of third parties. This mania for finding the simple inexplicable and resorting to ‘psychology,’ reminds of Honor Tracy’s account, in her book on McArthur’s occupation of Japan, of the two G.I.s who were noticed enjoying their doxies in broad daylight on a public hard tennis court in Tokyo, and were remitted to the psychiatric ward for study on why they were doing it. For, on the assumption of the Committee, that he and he alone is the assassin, the case is certainly a problem. The young man who claims he was first attracted to Communism at the age of 16 – and at 20 promptly joins the U.S. marines; who spends his time in the marines – studying the Russian language and Marxism. The flourishing ex-marine - who has money to go to U.S.S.R. The disillusioned anti-communist who writes an exposure of Soviet society on his way home – and on arrival, instead of publishing it, promptly takes out a subscription to the Worker instead. The unemployed man who spends his spare servings on printing propaganda and a visit to Mexico. This intending assassin who draws attention to himself by getting on radio and arrested as a supporter of ‘Fair Play for Cuba,’ and creating a row in Mexico City at the Cuban and Soviet Embassies – and leaves conveniently at his home a photograph of himself with a pistol and rifle holding copies of the Worker and the Militant. All that of course takes some psychologising – if you make the Commission’s assumption. No psychology can explain (so of course the Commission does not attempt to) why a man whose motive for shooting the President was (as it imaginatively concludes) to assert his personality, to be a somebody in the world and then go down in history, should do this deed and then deny it. Booth, after shooting Lincoln, jumped on the stage for an opportunity to shout ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ Every other assassin or would-be assassin of a U.S. President (all detailed in the report) proclaimed the deed. Not Lee Harvey Oswald. All he said in public was that he didn’t do it. Of what he said to the Dallas police in private the Commission notes that not a word was recorded, but admits he persisted in his denial.

But if this assumption is not made, if the denials of the C.I.A. and F.B.I. are taken, as grown-ups surely should take them, with the head cocked just slightly to one side and a recollection of the number of times these bodies have been caught lying, framing and – in the case of the first – even assassinating; if, in other words, we admit even just the possibility that Oswald (who was certainly not innocent) was a fall-guy, small fry doing a job for one and/or the other, one of the many kept ripe and ready for convenient usage and here employed to put hounds off the scent – then there is no mystery whatever about his biography, the problem disappears.

The effort to blur this in connection with the State Department, whose actual records can less easily claim excuse for non-publication than can those of the two cloak-and-dagger institutions, brings on a veritable orgy of contortions on the part of the Commission. Oswald gets his passport to go to Russia, the first time, in six days, puts on an act at the U.S. Embassy insulting everyone and declaring his loyalty to U.S.S.R. When even this does not get him any job nearer the hub of affairs in Russia then relegation to the premises as a small craftsman, he applies to return with his wife and asks for cash to do so. The resentful Embassy staff at first says no, but then is overruled by superiors at home who stretch the regulations (6). The Commission says this was because the State Department regarded Oswald as ‘an unstable character whose actions are highly unpredictable,’ and therefore considered it in the best interests of U.S.A. to get him back and out of Russia as soon as possible. Nevertheless, when he applies to the State Department for a new passport to go to Cuba and to the U.S.S.R. again, the same department which has just subsidised him to come out of U.S.S.R. in the U.S. interest, grants it at once, this time in one day! Which, says the Commission, was just routine! The Commission admits that in such cases a ‘look-out card’ is made out, warning that such a man should not get a passport again without due consideration. It even has a witness who remembers making out such a card for Oswald, but it was not in his file and none can remember how it failed to get in (or got out).

A report so packed with facts cannot but include, however fantastic, illuminations of American life. It is by no means devoid of unintentional humour. One is when Oswald, whose letters and diary and other writings are abundantly quoted throughout and who cannot write one single sentence correctly and without misspellings, is solemnly recorded as having been interviewed for a job and assessed as being of ‘outstanding verbal-clerical potential’ (p.640). Another is when, with equal deadpan, we are told (p.361) that he baited his officers by leading ‘them into discussions of foreign affairs about which they often knew less than he did.’ (Heavens above, what must be the level of commissioned rank education in the U.S. marines!) But the whole ‘investigation’ rollicks into farce when it starts on the biography of Jack Ruby, the man who so conveniently shut the mouth of fall-guy Oswald.

‘Many former employers of Ruby,’ we learn, ‘stated that he was a pleasant or unobjectionable employer,’ ‘genuinely interested in their welfare and happiness. In a moment, however, it is explained that he also dominated them, publicly embarrassed them, frequently resorted to violence against them, sometimes attempted to cheat them of their pay, and delayed paying their salaries. He struck one on the head with a blackjack, kicked another – a guitarist – in the groin. His partner was given eight years for sodomy and he himself arrested eight times in a few years for violence and various violations of laws. His activities, the Commission quotes a friend as saying, were ‘shady but legitimate.’ Nevertheless this paragon was on excellent terms with the Dallas police. His ‘personal attachment’ to police affairs is demonstrated by reports that he attended the funeral of at least one policeman killed in action. Ruby regarded several officers as personal friends and others had worked for him. Finally, at least one policeman regularly dated and eventually married, one of the nightclub’s strippers. The Commission concludes that ‘the precise nature of his relationship to members of the Dallas Police Department is not susceptible to conclusive evaluation,’ but it hazards the guess that the Dallas’ police chief’s testimony that a maximum of 50 of his men were acquainted with Ruby is possibly an underestimation. Nobody noticed him about in police headquarters when he shot Oswald, they guess, because probably he was there only about 30 seconds.

From gay to grave: perhaps the most sinister part of the Report is the last chapter. It goes over all the actions and failures of the security organs that were charged with Kennedy’s safety. ‘Errors,’ it characterises them. The remedy? A committee to think up something and meanwhile more of the same. More Secret Service. More money and men for J. Edgar Hoover. More ‘Liaison with local Law Enforcement Agencies’ (i.e., such as the Dallas police). And, we may suppose, if he is bumped off, more enquiries packed with enemies. The warning is clear: like a Sultan surrounded by his Mamelukes, the titular ruler of U.S.A. is to continue to know he must not go too far.

(1) Allusions are to the New York Times/Bantam edition.

(2) The reader will find an extract from the Editor’s January Notes at the end of this article.

(3) Except for other Federal and State organs. This was the White House instruction. But no-one investigated the F.B.I.

(4) Incidentally, General Walker still insists (Evening Standard, October) that neighbours saw two men involved in the assassination attempt. This inconvenient fact is not mentioned by the Commission.

(5) A fascinating ‘budget’ projected by the Commission and certified as sane by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ($27.73 for the Cuban leaflets and letterheads, $68.25 for his fare to Mexico and a week’s stay (with food) at a hotel) , works out over more than seventeen months within twenty dollars of the sum disposed of when arrested!

(6) A form filled by Oswald, if carefully read, would have shown him disqualified to return. The Commission, which is concerned to show the State Department as acting properly at every stage, states Oswald must have written his answer by mistake on the wrong line.

[Paul Rigby]

WWII member of British intelligence, historian of some repute...what made him do it? No, not validate the Hitler Diaries, I mean join the 'Who Killed Kennedy?' Committee.

The Sunday Times, Weekly Review, 13 December 1964, p.21

Kennedy Murder Inquiry Is Suspect

By Hugh Trevor-Roper

The assassination of President Kennedy was a great shock to the whole world. To the American people it was more than a shock: it was a humiliation. The shooting of the President, followed only two days later by the shooting of the supposed assassin, Lee Oswald, seemed to show that the leading power of the West, the guardian of its security and culture, rested precariously on a basis of insecurity and violence. In order to reassure the world, President Johnson set up a commission of inquiry charged to discover the true facts. In order to reassure the American people, he must have hoped that the true facts would reveal – especially in an election year – no basic strains in American society. This is, in fact, what the commission has done.

Its report, the Warren Report, has answered the factual question. The assassination is explained. The report has also resolved the emotional problem: the assassination is explained away. Oswald, we are assured shot the President for purely personal motives, explicable by his psychological case history. Jack Ruby shot Oswald on a purely personal impulse, similarly explicable. No one else is involved. The police, which watches over the city of Dallas, may have made errors; so may the secret service, which watches over the security of the President. These errors must be regretted and corrected in future: but American society is unaffected; the episode can be forgotten; or at least, if it is remembered, it leaves no taint in the American reputation, no trauma in the American soul.

Now let me say at once that there is no reason why this explanation, so massively documented, should not, theoretically, be true. Many assassinations, or attempted assassinations, have been the act of isolated, unbalanced individuals. The public has always been prone to see conspiracy in what is really the effect of nature or chance. The Warren Commission was composed of responsible public men whose officials undoubtedly collected a great deal of matter. Its chairman, however reluctantly he may have accepted the chair, was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Therefore no one should dismiss the report lightly. On the other hand, we need not altogether abdicate the use of reason in reading it.

If I dissent from its findings, it is not because I prefer speculation to evidence or have a natural tendency toward radicalism: it is because, as a historian, I prefer evidence. In this case I am prepared to be content with the evidence actually supplied by the Commission. That evidence is certainly copious enough. Behind the summary, so gleefully and faultlessly endorsed by the press, lies the full report, and behind the full report lie the twenty-six volumes of testimony which it claims lead to the comfortable conclusions of the report. It convinces me that the Commission, for whatever reasons, simply has not done its work, or, rather, it has half done its work. It has reassured the American people by its findings but it has not reassured the world by its methods; it has not established the facts; behind a smoke screen of often irrelevant material it has accepted impermissible axioms, constructed invalid arguments and failed to ask elementary and essential questions.

At this point I must declare my own interest. In June 1964 before the Warren Report was issued, I agreed to serve on the British “Who Killed Kennedy?” committee. I did this because I was convinced that the composition of the Warren Commission and the procedure which it announced were ill calculated to produce the truth. They did not guarantee a full examination of the evidence, and there was some reason to fear the relevant evidence might never come before the Commission. The purpose of the committee was to guard against the danger that dissenting evidence might be silenced between political authority and emotional expediency, but at the same time there was no need to prejudge the issue. Truth can emerge even from an official body, and the political composition of the Commission and its defective methods need not necessarily prevent it from reaching valid conclusions, provided it showed itself capable of independent judgment. I was therefore perfectly willing to examine the report, when it should appear, on its merits, to let it stand or fall, in my judgment, on its handling of the evidence. It is by that standard that I now consider it an inadmissible report. In order to demonstrate this, I shall concentrate on a few central facts which, to me, render the whole report suspect.

First of all there is the attempted arrest of Oswald by patrolman Tippett. Any reader of the report must be struck by this episode. According to the report, the Dallas police issued the order which led to this attempted arrest before any evidence had been found which pointed personally to Oswald. We immediately ask, on what evidence did they issue these orders? To fill the gap, the report mentions one witness, Howard Brennan, who, we are told, saw the shots fired from the sixth-floor window and made a statement to the police “within minutes” of the assassination. This statement, says the report, was “most probably” the basis of the police description radioed (among others) to Tippett.

Now this chain of events is obviously of the greatest importance. It also contains obvious difficulties. Not only does the alleged statement of Brennan seem far too precise to correspond with anything he can really have seen, and the alleged police description far too vague to be the basis of a particular arrest, but the words “most probably,” which slide over these difficulties, are unpardonably vague. Any police description leading to an attempted arrest must have been based on some definite evidence – the police must know on what evidence it was based – and it was the inescapable duty of the Commission, which claims to have “critically reassessed” all the evidence, to require the police to reveal the evidence. Either the police description was based on Brennan’s statement or it was not. Certainty, in such a matter, is absolutely essential and easily discoverable. Why then has the Commission been satisfied with the vague phrase “most probably”?

It is easy to see why the police prefer vagueness in this matter. If the description was based on Brennan’s statement, then we immediately ask another question. For Brennan (according to the report) did not only give a general description of the man who fired the shot: he also gave a particular description of the window from which he fired. Why, then, we naturally ask, did the police broadcast the vague description of the man but make no immediate attempt to search the precisely identified room? That room was not searched until much later, in the course of a general search of the whole building. On the other hand, if the police description was not based on Brennan’s statement, it follows that the police used other evidence which they have not revealed to the Commission. Either of these consequences raises further questions of great importance. By calmly accepting the comfortable phrase “most probably,” the Commission saved itself the trouble of asking these further questions.

When we turn from the prelude to the aftermath of Oswald’s arrest, the same pattern repeats itself. After his arrest, Oswald, we are told was warned by Captain Fritz, chief of the homicide bureau of the Dallas police, that he was not compelled to make any statement, but that any statement which he made could be used in evidence against him. After that, Oswald was interrogated, altogether for twelve hours, by the FBI and the police, mainly by Captain Fritz. And yet, we are told, Fritz “kept no notes and there were no stenographic or tape recordings.” This, I do not hesitate to say, cannot possibly be true. How could any statement made by Oswald be used against him if his statements were unrecorded?

Even in the most trivial cases such a record is automatically made – and this case was the assassination of the President of the United States. If no record was available to the Commission, there can only be one explanation. The record was destroyed by the FBI or the police, and the Commission, with culpable indifference, has not troubled to ask why. In the introduction to its report the Commission expresses special gratitude to the Dallas police for its readiness to answer all questions. The reader can only marvel at the Commission’s readiness to accept every answer – provided it came from that source.

If the police withheld or suppressed its evidence, at least there was one other source on which the Commission might have drawn: the medical evidence of the President’s wounds. Unfortunately, here too we quickly discover the same pattern of suppression. On medical evidence alone, the doctor who examined the President concluded that he had been shot from the front, and all police investigations were at first based on that assumption. This meant that the President – if indeed he was shot from the book depository – must have been shot either as his car approached the building or, if the building had been passed, at a moment when he had turned his head toward it. When both these conditions were ruled out by photographs, the police concluded that the shots must have come from behind, and the doctor was persuaded to adjust his report to the external police evidence.

When the Commission “critically reassessed” the evidence, it naturally had a duty to re-examine the medical evidence undistorted by police theories. Unfortunately it could no longer do so: the purely medical evidence was no longer available. The chief pathologist concerned, Dr. Humes, signed an affidavit that he had burned all his original notes and had kept no copies. Only the official autopsy, compiled (as is clearly stated) with the aid of police evidence, survives – and the Commission, once again, has accepted this evidence without asking why, or on whose authority, the original notes were destroyed. Police evidence withheld, police evidence destroyed, medical evidence destroyed, and no questions asked. This is an odd record in so important a case, but it is not the end.

According to the report, a specially constructed paper bag was afterwards found in the room from which Oswald is alleged to have fired the shots, and the Commission concludes that it was in this bag that Oswald introduced the fatal weapon into the building. Since this conclusion is in fact contrary to the only evidence printed by the Commission , it seems strange that the police should have to admit that the bag, too, has since been destroyed. It was, we are told, “discoloured during various laboratory examinations” and so “a replica bag” was manufactured under police orders “for valid identification by witnesses.” In other words, the police destroyed the real evidence and substituted their own fabrication. The replica may well have been a true replica, but we have to rely on mere assertion by the police. Finally, to complete this record of suppression and destruction, there is the destruction of the most important living witness.

Oswald was murdered, while under police protection, by Jack Ruby, an intimate associate of the Dallas police. Ruby’s close association with the Dallas police is admitted in the Warren Report, and it is undeniable that entered the basement, where he murdered Oswald, by either the negligence or the connivance or the police. But how did he enter? Once again, the details are of the greatest importance – but the police are unable or unwilling to say, and the Commission is unwilling to press them. All that we are told is that, after his arrest, Ruby refused to discuss his means of entry: he was interrogated in vain. But, then, suddenly, three policemen came forward and said that, within half an hour of his arrest, Ruby had admitted to them that he had entered by the main street ramp just before shooting Oswald – after which Ruby himself adopted this explanation of his entry. These three policemen, we are told, did not report this important piece of evidence to their superiors, who had vainly been interrogating Ruby on precisely this point, “until some days later.” Why, or in what circumstances, Ruby made this interesting admission, and why the three policemen did not pass it on for several days, are clearly important questions. But the Commission evidently did not ask them. It was content to repeat what it was told by the police, with the saving adverb “probably.”

Much more could be said about the Warren Report: about its selective standards of confidence, its uncritical acceptance (or rejection) of evidence, its reluctance to ask essential questions. It would be easy to lose one’s way in the mass of detail. I have concentrated on one question. I have stated that, although the composition and procedure of the Commission was highly unsatisfactory, its report could still be credible provided the Commission showed itself capable of independent judgment. All the instances I have given show clearly that it had no such independent judgment. Committed by its own choice to receive most of its evidence from police or FBI sources, it never subjected this evidence to proper legal or intellectual tests. Never looked beyond that evidence, never pressed for clear meaning or clear answers. The claim of the members of the Commission that they “critically reassessed” the police evidence is mere rhetoric. Their vast and slovenly report has no more authority than the tendentious and defective police reports out of which it is compiled. And of the value of those reports no more need be said than that even the Warren Report can only acquit the Dallas police or worse charges by admitting its culpable inefficiency.

Where then does the Warren Report leave the problem of President Kennedy’s assassination? My own belief is that the problem remains a mystery. Nothing in the Warren Report can be taken on trust. There is no evidence that Oswald took the gun into the book depository, nor that he fired it. He may have done so, but it is still to be proved. The evidence laboriously presented by the FBI and the Dallas police against Oswald is no stronger than the evidence incidentally admitted against themselves by their suppression and destruction of vital testimony. The best that can be said of the Warren Commission is that it has given publicity to the prosecutor’s case. The case for the defense has not been heard – and until it is heard, no valid judgment can be given.

More significant is the question, why has the report been so uncritically hailed by the press of America and even of Britain? I find this a disturbing fact: it suggests a failure of the critical spirit in journalism. In part this is explicable by mere technical necessity. A work like the Warren Report appears to be well documented. It is issued under respectable public names. It is too long to read – and its authors, recognizing this fact, obligingly serve up to busy journalists a “summary and conclusions” in which the chain of reasoning is concealed. The journalist who has to express a hasty but emphatic judgment glances at the document, weighs it, reads the summary and then plumps for a safe opinion. That may not necessarily be an endorsement of the document – but it will be a safe orthodoxy.

There is an orthodoxy of opposition, even of “liberalism,” which is no less smug and unthinking than the orthodoxy of assent. Sometimes the two orthodoxies coincide. It seems that that in respect of the Warren Report they do coincide. The Warren Report has satisfied the Left: it gives no countenance to the theory of a Communist plot. Equally, it has satisfied the Right because it exonerates the Right: it reveals no Fascist plot either. Moreover it pleases both great parties in America: on the eve of an election either of them might have been split by uncontrolled accusations. Fortunately, the report does not touch either party, even at its extreme edges. Nor does it touch the sensitive soul of the American people. Unfortunately, it may not touch the real facts either.

That acceptance of the Warren Report is emotional, not rational, is shown in many ways. Several of its most vocal supporters have had to admit, in controversy, that they have not read the text. Even those who have avoided this admission often show a surprising unfamiliarity with its contents. And anyway, documented or undocumented, the attacks of the orthodox on the heretics have been of a virulence incompatible with reasonable belief. When Lord Russell argued his dissent, he was attacked by Time magazine, and, in England by the Guardian, as a senile dotard whose beliefs could be dismissed unexamined. His supporters were declared to be psychological cases. The New York Herald Tribune, having published an attack on him, refused in advance to publish any reply.

Mr. Mark Lane, the American lawyer whom the Warren Commission refused to admit as counsel for Oswald, appointing instead an “observer” who was content merely to observe, has made a series of formidable criticisms of the report. They are documented, reasoned and, in my opinion, generally conclusive. For his pains he has been subjected to an incredible campaign of vituperation in the American and even the British press. To the press, it seems, the report is a sacred text, not to be questioned by the profane. And yet, behind the press, there still stands the public: a public which, I believe, is to becoming increasingly sceptical both of the press and of the report.

The American public does not much discuss the report. The same psychological causes which excite the press to shrillness and silence are protections for uncertainty. When I offer to discuss the report with Americans, many of them evade the offer. Some say frankly that they have not read the report but are determined to believe its conclusions: they are so reassuring. But many are sceptical. In fact, a recent poll showed that a majority of Americans were sceptical. No doubt the majority had not read the report either – but in such an atmosphere there is hope that the matter is not yet closed. Orthodoxy is not yet final; heresy may still be heard.

