Reclaiming History (82 page)

As indicated, Hoover’s fears led him, at the beginning, to oppose the formation of the Warren Commission,
⁴⁶
and according to Sullivan, who went from Hoover’s most obsequious flatterer to his most severe critic during the later Nixon presidency and was eventually forced out of the bureau by Hoover, when Hoover failed to do that, he attempted to limit the scope of the Warren Commission’s investigation. Hoover’s principal method, Sullivan said, was to leak to the press the FBI investigation, “believing that this would tend to satisfy everybody and perhaps the authorities would conclude that an investigation of great depth and scope by any entity other than the FBI would not be necessary.”
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*

On December 9, the FBI submitted a 384-page, five-volume report (one volume dealing with the assassination, one with Ruby’s killing of Oswald, and three volumes of exhibits) to the Warren Commission summarizing the bureau’s entire investigation to date, and concluding that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone.
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*

At its next meeting, on December 16, after Supreme Court justice Stanley F. Reed administered an oath to all its members, the Commission set about to determine the scope of the investigation. The first order of business was to consider the FBI’s summary report.

“Well, gentlemen,” the chief justice said to his fellow Commission members, “I have read that report two or three times and I have not seen anything in there yet that has not been in the press.”

“I couldn’t agree with that more,” Senator Richard Russell said. “Practically everything in there has come out in the press at one time or another, a bit here and a bit there.”

But that wasn’t the biggest problem. It was the obvious deficiency of the report, mostly attributable, John McCloy said, to the fact that “they [FBI] put this thing together very fast.”

Representative Hale Boggs pointed out that, remarkably, “There’s nothing in [the report] about Governor Connally.”

Senator John Cooper: “And whether or not they found any bullets in him.”

After reading the report, McCloy said that “this bullet business leaves me confused.”

“It’s totally inconclusive,” opined Chief Justice Warren.

Representative Gerald Ford: “[The report] was interesting to read but it did not have the depth that it ought to have.”

There were so many unanswered questions. For instance, Representative Boggs observed, “There is still little on this fellow Ruby, including his movements, what he was doing, how he got in there [City Hall basement garage].”

Warren: “His relations with the police department.”

Boggs: “Exactly.”

Talking about the issue of precisely what took place among the occupants of the presidential limousine at the time of the shooting, Warren said, “I wonder if the report we get from the Secret Service wouldn’t pretty much clear that up…They were there, right at the car, and know exactly what happened.”

Representative Boggs: “Well, this FBI report doesn’t clear it up.”

Warren: “It doesn’t do anything.”

Boggs: “It raises a lot of new questions in my mind.”

General Counsel Rankin summed up the feelings of practically all of the Commission members when he noted that “the report has so many holes in it. Anybody can look at it and see that it just doesn’t seem like they’re looking for things that this Commission has to look for in order to get the answers that it wants and it’s entitled to.”
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Very momentously, it was during this December 16 session that the Commission decided it could not rely solely on the FBI report or reports from any of the other federal agencies either. “After studying this [FBI] report,” Chief Justice Warren said, “unless we have the raw materials [i.e., interviews, affidavits, recordings, photographs, etc.] that went into the making of the report and have an opportunity to examine those raw materials and make our
own
appraisal, any appraisal of this report would be [worth] little or nothing.” Warren went on to move “that the Commission request at once from all investigative agencies and departments of the Government the raw materials on which their reports to the Commission are based,” and his motion was seconded and adopted.

The FBI, which would end up doing a monumental amount of very detailed investigation into the assassination, had failed its first test, badly.

In addition to the commissioners wanting to see and appraise the “raw materials” so they could determine the legitimacy of the conclusions in the reports from the federal agencies, they decided that among the commission staff there had to be a lawyer of high caliber who, as Senator Russell said, “would take this FBI report and this CIA report and go through it and analyze every contradiction and every soft spot in it…as if [in the case of an FBI report] he were going to use them to prosecute J. Edgar Hoover.” “I agree with you one hundred percent,” Warren said.

