Recorded Novem­ber 21, 2004
REALAUDIO

In obser­vance of the 41st anniver­sary of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion, this pro­gram notes that it is pri­mar­ily the media that per­pet­u­ate the pre­pos­ter­ous fic­tion of Lee Har­vey Oswald the “lone nut” assas­sin. The War­ren Report (issued forty years ago) was con­structed pri­mar­ily to save the U.S. from severe polit­i­cal embar­rass­ment. In pri­vate, many of this country’s most promi­nent polit­i­cal fig­ures have dis­missed the War­ren Report. LBJ, Robert and Jacque­line Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon, Pres­i­dent Clin­ton and many other nota­bles pri­vately voiced their con­vic­tion that the War­ren Report was non­sense. After dis­cussing this, the pro­gram reviews some aspects of the House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions’ find­ings on the killing of JFK. The broad­cast con­cludes with the read­ing of an account of a Ger­man uni­ver­sity professor’s expe­ri­ence of the rise of Hitler.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions’ find­ings that Clay Shaw (tried by Jim Gar­ri­son for JFK’s mur­der) may well have been involved in some aspect of the killing; dis­cus­sion of a film clip that allegedly con­nected Oswald with key CIA per­son­nel and peo­ple inves­ti­gated by Jim Gar­ri­son; the House Select Committee’s final con­clu­sion con­cern­ing the like­li­hood that the CIA/Anti-Castro Cuban/Mafia plots had all the ele­ments nec­es­sary for a suc­cess­ful assas­si­na­tion conspiracy.

1. Much of the pro­gram is devoted to the read­ing of an arti­cle from Salon.com, which is repro­duced here. The focal point of the story is that the unten­able fic­tion of the War­ren Report is upheld and per­pet­u­ated by the media. The vast major­ity of the Amer­i­can peo­ple do not believe the War­ren Report and this story reveals that many of this country’s most pow­er­ful peo­ple do not believe it either. It is note­wor­thy that many of the prin­ci­pal peo­ple involved in the events themselves—LBJ, Robert Kennedy, Jacque­line Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover to name a few—believed Pres­i­dent Kennedy to have been the vic­tim of a polit­i­cal con­spir­acy. Sub­se­quent inves­ti­ga­tors such as Sen­a­tors Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker were con­vinced that the killing was not the work of Oswald. Even Richard Nixon believed the War­ren Report to be a fraud. (Among the pro­grams cov­er­ing the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion are: The Guns of Novem­ber, RFA#’s 11, 12, 13, 15, 37—avail­able from SPITFIRE—as well as Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M48, also avail­able from SPITFIRE, and FTR#’s 19, 47, 54, 62, 63, 76, 104, 108, 120, 158, 168, 188, 190, 191, 288.)

The mother of all cover-ups.
Forty years after the War­ren Report, the offi­cial ver­dict on the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion, we now know the country’s high and mighty were secretly among its biggest crit­ics.
By David Tal­bot (Salon.com)

Sept. 15, 2004 | Once again, we find our­selves in the sea­son of the offi­cial report: the 9/11 Com­mis­sion Report, the Sen­ate Select Com­mit­tee on Intel­li­gence report, the Schlesinger inquiry on Abu Ghraib, among oth­ers. And once again the offi­cial ver­sion is under fire.

The 9/11 Report has been attacked for lean­ing over back­ward, in the spirit of bipar­ti­san una­nim­ity, to avoid pin­ning blame on the Bush admin­is­tra­tion for its casual atti­tude toward ter­ror­ist alerts before the calamity and for side­step­ping the issue of Saudi involve­ment. But at least it has won a mea­sure of pub­lic respect, due in large part to the vig­i­lance of 9/11 vic­tims’ families.

The Sen­ate report on the intel­li­gence fail­ures lead­ing to the Iraq cat­a­stro­phe has not fared as well, undoubt­edly because it lacked the same pub­lic over­sight. This report went to even greater extremes to keep Bush out of the cross hairs. As Thomas Pow­ers wrote in the New York Review of Books, “No tyran­ni­cal father pre­sid­ing over an intim­i­dated house­hold was ever tip­toed around with greater cau­tion than is the fig­ure of Pres­i­dent George W. Bush in the [committee’s] fat report.”