John Sparrow was the very right-wing - in the preferred euphemism of the English establishment, "High Tory" - Warden of All Souls, the Oxford home of MI6, and sundry learned pale youths, some whom were assuredly knighted for services to men like John Sparrow. Who was not above trousering a CIA subvention or three.

The Sunday Times, 3 January 1965, p.9

How was the President shot? Did Oswald have accomplices?

On December 13 Professor Trevor-Roper wrote for The Sunday Times his highly critical historian’s analysis of the Warren Report on President Kennedy’s assassination. He found “discrepancies” between the report and the 26 volumes of evidence published with it. He asked why witnesses had not been pressed in cross-examination, why the police had destroyed the paper bag in which the assassin presumably carried the gun, why the doctor who examined the President did not keep his notes and subsequently “adjusted” his report. He suggested that the Commission had put up a “smokescreen.” The following week, after others had accused Trevor-Roper of bias and misjudgment, John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, made on this page a searching assessment of his fellow Oxonian’s criticisms, accused him of, among other things, misrepresentation in regard to the doctor’s change of mind as to whether the lethal bullet entered from the front or rear, of presenting the evidence of identification by Brennan unfairly by omitting a further reference to it in the report, and of “innuendo” in regard to the paper bag, which he claimed was not in fact destroyed but handed to the Commission.

By Hugh Trevor-Roper

Mr. Sparrow contests my criticism of the Warren Report on two main grounds. He accuses me generally of seeking to undermine the Report by innuendo without offering any positive theory of my own, and he challenges my particular evidence. I certainly did not wish to gain any ends by innuendo, and if I did not advance a rival theory, it was because I have nothing so positive to advance. Lack of confidence in one set of conclusions does not require positive support for another. But before coming to the detail, perhaps it is best to recapitulate, very briefly, what I said and what I did not say.

I did not propose, or mean to suggest, a vast conspiracy. I explicitly stated that I distrust conspiratorial solutions. I did not state that the conclusions of the Warren Report were necessarily wrong: I explicitly stated that, though unproved, they could be right. I did not doubt the bona fides of the Commission. What I said was that its composition was “highly unsatisfactory.” By this I did not, of course, mean to ascribe “antecedent bias”: I meant that its members were nearly all busy politicians. One of them was so busy that he attended only two out of its forty-four sessions.

I also said that its methods were ill-calculated to guarantee the truth; that it had relied mainly on what would have been, in any trial of Oswald, “prosecution witnesses” – i.e., witnesses found by the police; and that it had shown insufficient independence of the prosecuting agencies – i.e., it had accepted with too little question their material and their interpretation. Its conclusions are, therefore, basically a prosecutor’s case. Such a case is often found to be true; but its truth would be more readily accepted if witnesses had been cross-examined, if defence witnesses had been summoned, or even if the Commission itself had pressed more heavily on the weaker joints of the evidence offered to it.

The Commission itself is obviously sensitive to this charge. It protests that although no defence counsel was allowed, adequate provision was made to ensure fairness to the “defendant.” The President of the American Bar Association, Mr. Walter Craig, was invited to participate for that purpose, and he did so, we are assured, “fully and without limitation,” being allowed to cross-examine and recall witnesses and make proposals. Mr. David Nizer, who introduces the published Report with such a flourish of trumpets, is enraptured by the “exquisite blend” of thorough probing with protection of individual rights “in accordance with the great traditions of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.”

Who would guess, from these statements, the real facts? For according to the official record, Mr. Craig only attended three of the forty-four sessions of the Commission, and none of the separate hearings and only opened his mouth – not on behalf of Oswald - at one of these three. It is precisely such discrepancies between the published Report and the testimony behind it which shake my confidence in its conclusions and make me wish that its procedures had been different.

Now to take Mr. Sparrow’s particular points. I said that there was “no evidence that Oswald took the gun into the Book Depository, nor that he fired it.” Mr. Sparrow contests this. But what in fact is the evidence? Only two witnesses saw Oswald enter the building. Both of them testified that he carried a parcel, but both equally testified that the parcel was such that it simply could not have contained the gun, even dismantled. The Commission accepts their evidence that he carried the parcel, but rejects their detailed and insistent description of the parcel. As Mr. Sparrow puts it, both witnesses “misestimated its length.” This begs the question. Anyway, they did not merely estimate: they described, circumstantially, explicitly, exclusively. This is what I mean by the Commission’s “choice of evidence.”

Nobody identified Oswald as having fired the gun. Admittedly one man, Howard Brennan, described the marksman in terms sufficiently precise to be, in the Commission’s words, “most probably” the basis of the search for Oswald. But it is interesting that whereas, in other connections, several persons identified Oswald (whom they had generally seen on television) in police line-ups (which he complained were unfairly arranged, and which were admitted by the police to be “unusual” in form), the one man who could not identify him was this same Mr. Brennan whose description had been so precise. (The report, on page 250, says that he did identify him, but this, as Brennan’s testimony shows, is inaccurate.) As I wrote, Oswald may have introduced and fired the gun. But there is no positive evidence that he did either and my words are strictly true.

Mr. Sparrow next takes me up on the Commission’s phrase “most probably”: words which, in the circumstances, seemed to me unpardonably vague and caused me to describe the Report as “slovenly.” He points out that, elsewhere, the Report uses the word “primarily.” This little fact had not escaped me. But I had also noticed that this word (which is anyway hardly less vague than “most probably”) occurs only in the Summary, not in the Report itself. It is merely a summariser’s faulty rendering and does nothing to correct the vagueness of the Report.

Now we come to the medical evidence. I think this is really fairly clear. It is not merely a question (as Mr. Sparrow would have it) of a “rumour” arising out of a Press Conference. This is the impression given by the Report, but for clarity we should go behind the Report to the testimony (vols. III and VI). There we see that the doctors at the Parkland Hospital were generally agreed. They regarded the wound in the President’s throat as an entrance wound, and they only allowed that it might equally have been an exit wound on the strength of outside evidence. As Dr. Perry put it, “With the facts which you have made available and with these assumptions, I believe that it was an exit wound.”

Even so, they only accepted this interpretation on condition that the bullet was “of low velocity,” so low “that you might think that this bullet barely made it through the soft tissue, and just enough to drop out of the skin on the opposite side.” And yet the Commission, having accepted the conclusion, did not accept this necessary condition of it. It could not do so, because its further theory required it to believe that this same bullet, so far from just dropping out of the front of the President’s neck, went on to pass right through the body of Governor Connally: a belief, incidentally, quite incompatible with the testimony of Governor Connally himself, who insists that, after hearing the first shot, which hit the President, he had time to turn around, first to the right, then to the left, before being hit himself. It is thus true to say that there is a discrepancy between the original medical evidence and the police theory.

By the time Dr. Humes conducted his autopsy, the throat wound had been distorted by the tracheotomy at Parkland. He was thus unable to see its original form. He also had the advantage of the police evidence. That his autopsy was “distorted” by this evidence is shown by the document itself (Exhibit 397). It is not a purely medical document. It begins with a narrative of the assassination from the Book Depository, as reported by the police and then describes the wounds in relation to it.

On one point I must eat humble-pie. In respect of the paper bag I regret that I made an error. I neglected the cardinal rule, “Always check your references,” and must pay the price. I withdraw the statement completely, and yield to Mr. Sparrow the discoloured remnants of that paper bag on which I have publicly slipped up.

Finally there is the, to me, astonishing fact that, after warning him formally that his statements might be used in evidence against him, the police claimed to have no record of Oswald’s statements in the course of a twelve-hour interrogation. I thought this so eccentric that I did not hesitate to suppose that the record must have been destroyed. Mr. Sparrow prefers to accept the police explanation, that the failure to make a record was exceptional: that in the confusion of the time “all principles of good interrogation” were forgotten.

But the police, who made this excuse, did not stick to it. On another occasion they told the Commission that they never took notes, so that their neglect of “all principles of good interrogation” was not exceptional when the President of the United States was murdered, but regular, in all the 500 shootings whose victims are brought yearly to the Parkland Hospital. So we can take our choice. We have a free choice, because here, as elsewhere when interrogating the police, the Commission did not press the point. Defending counsel, I think, would have done so.

This indeed is my principal complaint against the Commission. In the chain of reasoning constructed by the police several essential links are very weak. There is the mystery of the original message which motivated Tippit – and indeed the whole Tippit episode. There is the mystery of Oswald’s marksmanship: three rapid and deadly shots from a bolt-action rifle through an upper window. Qualified witnesses have deposed that the feat was impossible. “If I couldn’t do it myself,” declared a former naval ordnanceman, “eight hours a day, doing this for a living, constantly on the range, I know this civilian couldn’t do it.” There is the mystery of the rifle itself. Why did the experience police officer who found it - a graduate in engineering who admitted that he was familiar with rifles, having been “in the sporting goods business” – report, not casually, but in writing, both to his superiors and to the FBI that it was a Mauser 7.65 when a different make and calibre were clearly inscribed on it?

All these problems may be soluble. But the Commission never pressed these weak links. It was content with general, even evasive, answers which slid over their weakness.

Above all, there is the problem of a motive. Why should a Marxist, who expressed admiration for Kennedy, have laid so deep a plot to kill him? Unable to find a rational explanation, the Commission has accepted a psychological explanation. But it has only created a psychological mystery. If Oswald were an idealist or an exhibitionist, we would have expected him, on arrest, to have boasted of his act of justice, claimed his full publicity. In fact, he obstinately denied the fact. Such denial might be natural in a hired assassin, who reckoned on protection. It is difficult to understand in a “loner.”

If there are weaknesses within the testimony used, there are also problems about testimony that was unused or unpursued. Some known witnesses were not heard by the Commission, or at least, if heard, were heard in spite of, not through, the police. Such was Warren Reynolds, a witness of the Tippit affair, who was mysteriously shot in the head two days after being interviewed by the police. He survived and gave evidence, but it was General Walker, not the police, who got him to do so: the police sought to discount his evidence in advance.

Two other possible witnesses, one known to Oswald, the other to Ruby, died violently before being able to testify. Some evidence given to the police, on the day of the assassination, was not pursued because “it did not fit with what we knew to be true.” Of course much of the evidence which was not brought before the Commission is, by definition, hearsay. For that reason I have been careful to cite none of it. But it need not have been ignored. The pursuit of hearsay sometimes leads to the discovery of evidence. And even the evidence that did come before the Commission was not fully digested by it. How could it be? We only have to look at the dates. The Commission began its work in February. On September 15 it was still taking evidence. And yet the final Report was handed to the President on September 24 and was on the bookstalls, printed and bound, two days later. Clearly its main conclusions had been reached, and its separate chapters composed, before the last witnesses had been heard.

Nevertheless, from that mass of fascinating detail, and perhaps from other evidence, conclusions will one day be drawn. Whether those conclusions will be the same as those of the Commission is, in my opinion, an open question. Mr. Sparrow would have me believe, as the only logical alternative to swallowing the Report whole, in a vast conspiracy involving police, FBI and all their witnesses. I do not accept such an alternative, or such logic.

It seems to me that, whatever may have been established, certain specific questions have been left unanswered. Not knowing how far we can trust the police evidence, we do no know how fully we have been informed. The solid pieces of evidence, which may have been arranged in one pattern, may easily, if that is defective, have to be rearranged in another. Meanwhile, precise conclusions are necessarily uncertain. We do not know precisely how the President was shot. We do not know whether Oswald had accomplices. We do not know the real motives, or connections, of Ruby. And these, after all, are the essential questions.

[Paul Rigby]

This is the first part of the publication; the second was devoted to the question and answer session which followed the lecture. I've split the pamphlet into two at this natural division to make posting more manageable.

Lane's pre-Rush To Judgment work is rarely read with the attentiveness it merits. Sprinkled throughout are leads which offer the potential to liberate understanding - not least from the drear orthodoxy of Lane's own grassy knoll advocacy.

The British ‘who killed Kennedy?’ Committee, December 1964 (Pamphlet, 32pp)

The Warren Commission Report and the Assassination [part 1 of 2]

By Mark Lane

[QUOTE]This is a transcript taken from a tape recording made of Mark Lane’s extemporaneous lecture. To the best of our knowledge, there are no errors in this transcript from the tape recording of Mr. Lane’s lecture, but as Mr. Lane did not proof-read this transcript, we wish to guard against any possibility of error being imputed to him by making clear that any error which may be found in this transcript must be ascribed to the process of transferring his remarks from tape to paper.

We emphasize that we have no reason to think such error exists, but the procedure wherein remarks are transferred from one medium to another is subject to error, and it is important that it should not be possible for anyone to impugn Mr. Lane’s scrupulous and meticulous accuracy because of this remote possibility of secretarial failure.

Text of Mark Lane’s Extemporaneous Lecture at University College, London, 10 December, 1964

This is the Warren Commission Report. The New York Times has described it as the most massive detective job in the history of the world. They said that some 25,000 separate interviews and re-interviews were conducted by agencies of the FBI alone when this document was being prepared, and concluded that it was unmatched in the annals of fact finding. President Johnson, in accepting this document before a nation-wide television audience in America, made precisely the same point, although in a somewhat less sophisticated fashion. “This document,” he said, “is very heavy”, as indeed it is, and perhaps history will conclude that that comment made by the President is the finest short analysis of the Report. For heavy though it is, it has been compiled by refusing to permit to testify before the Commission the vast majority of important witnesses to such events as the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Patrolman J.D. Tippit. And for good reason. For those who were not permitted to testify all had given stories, quite publicly, at complete variance with the conclusions reached by the Commission.

This is a rough approximation of the Dallas scene on November 22, with the Book Depository Building, and the President’s limousine, showing the route up Main Street and Houston Street taken by the car, which then made a sharp left turn down Elm Street. The vast majority of the witnesses to the assassination stated the shots did not come from the Book Depository Building, but the Commission said they did, and Oswald was up there on the sixth floor firing his rifle at the President. In fact, the vast majority of the witnesses said the shots came from high up on the grassy knoll, behind a wooden fence, where there were some bushes and some trees. Standing here (just below the grassy knoll) was a man named Abraham Zapruder, who is an amateur photographer, brandishing his amateur motion picture camera. He took the pictures which have been published in magazines throughout the world. Stills taken from the motion picture show the limousine here (part of the way down Elm Street) and show the President being struck by the bullet. Mr Zapruder was called before the Commission because it was essential to the Commission’s work that they have the film which he took, and while he was there he blurted out before the Commission that it was dangerous taking those pictures because “they were shooting right over my head, because the shots came from behind that fence and I was right in front of it. They were shooting right over my head when I took the pictures.” They had to have Mr. Zapruder, but the Commission did not call in order that he might testify as to the direction of the origin of the shots. He, nevertheless, gave them that information. Standing right with him were four employees of the Dallas Morning News, the local publication in Dallas, and they wrote an article which was published the very next day in the Dallas Morning News in terms of the shots which they heard. Those standing in this area – witnesses all over this area, including some who were standing right in front of the Book Depository Building – said the sounds of the rifle shot were as if it were a fire cracker, in fact many of those standing here thought they heard fire crackers, as they told reporters immediately after the shots were fired. Not so these four employees of the Dallas Morning News in front of the fence. They wrote an article which appeared the next day in the Morning News, which said: “We heard the shots. It was a horrible, ear-splitting roar coming from behind us and a little to our right: right behind the bushes, right behind the fence.” Now those four reporters are well-known. Their names were published all over America in the newspapers. But the Warren Commission never called them, never permitted them to testify, never took a statement from them, and they were – with Mr. Zapruder – four of the five persons closest to the origin of the shots.

Standing right over here (by the Presidential limousine at time of impact) was Mrs. Mary Moorman. The New York Times referred to her on the 23rd in the article written by the only New York Times reporter in Dallas that day, Tom Wicker, as one of the key witnesses to the assassination. She was standing so close to the limousine that when the first bullet was fired – the one that struck the President in his throat – Mrs. Moorman heard Jacqueline Kennedy address a remark to her wounded husband. She was that close to the limousine. She was quoted in every single newspaper in America. She was on radio and television all day long on November 22nd as a crucial witness, and on the very day the Warren Commission Report was released, some ten months after the assassination, a national network, C.B.S., presented a programme, a documentary programme, on the twenty-six key witnesses to the assassination, and there was Mrs. Moorman talking to the American people about what she heard. But the Warren Commission never found her, she never testified before the Warren Commission.

The most revealing aspect of the Warren Commission Report begins on page 483 of this document. It is the list of witnesses. Appendix V is a list of 552 witnesses, and that includes not only those who testified before the Commission, but those who gave statements to the Commission, or affidavits to the Commission, or from whom depositions were taken, and that is the entire source of information. The New York Times says 25,000 people were interviewed by the FBI. That may be, but the Commission was only told about 552 and only secured statements or testimony from the 552. The Commission called others before it who did testify in terms of the origin of the shots. It was essential for them to call the witnesses, for they were involved in other aspects of the case.

One of the major questions of the day was in reference to the weapon found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building by a police officer. It was first referred to as a German Mauser, 7.65 mm. It was so referred to by the officer who found it at 1.22pm on November 22nd. He said it was a German Mauser, 7.65mm., and he went on to describe the telescopic sights, colour of the sling and the material of which the sling is made. Now one of the distinguished members of the Warren Commission, Congressman Ford, one of the seven members of the Commission, wrote an article which he sold to Life magazine. He talked about the inner workings of the Warren Commission. This was published in Life magazine on October 2nd. He said one of the major problems of the Commission was in reference to this rumour about the rifle. They did, indeed, have a problem with reference to that, because after the story was given out all over Dallas that it was a German Mauser, 7.65 mm, the following day the FBI announced in its first public statement in reference to the case: “Our records show that Oswald purchased a rifle back in March of 1963 and the weapon he purchased, according to our records, was an Italian carbine, calibre 6.5.” Immediately, the Dallas District Attorney, Henry Wade, jumped in front of the first live camera he could find to proclaim that a miracle had taken place in that holy city of Dallas overnight. The weapon which they had in their hands overnight had been transformed. It had changed both its nationality and its size, and it had become by the afternoon of November 23 no longer German, now Italian, no longer a Mauser, now a carbine, and no longer 7.65 mm., but now calibre 6.5. It matched in every single respect the weapon that Oswald allegedly purchased, according to the FBI, back in March, and matched exactly the description of the weapon which the FBI, moments before, for the first time, had made reference to.

Congressman Ford, in seeking to explain it to the American people (many more of whom will read or have read Life magazine, since it goes to 12 million homes in America, than will read the Warren Commission Report) said that this story got out because a reporter, who was facing an immediate deadline for his newspaper, saw an officer standing nearby and said to the officer: “What kind of rifle do you think that might possibly be?”, and the officer said: “It might be a Mauser”, and thus, in that fashion, an incorrect story was broadcast throughout the world, according to this distinguished member of the Warren Commission. That statement is an absolute falsehood, and Congressman Ford knows it is an absolute falsehood. That is, he knows it if he has read the Warren Commission Report, which he signed. For the officer who said it was a German Mauser did not say this to a reporter facing an immediate deadline. He, in fact, signed an affidavit for the Dallas Police Department 24 hours thereafter on November 23. The Commission knows that, because we submitted a photostatic copy of that original affidavit to the Commission when we testified before them, and they said it was an authentic document, and they deal with that. So it is untrue that it was not described in that fashion. The Commission had to make an explanation, and the Commission does. The Commission implies that Officer Weitzman, who signed the affidavit, is some kind of a ‘boob,’ and does not know about rifles and signed an affidavit without even examining the weapon, and would not even know, if he examined the weapon, what it was.

When I testified before the Commission, I asked if I might see the alleged assassination weapon, and they showed it to me, and I read into the record, and it is now part of the Warren Commission document, that inscription, which was printed in large clear letters, deeply etched into the metal portion of the rifle, and consisted of these words: “Made in Italy. Calibre 6.5.” How could anyone pick up that weapon and say it was a German Mauser, 7.65mm.? Officer Weitzman is an idiot, obviously, implies the Commission’s Report. Let us read now from the 26 volumes of testimony before the Commission. In Volume III, page 105, Seymour Weitzman describes his background. He is a rather unusual Dallas police officer. He is a graduate engineer. He owned a sporting goods shop for years and he sold rifles at that sporting goods shop and considers himself to be familiar with weapons. While he was there, he also testified (page 108 and 109 of Volume III) that he was standing at the corner of Elm and Houston. He heard the shots fired and he ran to the place from which the shots came. He ran to the origin of the sound. He climbed over the wooden fence, he said, behind the bushes, and: “There I saw a railroad yardman, standing near the overpass, a little bit to the north of the fence,” he said. “I said to the railroad yardman: ‘Where did the noise come from?’ The railroad yardman pointed to the shrubbery at the fence and said: ‘It came from there.’” The Weitzman said: “I asked the yardman: ‘Did you see anything as the shots were fired at the President, I thought I saw someone throw something into those bushes’.” Well now, we may be talking about the most important witness in the entire assassination investigation – that railroad yardman – and obviously the Commission is going to want to find out from Officer Weitzman the name of that railroad yardman, and if he does not have the name, his description and who he worked for, so they can bring him down as a key witness. After Weitzman testified that he pointed to the shrubbery and said: “I thought I saw somebody throw something there,” the Attorney for the Commission, Mr. Ball, said: “I think that is all. That is enough testimony.” That was the end of Officer Weitzman’s testimony, and you can look through the 26 volumes of evidence and exhibits and you will see that the Commission never called the railroad yardman, nor did they make any effort to procure his name or to procure his presence before the Commission.