General Counsel Rankin raised the possibility with the Commission that he and his staff “might have to come back to you and ask for some investigative help…[in] situations where we can’t get answers” from a federal agency like the FBI, but Senator Russell interjected that if such a situation arose where there was a need for “an independent inquiry,” it could be presented to the Commission for resolution, but it would be unnecessary to set up an investigative staff “at this time.” The commissioners, however, left no doubt that they themselves were in a very investigative mood.

Senator Cooper: “I think that we ought to have a list of the people we want to interrogate.”

Allen Dulles: “I think one who you should see fairly soon…would be [U.S. Secret Service chief U. E.] Baughman.”

Mr. McCloy: “I think we should get that film [Zapruder] in our possession [before] it deteriorates.”
*

And so on.

Ultimately, the Commission decided to rely on its own legal staff to direct the efforts of the FBI and other federal investigative agencies, being convinced that since the president had promised it the full cooperation of these agencies, the Commission’s counsel would be able to play a significant role in directing the FBI’s field work, which the evidence clearly shows the Warren Commission largely did (see later text). Accordingly, Rankin was authorized to employ and organize a staff of lawyers (assistant counsels) whose job would be to review, analyze, and evaluate the thousands of pages of investigative reports that were expected. Assistant Counsel Howard Willens, Robert Kennedy’s deputy at the Department of Justice, was in charge of recruiting the staff and forwarding their resumés to Rankin. Eventually, twenty-eight different agencies would send the Commission more than three hundred cubic feet of paper, most of it catastrophically unorganized and unevaluated. It would largely be up to the staff to identify the issues that required verification and further investigation.
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V
irtually all conspiracy theorists believe that the Warren Commission did not conduct an independent investigation of the assassination, and instead relied almost exclusively on the FBI’s investigation to reach its conclusions. For example, in
Crime of the Century
, Michael Kurtz writes, “Rather than conduct its own independent investigation, the commission relied
entirely
on the FBI report.”
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“The Warren Commission” was “
totally reliant
on the investigative reports and functions of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI,” wrote Bernard Fensterwald Jr. in his book
Assassination of JFK by Coincidence or Conspiracy?
⁵³

Indeed, this myth created by the conspiracy theorists has been trumpeted so much that even most Warren Commission supporters have bought into it. “The [Warren Commission],” says anti-conspiracy author Gerald Posner, “
was almost entirely dependent
on agencies such as the FBI to conduct the actual investigation.”
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Let’s briefly jump ahead to discuss this issue, and then we’ll return to the chronology. Because of the Commission’s supposed subjugation to the FBI, and the assumption by the conspiracy theorists that the FBI (under Director J. Edgar Hoover) could not be trusted to conduct a truthful investigation, critics believe the Warren Commission’s conclusions—that Oswald was the lone assassin and that there was no conspiracy—were compromised. But this is simply an enormous myth that has taken hold and could hardly be more incorrect. First of all, as you’ve just seen, on December 16 the Warren Commission came to the conclusion that it could not rely exclusively on the reports of the FBI and other federal agencies to reach its conclusions. In fact, even before this, on December 13 the Commission obtained the necessary powers to conduct its own independent investigation with the enactment of Senate Joint Resolution 137,
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which empowered the Commission to issue subpoenas requiring the testimony of witnesses and the production of documentary evidence. The resolution also gave the Commission the power to grant immunity and thereby force the testimony of witnesses who invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
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The Commission never had occasion to grant immunity.

Pursuant to these powers, the Warren Commission,
by itself and independent of the FBI
, took the sworn testimony of 489 witnesses, many in great depth. (This hardly constitutes relying exclusively on the FBI.) Of these 489 witnesses, 94 testified before one or more members of the Commission itself, and 395 were questioned in depositions by members of the Commission’s staff, with the Commission members not being present. In addition, 61 witnesses gave sworn affidavits and 2 gave statements, for a total of 552 witnesses. More than 3,100 exhibits were received into evidence.
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*
Although Commission member John McCloy complained early on, and
before
the taking of any testimony, that the Commission was “so dependent on them [FBI] for the facts,”
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if examining 489 witnesses under oath is not conducting an independent investigation, then what is?

