05-05-2009, 08:28 PM
In this review, the notorious MI6 organ considers the work of our happy duo. The penultimate paragraph contains an observation of real acuity:
Quote: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.