One of the major questions unanswered by the Commission is why Oswald was wanted in the first place. We know that Oswald was arrested on November 22, early in the afternoon, and shortly after his arrest the Dallas police said: “We wanted Oswald only for one matter: in connection with the murder of Officer Tippit. He killed Patrolman Tippit a little while ago, we believe.” The FBI said the same thing. The Dallas police said the same thing through their Homicide Chief and through the Dallas Chief of Police, Jesse Curry. Oswald was wanted, they said, solely in connection with the murder of Officer Tippit, not for anything else. They said that when he was arrested, they said it subsequent to his arrest and they said it for three days thereafter: he was wanted solely for the murder of Patrolman Tippit. In fact, after Oswald was arrested, late in the evening of November 22, he was paraded before the television cameras, broadcast throughout all America, on every radio and television channel. A reporter walked up to him and said: “Did you kill the President?” and he replied: “The President? They haven’t even asked me about that. They said I killed a police officer.” The reporter said: “Did you kill the police officer?”, and he said: “It’s just ridiculous, I didn’t kill anyone. I don’t know what they are talking about.” The reporter said: “When did you first hear about the President?” He said: “A reporter just yelled it out to me in the hallway as I was coming in here. The police never even asked me about killing the President.” It was late in the evening of November 22 when the reporter said: “How did you get that bleeding gash across your forehead?”, and Oswald replied: “A police officer struck me,” at which point two Dallas police officers dragged Oswald away from the camera. That was the end of the interview. But what Oswald said totally confirmed that which the Dallas authorities, the FBI and the Secret Service had been saying all along: he was not wanted for the assassination; he was wanted solely in connection with the murder of Patrolman Tippit, and there is something strange about that because the Commission concedes, quite accurately, that Oswald’s description was despatched at 12.45 p.m. on November 22. They so concede on page 144 of the Report, and they concede, quite accurately, that Officer Tippit was shot at 1.15 or 1.16p.m. So Oswald was wanted ostensibly for the murder of Officer Tippit at 12.45p.m., some 30 to 31 minutes before Officer Tippit was shot. That raises a rather curious question and the Commission is anxious to fob us off. Now one does not have to conduct the greatest examination in the history of the world – the most massive detective hunt in the history of the world – in order to find out why the Dallas Police sent out this description at 12.45p.m. as the Commission states they did. They wanted a man who was white, slender, weighing 165 lbs and 5’10” tall. Why did they send that out at 12.45p.m.? It was sent out over the Dallas police radio, the Commission states, and the Commission states, however, that it is unable to determine the basis on which that description was despatched – now why should it be unable to do that? All they have to do is call the Dallas Police Officers who sent out the description and say “Why did you sent out that?” and then they would know the basis. The Commission merely states on page 144 of the Report that it is unable to determine the basis on which the description was despatched.

Well, the Commission, however, is willing to hazard a guess as to why the description was sent out. The Commission does this throughout the report – it deals with speculation from beginning to end – apparently this happened, likely this happened, possibly this happened, probably this happened and the highest order of speculation awarded by the Commission to an important area: “most probably”. This is a “most probably” area. This description – 5’10” tall, 165 lbs, white and slender “most probably” was sent out because a witness named Brennan “most probably” gave that description to a Dallas Police Officer. And now we have Mr. Brennan who makes a rather tardy appearance on the scene.

It is now 10 months after the assassination and the Commission has come up with an eyewitness. He is over here (on a wall before the Depository Building) – that’s Mr. Brennan – he is leaning on the concrete wall, near which there is a pool of water and he is looking in this direction. The shots were fired and Mr. Brennan was 107’ from the place of the Book Depository Building – 107’. And he glanced up, says the Commission, he glanced up after the second shot was fired and saw a man, says Brennan before the Commission: “I saw a man standing in the window with a rifle in his hand.” That was that German-Italian carbine-mauser 6.5/7.65 that he saw there. “And I saw him aim and fire the third shot as he stood in the window and then he walked away from the window.”

We have another problem now for the Commission – the windows in the Book Depository are 18’ off the floor, that is where they begin. The window was half-closed and if Oswald was indeed firing out of this window, then he was firing through the panes of glass, but none of the glass panes were broken. Of all the miracles that took place in Dallas that day, that was the most remarkable. The Commission solved that by stating that “most probably” Oswald was not standing, he was sitting on the floor, or kneeling, and Brennan was wrong when he said he was standing. Page 144 of the Report: “Although Brennan testified that the man in the window was standing when he fired the shot, most probably he was either sitting or kneeling.” Now we have it. Oswald was seated on the floor, poking his rifle out of the window as he sits on the floor, firing down the third shot and Brennan was 107’ away from the base of the building – six storeys beneath the building – he looks up and he sees Oswald seated on the floor. He thinks he is standing and he gives this description to the Dallas Police “most probably”(!): “white, slender, weighing 165 lbs and 5’10” tall.” Well the Commission is concerned about that and they handle it in one pithy sentence, page 145: “Brennan could have seen enough of the body of a kneeling or squatting person to estimate his height.” That’s it! They said it, so it is so.

Now Brennan is brought down to Dallas Police Station to view Oswald in a Police Line-up. We know how these line-ups are conducted – we are indebted to a Dallas taxi driver named William Whaley – he testified before the Commission about his appearance before the line-up. He sums up how such line-ups are conducted. He said to the Commission – that is his testimony – He said “When I was brought to that line-up, I picked out Oswald like that. I could have picked out Oswald with my eyes closed.” The Commission Attorney said: “You don’t mean literally with your eyes closed?” “Yes,” he said, “I mean with my eyes closed.” He said “There he was on one side of the stage wearing a ‘tee’ shirt, handcuffed with both hands together, on the other side,” he said, “there were five young teenagers, young teenagers, 14, 15, 16 years old, handcuffed together.” And he said: “There was Oswald, he was saying out loud, we all heard it, he said, ‘You call this a fair line-up, this is not a fair line-up.’” He said: “I could have picked him out with my eyes closed. He was the only one that was complaining about the line-up.” Well, they brought Mr. Brennan down to one of these line-ups. Incidentally, with that testimony before the Commission, the Commission concludes that the Dallas police line-ups were conducted with scrupulous fairness – that was what they concluded after hearing Mr. Whaley’s testimony. Well, they brought Mr. Brennan down to the Dallas Police line-up and there were four people then – most of the day there were just four and Oswald occupied position number two almost all of the day. “And Brennan,” the Commission sadly states on page 145, “was unable to make an identification of Oswald as the man he saw in the window.” But then Mr. Brennan was talked to by agents of the FBI and the Dallas Police for a period of three weeks and after Oswald’s death, on December 17th, three weeks after his death, the FBI said that Brennan told us he was then able to say that the person in the window definitely was Oswald. However, on January 7th, the Commission states, Mr. Brennan went back to the FBI to state: “I can no longer say it was Oswald in the window, I don’t know if it was Oswald or not.” That’s page 145. Then we turn to page 250. 105 pages later the Commission begins to sum up this section. “One witness, Howard L. Brennan, made a positive identification of Oswald being the person at the window.” That is the Commission’s conclusion in reference to Mr. Brennan.

Now, of course, Oswald was arrested in connection with the Tippit killing and the Commission asserts – in fact, there is a publication which is published here called Peace News, I think is its name, which discusses some of the aspects of the case as seen by the American Establishment. In this current issue, they take the position, which is taken widely by establishment publications in America as well, that there were 12 witnesses to the Tippit killing, and over and over and over we hear that there were 12 witnesses to the Tippit killing. Well, if one reads the Warren Commission’s Report carefully, while they do use that language rather loosely, when you come right down to it, there were only two who actually saw Tippit killed. There are some people who saw one or more persons in the vicinity some time thereafter, some of them as far away as two or three blocks, later, 10 or 15 minutes later. But there were two, the Commission says, who actually saw Tippit killed, just two.

One is the man called Domingo Benevedes and Mr. Benevedes said “I saw the man kill Tippit, but I do not have any idea what the man looked like. He might have been a midget. He might have been 8’ tall. I don’t know. All I can tell you is I was so upset I did not see anything. I could not identify anyone” and he did not even go the Dallas Police line-up and when he testified before the Commission he said: “I don’t know if it was Oswald or anyone else. I haven’t the faintest idea who did it.” Well, while there are two eye witnesses to the Tippit killing, one is a witness who cannot identify anyone and is valueless as a witness against Oswald or against anyone else.

Then we come down to the sole eye-witness who can make an identification and her name is Helen Louise Markham. Mrs. Markham heard the shots she said and then she saw Officer Tippit shot to death in the street and she ran over to him and stayed with him for 20 minutes while he was there dying and then dead on the street – for 20 minutes and there was not another soul around; and finally, 20 minutes later, an ambulance came and took him away. Now that story, strange, indubitably, even in Dallas where there are murders conducted on a rather regular basis, unfortunately, (Dallas leads America in murders every year), even in Dallas, women are not expected to be so sophisticated that they would allow a dead Police officer to remain on the street for 20 minutes, without anyone seeking to remove him. It did not happen that way at all, as the Commission states.

Tippit was shot at 1.16 and when he was shot, a couple by the name of Mary and Frank Wright, living on that very same street, heard the shots, ran to the window and called the nearest ambulance station. The despatchers received a ‘phone call and sent out an ambulance driven by Clayton Butler, and the assistant ambulance driver there, and they arrived on the scene and they picked up Tippit’s body and they took it to the hospital. Now, all one would have to do to establish this fact, would be to call Mary and Frank Wright, and ask them when they made the ‘phone call – the Commission never called them. They never called the despatchers to ask them when the call in. They could have called the ambulance driver Clayton Butler, or the assistant ambulance driver – if they had done any of those things they would have found a very consistent story and that is, the shots were fired at Officer Tippit at about 1.16 or 1.17 and before 1.19, the ambulance, which was not more than 200 yards away, arrived on the scene and removed Officer Tippit. But all those key witnesses were not called by the Commission, because if they had called them, the Commission would have had a record showing that Tippit was removed between 2 or 3 minutes after the shot, and here is their only witness to the murder of Officer Tippit who claimed she was with Tippit for 20 minutes in the street and so they never called the other key witnesses because they would contradict what the star witness said.

Well, they called her and she testified and then I made a ‘phone call to her, many, many months ago, in March. I called her because I had read in the Dallas newspaper that a star Dallas reporter by the name of Hugh Aynesworth was present when Mrs. Markham was being questioned by the Dallas Police. (They have a rather informal method of investigating crimes in Dallas.) The reporters were right there listening – and she said “Yes, I saw the man who killed Tippit. I saw him very clearly. He was short, he was stocky, he was on the heavy side and he had brown bushy hair, a lot of bushy hair.” So this story appeared in the Dallas newspapers, and as well we heard on radio and television that day that the man who killed Tippit was identified by the one eye-witness as a man who was short, stocky, a man who had a lot of bushy hair. Now since Oswald was medium height or a little taller, extremely thin, and he had hair which was receding, and thin hair, the description hardly seems to be consistent of Lee Harvey Oswald. So I called Mrs. Markham to discuss the matter with her and she finally agreed to talk with me, first saying that she was not permitted to talk with me. The FBI had warned her, the Dallas Police had warned her that she should never talk with anybody about the facts in this case. I said: “Well, Mrs. Markham, even way down there in Dallas you have probably heard this expression which we repeat rather broadly throughout the United States, and that it that this is a free country, and that means in essence, if you want to boil it down to one sentence, that the police, local or federal, cannot tell a citizen of our country what to say or what not to say. That’s really what it means.” And finally she agreed to speak with me and said: “What do you want to know?” and I said “What did you see?” And she said: “Well, I saw the man who killed Tippit you know.” And I said: “Yes, what did he look like?” She said: “He was short, absolutely, he was short, no question about that.” “How about his build?” “He was a little on the heavy side – yes, a little on the heavy side.” “How about his hair?” “His hair was somewhat bushy. No question about that,” she said, “his hair was somewhat bushy.” Well, I testified before the Commission two days afterwards and I told them about having a surprise for them regarding their star witness in the Tippit case. I said she had identified a man who did not seem to me to be Lee Harvey Oswald. She said he was shot, somewhat stocky and with somewhat bushy hair. Well, the FBI went out to see Mrs. Markham, to talk with her. “Did you tell Lane that? We ordered you not to talk with anyone.” She said: “No, I swear I never told him that.” “Why did you talk with him at all after we ordered you not to talk with him?” She said, “I never talked with him at all, he made it all up; I never talked with him.”

Mrs. Markham is not the best witness in general, for a number of reasons. First of all, after Officer Tippit’s body was removed Mrs. Markham passed out on the scene. She was taken to the Parkland hospital in a state of hysteria. She was treated for hysteria at the hospital and then taken by the Dallas Police to the police line-up to pick out Oswald and we are told that she picked out the magic number two man in the line-up, the place that Oswald had occupied almost all of the day. Of course on the way to the hospital and on the way from the hospital she was in the company of the Dallas authorities, the Dallas Police, who were talking to her all the time, and we are told by the Commission that she picked out Oswald as being the person who did the firing.

Well they called Mrs. Markham before the Commission and they asked her if she had ever talked with me and she said she had not. On 16 separate occasions (Volume III) she was asked if she had talked with me. Had she ever talked with any lawyers? Had she ever talked with anybody on the telephone and given that description to him, and on and on and on. The man who was most interested in that was Allen Dulles one of the Directors of the CIA, a member of the Warren Commission. Of course he was fired from that position in the CIA by John F. Kennedy. The seven distinguished members of the Warren Commission was made up of five Republicans, and two Southern Democrats. The whole seven-man Commission did not have a single Kennedy supporter on it.

They asked Mrs. Markham: “Did you ever talk with Lane? Did you ever talk to anyone after leaving us?” and then Mr. Ball, Counsel for the Commission, began to question her about having picked out No. 2 man in the line-up because he wanted to get this fact into the record. (Volume III, page 310.) “Now when you went into the Police line-up room and you looked these people over, these four men?” “Yes Sir.” “Did you recognise anyone in that line-up?” “No Sir.” “You did not. Did you see anybody - now I have asked you this question before – did you recognise anybody from their face?” “From their face, no.” “Did you identify anybody in these four people?” “I didn’t know nobody.” “I know you didn’t know anybody, but did anybody in that line-up look like anybody you had ever seen before?” “No, I have never seen none of them, none of these men.” “Not one of the four?” “Not one of them.” “No one of all four?” “No Sir.” And now the magic question: “Was there a number two man in there?” Her answer: “Number two was the one I picked.” Not leaving well enough alone, Mr. Ball decided he would plunge a little further and get the basis for the recognition. “How did you recognise him?” “Well, when I looked at this man, I was not sure. I was not sure, but then I had cold chills run all over me.” The Commission’s conclusion: “We conclude, addressing ourselves solely to the probative value of Mrs. Markham’s contemporaneous description of the gunman and her positive identification of Oswald at a Police line-up,” the Commission concludes that “her testimony is reliable.” I told the Commission thereafter about the telephone conversation with Mrs. Markham, as I had told them before and told them again after Mrs. Markham had been called back and denied that she ever spoke with me. I was in London in June and the Commission called me back to testify before them again – they said. In fact, the purpose of my return was not so that I could testify, but so I could be present at a public Press conference run by the Commission, so that the Chief Justice could say to me in the presence of the Press: “We believe Mrs. Markham, not you. We have every reason to doubt the truthfulness of your statement.” They believed this woman, who passed out on the scene, was hysterical, who contradicted herself a dozen times – they said: “We believe her and not you.” I said: “Very well, Mr. Chief Justice, then I shall make this one request that you take my testimony and you submit it to the United States Supreme Court with a prosecution for perjury, and take Mrs. Markham’s testimony as well, and I shall be happy to allow an American Jury to determine which one of us committed perjury.” Of course they declined that challenge, as they had declined every challenge which might elicit facts in this case. The Commission indicated that they thought I was being somewhat confident in making this request and I said: “Yes, you see I have a tape-recording if my telephone conversation with Mrs. Markham.” Well, I stunned them and this made them decide to have a conference to discuss what they were going to do about that. The tape recording of Mrs. Markham was produced and they heard it. She was their only witness and they were very unhappy about that thought.

I should tell you that in America, it is a crime to make a tape recording without procuring the permission of the other party and divulge it, that is to play it. It is not a crime to make a recording without permission and not a crime to divulge it without permission, but it is a crime to make it and to divulge it without permission. If the Commission wanted that recording, all they had to at that conference when they discussed that matter, was to conclude that they were going to direct me to make the recording available, and if they directed me to make the recording available, I would have given it to them, and the divulgence would have been theirs and not mine. They would have divulged it, I would have made it, they would have had the recording and no crime would have been committed. The Commission came back into the room after exploring the legal possibilities and said: “Mr. Lane, did you have permission from Mrs. Markham to make this recording?” And I said: “No, I did not.” They said “Mr. Lane, would you like to give us that recording voluntarily?” I said: “You know I can’t do that. That’s a crime. I would go to jail for 5 years.” The question was whether or not the Commission would direct me to give them the recording and there need be no crime and they would have the recording. The Commission decided to decline to direct me. They refused to direct me. Instead, they gave out a handout to the press saying that “Lane claims he has a recording. We do not believe he has a recording because he refuses to give it to us,” without explaining the legal questions involved. This story, of course, was published all over America, that I had refused to give them the recording and this was commented on by learned journals that were writing about the case, so I went back to my office that day, considered the personal problems involved and also the overriding considerations that went beyond the considerations of any one person, and I voluntarily mailed the tape recording to the Commission with a letter to the Chief Justice which said: “You said that I do not have a recording, that you believe that I have made up the whole story, that I committed perjury before you, and this has been published in every newspaper in America and many abroad as well. I now ask you, not for an apology, but to send a letter to me, saying that now you have the recording, you no longer have any reason to doubt the truthfulness of my testimony.” That was on July 7th and I have not yet received acknowledgement from the Chief Justice or any member of the Commission.

But they did call back Mrs. Markham. Mrs. Markham was called back and she was asked, (Volume VII page 499) if she had ever had this conversation with me and they only asked her 12 different times and each time she said no. And then the Counsel for the Commission said (page 500, Volume VII): “I must tell you frankly that we have a tape recording of a conversation which purports to be a conversation between you and Mark Lane on the telephone. I want to play it for you.” But then he explained that unfortunately he could not play it for her because he did not have a tape recorder. (I really did feel that I should take the responsibility for that. I just sent them the tape, I didn’t send a recorder.) However, the full power of the Government was harnessed and within four hours a tape recorder was located. Mrs. Markham was brought back and the recording was played for her. On page 501, she made her first comment. Mr. Liebeler said: “I see you are shaking your head. Do you want to say something?” This was her answer: “I never talked to that man.” “Is that not your voice on the tape?” “I cannot tell about my voice, but that man I never talked to, no woman or man like that.” So they said: “Alright, we will play the recording some more for you” and they played it some more. In the recording she was saying he was short, his hair was somewhat bushy, he was a little on the heavy side. Then there was a question on the recording – I asked if she could see what colour shirt he had on. And she said: “No, I could not. He had his jacket on and it was zipped up and I could not see his shirt.” In Volume 3, she had sworn before the Commission that Oswald was wearing a light coloured shirt, and then they showed her the shirt taken from Oswald and she said: “Yes, that’s the shirt he was wearing.” But months before that she told me she couldn’t see the shirt. The Commission saw no contradiction there at all. Then the recording goes on and then again he says “I see you are shaking your head; what do you mean by that?” And Mrs. Markham comments: “This man I have never talked with. This lady was never on the telephone.” Now ponder that for a moment. “This lady was never on the telephone.” If that is her voice she knows that she was involved in a telephone conversation.