If I were the lead prosecutor on a major murder case and I personally interviewed all of the key—and many of the supplementary—witnesses (roughly analogous to the Warren Commission and its staff taking testimony and depositions of the witnesses), and someone denigrated my involvement in the case by saying I relied almost exclusively on the police department (analogous to the FBI) in the case, my response would be to say, “Either you are joking or you are just completely unaware of what took place in this case.”

The argument that even if the Warren Commission did independently and thoroughly investigate the assassination by taking testimony and depositions of key and secondary witnesses, the FBI still controlled the investigation by informing the Commission members whom they should examine under oath, is, for the most part, invalid. Indeed, before the FBI even started interviewing witnesses, the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department were interviewing key witnesses in the case. And the media, with their unprecedented scrutiny of the case, were locating and reporting on witnesses to the event in Dealey Plaza and related circumstances. And, of course, witnesses themselves were coming out of the woodwork reporting their stories to the authorities. To suggest that without the FBI the Warren Commission wouldn’t have known whom to talk to is ludicrous. Even without the aforementioned sources, let’s take a representative witness like George Senator, Jack Ruby’s roommate whom the Warren Commission examined under oath in considerable depth. I don’t know how Senator came to the attention of the Warren Commission. The FBI may have informed the Commission of Senator’s existence. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that the FBI did not inform the Commission of Senator’s existence. All seven Commission members, General Counsel J. Lee Rankin, and his fourteen assistant counsels were distinguished lawyers. Though most didn’t have substantial trial experience, any lawyer, civil or criminal (in fact, any rational person, lawyer or not), would know that if they are investigating any event, it is imperative that they interview all witnesses who might have knowledge about an issue relevant to the case. Does anyone really believe that if the FBI had not informed the Warren Commission of Senator’s existence, the Commission (with members like Earl Warren, a former district attorney and attorney general of the state of California) and the assistant counsels (like Joseph Ball, one of the most experienced trial lawyers in the land; Arlen Specter, a former assistant DA in Philadelphia; Albert Jenner, a former special assistant attorney general of Illinois; Burt Griffin, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Ohio; and Frances Adams, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney in New York and police commissioner of New York City, etc.) would not have sought to find out, on their own, what people were closest to Ruby and knew him well (which would include Senator as well as Ruby’s key employees at his club, and his sisters and brothers) and then taken their testimony or had them interviewed? Please. Let’s not get foolish.

And whom did the Commission rely on the most in writing its famous Warren Report? The FBI’s interviews of witnesses or its own examination of these and other witnesses? The official record is clear that for the most part the Commission based its report on its examination of the witnesses, not FBI reports.
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As the Commission stated, “In addition to the information resulting from these [federal] investigations, the Commission has relied
primarily
on the facts disclosed by the sworn testimony of the principal witnesses to the assassination.”
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And the Commission didn’t limit itself to taking testimony, which would alone immunize it from the total-reliance-on-the-FBI argument. Its staff went beyond this, going out into the field, mostly in Dallas. Assistant Warren Commission counsel Joseph Ball said, “As lawyers we investigated the case thoroughly. We got some leads as to who to talk to from the FBI.
But we went into the field
, we talked to every witness that we reported on. We took depositions. We took people before the Commission. We handled this like we would handle…any lawsuit.”
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As Assistant Counsel David Belin wrote, “In the middle of March [1964], Joe Ball and I flew to Dallas to conduct our initial field investigation…The first evening there, I telephoned Rabbi Silverman (Ruby’s rabbi) and arranged to see him the following Friday night.”
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As just part of his investigation, Arlen Specter said he “sent ahead a list of witnesses whom I wanted to see at” Parkland Hospital, then went “to Parkland Hospital…and I interviewed…some 20-odd witnesses” there.
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Does this sound as if the Warren Commission relied exclusively on the FBI? In fact, by the end of March, most of the assistant counsels had arrived in Dallas to conduct their field investigation with respect to witnesses they would eventually take sworn testimony from.
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“At Chief Justice Earl Warren’s insistence,” Assistant Counsel Joseph Ball said, “every witness [called before the commission] was privately questioned…by commission counsel…before being called to testify.”
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