And the Schlesinger report on Abu Ghraib has quickly earned itself an utterly con­temp­tu­ous response, elic­it­ing wide­spread out­rage for giv­ing Defense Sec­re­tary Rums­feld and the Pen­ta­gon a sweep­ing pass on the reign of tor­ture at the prison. While the world shud­dered in hor­ror at pho­tographs and descrip­tions of the Abu Ghraib may­hem, James Schlesinger, the for­mer defense sec­re­tary picked by Rums­feld to chair the civil­ian com­mis­sion, was con­sid­er­ably less agi­tated in his response. “Ani­mal house,” he blithely called the prison’s cham­bers of vio­lent per­ver­sity, a casual assess­ment that mir­rored the for­giv­ing views of Rush Lim­baugh, who dis­missed the scan­dal as a frat party gone wild.

So it is only appro­pri­ate, in this stormy sea­son of the offi­cial ver­sion and its dis­con­tents, that we observe the 40th anniver­sary of the War­ren Report — the mother of all such con­tro­ver­sies. The vast, 26-volume report was deliv­ered by the com­mis­sion chair­man, Chief Jus­tice Earl War­ren, to Pres­i­dent John­son on Sept. 24, 1964. The War­ren Report con­cluded that Pres­i­dent Kennedy was the vic­tim of a lone, unsta­ble assas­sin, Lee Har­vey Oswald, who was him­self, con­ve­niently, gunned down just two days later in the Dal­las police sta­tion by mob-connected hus­tler Jack Ruby. The War­ren Com­mis­sion — itself the vic­tim of mas­sive fraud and manip­u­la­tion by the FBI and CIA — came under imme­di­ate fire from crit­ics, with its report being denounced as a gov­ern­ment coverup by a grow­ing army of inde­pen­dent researchers. His­tory has not been any kinder to the War­ren Report, which has been derided and con­demned by every­one from the House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions — the only other fed­eral panel to exhaus­tively probe Kennedy’s mur­der, and which found in 1979 that the pres­i­dent was the prob­a­ble tar­get of a con­spir­acy — to Oliver Stone in his explo­sive 1991 film “JFK” to the His­tory Chan­nel, which rou­tinely airs even the outer lim­its of con­spir­acy theories.

Four decades later, the War­ren Report is widely regarded as a white­wash, with polls con­sis­tently show­ing that a major­ity of Amer­i­cans reject the offi­cial ver­sion of Kennedy’s death. (The Assas­si­na­tion Archives and Research Cen­ter will hold a con­fer­ence to dis­cuss the lat­est schol­ar­ship on the crime in Dal­las and the War­ren inves­ti­ga­tion from Sept. 17–19 in Wash­ing­ton. Infor­ma­tion is avail­able on its Web site.