If it was not her voice, how did she know whether or not this lady was on the telephone? “A man called me, he told me he was from the City Hall. Yes he said he was Captain Fritz of the Police Department.” (Actually, the tape begins: “Hello Mrs. Markham. My name is Mark Lane, I am conducting an independent investigation.”) “He said he was Captain Fritz of the Police Department.” “Well now, do you remember having a conversation with somebody?” “Yes, I do, but he told me he was from the Police Department at City Hall and had to get some information.” “But this man on the tape, he keeps on saying did the Police do this, did they do that, did they take an affidavit. He is talking about the Police. Does that sound to you like someone who says he is from the Police Department?” She said: “Well, I know what you mean.” “Do you recognise this as the voice of the man you talked with?” “No, it is not.” “It is not the same voice?” “No.” “How do you explain the fact that the woman’s voice on this tape recording is your voice?” “I never heard that.” “You never heard the man’s voice before?” “And I never heard the lady’s voice before. This is the first time. This lady never talked to me.” “Which lady was that?” “On the tape.” “Which lady on the tape?” “Well, there was a woman talking.” “The lady’s voice that was talking on the tape here just now?” “Yes.” “I thought that was your voice?” “It is my voice.” The Commission concludes, on page 168, that Mrs. Markham is a reliable witness. Now, she was questioned first by Mr. Ball, Counsel for the Commission. I debated with Mr. Ball in Los Angeles about a week ago at a public meeting which was taped and played over one of the radio stations there. I read this testimony to him and I said: “This is your only witness. What do you have to say about Mrs. Markham?” And he said: “Mrs. Markham is an utter screwball; there is no question about that.” That is his consideration and he is the only one who questioned her for a day and not in the presence of the Commission. The Commission therefore had to rely upon the Attorney’s view as to the credibility of the witness. He says she is an utter screwball, but the Commission concludes, because she is the only witness of the murder of Tippit, that Mrs. Markham is a reliable witness.

If the weapon was not capable of the performance that the Commission claims it gave that day, then obviously the whole case against Oswald as the lone assassin must fall. In the words of the great American humorist Mark Twain, “Whoso hanging from a rope by his hands severeth the rope above his hands shall fall, it being no defence to claim that the rest of the rope is sound.” Well, let us see if the weapon is capable of this performance. The world’s greatest rifle shot could not fire that weapon as Oswald allegedly did with those results. That statement was made by Hugo Hammerer the world’s greatest rifle shot, the world’s rifle Olympic champion. He said, “In my hands, the weapon is not capable of that performance.” Well now, we are going to see what Oswald’s score with a rifle was. Oswald was a rather poor shot as a matter of fact, but after his death, the one kind thing the Commission did on his behalf was to escalate his abilities with the weapon. They brought before them a Major Anderson of the Marine Corps. Major Anderson testified: “When compared with the entire American population, Oswald must be considered a good to excellent rifle shot.” That is compared with the entire American population. Of course that includes two year old children, 98 year old grandmothers, and it includes the vast majority of Americans who have never picked up a rifle in their lives. Perhaps compared to them, Oswald was a good to excellent shot. We don’t have any statistics on that. Let us compare him in a more constructive fashion with the entire tests of those who have passed through the armed services of the United States in the last ten years, to see what a good shot he was. He fired twice before the Marine Corps – the first time he fired 212, the second time he hit 191. 191, which was his last firing score in the Marine Corps, is one point above the minimum qualifying score for the United States armed forces and the United States Marine Corps describes those in that category and those who fire several points above that as being “a poor shot.” So first the Commission escalates Oswald from a poor shot, the marking given to him by the United States armed services when he last fired for score, to a good to excellent shot by comparison with others, many of whom never fired a rifle at all.

After having done that, the Commission then decides it is going to examine the rifle’s ability. Well, we made a suggestion to the Commission. We said: “Take that rifle up on the 6th floor of the Book Depository Building (that is the alleged assassination weapon). Bring in 100 Marines, each of whom, on his score, fired considerably better than Oswald did. Give them 3 shells, have the car turn around and when the car reaches this point where the first shot was fired at this point where the last shot was fired, have the Marine fire three shots. If two of them can hit a sandbag in the back seat – the seat previously occupied by the President in this now radio-controlled car – if two of them can hit that sandbag target, that is, if one can hit it twice, out of 100 Marines, if one can emulate what Oswald allegedly did, we will concede that you proven that the rifle is capable of the performance. Whether or not it is likely that Oswald, who was a poor shot, could have done it if only 1 of a 100 Marines who are better shots, could do it, is another matter but at least you will certainly have proven that the rifle is capable of the performance. Well the Commission did not accept that challenge. On page 193 of the Report, they said they were going to have tests of their own. In an effort to test the rifle under conditions which simulated those which prevailed during the assassination, the Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch of the Ballistics Research Laboratory had riflemen fire the rifle at distances of 175, 240 and 265 feet. Now let’s see who they chose first.

They chose three men, certified as masters by the National Rifle Association. They don’t really go into great detail to tell you what that means, but that is the highest level of expertise with a weapon on an international level. They secured three of the best rifle shots in all of America to test the weapon. They took them out to a target range which they developed into a laboratory by building a tower 30’ above the ground and that tower was equipped with a chair and with a 2 x 4 wooden arm for the rifle – a rifle rest. Now Oswald allegedly was sitting on the floor, maybe perhaps on a wooden carton. 30’ above the ground was this tower. The 6th floor of the Book Depository Building is 54-55’ above the ground. They chose these three great experts and they had them fire at three stationary targets. That portion of the President’s body which would be visible to one on the 6th floor of the Book Depository Building would be an area just below the shoulders, as he was seated up against the back seat, to the top of this head. These three experts fired at 3 stationary targets, each of which was a little more than twice as large as the target allegedly facing Oswald and these are the conditions which the Commission said simulated those which prevailed during the assassination.

Oswald allegedly fired the first shot. The Commission took pictures from the window of the Book Depository Building and said that until the limousine reached this point (on Elm Street) the limousine was not visible from the Book Depository Building because of the trees and it became visible here at this point (further along Elm Street). The President, said the Commission, began to grasp his throat, reacting to the first bullet which struck him and that was, the Commission says, 8/10ths of a second after the car became visible for the first time. In other words, not allowing for some time for reaction to take place, at the very most Oswald had 8/10ths of a second from the time the car was visible until the time the first shot was fired. At the very most, 8/10ths of a second according to the Commission’s own findings. Of the three shots fired that day, allegedly by Oswald, that one required the greatest skill for that one was the one which required the shortest period of time.

How does the Commission allow its marksmen to take the test (page 193 of the Report): “The marksmen took as much time as they wanted for the first target and all hit the target.” The three marksmen each fired groups of three shots twice, so six shots were fired at the first target. A stationary target twice as large, more than twice as large, as the target Oswald allegedly fired at and they fired from half the height and they hit six out of six. But now they have to move their rifle a bit. The target is stationary, but the rifle has to be moved and they have to work the bolt and fire again. The majority of those who tried in their efforts were unsuccessful, were unable to fire shots as quickly as Oswald allegedly did in that six second period, even firing at a still target. Of the next twelve shots that were fired by those three great rifle experts, seven hit the target and five missed. Oswald allegedly hit at least two out of three, says the Commission, perhaps three out of three, but at least two out of three. Now what did this test prove, according to the Commission? The Commission proves through this test, it states, that Oswald had the capability and the weapon had the capability to do that which the Commission claims he did: fire two accurate shots out of three shots at the President.

That test is a fraud, as this document is a fraud from the first paged to the last page. It is a fraud in this particular respect because it seeks to state to those who read it quickly, that the test which they conducted was a comparable test, when in fact it was comparable in no way and even these experts under these conditions were unable to emulate the shooting ability that Oswald, who was a poor shot, allegedly was capable of on November 22nd. This report is a fraud from the first page to the last page, because in presenting its conclusions, it has first suppressed the facts, and secondly it takes out of context or distorts the facts which were brought before it.

The vast majority of those who testified before the Commission said that the shots came from there (the grassy knoll, behind the wooden fence). Over here on the Railroad overpass there was a Railroad employee. He said, “I heard the shots, they all came from over here,” (the grassy knoll) and he testified before the Commission, “I looked behind the bushes and I saw smoke coming as if a rifle had been fired.” Also present was a man named S.M. Holland, a Railroad Supervisor, who said: “I saw the shots. I heard the shots come from there (the grassy knoll) and I looked up, and I saw from behind the trees near the bushes smoke coming up in the air.” Weitzman who testified that he ran over here (the grassy knoll) said: “After I jumped over the fence that place was then swarming with Dallas Police Officers, FBI Agents and Secret Service Agents, all of whom were back there (behind the wooden fence) looking for the assassins, scores of them.” Two people testified before the Commission, including a Dallas Officer, that when they arrived back behind there (behind the wooden fence) they smelled gunpowder, and they knew the shots had been fired from there. What does the Commission conclude? Without any of that evidence before them filtering through their 888 page, one million-dollar tranquilliser which they had imposed on the American people, what do they state? They state: “There is no credible evidence whatsoever to support the theory that shots came from this area.” “No one saw the shots come from that area.” Well very likely that’s because the bullets were travelling at too rapid a rate of speed to be seen. But the vast majority of the testimony of eyewitnesses before the Commission leads one to the inescapable conclusion that some shots were fired from behind that area.

Well let’s look at the medical testimony, because the medical testimony will tell us how. When that first bullet struck the President and he grasped his throat with both hands, all one has to do is examine the wound and find out if it was an entrance wound indicating the shot came from the front, or an exit wound. The doctors at the Parkland Memorial Hospital on November 22nd held a Press Conference after they pronounced the President dead, and at that Press Conference, which was widely televised and broadcast by radio throughout America, the doctors made these comments. Dr. Malcolm Perry, the physician who performed the tracheotomy on the President’s throat so that a tube could be inserted in the throat said: “I followed the path of the bullet which entered at the Adam’s apple and ranged downward into the chest. The bullet did not exit, and that is the path I followed with the tube when I performed the tracheotomy.” Dr. Kemp Clark, the physician who signed the death certificate said: “The bullet entered the President’s throat at the Adam’s apple and ranged downward into the chest and did not exit.” Dr. Robert N. McClelland, Senior Physician at the Parkland Hospital, said: “Down here in Dallas we have an opportunity to examine and treat bullet wounds every single day. As a result we know the difference between entrance wounds and exit wounds, and the wound in the President’s throat was an entrance wound. The bullet entered from the front.”

Based upon that information, the FBI and the Dallas Police issued a statement saying that the limousine was right here (on Houston Street, facing the Book Depository Building) when the first shot was fired and Oswald took that rifle, fired down Houston Street, the first bullet striking the President in the front of the throat. Well that testimony then totally confirms the medical statement that the bullet entered the throat from the front and from above and ranged downward into the chest. But there was a problem with that story.

The problem is that it’s totally false and not only that, the witnesses agreed that it was false, that the car was here, moving away from the Book Depository Building in this direction before the first shot was fired. Now among the witnesses who said that the car was on Elm Street, not on Houston Street, were such witnesses as Jacqueline Kennedy, Governor Connolly, Mrs. Connolly, and all the films that were taken showing the car there. Just before it was announced, however, just before the story was changed to version number two, the Dallas District Attorney said: “We have a map found in Oswald’s possession. He circled the Book Depository Building, and he had drawn a dotted line on the map down Houston Street, showing the trajectory which he had planned, and he drew that dotted line in his own handwriting.” However, now that the witnesses have all said publicly: “The car was here” (on Elm Street) and the films show the car was there, the FBI and the Secret Service and the Dallas Police are nothing if not absolutely flexible, and so version number one was forever erased, and we now reach version number two. Now version number two is presented with two new problems. Number one: what about that dotted line that Oswald drew down Houston Street? New York Times, November 29th: “The Dallas authorities said today there never was such a map. Any reference to it was an error.” That takes care of the map.

However, there’s another problem, how did Oswald shoot the President in the front of his throat, how did he shoot him from the front, from the back? That’s a more weighty problem. The autopsy was conducted on November 22nd from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. on the very day of the assassination, and agents of the FBI were there when the autopsy was being conducted and got reports on the progress of the autopsy and immediately thereafter. After that autopsy had been completed, thirteen days later, the Federal Authorities re-enacted and reconstructed the crime, with an FBI Agent sitting in the back seat playing the role of President Kennedy, and the New York Times which observed the re-enactment reported that as the limousine came to this point, the officer of the FBI who was playing the role of the President turned completely around to face the Book Depository Building to expose his throat, seeking to explain how that first bullet entered the President’s throat from above, and from the front. “But,” mused the New York Times, then, “that’s rather curious because the pictures which have already been published widely show that the President was looking in this direction, to the front and to the right when the first bullet entered his throat.” Well, the Times, throwing its hands up at that point, said: “There is one document that will answer these questions for us: the statements made by Dr. Humes, the medical Corps Commander of the Navy who performed the autopsy on the President’s body at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, for Dr. Humes is the expert,” said the New York Times, “on the angle of entry of the bullet, so we must wait for his report.” And those preliminary statements prepared by Dr. Humes would be of great value, obviously, which show exactly what Dr. Humes thought when he conducted that autopsy, and so we waited eagerly the release of this most massive document in the history of detective work in the world. But no reference was made to those important and vital preliminary statements prepared by Dr. Humes, not a word, and then we waited for the twenty-six volumes.

They arrived and there is no index to those twenty-six volumes. Hundreds and thousands of words and exhibits, but no index to indicate what they are. It’s very difficult to find anything in these twenty-six volumes. You may recall the Chief Justice, Chairman of the Commission, Mr. Warren, was asked by a reporter, just after he was appointed Chairman, and after he began to take testimony. The reporter said: “Mr. Chief Justice, when will we get the facts in this case?” and Earl Warren replied: “You may never get the facts in your lifetime, and I mean that seriously.” I wonder if he was making reference to the fact that they were not going to publish and index. But we looked through the twenty-six volumes, page after page after page, to see if we could find that most vital document, the preliminary notes of Dr. Humes who conducted the autopsy, and in Volume XVII page 48 (it’s Commission Exhibit 397) we came across the only reference to it in the twenty-six volumes.

On the stationery of the United States Naval Medical School, National Naval Medical Centre, Bethesda, Maryland, November 24th, 1963, Certificate. “I, James J. Humes, certify that I have destroyed by burning preliminary draft notes relating to the autopsy I conducted on the body of President Kennedy.” He burned the papers, now why do you suppose he did that? I’m sure that if any of you were a member of the Warren Commission, and Dr. Humes testified before you as he did before the Commission, your curiosity would get the better of you, and you would say: “Dr. Humes, why did you burn the notes?” But the question did not occur, believe it or not, to a single member of the Warren Commission, nor to Counsel, and he was never asked the question, and he never volunteered the information.

Now that’s rather curious because Dr. Humes is a Commander of the Marine Corps, the Navy, and he was given an official assignment on November 22nd. He was on Government business, and acting in his capacity as a doctor or Commander for the Navy when he conducted that examination, and therefore the work product of that examination did not belong to him. It belonged to the American people and to the United States Government, and it belonged to everyone in this world who wants to know what happened in Dallas on November 22nd. When he burned those notes, he burned documents belonging to the United States Government, and if there is anyone who is naïve enough to believe that he did that without order, without authorisation, then I think he underestimates the efforts that have been made to suppress the vital facts in this case. There’s no Marine Corps Commander who goes around burning vital documents and then signing certificates saying that he did it. Dr. Humes was, in fact, in a somewhat complaining mood when he appeared before the Commission. He said: “You know, when we conducted the autopsy we had photographs taken, of President Kennedy’s body, and we had X-rays taken of the President.” The Commission says, “Why, is that routine?” and he said “Yes, it is routine, in every single case involving an autopsy related to violent death. In every case, as a matter of routine, we have photographs and X-rays taken, because they are of great value in assisting the doctors in making their diagnosis in terms of the direction of the missiles that coursed through the body.” But Dr. Humes said: “Unfortunately though, before the photographs, before the X-rays were developed, they were taken from us by agents of the FBI, and we have never been able to see them.” Although they were prepared so that Dr. Humes could prepare a report, the documents were taken from him. He said: “I want to explain to you gentlemen exactly where the wounds were that we discovered, but of course medical language is not generally understood by lay people, and I want to have the pictures to show you, but I did not know,” said this Marine Corps Commander to the Commission appointed by the President of the United States which was charged with the responsibility of getting all the facts, “I did not know whether or not you would ever be able to have photographs or the X-rays which have been taken from us by the FBI.” So he said: “I had an artist brought in and I dictated to the artist. I verbalised that which I remembered in terms of the wounds, and he drew three pictures based upon this which may be of assistance to you.” You can look through these twenty-six volumes and you will see the only pictorial depiction of the wounds consists of those three pictures drawn by an artist after Dr. Humes tried to explain to him what he saw. No photographs, no X-rays, and the New York Times says when the twenty-six volumes come out: “These twenty-six volumes sustain the position taken by the Warren Commission”, and the British press here in London takes precisely the same position, and I doubt there’s a single editorial writer in London or in New York or in Washington or Los Angeles or San Francisco who has written his words of praise about this document, how it represents everything in the twenty-six volumes, who has bothered to even leaf through one of the twenty-six volumes. Oh, there is much praise for this document by those who have neither the time nor the courage nor the intellectual honesty to read these documents upon which it is allegedly based. But when we hear these comments and we invite those who take these strenuous positions here in England and in the United States to participate with us in an open and free debate, to support the Warren Commission Report, we cannot find any one associated with these words of praise for the Commission Report who has the intellectual courage to get up at a public meeting in debate to try to defend anything that this Commission has done.

Let’s take the question of how Oswald carried the weapon into the Book Depository Building. I’ll just skip around taking various points. I’ll tell you this, time does not permit of course an adequate XXX which would take many, many hours, let me just conclude on this one point, I can assure you that there is not a single, not a single area in the Commission’s report where their conclusions can be reasonably based upon the testimony which they adduced, not a single important area. How did Oswald carry the rifle into the Book Depository Building? The Commission is able to present the testimony of only one person who saw Oswald enter the Book Depository Building, in addition to two witnesses who saw Oswald holding a brown paper package some time in the morning of November 22nd.

First we take the testimony of the one person who saw Oswald enter the building so far as the Commission was able to find witnesses. Here’s what the Commission says of one witness (page 133 of the Report): “One employee, Jack Dougherty, believed that he saw Oswald coming to work”, but does not remember that Oswald had anything in his hands.” Well that sounds rather vague testimony. Let’s now look to the Report of the Commission itself and see the testimony of the Commission itself, and see what Mr. Dougherty actually told the Commission, see if it was quite that vague. Volume VI, page 376: “Did you see Oswald come to work that morning?” “Yes”. “Did he come in with anybody?” “No”. “He was alone?” “Yes, he was alone”. “Do you recall him having anything in his hands when he came into the building?” “Well I did not see anything if he did”. “Did you pay enough attention to him do you think, that you would remember whether he did or did not?” “Well, I believe I can, yes, sir, I’ll put it this way, I did not see anything in his hands at that time.” “In other words your memory is definite on that?” “Yes, sir”. “In other words you would say positively he had nothing in his hands?” “I would say that, yes, sir”.

How does the Commission sum up? “One employee, Jack Dougherty, believed he saw Oswald c

[Paul Rigby]

A full list of the audience's details is available upon request from MI5 and, of course, Langley:

The British ‘who killed Kennedy?’ Committee, December 1964 (Pamphlet, 32pp)

The Warren Commission Report and the Assassination [part 2 of 2: Lane's responses to questions from the audience]

By Mark Lane

This is a transcript taken from a tape recording made of Mark Lane’s extemporaneous lecture. To the best of our knowledge, there are no errors in this transcript from the tape recording of Mr. Lane’s lecture, but as Mr. Lane did not proof-read this transcript, we wish to guard against any possibility of error being imputed to him by making clear that any error which may be found in this transcript must be ascribed to the process of transferring his remarks from tape to paper.

We emphasize that we have no reason to think such error exists, but the procedure wherein remarks are transferred from one medium to another is subject to error, and it is important that it should not be possible for anyone to impugn Mr. Lane’s scrupulous and meticulous accuracy because of this remote possibility of secretarial failure.

Text of Mark Lane’s Extemporaneous Lecture at University College, London, 10 December, 1964

The British ‘who killed Kennedy?’ Committee, December 1964 (Pamphlet, 32pp)

The Warren Commission Report and the Assassination

By Mark Lane

Text of Mark Lane’s Extemporaneous Lecture at University College, London, 10 December, 1964 [part 2: Lane’s responses to questions from the audience]

Question from the audience.

