02-05-2009, 09:39 PM
Quote:Labour Monthly, January 1964, pp. 1-15;
Notes of the Month: After Kennedy
Quote: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.
Quote: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.