02-05-2009, 10:01 PM
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.
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.
Quote: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.
Quote: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.