Answer: There are many discrepancies, and let me see if I can deal with some of them that you’ve raised. First of all, the Commission never deals with the basic proposition of the origin of the shots, never. The Commission makes reference to the overpass, not to the wooden fence when they give the statistics. Secondly, the area here (1)* the Commission says was 177 feet when the shots were fired. It was not much greater from here (2)* perhaps another 30 or 40 feet. In the first place, the figures which you’re quoting are the figures relating to the overpass, not at all to this area (the grassy knoll). This was closer to the car in several respects than the overpass, as you can see. Secondly, in terms of the medical statements, Dr. Humes has made this statement in his testimony: “When I examined the wound in the President’s throat, I could not determine whether it was an entrance wound or an exit wound.” Dr. Humes states: “I could not determine that because the wound had been so completely altered and disfigured by Dr. Perry, who had conducted the tracheotomy on the President’s throat, utilising the bullet wound as the basis for the operation.” Dr. Humes said: “I must yield to Dr. Perry on the question of whether the wound in the President’s throat was an entrance wound or an exit wound.” Dr. Perry had already stated very freely and very openly and most repeatedly: “The wound in the President’s throat was an entrance wound.” No question in his mind about that, he said it over and over on November 22nd, November 23rd, November 24th and days afterwards, until such time as it was concluded that since Oswald was there (in the Book Depository Building) and the President was actually facing forward, the wound in his throat had to be an exit wound.

Now there is a transition which took place in terms of when the changes were brought about. I’ll tell you how that took place. Of course the final statements now tend to confirm that conclusion reached by the Commission, but what is very enlightening I think is to determine how the statements got that way. On the last day of May and the first day of June, it was first said by the Government that the bullet which entered the President came from the back. They had a picture in the New York Times of the Secret Service Agent sitting in the limousine, and a chalk mark was drawn on his back, stating exactly where the bullet entered and it was here, more than five inches below the collar. They said: “That’s where the bullet entered.” Shortly thereafter, the FBI displayed the shirt and the jacket, pictures of which are now documents before the Commission, showing that there is indeed a bullet hole, or a hole, in the shirt and in the jacket, a little more than five inches below the collar.

Alright, then the next question was raised: If that’s the bullet which entered the President’s back, shot from not a 26 degree angle, but a 23 degree angle, because the street was on a 3 degree angle, the Commission says, the angle of the bullet when compared to President was just 20 degrees, but the Commission said (comment from the audience) – that’s the Commission’s conclusion. Yes, I’m telling you what the Commission elects, though. The question is how a bullet going that way, going downward, could then go on and hit Governor Connolly, because that’s another matter that we’ll get to in just a bit in terms of whether or not that bullet hit Governor Connolly. It became necessary for that bullet to hit Governor Connolly. I’ll tell you why: because there were four shots that were fired. One struck a kerb over here (between Commerce and Main Streets, near the Triple Underpass) and a man by the name of James Tague testified before the Commission that he was standing there and as the bullet hit the kerb it shot concrete up in his face, and his face began to bleed, so Tague went to the Parkland Memorial Hospital to be treated for the concrete in his face. That’s one bullet. One bullet hit the President, that’s one, (not necessarily in that order), one hit the Governor, then another one hit the President. That’s four.

Now, the Commission states that the rifle requires a minimum interval in the hands of the great rifle experts who work with it, 2.3 seconds in between shots. Now, from the time the first shot was fired till the last shot was fired, the Commission says was six seconds, therefore only three shots could have been fired, because there’s not sufficient time even for the three intervals. Now we have four bullets fired, because there’s not sufficient time even for the three intervals. Now we have four bullets fired, but they’re done in a period of six seconds, and 2.3 second intervals were required between shots. In other words, Oswald is not the lone assassin, unless one bullet can be removed. One shot must be removed.

Now how can we do this, ah, yes, if we take one bullet and press it into double duty that day, have it hit the Governor, have it hit the President, go through the President, then hit the Governor, and that’s one bullet. The second one hit the President in the head, and the third one strikes over here (the kerb, near the Triple Overpass) and then we get down from four bullets to three bullets and still have the result of three bullets, and then we have the six seconds and it makes sense with the 2.3, so that’s what happened. That happened after this was published, though, in May, end of May and beginning of June, then the question was: How did that bullet go out, hit five inches below the collar and then go out of the throat? It could have happened originally if it hit a bone, and was deflected upwards, that’s possible, but now since that bullet has to go through the President, and after going through the President, it must go through the Governor’s back, exit, smash out two ribs, crash through his wrist, fracturing it, and end up in his thigh, the doctors all agree that if it struck any bony material in the President and was deflected, it would have lost sufficient velocity so it could never have done what it did to the Governor. So now the bullet could not strike a bone, in fact it must strike no muscle, it must find its way in between muscles, and that’s what happened, it came out the throat. So it didn’t go in here (1) they were wrong when they drew the chalk mark – actually the bullet went over here (2) the autopsy point, right over there, and came out the throat. Even then, it went about the same level it came out, and should really have gone in a little bit higher, but this is the Commission’s finding, their review of the autopsy.

Now what about the jacket and what about the shirt – still before the Commission in the same shape they were shown to the American people at the end of May – they still have a hole down there, five inches down. That hole is more than 3½ inches below the corresponding spot on the President’s body. Well, that is true, you were a jacket – my clothes don’t fit as well as the President’s did obviously, but I know when I wear a jacket and when it’s buttoned up and I raise my right hand, as he was doing when the first bullet struck him, that will tend to have one’s jacket hiked up, not 3½ inches perhaps but if you’re sitting in the back of a car maybe it would help to hike it up. That’s for your jacket.

How about your shirt? Let me see you get your shirt 3½ inches above this point on your back (3). You can do that by pulling it up and holding it up with two hands, while awaiting the shot, but the President was not doing that. And so with the development, as the needs changed, the evidence changed, and there is absolutely no explanation in the twenty-six volumes or in the 888 page report as to why these two marks in the jacket and the shirt correspond with each other completely and with the original story at the end of May, but have no relation whatsoever to the final story that the bullet entered over there (3).

Now let us pose that rather absurd conglomeration of the development of the case with the statement of Dr. Perry that the wound in the President’s throat is an entrance wound and the statement of Dr. Humes that he could not tell but only Dr. Perry could tell. In addition to this, Dr. Clark said: “I examined the President’s back”, but thereafter when it was pointed out that there was a wound in the back, he said: “Well, I didn’t turn him over”, but on November 22nd he said: “I examined the President’s back, from the small of his back to the top of his neck, and I felt his whole back and I did not feel any wounds.” Now Dr. Kemp Clark is supposed to be a proficient physician, and he was feeling the President’s back to see if it was possible that there was a wound there. Now is it possible that a large wound in the President’s back, full of blood, the shirt’s absolutely drenched with blood now, is it possible that the doctor ran his hand up the President’s back – the President was wearing no shirt, no jacket and no braces at that time – and he didn’t notice there was any blood there, didn’t notice there was a hole in the President’s back? It is very difficult for me to accept that fact.

Question from the audience

Answer: Oh, I see, well of course, these are two entirely different matters. Well, let me answer them…have you finished the question? Fine, why don’t you comment, if you like, after I’ve made my comments. They are two entirely different matters. First of all, Oswald’s dead, and nothing can affect his rights any longer in terms of publicity on the case, firstly, but far more important than that is that pre-trial publicity is harmful to the fair administration of justice, but the right to a public trial is absolutely essential in any free democracy, any free society, and there’s no conflict there, you have both in Great Britain, we don’t have the former in the United States, but you have both here. You have the right to a public trial, and you have the right to see to it that there is no pre-trial publicity in terms of unfair comments by the District Attorney upon what a defendant allegedly did. One is totally unrelated to the other, that is that prior to the time that the jury is chosen, the jury should not be prejudiced against the rights of the defendant by reading the papers every day that this is the man who did it, we’re certain we have him, there’s no question in our minds, so that over a period of weeks, they, the jurors, just walk around, the prospective jurors walk around, and I if you ask them: “Did so-and-so commit a crime?” “Of course he did, I read it in the papers, and I’ve been reading it every day, of course he did it.” That’s where the problem of pre-trial publicity affects the fair administration of justice, but once the trial begins you already have the jury, and there’s no problem in terms of pre-trial publicity, then the defendant’s only protection against the society which is seeking to convict him, is the right to a fair trial which is guaranteed only in a society which presents him with a public trial, so that what is transpiring is known throughout the whole society. There’s no conflict at all, I don’t think.

Question from audience

Answer: I’m not commenting upon integrity. You listen, I’ll tell you this, you can draw whatever conclusion you want from the facts. This much we know, that Earl Warren is supposed to be the man with the greatest integrity of all the members of the Commission. I question the integrity of a number of members of the Commission and their competence in general. It was a highly important Commission, very important Commission. It was made up of six political appointees, politically chosen, not traditionally chosen, and the Chief Justice. Of the seven members, only two, one beside the Chief Justice, have any background in terms of the courts at all. Who do we have on the Commission? Let’s go through the names and see if we all have faith in them.

We have Earl Warren, Chief Justice. We have two Republicans and two Democrats, two members of the House and two members of the Senate. We were told by the New York Times: “This represents a vast cross section of the American people.” The two Democrats happen to be racist Southern Dixiecrats. These are the two Democratic representatives: Hale Boggs of Louisiana and Richard Russell of Georgia. The two Republicans were Cooper of Kentucky and Congressman Ford, who is Goldwater’s sparkplug, who has been selling his articles, which contain false material from beginning to end, widely throughout the United States.

In addition to that, we have Mr. McCloy, the former High Commissioner for Germany, and the former Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, who was fired from that position by John Fitzgerald Kennedy. So you have a seven-man Commission, made up of five Republicans and two Southern Democrats, and in addition to that, every bit of evidence presented by the Commission originated with the Dallas police. Remember that. The bullets were found by the Dallas police. The case was developed against Oswald by the Dallas Police. Every bit of physical evidence which the Commission passed upon was developed by the Dallas Police. Now, it’s one thing to ask people to have faith in the Warren Commission. I don’t ever ask anyone to have faith in anything I say, nor do I think anyone has a right to say: “Have faith in what I say.” The facts, when shown to reasonable men, allow each individual to make his own conclusion, and that’s how a democratic society functions. The whole idea of having faith in this Commission is at war with the concept of a jury of one’s peers, which means that ordinary people are picked out and they rationally pass upon the evidence which they see. And here we have a non-judicial tribunal and we’re asked to have faith in the source of all the evidence against Oswald, the Dallas Police Department, and I think that that is asking too much of the ordinary reasonable person.

Question from audience

Answer: I don’t know where all the shots were fired from, I just can tell you this. The testimony which I commented upon is the testimony before the Commission. I don’t know if all the shots were fired from that area or not, but we do know that Governor Connolly was facing this direction (toward the crowd on the right of the limousine). He said he heard the shot: “And after I heard the shot, I turned to my right to look at the President, but I could not see him because the President gripped his throat with both hands and was then sinking over to his left. As he slumped to his left,” Governor Connolly said, “I spun to my left to look at the President and as I turned I was shot in the back.” Now when was he shot, it’s hard to tell from the pictures because the bullets don’t show up in the pictures. You can just guess. When he turned completely to his left, his back was to that area, (the area of the grassy knoll), and of course the car was closer to that area then, and he could have been shot in the back then. I don’t know if that’s true that he was shot then, but it is possible that before he turned to his left he was shot from the back. If so, the shots would have to come from back here somewhere (1).

Now he picked out a frame of the picture himself, he said: “That is the picture where I was shot in the back.” Now at the time, if he was accurate about that, and one can never be sure that a witness, a victim of a shooting, can be absolutely accurate in terms of when exactly he was shot, but if it is true, his back at that time showed that he had already turned to his right to look at the President, and if he was shot in the back then, if you extrapolate the line it would have to come back here, which would obviously be impossible because this is the Dallas Sheriff’s Office. The whole Commission’s conclusion rests upon the assertion that the bullet which struck the President also struck the Governor. If it did not, then we have four bullets, and if we have four bullets, then we have more than one assassin involved. The Commission’s report that Oswald was the lone assassin rests exclusively upon the fact that the bullet which hit the Governor came through the President first. Now, Mrs. Connally testified as follows: “The first shot was fired, struck the President’s throat, I turned to my right to look at the President, and he was clutching his throat with both hands.” Then she said: “John,” her husband, the Governor of Texas, on her right, “turned to his right to look at the President, then started to turn back to his left, and he was shot”, and Connally said: “I’ve done enough hunting to know that the bullet travels more quickly than the sound of the shot, and when I heard that shot it had already struck the President, and I was hit some time thereafter.” Well, if this testimony is accurate, if Mrs. Connally’s testimony is accurate, and if the pictures which tend to confirm both of their statements are accurate, then indeed the Governor was struck by a bullet other than the one which struck the President. If that’s so, then the whole case against Oswald as the lone assassin goes out of the window, because then we get back to four shots, and since they only had six seconds and that’s the interval required in between the shots, then the whole case goes out the window. How does the Commission handle it? Page 19, conclusion 3: “Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally,” etc., but it is, the whole case is predicated upon the fact that the bullet which hit the Governor hit the President first, and their language cannot change the fact that the whole case goes out of the window if it is not the same bullet.

Chairman: Before you answer the next question, can I announce before people do go that as a society, an affiliated society of Union, we’re not allowed to take contributions, but as you can imagine the whole of this colossal case, I think we’ve seen enough evidence this afternoon to show that there is a very real case being made out, must be sustained via voluntary contributions, and therefore I’m going to write on the blackboard the address of the British “Who Killed Kennedy?” Committee, to which you can address your postal orders and cheques. All of the money will be used in Dallas towards ascertaining the truth, so I’ll write it on the other board, and I hope that you’ll tell the people who’ve already left to do so also.

Question from audience

Answer: Well, that’s the testimony of Deputy Constable Weitzman saying that a railroad yardman said he heard the noise come from here, and thought he saw someone throw something into the bushes at that time. We don’t know what happened, because, as I indicated, Weitzman was never asked any additional questions about that, and there is no testimony anywhere in the twenty-six volumes indicating that anyone ever looked for that railroad yardman or if they found him, that he was permitted to testify. And the first we heard of that was when the Commission Report, when the twenty-six volumes were issued just two weeks ago. We have someone now in Dallas trying to find him. I have not been in contact with that operation in some days. I don’t know if he’s been found yet.

Question from audience: At the actual time, on the radio, I heard someone say, “People have been seen running away from the underpass, and policemen have gone after them”, but no mention…

Answer: Right, well here is the track, and there was a man who was standing over here (1). Mrs. Hill, a Dallas Public School teacher was standing here (2) and she said: “I saw a man standing there (3) just after the shots were fired at the President. He was wearing a brown overcoat and a brown hat, and I saw him run back here” (4). And she testified before the Commission: “That man is Jack Ruby. I saw Jack Ruby at the scene and he ran back behind the wall.” The Commission doesn’t even present that in their Report, although they have such evidence, and there’s no question that on the Dallas Police Radio (they present the monitored broadcast on Dallas Police Radio, in the documents) the first report is: “Shots have been fired at the President. This is Sheriff Decker stating shots have been fired at the President, and we are going directly to the Parkland Hospital to prepare all emergency treatment there. We do not know who else has been hit. The shots have all come from near the railroad overpass.” That was the first Dallas Sheriff’s broadcast, and of course it was broadcast widely in the United States as well.”

Question from audience: What about the Ruby meeting with Tippit and your refusal to give your source?

Answer: There’s been much mis-information about that fact in the current issue of Encounter, which I think I have here, in an article by D.W. Brogan called “Death in Dallas: The Myth after Kennedy” which is a great contribution to the myth because I think that D.W. Brogan, who I understand is respected as an historian, does not encounter any of the facts along the way in his long article, and he makes reference to the very meeting you’re speaking of and he says: “Will Mark Lane produce his missing witness to the Oswald, Ruby and Tippit meeting?” which of course is not the meeting, but the one that you made reference to is the one which the Commission has evidence regarding, and that is the meeting that took place on November 14th, at Ruby’s nightclub, the Carousel. And present at that meeting were three persons: Bernard Weissman, who placed a full page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News on November 22nd, which advertisement said: “Welcome to Dallas Mr. President, why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favour of the Sprit of Moscow,” and on and on and on, and the other two persons were Ruby and Officer Tippit. Now one of the leading Dallas citizens, one of the leading professional citizens of Dallas contacted me and said: “I’m in a terrible position.” I said “What’s that?” He said: “I know Jack Ruby and I knew Officer Tippit. I knew them both fairly well, and I was at the Carousel Club on November 14th, eight days before the assassination, and they were there in a meeting with a man named Bernard Weissman whom I did not know then, but I heard his name come up in discussion. I’ve seen pictures of him. He’s now known in Dallas.” He said: “I didn’t think anything of it at the time, except that Ruby is a fellow who is very gregarious, goes round and buys everyone a drink in the club. He always used to buy me a drink. That evening he wouldn’t talk to anybody. He sat there intently. He has a limited attention span generally, but he sat at that table for more than two hours at that meeting, not talking to anybody else, just those two gentlemen. I just thought that was a little strange,” he said. “Then on November 22nd I realised that I’d been witness to a meeting at which two persons involved in the events of November 22nd were present, Tippit who had just been killed, and Weissman, who had already placed the advertisement in the Dallas Morning News and was then quite well-known in Dallas as a result of the advertisement. I didn’t think much of that until two days later when Ruby killed Oswald, and then I realised I was next to a meeting of three persons, all of whom were important principals in the tragic events of those two days. I know that if I ever give my name, I’ll be wiped out in Dallas, maybe anywhere, but I think it’s important someone knows that meeting takes place. Now will you give me your word that you will never reveal my name?” and I said: “Yes.” I came up before the Commission and said: “I have some information which may be of interest to you. It is not proof, of itself, because I can’t give you the source, but you can check it out in any other way and see if this actually happened. I said: “Since I cannot give you the source you just tell me now if you want me to give you the information. If you don’t I won’t give it to you, if you do, I will.” They said: “Alright, we’d like to hear the information.” I told them what I’d heard.

Well, the Commission was interested in getting the source, they said, and I made it plain to the Commission that if I was directed to give them the information – they had the power to make this direction and they had the power to send me to jail for contempt if I refused to give it to them – then I could in all probability secure permission to give the name. I could go back to my source and say: “Look, I know you don’t want to get into trouble, but I’ve done just what you said. I’ve honoured this commitment, but now they’re going to send me to jail, and I want to give your name.” Under those circumstances, very likely, I would have been able to get permission. Now the Commission said “Are you relying upon any legal protection in Attorney-client relationship?” If I had said “Yes, I am relying upon an Attorney-client relationship,” which I could have said, then the Commission could not direct me to give them the answer, because that relationship is superior to their power to make a direction. And so I said: “ No, I am not relying upon such a relationship,” inviting the Commission to direct me, and of course the Commission did not direct me, and merely said that I would not give them the name. Well, I made a commitment and I keep my commitments, and I won’t give them the name unless I’m so directed, and then secure permission from the source. But the Commission was able to get a lot of information which they don’t comment upon in the Report. Let’s see what they turned up.

First of all they found Larry Crafard. Larry Crafard was associated with Jack Ruby in the operation of the Carousel Club, his nightclub. Crafard left Dallas the day before Ruby killed Oswald, with seven dollars, that’s all he had, he had seven dollars in his pocket and he left to go back to Wisconsin from Dallas, which is a long, long distance. He couldn’t explain why he left at that point, but when he was brought before the Commission, they showed him a picture of Bernard Weissman and asked if he’d ever seen that man. He said: “Yes, that man was in the club on several occasions, and I used to serve him drinks. I’ve personally served drinks to that man.” “What’s his name?” and Crafard said: “I don’t know his name, that is I was never introduced to him. I can only tell you the name Ruby used to call him.” The Commission Counsel said: “What did Ruby call him?” He said: “Ruby called him Weissman, and he was in the club several times”- and that was Bernard Weissman.

In terms of Tippit, Ruby went all over Dallas November 22nd, November 23rd, the Commission concedes, went all over Dallas saying: “J.D. Tippit, the officer who was killed, was my friend. That’s ‘Buddy’ Tippit. Buddy Tippit and I were very close. I know him very well. He’s been in the club very many times.” What does the Commission conclude, based upon this evidence? The Commission concludes that there is no credible evidence that Ruby ever knew Tippit, nor is there any credible evidence that Weissman was ever in the club. That’s the Commission conclusion. That statement is an outright falsehood, because Jack Ruby never denied he was at the meeting. You can read every word of Ruby’s testimony now published, and he never denied it. This is exactly the question that was put to him by Rankin, Counsel of the Commission, and later put to him within five minutes by Earl Warren. Rankin said: “Mr. Ruby, there is a story around that you were at a meeting with Tippit and Weissman and a rich oil man.” Now where did that rich oil man come from? It must be Thomas Buchanan’s rich oil man. “You were present at meeting with Tippit and Weissman and a rich oil man in Dallas at your club. Is that true? Were you there?” Now suppose you were Jack Ruby and you were there with Tippit and Weissman and you were asked that question, might not you answer just the way Ruby did? He said: “Rich oil man. Who’s this rich oil man?” Counsel for the Commission said: Well, we’re trying to get the information from you. Do you know any rich oil men?” Now we’re all talking about rich oil men instead of the meeting, and Ruby’s very accommodating, he says: “Well, there are only two people I know who might be called rich oil men. One is a man who is now rich and he used to dabble in oil, and the other’s the man who now owns the Stork Club, and he used to dabble in oil, but I wouldn’t call either one of them rich oil men.” Then the Chief Justice moves in with this statement: “This is the story given to us by Mark Lane”, which is of course totally untrue because you were accurately presented the information as it is in the Commission's Report. In terms of my testimony there were three people, not four, and no rich oil man at all. Anyway, the Chief Justice said: “This story was given to us by Mark Lane. It was in the newspapers.” That’s not true, it was never in the newspapers, at that time. “So we subpoenaed him.” It’s not true, they did not subpoena me, they asked me to come, and I went voluntarily. “And he told us that there were these four people present.” It’s not true, I said three. He said: “However, we wanted to ask you this question, Mr. Ruby, and get your answer, and that is that.”

There was only one person at that hearing who was not satisfied to let that matter rest there, and that was Jack Ruby. He said: “Well, when did this meeting take place?” The Chief Justice said “I don’t have the exact date, but some time a week or two before the assassination.” What does he mean, he didn’t have the exact date? When I testified, I gave him the exact date and he had my testimony before him. If he didn’t he could have secured it easily enough. It’s a Commission exhibit. “I don’t have the exact dates, a week or two before.”

Then Ruby asked another good question. There was some very good questioning taking place that day, but it was all being done by Jack Ruby. Ruby used to call him Earl every once in a while, the Chief Justice, and he said: “Well, Earl, let me ask you this. Was it known at that time that the President was going to be in Dallas when that meeting took place?” That was an excellent question. If the meeting was related to the assassination, was it known that the President was coming to Dallas? I didn’t know when I testified on March 4th, but I know it now because I read it in the Commission Report. It was known on November 13th at a meeting of the Dallas Police Department – the Dallas Police Officers including those on J.D. Tippit’s squad - that this was the route which was going to be established, taking in this general area (1). That route was set on November 13th, and the next day Ruby, Tippit and Weissman met in the Carousel Club. The Chief Justice said: “Well, look, Lane won’t give us the source, and so we’re just going to leave the matter as it is, and that is that,” cutting Ruby off again. And Ruby said: “Look, I don’t want any matter to be gone over lightly. I want you to dig into everything, now matter how embarrassing it is for me. I want you to delve into it deeply. Ask me any personal, biting question you want. Ask me anything about that.” He said: “My background’s not too bad. I used to be involved in sporting events and sold tickets to people. You meet all kinds of people in Chicago selling tickets for sporting events.” And then the Chief Justice came in with a most incisive question. He said: “Did you sell tickets to the prize fights?” Well, Ruby talked about the prize fights for a while, and as soon as he finished talking about the prize fights, Counsel for the Commission, Mr. Rankin, stepped in and said: “Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party or any other subversive organisation?” and Ruby said, no, he was a loyal, patriotic citizen who would never do such a thing, and they never got back to the question of the meeting, never again.

The he was questioned by the FBI as the record shows, for a Polygraph test – that’s a lie detector test – and he was asked this question three times by agents of the FBI and it’s in the records: “Were you present at a meeting with Tippit and Oswald at your club?” and he swore that he was never present at that meeting. Tippit and Oswald, that’s possibly where D.W. Brogan gets that story from. But he was never asked: “Were you present with Tippit and Weissman?” and he never gave an answer. When the Commission says that he denied that he was present, the Commission is publishing an outright false statement, and they know it, because the testimony shows that the statement is unrelated to the testimony before it.

There are a lot of interesting things about Jack Ruby’s entrance into the jail that day. First of all, if Mrs. Hill is right, then Ruby was here (1) on the scene when the President was shot. Ruby was in the hospital. He was in the hospital when the President’s death was announced. Now we know that because there are two witnesses before the Commission. One is a woman who said: “I saw Ruby there. I was standing two or three feet away from him, right at the hospital.” What does the Commission say about her? “We don’t believe her. She admitted she never saw Ruby before and saw him only briefly then, so we discount her testimony.” How about Brennan? He never saw Oswald before. If he saw him then, he only saw him briefly then, at a much greater distance than two or three feet. They don’t raise those qualifying questions about Brennan’s testimony. And then there’s another person who comes before the Commission. Seth Kantor, a very distinguished reporter of the Scripps-Howard Publications in America, said: “I know Ruby as well as I know my own brother. I’ve known him for five years. I know him well.” He said: “It hurts me to say this, but I was in Parkland Hospital when it was announced that the President had died, and the only people in that hospital were doctors, people in the President’s entourage, and reporters, Federal and local police, and Jack Ruby.” He said: “There was Jack Ruby there, and I walked up to him , and I said, ‘Jack. My God, what are you doing here in the hospital?’ and Ruby turned around and he said. ‘You know, if the President dies,’ – it had not yet been announced that the President had died, it was after one, before one-thirty p.m. November 22nd – ‘If the President dies, you know Seth, that would be very bad for business for the night club owners in Dallas, very bad for business.’” That was probably the beginning of the fugue that we heard about, that he went into because he was so deeply devoted to the President that he had to go out and kill the man who was charged with the commission of the crime.

Well, the Commission doesn’t want to believe Seth Kantor. Now Seth Kantor’s one of the most distinguished reporters in America, and he said: “I knew the fellow for five years, and I had a conversation with him in the hospital. I said: ‘My God, Jack, what are you doing in the hospital?’ and he said: ‘If the President dies that will be bad for business.” The Commission cannot say Seth Kantor is a liar, not unless they want to bring down the wrath of some of the Scripps-Howard Publications upon them. They merely say Seth Kantor is wrong. He is mistaken. “Most probably,” says the Commission, “Most probably Kantor saw Ruby in the basement of the Court House the following day and has mistaken this.” Sure, that’s what happened. He walked up to him in the basement of the Court House and said: “My God, what are you doing here in the hospital?” and the day after it was announced that the President had died, Ruby replied immediately: “If the President should die, will that be bad for business.” Well, the Commission concludes just that which it wants to conclude, but if it is true that Ruby was here on the scene (1) when the President was killed, and if it is true that Ruby was in the Parkland Hospital when it was announced that the President had died, and it is true that he was present when Oswald died, even the Commission discovered that, then one might ask why Ruby was so involved with it all.

What’s Ruby’s story? Ruby’s story is this. He was down the overpass way at the Dallas Morning News at 12.15 on November 22nd in the afternoon, placing an advertisement for his nightclub. Well, he always went there Saturday night or Sunday morning after the last show, two or three o’clock in the morning. For years that’s the only time he went down to place an advertisement, and now all of a sudden, the first time in his life he was there, and swears that he was down there. He was seen at 12.15, and no one saw him again until 12.45. No one knows where he was during that half-hour, the half-hour during which the President was shot. Fifteen minutes before the shots, and fifteen minutes afterwards, nobody knows where Jack Ruby was. He’s the man so in love with the President that the thought that the President was killed by this punk as he said upset him so that he went into a fugue and went out and killed Oswald in an absolute passion, because he was in love with the President. Never saw the President in his life. Never even voted for him. He had the chance to in 1960. And here he is, the first and only time in his life he has an opportunity to see the President of the United States, the man he’s been in love with all these years, and all it takes is a two minute walk to this point, two minutes and he will see the President, the man for whom he was willing to kill someone thereafter. All he had to do was walk two minutes. He says he didn’t bother. He stayed in the Dallas Morning News and waited till the car had passed by. He wasn’t interested in seeing the President.

His Attorney, Joe Tonahill, summed up for the jury this way: “If you find Ruby guilty of murder with premeditation,” murder with malice it’s called in Dallas, meaning he had meditated the crime in advance, “You must reach this conclusion: Since it was known that Oswald was going to be transferred at ten o’clock in the morning, and since Ruby did not arrive on the scene till after eleven thirty, when one could assume that Oswald would have been long since transferred, if you come to the conclusion that there was murder with premeditation, murder with malice, you must first reach the conclusion that Ruby was involved in a conspiracy with the Dallas Police to kill Oswald, because otherwise how would he know that when the Police announced ten o’clock in the morning he could wait till an hour and a half later, stroll into the basement somehow, past the Dallas Police, unseen by the Dallas Police (that’s one mystery the Commission never clears up, how Ruby got into that basement), walk past the Dallas Police and arrive in the basement less than thirty seconds before Oswald was brought down, and place himself at the only place in the basement where Oswald could be shot, because this is a little cubicle that Oswald was being brought out into.” Here (just behind the basement door) was the little police car with the door open, and here on the outside (to the side of the car) were big armoured cars which were decoys into which everyone thought Oswald was going to be placed, but actually he was just going to be walked into there (the police car). “Somehow, though, Ruby knew,” said his Attorney, “if there was premeditation, that he could get there an hour and half late, somehow get passed the Dallas Police, walk to this point thirty seconds before Oswald was brought in, and then catch him right at that point, the only place where he could possibly be shot, and,” said Mr. Tonahill, “if you find Ruby guilty of murder with malice, you have come to the conclusion that the Dallas Police were involved in a conspiracy to kill Oswald.” They found him guilty.

I don’t think that means they passed upon this proposition at all. I don’t think the jury necessarily concluded that Ruby was involved in a conspiracy with the Dallas Police, but the questions which Mr. Tonahill raised so eloquently in Ruby’s defence are questions which have to be considered, and so does this question: When Ruby testified before Earl Warren, he said: “Mr. Chief Justice,” – it’s right in the records – “I know there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, I know there was a plot. Get me out of Dallas to where I’m safe. Get me out of this jail. Let me go to Washington for one day and I’ll tell you about that conspiracy.” The Chief Justice said: “Well, it’s getting to be time for lunch and we don’t have time to make preparations, because after lunch we have to go back to Washington. We don’t have time to make security preparations for you, so you’re going back to your jail cell. Is there anything else you want to tell us before you go?” He said: “Under these circumstances, no.” We are asked if we have confidence in the way this investigation was run. Of course we do not have confidence. We have no confidence in the investigation, nor in the fact that facts surrounding the assassination of the President have been suppressed by members of the Commission as well as by the Press and the media in the United States, which refused to allow any adequate comment or dialogue on these events.

Question from audience: You mentioned the fact that your name had been published in this Immigration Look-Out Book. I was wondering whether, in the course of any of your investigations, questioning or interviewing people, or attempting to have articles or books published in the United States after this event took place, you met any sort of Governmental interference at all?

Answer: Well, we have the general problem of all, or almost all the witnesses being told by the Dallas Police, the Secret Service, or the FBI – in some cases all three agencies – that they were not free to discuss the facts in the case. That was not directed at us very likely, but it affected our investigations as well. It was a direction which had no basis in law. They could not have been directed. They had no authority to direct these witnesses not to talk, but they did direct them. And I’ve been stopped by the FBI. We know through electronics engineers who’ve checked our telephone that my phones, both in my home and my office, are being tapped. I don’t know who is doing that, but I shouldn’t be surprised if it were agents of the United States Government. The FBI publishes lists every year. I don’t know how many millions of phones they have taped. If they were taping millions and not mine, I’d feel somewhat slighted.

Our major problem has been in terms of trying to get a dialogue in America, and it has not even been very easy to have a dialogue in England, frankly. Those are the only two countries in the whole world where there has not been a very serious dialogue and discussion in terms of what took place in Dallas. Here we have articles like this one in Peace News and such publications, and the Guardian, for example writes articles attacking, very personally, members of the “Who Killed Kennedy?” Committee. In many cases, the publications which do that here deny to those who are attacked room in the Letters to the Editor column just for defence of themselves and their own participation, and so our major problem has been, in the United States, and to a lesser extent, but still to a considerable extent, in England as well, an effort to begin a dialogue. This is still totally impossible in the United States. There’s not been one network television programme or radio programme, not one anywhere in America, for more than a year now, which has raised a single question about the Warren Commission Report, and not only about the Report, now that it has been released, but about any portion of the case as it was presented.

We had that which purported to be a debate scheduled. Les Crane – I don’t know if he’s known here. He is supposed to be Mr. Controversy. He has all kinds of controversial programmes – as long as they’re non-controversial – on national television network programmes in the United States. He invited Mr. Belli, Ruby’s trial Counsel, to debate with me the Warren Commission findings. I accepted, Mr. Belli accepted, and the programme was cancelled by the network upon advice from their legal department. The department took the position that there could be no such debate as proposed by Mr. Crane. Instead they would work out a different programme. They came back with the suggestion that there should be a debate. It should be between Melvin Belli, who is a very able, flamboyant lawyer, with a vast amount of factual information on one hand. Representing the accused on the other hand, raising doubts about the Commission Report, was going to be Lee Oswald’s mother. Well, this was supposed to be a debate.

I have great respect for her tenacity in raising these questions, although I would differ from her very, very often in terms of conclusions, in terms of judgement based upon the same set of facts. I don’t say this to demean her, but she is a woman who has never had any real, any formal education at all, and she was to take on one of the quickest and most able Attorneys in the United States, one of the best trial lawyers in America. When he said: “Do you deny that at such and such a date this and that was the finding of the autopsy report about the 19th rib,” etc. etc. She kept on saying: “Look, I’m just his mother and I believe he’s innocent. That’s all I can say.” Well this was the great debate. I called Mr. Crane, and I said: “How could you do that? On what basis did ABC TV make the determination that the debate was alright and that I was not to be permitted to debate Mr. Belli?” He said: “Well, I’ll tell you frankly. The legal department of ABC said: ‘Don’t have Lane on. He’s got the affidavits. He’s got the evidence. Have Mrs. Oswald on. It will be a much better show’.” Better, depending on your objective.

Question from audience

Answer: I don’t know if there’s any connection between the murder of Officer Tippit and the assassination of the President. We have two eyewitnesses. One who the Commission called, Mrs. Markham, strikes me as being such an unreliable witness, that even her description of the man who did it as being short, stock with somewhat bushy hair is suspect, frankly. I think that her conduct before the Commission and the fact that she’d been questioned so repeatedly by members of the FBI and the Secret Service and the Dallas Police, renders her testimony, probably, valueless at this point. It was by the time she reached the Commission. But in addition to this, there is a woman who was near the scene. Her name is Acquilla Clemmons. She said she saw the shots fired. The Commission never called her although we informed them of her existence, and she said: “I saw the man who did it. He was short and he was fat.” That was the only description. Now Mrs. Markham tended to make statements, thereafter, based upon what she saw when the shots were fired which seem to have been statements which she gathered from talking to others at the scene. I know she talked to Mrs. Clemmons, and this description of a short, stocky, bushy-haired man might have come from the fact that Mrs. Clemmons described the assailant to her. For example, Mrs. Markham said: “As soon as Tippit was shot, I saw that he had been shot twice in the head and twice in the chest.” Now, that’s what she saw immediately, while she was with him. The ambulance driver, who had some medical training, and the assistant ambulance driver who was back in the ambulance with Tippit, did not know that Tippit was shot in the chest until after he was brought into the hospital and they removed his jacket. No blood came through his jacket and the bullet holes in his chest were so small that the bullets did not exit and were not visible. The first moment the ambulance driver and the assistant ambulance driver knew that Tippit had been shot anywhere other than in the head (which was pretty badly blown apart) was after the body was taken to the hospital. Yet Mrs. Markham, who has no medical training at all, said: “As soon as I saw him, I knew he had been shot in the chest and head.” Then she identified the shirt, after saying that she couldn’t see the colour of the shirt at all. She tended to continually present a view based upon what other witnesses at the scene had already reported in the press, and I think that she just, maybe unconsciously, maybe consciously, presented evidence which was not what she had seen herself. So I don’t know if she was of any value at all in any respect.

Question from audience: I’d like to ask what I think will be rather a basic question, that is, what possible reason could the Johnson Democratic Administration have for hiding the facts about the assassination of President Kennedy?

Answer: Well, I can think of many possible reasons, one a very obvious one, but there is one which is overwhelming. Let’s just remember what the Commission said about the FBI. The Commission never blamed the FBI or the Dallas Police, the Commission was very kind to the law enforcement authorities. All they said about the Dallas Police was that there seemed to be some kind of breakdown of communications among the agencies. In fact, after Oswald was shot to death in the basement of the Court House while handcuffed to a law enforcement official, all the Commission could say was that they were faced with unique problems as the Press wanted to come into the room. Under the circumstances, they said, the Dallas Police took rather good precautions. Well, one shudders to think what might have happened to Oswald if the Dallas Police didn’t take those fine precautions that day. He might have been killed in the basement or something. So they were very kind to the authorities, very kind.

All they said about the FBI was there was a breakdown of information in the FBI. Since they knew about Oswald they should have given that information out. There was a breakdown of communication. Well, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, has attacked the Warren Commission violently for taking that position. Newsweek magazine had a cover story about Hoover that talks about how Hoover may be finished now. Why? I mean there are many reasons why he should have been finished many years ago, but why would he be finished now? McCarthy could say anything that he wanted in America until he attacked the United States Army. No one can attack the United States Army and remain in political life in America. J. Edgar Hoover, the most powerful single man in America for more than twenty years has taken on a sacred cow now as important as the United States Army – the conclusions of the Warren Commission. He has been very sharp in terms of taking them on, and he may now be at the end of his leadership of the FBI because he’s dared to attack the Commission.

What did the Commission say? “There was a breakdown of communications.” Suppose the Commission told the truth. Suppose the Commission said whether the shots came from here (overpass) or from here (grassy knoll) – an area of three to four hundred feet? The place was an armed camp, with Dallas Police Officers all over the area and FBI agents all over the area. In addition to that, there were Secret Service agents all over the area in cars – carloads of them with sub-machine guns in their hands. It was an armed camp when the shots were fired. There was nobody up here (knoll). There was nobody in the Book Depository Building, nobody on the roof, nobody in front of the target, nobody in this whole bunch of trees. In fact, the former Director of the Secret Service said: “Our most serious problem in protecting the life of an American President came up when Eisenhower was President, because he was always on the golf course, and on the golf course there are many hills with trees and bushes.” He said this in 1961 in a Look magazine article: The classic place from which to shoot a President, the classic places we always examine most closely, are grassy hills with bushes and trees. Well, here’s a grassy hill with bushes and trees, and there was no Secret Service man or FBI Agent, or Dallas Police Officer anywhere around there, although the place was an armed camp. Now the very least one can say is that the Federal and local authorities failed in their obligations to protect the President, and because of their absolute failure the President was killed on November 22nd. That is the very least one can say about those authorities.

The day before the assassination, November 21st, the Secret Service, in order to reassure the American people, who were deeply concerned about that trip to Dallas, said that the greatest precautions in the history of America would be taken the next day in Dallas. Now why? Because Lee Harvey Oswald was there? Of course not. Because in 1960, when Lyndon Johnson was a candidate for the Vice-Presidency he was attacked, spat upon, and his wife was spat upon, in the Adolphus Hotel on Dallas, Texas. They started chanting: “You’re a Commie. You’re running with that Commie Kennedy.” He went on a Texas network television broadcast from Houston, Texas the next day in order to tell about his fear of the violent right wing in Dallas.

Then there was the advertisement on November 22nd. Before then, October 24th, Adlai Stevenson spoke on the leadership role the United States must continue to have in the U.N. While he was there he was jeered and booed by the violent right wing, and when he left he was physically assaulted, struck over the head with a club by a group of right wing extremists, one of whom was later arrested and charged with assault on Adlai Stevenson. That’s why Stevenson wrote to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and said: “Please tell the President not to go to Dallas. It’s not safe.” There were leaflets given out all over Dallas. “Wanted for Treason”, they said. There were leaflets and a set of posters with two pictures. One had a profile of President Kennedy, and one a full face picture with big letters: “Wanted for Treason”. What had he done? He was in favour of giving Negroes equal rights, and other such treasonable activities against the best interests of the American people. That was given out. Now everybody knew about the terrible problems of the President’s trip to Dallas, and they had nobody guarding this whole area, nobody in the Book Depository Building, nobody at all. The very least one can say was that these authorities failed absolutely in an obligation of which they were well aware before. Then you go beyond that and say: “Wherever the shots came from – from here (overpass) or here (knoll) or anywhere in between – the place was an armed camp and they never caught the guy who did it.” They never caught him. They heard the shots. They could have run to where he was somehow and caught him, or failing to do that they could have sealed off the area. They could have sealed off that area and they’d have caught him in a net.

Now when Frank Sinatra, Jr., was kidnapped, a few days after the assassination – which was a very important case, but I suggest, less important than this one – the FBI moved in after they’d had fifteen minutes notice in the wide open city of Los Vegas. They had fifteen minutes notice , and they established a net. They closed off the whole city. They set up road blocks at every single major intersection. They cut off the means of exit in terms of having agents at the railroad stations, the bus terminals, the planes, and every bridge. No one could get out of that city with Frank Sinatra, Jr., in the car. Now Junior was cramped in the back of the trunk, tied up there and gagged. Unfortunately, although the road blocks were very effectively set up, they were not too well manned, because when the FBI Agents stopped the car which had Junior in the trunk and checked it out, they forgot to look in the trunk. So they drove Junior through the roadblock. But at least one can say this about the FBI in that important case: They tried. But here you can’t say that.

I’ve talked to a French reporter who was over here (near the car) and after the shots were fired he met with a group of reporters – all non-American reporters – and discussed the case. They said: “You know, you are never going to get out of this area. None of us will get out of this area. We are going to be kept here for days, maybe for weeks. They’re going to close off the whole area, no one will be able to leave. Every single person will have to explain what he was doing when the shots were fired. In our country,” they said, “it would be done. They always close off these areas, if there is anything close to an attempt upon the Head of State, much less a successful assassination.” This reporter said: “I have to fly back to France. My relief has already arrived, and my vacation begins tomorrow. I have to fly back this afternoon.” They laughed and said: “Well, you’ll never get out.” He said: “Well, at least I’ll get a good story. I’ll go back to the Book Depository Building and hail a taxi, and say: ‘Take me to the airport.’ I’ll be arrested somewhere along the line, and I’ll write a first-hand account about the efficient American police.” So he went up to the Book Depository Building and stopped a taxi, and said “Take me to Love Field” – that’s the name of the airport in Dallas. He was driven to Love Field, got out at Love Field, and never saw a cop anywhere. He got on his plane and flew to Paris. No one ever talked to him.

Now they didn’t seal off the area. No effort was ever made. Even if it was Oswald who fired the shots, he was four miles away when he was caught. All they ever did was to send out Oswald’s description after the shots were fired. We don’t know when it was first sent out. We know that at 12.45 it was sent out, because the Commission asked for the transcript of all the broadcasts of the Dallas Police for that whole day. The Dallas Police gave them all the transcripts, with the exception of those starting at 12.26 up to 12.34 (the assassination was 12.30), four minutes before the assassination and four minutes after. There was just a note: “The transmitter broke down for eight minutes” – the only time it broke down all day. But we know that at 12.45 at the very latest, Oswald’s description was dispatched. That’s right in the transcript of the broadcast. Well, they never caught the assassin, and made no effort to maintain anyone in the area. They just sent out Oswald’s description and they caught him. He was dead within forty-eight hours, maintaining his innocence all the time, but denied the right to see a lawyer to tell the story and where he was, to anyone. Well, the very least the Commission must say, (even if Oswald did it, and they concluded that he did), is that the breakdown of the activity of the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Dallas Police was a national disgrace.

Firstly the President had been killed without their making any effort to protect him, and secondly their failure to apprehend the assassin within the area is an indication that the United States needs new police agencies. These are worthless – the very kindest statement one can make. If you go beyond that, then you talk about complicity of these agencies in the assassination. I have no such evidence about that. If I ever do secure such evidence, I will make it public in a public meeting held in Zanzibar or some such place. The very least you can say is that they failed in their obligations to prevent the assassination, to take some constructive steps to protect the President, and then to catch the assassin. If the Commission had said just that, there would have been war in America, because just saying there was a breakdown in communications was enough to bring about a sharp attack upon the Commission, and possibly the resignation of the Director of the FBI for having raised that question. So, if there was no other motivation other than the protection of the status quo in terms of the Secret Police in the United States, that might be sufficient motivation for the Commission’s front, and there may be other motivations as well.

Question from audience

Answer: Well, it depends, you mean from here, or from here? Well, the third shot was fired when the car was roughly here. By the time the fourth shot was fired the car might have been here. As it struck here it would have just missed. I don’t know where it was fired from actually. A Dallas Police Officer said he found a bullet. Later on they said he didn’t but there are pictures of Dallas Police Officers taken at the scene which were published in the French publications, not in the United States, and one in the Dallas Morning News as well, showing the Officer kneeling down pointing to the hole in the kerb. Now the Commission decided it wanted to examine the hole. The Commission could see that there was a hole there which had barium and antimony on it which comes from a bullet. The Commission wanted to examine that kerb. They were very interested in it, so they had it removed in the middle of August. That bullet hole had remained in Dallas over half the year, subjected to anything any vandals wanted to do (if they wanted to change the evidence) and subjected to weather. It was right out there in the open.

In the middle of August the Commission decided it wanted to examine it, so they had the kerb removed and brought before them for examination. And there’s a fellow by the name of Mr. Tague who was standing there. There’s no question in his mind that his face was bleeding just after the shot was fired. He said he saw it hit the kerb. There were others who were standing there (on pavement), at least three others, two here (on grass) and one here (by kerb) who said they saw flame come up from the kerb as the bullet actually struck the concrete. I didn’t say there were four shots. I just said there was testimony that one struck here, and there’s an indication that at least three other shots were fired. In addition to that, Mrs. Hill, a Dallas Public School teacher standing there said there were at least four, maybe as many as six shots, and many have testified that more than three shots were fired. Now, testimony of the number of shots that one hears in such a crisis situation has to be looked at very cautiously, because they can think they hear four when in fact they hear three. But there were a number of people who said there were more than three shots fired.

[Paul Rigby]

A full list of the audience's details is available upon request from MI5 and, of course, Langley:

The British ‘who killed Kennedy?’ Committee, December 1964 (Pamphlet, 32pp)

The Warren Commission Report and the Assassination [part 2 of 2: Lane's responses to questions from the audience]

By Mark Lane

This is a transcript taken from a tape recording made of Mark Lane’s extemporaneous lecture.

And so to the home of lost causes…

Oxford Opinion, (3), June 1965, p.5

Editorial

It is a sad indictment of the University’s powers of criticism that two of its Senior Members’ controversial analysis of the Warren Report was inaccurate or based on false premises. The Regius Professor of Modern History, who attacked it, committed one major blunder; the Warden of All Souls, who defended it, made the double discrimination of quoting evidence at variance with other sources.

The real point about the Warren Report is that it bends over backwards to present the world with a simple case of a lone, insane assassin, and discards, often without comment, all the evidence to the contrary. There are good grounds for supposing that not only would Oswald have been denied a fair hearing, but that action was taken to ensure that he would never be brought to trial. The total of discrepancies is so large that it seems impossible that the Commission could not be aware of them.

Apart from the rather irrelevant debate between Sparrow and Trevor-Roper, the British Press had studiously ignored all adverse criticism of the Warren Report. At first, because they were afraid of the implications; now, because it has lost its immediacy. But the contradictory evidence has still not been brought to the attention of the public, and the implications remain: that the authorities are not prepared to see the whole truth brought out into the open. By allowing the affair to drift into obscurity, we are playing into the hands of those who would prefer their part to be quickly forgotten.

And after the hors d’oeuvre…

Oxford Opinion, (3), June 1965, pp.10-13

Warren Report: Fraud or Failure?

By Roger Macdonald

MARK LANE

It is impossible to disbelieve the Warren Report if the Summary is the reader’s only source of information. Without the volumes of evidence as a background, any observations such as Sparrow’s are naturally invalid. Lane’s case rests solely on his use of the evidence put forward by the Warren Commission.

Mark Lane became interested in the Kennedy affair when he wrote an article criticising police methods and contradictions arising from differing reports in the first few days after the assassination. His manuscript on the Warren Report reached an English publisher last week, and will be published in the autumn.

Recently he married a young Dane, whom he met after one of his lectures. His wife is devoted and it is obvious that their whole life is centred around this cause. Lane hopes to regain prestige when someone finally pays attention to his criticisms, but he is disappointed that people are so gullible in their belief in authority. He believes that all his lectures have been a success and he is resentful that no newspaper has given him fair coverage. Particularly he was surprised that the “Guardian” should be so adamant in its refusal of publicity. He is not bitter yet, but he has become such an outcast in his own country that he soon will be.

JOHN SPARROW

When Mark Lane finished his lecture at Oxford, he was asked if John Sparrow was present. The latter reluctantly stood up: “Is there anything, one thing, in the whole of my speech with which you can find fault, Professor Sparrow?”

Sparrow mumbled that he wasn’t a professor and nervously put forward some suggestions. Lane advanced many well-documented arguments. Sparrow’s only defence was: “As you know, Mr. Lane, I haven’t read the 26 volumes.”

Recently we asked Warden Sparrow if he had changed his opinions: “No,” he said, “if anything my belief has strengthened since my debate with Mark Lane. I have nothing further to add to my original discussion with Trevor-Roper. I don’t possess copies of the 26 volumes – have you ever tried to get hold of them?

“No, I don’t attach any importance to the fact that they are so difficult to get at, and that there’s no index. I’ve looked at them sometimes at Rhodes House, but they’re half photographs. No, what importance would there be? The American government certainly went to a great deal of trouble to distribute the Summary and that wasn’t expensive.”

HUGH TREVOR-ROPER

Professor Trevor-Roper would not reveal the nature of his discussion with Mark Lane when he came to Oxford earlier this year. “Lane is careless and inclined to exaggerate. But under his direction the American Citizen’s Committee has persisted in performing much meritorious work. Lane’s trouble is that his mind is already made up, but, apart from this and certain other reservations, I have nothing but admiration for the man and his work.

“Any group that might uncover fresh information has my approval, but even though I am on the ‘Who Killed Kennedy’ Committee I don’t know what it does: I just lend my name to it.I don’t think that the British press has tried to suppress any facts. Possibly there is some inhibition, but …if Lane met with any difficulties that’s probably because the Press is bored with him. I don’t think there’s any government policy on the subject.

“My opinions haven’t changed, but I don’t anticipate any future developments. Unfortunately the trail is going cold.”

In December 1964, the ‘Who Killed Kennedy’ Committee began a full scale offensive against the Warren Report. Mark Lane, the U.S. Attorney, visited England on a lecture tour and delivered a painstaking criticism of the Report at University College, London, on 10th December. Three days later, probably by prior arrangement, Hugh Trevor-Roper, then in the United States, made a formidable attack in the Sunday Times on the Commission’s interpretation of evidence. But the offensive failed within a matter of weeks because the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford failed to check his sources, and he was caught out on one major error by John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls. Sparrow was permitted to quote from the abbreviated version of the Report as though it were the Book of Genesis. Mark Lane’s lectures were too complicated to be assimilated by his audiences, and they were studiously ignored by the British Press.

The day after the Report was published (Sept.28th), the Times published a leader. “There is no mistaking the stamp of honesty,” it said, “in the Warren Commission’s report on President Kennedy’s murder. It is thorough, painstaking, voluminous, frank, and above all else scrupulously careful in its analysis and conclusions.”

The Times does not care to explain how its U.S. correspondent, let alone its leader writer, managed to digest 26 volumes of testimony in less than 24 hours. The number of people who have read the full report remains exceptionally small. It contains no index; its price, $75, is prohibitive; Blackwells suggest that it could take a whole year to obtain a set from America. The Bodleian Library at Oxford still has not received a set, despite its millions of books. In contrast to Warden Sparrow’s attempted refutation of Trevor-Roper from the misleading summary, Mark Lane has analysed the full report from cover to cover. He adequately demonstrates that the Warren Commission’s findings are, at best, the case for the Prosecution; and that there is another case for the Defence.

THE SHOTS WHICH KILLED PRESIDENT KENNEDY AND WOUNDED GOVERNOR CONNALLY WERE FIRED FROM THE SIXTH FLOOR WINDOW AT THE SOUTH-EAST CORNER OF THE TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY.

Some of the witnesses, who were not called, thought differently. The Dallas Morning News published the impressions of four reporters on the day following the murder:

“We heard the shots. It was a horrible, ear-shattering roar coming from right behind us and a little to our right: right behind the bushes, right behind the fence.”

A railroad yardman:

“Just after the shots were fired at the President, I thought I saw someone throw something into those bushes.”

Conclusions of the Commission:

“There is no credible evidence whatsoever to support the theory that the shots came from this area.”

THE SHOTS WHICH KILLED PRESIDENT KENNEDY AND WOUNDED GOVERNOR CONNALLY WERE FIRED BY LEE HARVEY OSWALD.

The 6.5 mm. Italian rifle from which the shots were fired was owned and in the possession of Oswald

The inscription on the rifle is so clear that only an idiot could have signed an affidavit, as P.C. Seymour Weitzmann did on November 23rd, that the gun was a German Mauser, 7.65mm. But Weitzmann is a graduate engineer, who owned a sporting goods shop for several years and who was familiar with rifles of all kinds.

Oswald carried this rifle into the Depository Building on the morning of November 22nd 1963.

Although Warden Sparrow succeeded in proving that Professor Trevor-Roper was mistaken in his claim that the police destroyed the original paper bag in which Oswald is said to have carried his rifle, the fact remains that the witnesses who saw Oswald with a bag at the Depository insisted it was too short to have contained the weapon. Of the 3-foot package in front of the Commission, Wesley Frazier said:

“I am sure he did not carry that, it was a much smaller bag, much thinner and shorter.”

Conclusions of the Commission:

“Frazier could easily have been mistaken when he stated that Oswald held the bottom of the bag tucked in his hand with the upper end tucked into his armpit.”

A rifleman of Lee Harvey Oswald’s capabilities could have fired the shots from the rifle and in the assassination within the elapsed time of the shooting.

THE WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT THERE WERE THREE SHOTS FIRED.

Oswald’s two firing scores in the Marine Corps were 212 and 191, the second only one mark above the minimum qualifying score. Mark Lane points out that “the Commission…secured three of the best shots in all of America to test the weapon…and they had them fire at three stationary targets.”

With 6 seconds accepted at the time elapsing between the first and last shot, these experts could manage only three. Therefore, as James Tague testified that one bullet hit the kerb by the new triple underpass and shot concrete up into his face, one of the other bullets must have hit Connally and Kennedy.

Governor Connally said: “I heard the bullet strike the President. I heard the shot, and I turned to the left; and then I was struck.”

To have struck Connally the bullet would have to pass through Kennedy’s body evading all bone structure. This was possible only with the entrance position finally fixed on the President’s body. The hole in his jacket and coat was 3½ inches below.

Conclusions of the Commission:

“Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally…”

OSWALD KILLED DALLAS POLICE PATROLMAN J. D. TIPPIT APPROXIMATELY 45 MINUTES AFTER THE ASSASSINATION.

Domingo Benedes: “I was so upset I did not see anything. I could not identify anyone.”

Helen Louise Markham (in the presence of Dallas Reporter Hugh Aynesworth): “Yes, I saw the man who killed Tippit, I saw him very clearly, he was short, he was stocky, he was on the heavy side, and he had brown bushy hair.” (Oswald: medium height, thin, receding hair.)

(On the Identity Parade): “I have never seen none of them…Number two was the one I picked…I was not sure, but then I had cold chills all over me.”

(To Mark Lane, on tape): “he was short, somewhat stocky, and with bushy hair.”

Commission:

“We conclude, addressing ourselves solely to the probative value of Mrs. Markham’s contemporaneous description of the gunman and her positive identification of Oswald at the police lineups…that her testimony is reliable.”

Mr. Ball, Councillor for the Commission (sole questioner of Mrs. Markham): “Mrs. Markham is an utter screwball; there is no question about that.”

This conflicting evidence alone is surely sufficient to show that there is reasonable doubt that Oswald committed two murders. But, as Lane says, there are signs that other evidence which did not fit the ‘facts’ was suppressed. The Dallas Police Force made the incredible claim that their 12-hour interrogation of Oswald had been conducted without notes of nay kind; by an equally incredible coincidence their transmitter broke down for an eight minute period around the assassination, and there is no transcript of that either. James J. Hume, the Naval Doctor, burned his notes on the autopsy: there can be no other explanation than that he was ordered to do so. The F.B.I. took away the X-ray plates of the autopsy before they could be developed, and they did not appear in the Report. One of the doctors who changed his testimony told a Newsweek reporter: “There is much about this case that I know that I am not permitted to discuss.”

On several occasions the Commission actually shut up witnesses who attempted to give conflicting evidence. For example, when Officer Weitzmann testified talking to the railroad yardman who saw someone throw something into the bushes, Mr. Ball said: “I think that is all. That is enough testimony.” The Commission never called the railroad yardman, nor did they make any effort to find him.

The Commission described the Dallas police line-ups as “scrupulous fairness.” A Dallas taxi-driver, William Whaley, thought otherwise.

“I could have picked out Oswald with my eyes closed…There he was on one side of the stage wearing a ‘T’ shirt, handcuffed with both hands together. On the other side there were five young teenagers, 14, 15, 16 years old, handcuffed together. There was Oswald, he was saying out loud, we all heard it, he said ‘You call this a fair line-up, this is not a fair line-up.”

Earl Warren did not want the job of investigating Kennedy’s assassination. He went to see Johnson several times, and when he finally accepted, he left the White House in great distress. Mark Lane describes him as “the man with the greatest integrity of all the members of the Commission. I question the integrity of a number of members of the Commission and their competence in general…It was made up of political appointees…Of the seven members, only …one besides the Chief Justice, have any background in terms of the courts at all…We were told by the New York Times: ‘This represents a vast cross section of the American people.’ The two democrats happen to be racist Southern Dixiecrats… Hale Boggs of Louisiana and Richard Russell of Georgia. The two republicans were Cooper of Kentucky and Congressman Ford, who is Goldwater’s sparkplug, who has been selling his articles, which contain false materials from beginning to end, widely throughout the United States. In addition to that, we have Mr. McCloy, the former High Commissioner for Germany, and the former Director of the C.I.A., Allen Dulles, who was fired from that position by John Fitzgerald Kennedy. So you have a seven-man Commission, made up of five Republicans and two Southern Democrats, and in addition to that, every bit of evidence presented by the Commission originated with the Dallas Police.”

If Oswald was innocent, or, more plausibly, not the only guilty person, the probable alternative to a lone assassin is a major conspiracy. A leading professional citizen in Dallas, who asked Mark Lane not to reveal his name, saw Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner, Police Officer Tippit, and Bernard Weissmann (who placed a full-page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News on November 22nd: “Welcome to Dallas, Mr. President, why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favour of the Spirit of Moscow?”) meet at the Carousel Club on November 14th. Oswald was not at the meeting, but a curious chain emerged later when Tippit’s wife accused Marina Oswald of sleeping with her husband. Ruby went all over Dallas on November 23rd, saying: “J.D. Tippit, the officer who was killed, was my friend…We were very close.” Ruby pops up everywhere. Mrs. Hill, a Dallas Public School teacher, testified: “I saw a man standing there (near the tracks by the grassy knoll) just after the shots were fired…That man is Jack Ruby. I saw Jack Ruby at the scene and he ran back behind the wall.”

[Paul Rigby]

In the days before O'Brien transformed himself into a Conservative Unionist...

The New Statesman, 14 January 1966, pp.50-51

The Life and Death of Kennedy

By Connor Cruise O’Brien

In Britain, I suppose, one is either a politician or not; in America, the line is not so clear. There, the cabinet-member or trusted adviser of one government does not usually go into opposition on the fall of that government; he goes back into private life, often with the hope of returning to politics when the government changes again. Normally, such hopes hinge on the alternations of the parties in power. At present it is not so much a question of Democrat and Republican; there is an air of fin de republique around; a dynastic loyalty stirs; the servants of the murdered Caesar have much god to say of young Octavian. John Kennedy, Mr. Schlesinger* tells us, ‘was particularly proud of his brother, always balanced, never rattled, his eye fixed on the ultimate as well as on the immediate.’ ‘Bob’s unique role,’ says Mr. Sorensen** in his first chapter, ‘is implicit in nearly every chapter that follows.’ And Sorensen also reminds us of a pertinent observation made by John Kennedy in his senatorial days: ‘Just as I went into politics when Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow my brother Bobby would run for my seat.’

We can hear him running now, if we listen; Schlesinger and Sorensen are listening. Nothing in either of these important and valuable books is inconsistent with the hypothesis that both authors expect to serve, before long, in the administration of President Robert Kennedy. I believe that this expectation exists, is reasonable and honourable, and is a limiting factor on the candour, and therefore the value to the public, of both books. Mr. Sorensen has written a dry book, even a dull one: he could certainly produce a blaze if he chose, but his fires are banked; there is nothing in these sober pages that could embarrass or hamper a future Secretary of State. Granted the length of the book, the subjects treated, and the considerable amount of information conveyed, this feat is in itself a proof of Mr. Sorensen’s formidable talents.

Mr. Schlesinger, on the other hand, is entertaining, easy, sometimes witty; there is a touch of Pepys, of Boswell, even of Pooter about him, as he revels in it all. He is too much the writer, the don, even the ham, to be capable of Mr. Sorensen’s iron discretion. So much the better Mr. Schlesinger’s book, so much more remote, I suspect, Mr. Schlesinger’s person from the future throne. Happy consequences, both.

A Thousand Days has been much condemned, in America, for its ‘indiscretions’, and notably for disclosing that Kennedy planned to drop Dean Rusk. (‘Drop Rusk on Hanoi,’ said one of the peppier placards at the last Washington march.) All indiscretions are indiscreet – ‘if he did it once he may do it again’ – yet some indiscretions have an in-built teleological discretion at their core. This particular disclosure is a flaming indiscretion in the view of the Johnson administration since it diminishes what is called the ‘credibility’ of an already sufficiently improbable Secretary of State. But what is scandalous under Johnson, damaging to Johnson, may be helpful to the second Kennedy, and pardoned by him, with obvious reservations. In any case, entertaining as the book is, it certainly could have been much more entertaining: there are moments when one seems to hear the muffled struggle as some lively anecdote is suppressed for the time being. Nothing is here that could hurt any Kennedy candidature, no scarves are plucked from Caesar’s images.

Not that that particular Caesar had any real need of scarves. Both these books on Kennedy, which complement each other, record the emergence of an unmistakably great man: a powerful mind and indomitable will at work, steadily divesting themselves of the inherited and unnecessary, and beginning, towards the end, to master the multiple, unruly energies of the greatest power in history. The natural momentum of this power-system is towards world-domination: throughout the world ‘power-vacuums’ ‘have’ to be filled, dependents advised or admonished, potential enemies bought, besieged or destroyed. This sheer momentum dragged Kennedy through the Bay of Pigs and left him, on the far side, a sadder, dirtier and very much wiser man.

That salutary fiasco shattered, as these books show, all the idols of the Establishment – the Joint Chiefs, the State Department, and especially the CIA – and led Kennedy to depend increasingly on his own judgment, and on those whom he chose to consult informally. The momentum remained: he sought, with increasing success, to control it. That the attempted installation of Russian rockets in Cuba was answered not by invasion but by selective blockade, is proof of the degree of control he had won. What the momentum will do when not under the control of a human mind we have seen in the case of the Dominican Republic, invaded in a Texan reflex. Mr. Sorensen’s account of the Cuban missile crisis is sober, detailed and lucid; it is also a first-hand account and thereby to be preferred to Mr. Schlesinger’s. In the first Cuban crisis Mr. Schlesinger was present for the critical decisions, and Mr. Sorensen was not; in the second Cuban crisis Mr. Sorensen (working closely with Robert Kennedy) was involved in shaping the decisions, and Mr. Schlesinger was not. As Mr. Schlesinger says, President Kennedy grew while in office.

It should be impossible to read Mr. Sorensen’s account of those fateful 13 days without immense admiration for the President’s combination of nerve and prudence, his concern for leaving a way out open to his adversary, his refusal to posture during the events or to gloat after them.

Did I think so at the time? No, I did not. I resembled in this respect ‘the British’ who, Mr. Schlesinger says, greeted Kennedy’s speech – announcing the presence of the missiles – ‘with surprising scepticism.’ Mr, Schlesinger, of all people, has no call to be ‘surprised’ that people should treat with scepticism American announcements about Cuba. In this very book he himself describes the miasma of mendacity which the American official agencies spread around their Bay of Pigs operation. He himself played an active part in the creation of that miasma: in response to a challenge from the New York Times–arising from discrepancies between the version given in A Thousand Days and announcements of his own at the time of the Bay of Pigs – he has admitted (on Thanksgiving Day, 1965) that he lied to the public about the scale and nature of that operation. He did so in the national interest, of course, but the trouble about that is that one never knows when the national interest may not again require such a sacrifice.

I heard the late Adlai Stevenson make his statement to the Political Committee of the United Nations, explaining the authentically and uniquely Cuban nature of the ‘revolution against Castro’: this statement relied for its facts on what is now admitted to be the faked evidence of the CIA and for its ideology on Mr. Arthur J. Schlesinger Jr.’s doctrine of ‘The Revolution Betrayed’. One of the odder things about that shadowy world of credible and incredible images in which Mr. Schlesinger’s mind sometimes likes to move is that Harvard always turns out to be the best judge not only of how a revolution in a place like Cuba should be run, and of when it has been ‘betrayed’, but also of how a Cuban counter-revolution should be run and presented. Thus Mr. Schlesinger tells how the unfortunate émigrés in whose name the CIA ran the invasion prepared a manifesto to their compatriots and supporters. They addressed themselves, quite sensibly from their point of view, I should have thought, to those who had lost as a result of Castro’s victory and Batista’s fall: ‘the foreign investor, the private banker, the dispossessed property-owner’. Their manifesto had very little to say, Mr. Schlesinger points out reprovingly, to ‘the worker, the farmer or the Negro’. Mr. Schlesinger therefore scrapped this insufficiently Cuban and inadequately revolutionary document and invited ‘two Latin American specialists from Harvard’ to produce something more authentic. Shortly afterwards the Cubans who had failed to produce a manifesto capable of arousing Harvard were simply shut away in the deserted airbase of Opa-Locha while revolutionary propaganda, about which they were not consulted, continued to be issued in their name by a public relations expert employed by the CIA. It is disappointing that Mr. Schlesinger does not tell us how ‘the Negro’ in Cuba responded to the calls of freedom coking from Florida.

Apart from the sinister buffooneries of the Cuban crisis of 1961, it is in no way surprising that when the 1962 crisis broke, according to Mr. Schlesinger, ‘the British Ambassador, mentioning the dubious reaction in his own country, suggested the need for evidence’. This time the evidence was there: it was the Russians who were lying and had to climb down.

By the end of the second Cuban crisis Kennedy had little more than a year to live. He did not use his time in exploiting the immense ‘Cold War’ advantages which were his once the Russian cargo-ships had turned back and the missile-sites had been dismantled: he used his time and his advantage to re-examine the assumptions he had inherited and to seek accommodations, tolerable not only for America but for the rest of the world. He worked for and achieved the test-ban treaty; he began to feel his way, as these books show, towards a new relation with Castro’s Cuba; Castro himself observed to Jean Daniel, in the autumn of 1963, that the President had ‘come to understand many things over the past few months’. On Vietnam, too, a problem on which, as Mr. Schlesinger observes, he had hitherto had ‘little time to focus’, he began towards the end to concentrate his attention. Kennedy was clear at least on one important principle which his successors have ignored: ‘The war in Vietnam could be won only so long as it was their war. If it were ever converted into a white man’s war we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier’ (Schlesinger). He planned to see Ambassador Lodge on Sunday, 24 November, to ‘discuss his most vexing worry, Vietnam’. But on Friday, 22 November, the President who had ‘come to understand many things’ was murdered. ‘Es una mala noticia,’ said Castro.

Who killed Kennedy? Mr. Schlesinger does not attempt this question. But Mr. Sorensen’s comments are of interest, coming from so discreet and far-sighted a man. He pays the ritual tributes to the Warren Commission’s ‘painstaking investigation’, accepts also ‘the conclusion that no plot or political motive was involved’. But in his summing-up he also uses some less orthodox words: ‘we can never be absolutely certain whether some other hand might not have coached, coaxed or coerced the hand of President Kennedy’s killer’. Long before President Johnson’s successor is inaugurated it will have been seen, I believe, that this observation of Mr. Sorensen’s was wiser than his endorsement of the Warren Commission Report. Mr. Mark Lane has shown me the proofs of his forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Rush To Judgment, which is a critique of the Report, based on a detailed study of the published evidence, supplemented by private inquiry. In an argument of devastating, cumulative force, Mr. Lane demonstrates that in case after case the Commission ignored or twisted the evidence before it, in order to reach a pre-ordained conclusion, and that, in particular, it ignored a substantial body of evidence which seemed to point in the direction of conspiracy. The details of this cannot be discussed here and now; there will be ample opportunity to discuss them when Rush To Judgment appears in a few months’ time. When it does appear, I believe it will be demonstrated that the Warren Report bears the same relation to the facts about Kennedy’s assassination as Adlai Stevenson’s report to the UN bore to the reality of the Bay of Pigs.

* A Thousand Days. By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. Deutsch. 55s

** Kennedy. By THEODORE SORENSEN. Hodder & Stoughton. 63s.

[Paul Rigby]

One of the few pieces which pointed out just what was at stake - see paragraph in bold - in any admission that the official enquiry was a farcical pack of lies.

The New Statesman, 29 July 1966, p.163

The Kennedy Mystery Reopened

By Andrew Kopkind

The Warren Commission consisted of seven men, any one of whom you would trust with your wrist-watch. In (almost imperceptible) descending order of unimpeachability, they were: Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the US; John J. McCloy, former High Commissioner for Germany and President of the World Bank; Allen Dulles, former director of the CIA; Senators John Sherman Cooper (Republican) of Kentucky and Richard Russell (Democrat) of Georgia; and Representatives Hale Boggs of Louisiana, the Democratic Whip, and Gerald Ford of Michigan, the Republican Conference Chairman. It was the kind of list someone might bury in a time capsule at a world’s fair, to show future generations who had embodied all that was noble, wise, responsible and powerful in America in that era. The seven had the task of determining exactly what happened in the hour after noon of 22 November 1963 in Dallas, Texas. Whatever else they might have done, they botched that job.

It is almost two years since the commission, after a 10-month investigation, published its report on the assassination of President Kennedy, and released 26 volumes of testimony and exhibits. The question which was raised from the very beginning still remains: was Lee Harvey Oswald the lone assassin? For a long time it was not a very popular question to ask. Richard N. Goodwin, one of President Kennedy’s assistants, has dismissed the early critics as “demonologists, charlatans and self-promoters.’ Now, all of a sudden, the seeds of doubt have blossomed, and Mr. Goodwin, among others, finds himself a questioner, although of a more respectable category. Magazines and newspapers are full of revised histories of the assassination; there are demands from rather impressive sources that the investigation be reopened.

The proximate cause of the fuss is a thin book, called Inquest, by a young graduate student, Edward Jay Epstein. In what began as a master’s thesis in political science, Epstein’s book shows the extent of the commission’s sloppiness, prejudice and unwisdom. Not one member or staff assistant ever read or heard all the testimony; the commissioners were only sporadically in attendance at hearings; the five senior lawyers drifted out of the investigation to return to their lucrative private practices before the report was written; one junior lawyer had to assemble all the material on the actual assassination; there was political pressure to get the report on supermarket bookstands before the 1964 elections.

More seriously, the commission and most of its staff were deeply committed to the only comfortable theory of the assassination -–that it was the work of one demented man. The most pervasive myth in America is the delusion of innocence: we are essentially a benevolent, generous, sincere, straight-forward folk whose errors are those of inexperience, guilelessness and eagerness. Americans cannot conceive of themselves as conspirators (despite the tactics of corporations, the mafia, the CIA and the FBI, and the torturous, if legalised, dealings of politicians).

Perhaps out of such delusions, the commission took great pains to construct a theory of the assassination completely in accordance with its members’ basic beliefs about America. When the general counsel, J. Lee Rankin (a former member of the Eisenhower administration), heard stories that Oswald might be an FBI informer, he presented a statement to the commission: ‘We do have a dirty rumor that is very bad for the commission …and it is very damaging to the agencies that are involved in it and it must be wiped out…’ Not by examining its source (that witness was never called), but by letting Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, the well-known archetype of the guileless, benevolent American, deny it all. The very peculiar fact that the name of an FBI agent was in Oswald’s address book – and was deleted from the FBI’s official list of the book’s contents – was explained by Hoover: ‘The circumstances under which (the) name, etcetera, appeared in Oswald’s notebook were fully known to the FBI.’ So much for that: the investigation was closed. Later, Mr. Warren told a reporter that some facts of the assassination might never be known ‘in your lifetime.’ It is not difficult to see how a commission concerned about damage to the FBI image (the assumption being that there are no FBI informers) would be inclined to treat ‘dirty’ evidence casually – if it were not determined to withhold it altogether.

By its very composition the commission was almost certain to produce an inadequate report. The members all reached their rank and status in the US by closing its doors, eliminating doubts, shoring up the American mythology. The commission had a political job to do, to establish one more or less plausible version of the assassination events as an official ‘truth.’ No matter that the conflict in evidence about bullet paths in the President’s body has never been resolved; that the case for a lone assassin rests on the unlikely hypothesis that a single bullet struck President Kennedy and Governor Connally (the Governor still maintains he was shot seconds after Kennedy was hit, and a film record bears out this story): or that there is reliable testimony that ‘Oswald’ was often seen in two places at the same time in the months before the assassination (suggesting, as Professor Richard H. Popkin has done, that a ‘double’ was being employed by putative conspirators). When junior staff members began to explore such problems, they were called off by Rankin and the commissioners.

Doubts about the Warren investigation exist on several levels. Mr. Goodwin cannot believe that Oswald was not the lone assassin, but he would like the commission’s shoddy work patched up. ‘If we cannot deny this book,’ Goodwin said in a review last Sunday in Book Week, ‘then the investigation must be reopened if we wish to approach the truth more closely.’ Epstein’s attack is mainly directed against the commission, but it also contains disquieting material for an alternative theory of conspiracy. Harold Weisberg’s discursive and frequently strident book, Whitewash, charges that the commission deliberately suppressed evidence, Popkin’s long and detailed article, in the current New York Review of Books, builds a delicious, Hitchcockian plot of four conspirators working to force a US demarche against Cuba. Others, not surprisingly from among the most disaffected elements in the country, would like to implicate everyone in authority in a massive national conspiracy.

So far there is evidence for only modest revisionism. But even so, if the Warren commissioners are exposed as merely hapless dupes, other doubts about American history over the last two decades become more pertinent. Was the Rosenberg case also a fraud? The FBI’s role then was every bit as curious as it is in the Oswald business. Was the whole US position on the origins of the cold war fraudulent? John McCloy and Allen Dulles had the same job in feeding the national mythology then as they did by ‘wiping out’ the ‘dirty rumours’ in the assassination investigation and preventing ‘damage’ to shining images.

Already the Warren Commission report is beginning to be a political issue. Goodwin is, more or less, a member of the Kennedy government-in-exile. Others of like politics are worried about the flaws in the report. Although there is no evidence that Robert Kennedy has yet taken any interest in the matter, the continuing doubts will certainly increase his distance from the Johnson administration. The demand for a new investigation may become loud enough to affect the 1968 election campaign. That hour in Dallas may yet survive to haunt us for generations to come.

[Paul Rigby]

In this review, the notorious MI6 organ considers the work of our happy duo. The penultimate paragraph contains an observation of real acuity:

The Economist, 6 August 1966, p.544

Was Oswald alone?

From a Special Correspondent

Some weeks ago when the Doubting Thomases resumed their offensive against the official explanation of President Kennedy’s assassination, the country tended to dismiss them, much as it had dismissed earlier sceptics. But the new critics, unlike the old, were not dealing in pure conjecture; they had made a serious study of the 26 heavy volumes of testimony and exhibits published by the Warren Commission in the autumn of 1964. Working independently of one another, they produced arguments that were well reasoned, careful and based upon evidence. Two books* and several long articles, all searching though none flawless, have raised serious questions about whether Lee Harvey Oswald, by himself, killed President Kennedy. These questions will simply not go away.

The principle defect in the Commission’s reconstruction, the one on which the critics all agree, lies in the contention that Kennedy and Governor Connally of Texas, who rode in the car with the President, were both struck by the same bullet. The films of the shooting, the angle of fire, the established interval between shots and the testimony of Mr. Connally himself, all tend to cast doubt on the contention. Yet upon it rests the whole theory of a single killer. Each of the critics has found other significant defects in the Warren Commission’s elaborate explanation. The net result is a very persuasive argument that the Warren Commission had no right to conclude that Oswald acted alone.

Last month the Doubting Thomases received, from a figure within the Kennedy establishment itself, their first important recognition. Mr. Richard Goodwin, an adviser to the late President and a close friend of his brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, has called, in a book review, for the creation of an independent group to assess the Commission’s findings and recommend whether a new inquiry is justified. “Monumental doubts,” said Mr. Goodwin, had been cast upon the Commission’s work.

More than anything, the criticism focuses on the slipshod methodology of the Warren Commission. Its members were selected for their eminence, not for their competence to conduct a difficult investigation. All, including the Chief Justice, Mr. Warren, gave to the Commission only such time as they could spare from their normal pursuits and it had no full-time investigators of its own. Had the whole story been easy to establish, the Commission’s organisation would have been quite adequate. But this proved to be an enormously complicated matter. In “Inquest,” the book most responsible for the current disquiet, and the one reviewed by Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Edward Epstein writes that “the entire task of ascertaining the basic facts of the assassination fell upon one lawyer.” Obviously, it was not enough.

Without resources of its own, the Warren Commission had no choice but to depend for its facts upon the facilities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service and the Texas police. Each of these had a vested interest in establishing that Oswald was the killer. Had the Commission dissented from this pre-established truth, it would have generated a bitter inter-governmental wrangle. But perhaps more compelling to the Commission was the subtle pressure from the White House. President Johnson had instructed the Warren Commission to end any mystery once and for all as to who killed Mr. Kennedy, to put the public’s mind at rest and to do it quickly, well before the 1964 presidential election. Could the Commission then go back to the President to say that it did not know what had happened? Neither he nor the American people would have accepted this.

But the members of the Commission, whatever their faults, were men of honour and integrity, capable of withstanding pressure from President and policemen. They would not have announced a decision that they did not believe was right. They were on the Commission only to serve the country in a time of crisis. Yet, one suspects, it was precisely this concept of service that made it so easy to select the facts that pointed to Lee Oswald and Lee Oswald alone.

Each member of the Commission must surely have considered whether it was in the public interest to report that he suspected a conspiracy. Suppose the Commission said that there was more to the matter than Oswald’s lunacy? Suppose it said that unknown killers were at large, that a plot remained to be unravelled? Suppose it said that, at best, a long and tortuous investigation stood in the way of an answer? The members of the Commission had no desire to generate anxieties. They did not want to rend the social fabric. Perhaps they did not consciously conceal, twist or ignore facts. But each member had to ask himself what was best for the country and it seems cleat that to all of them the answer was a finding that the late Oswald was guilty.

But the dead President’s brother, Mr. Robert Kennedy, was then Attorney General, the country’s chief law enforcement officer. Would he not have supervised the proceedings carefully and guaranteed their integrity? The answer is that he probably did not know much about them, given the relative or complete autonomy of the FBI, the Secret Service, the Texas police and the Warren Commission itself. In any event his own aristocratic sense of public duty might well have worked in much the same way as the commissioners’.

Yet now it seems unlikely that Mr. Goodwin would have called for a review without any consultation with Mr. Robert Kennedy. Thus Mr. Goodwin may have been giving a signal to the Kennedy following to press for a new investigation. The general public is still apparently content to leave the official story unchallenged. But it seems clear that demands for a reopening of the case will grow.

* Inquest. By Edward Jay Epstein. Viking Press, New York. $5.
Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report. By Harold Weisberg. H. Weisberg, Hyattstown, Maryland. $4.95.