But there is one sanc­tu­ary where the War­ren Report is still stub­bornly upheld and where its man­i­fold crit­ics can expect their own rough treat­ment: in the tow­ers of the media elite. Fresh from assault­ing Oliver Stone, not only for his film but for his very char­ac­ter (a media shark attack in which, I must con­fess, I too once engaged), the national press rushed to embrace Ger­ald Posner’s bold 1993 defense of the War­ren Report, “Case Closed,” mak­ing it a best­seller. (“The most con­vinc­ing expla­na­tion of the assas­si­na­tion,” his­to­rian Robert Dallek called it in the Boston Globe.) And the 40th anniver­sary of JFK’s mur­der last Novem­ber sparked a new fusil­lade of anti-conspiracy sound and fury, with ABC’s Peter Jen­nings mak­ing yet another net­work news attempt to silence the report’s crit­ics. Most of the press lords and pun­dits in the 1960s who allowed them­selves to be con­vinced that the War­ren Report was the cor­rect ver­sion of what hap­pened in Dal­las — whether because they gen­uinely believed it or because they thought it was for the good of the coun­try — are now dead or retired. But after buy­ing the offi­cial ver­sion for so long, it seems the elite media insti­tu­tions have too much invested in the War­ren Report to change their minds now, even if they’re under new edi­to­r­ial lead­er­ship.
/>One of the great ironies of his­tory is that while the media elite was busily try­ing to shore up pub­lic con­fi­dence in the War­ren Report, the polit­i­cal elites were pri­vately con­fid­ing among them­selves that the report was a trav­esty, a fairy tale for mass con­sump­tion. Pres­i­dents, White House aides, intel­li­gence offi­cials, sen­a­tors, con­gress­men, even for­eign lead­ers — they all mut­tered darkly among them­selves that Kennedy was killed by a con­spir­acy, a plot that a num­ber of them sus­pected had roots in the U.S. gov­ern­ment itself. (In truth, some high media dig­ni­taries have also qui­etly shared their doubts about the offi­cial ver­sion. In 1993, CBS anchor­man Dan Rather, who did much along with his net­work to enforce the party line on Dal­las, con­fessed to Robert Tan­nen­baum, the for­mer deputy chief coun­sel of the House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions, “We really blew it on the Kennedy assassination.”)

Thanks to tapes of White House con­ver­sa­tions that have been released to the pub­lic in recent years, we now know that the man who appointed the War­ren Com­mis­sion — Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John­son — did not believe its con­clu­sions. On Sept. 18, 1964, the last day the panel met, com­mis­sion mem­ber Sen. Richard Rus­sell phoned John­son, his old polit­i­cal pro­tégé, to tell him he did not believe the single-bullet the­ory, the key to the commission’s find­ing that Oswald acted alone. “I don’t either,” John­son told him.

Johnson’s the­o­ries about what really hap­pened in Dal­las shifted over the years. Soon after the assas­si­na­tion, John­son was led to believe by the CIA that Kennedy might have been the vic­tim of a Soviet con­spir­acy. Later his sus­pi­cions focused on Cas­tro; dur­ing his long-running feud with Robert Kennedy, LBJ leaked a story to Wash­ing­ton colum­nist Drew Pear­son sug­gest­ing the Kennedy broth­ers them­selves were respon­si­ble for JFK’s death by trig­ger­ing a vio­lent reac­tion from the Cuban leader with their “god­damned Mur­der Inc.” plots to kill him.

In 1967, accord­ing to a report in the Wash­ing­ton Post, Johnson’s sus­pi­cious gaze came to rest on the CIA. The news­pa­per quoted White House aide Mar­vin Wat­son as say­ing that John­son was “now con­vinced” Kennedy was the vic­tim of a plot and “that the CIA had some­thing to do with this plot.” Max Hol­land, who has just pub­lished a study of LBJ’s views on Dal­las, “The Kennedy Assas­si­na­tion Tapes,” intrigu­ingly con­cludes that John­son remained haunted by the mur­der through­out his tenure in the White House. “It is vir­tu­ally an arti­cle of faith among his­to­ri­ans that the war in Viet­nam was the over­whelm­ing rea­son the pres­i­dent left office in 1969, a worn, bit­ter, and dis­il­lu­sioned man,” writes Hol­land. “Yet the assassination-related tapes paint a more nuanced por­trait, one in which Johnson’s view of the one in which Johnson’s view of the assas­si­na­tion weighed as heav­ily on him as did the war.”

Crit­ics of the War­ren Report’s lone-assassin con­clu­sion were often stumped by defend­ers of the report with the ques­tion, “If there was a con­spir­acy, why didn’t Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s own brother — the attor­ney gen­eral Crit­ics of the War­ren Report’s lone-assassin con­clu­sion were often stumped by defend­ers of the report with of the United States, Robert Kennedy — do any­thing about it?” It’s true that, at least until shortly before his assas­si­na­tion in June 1968, Bobby Kennedy pub­licly sup­ported the War­ren Report. On March 25, dur­ing a pres­i­den­tial cam­paign rally at San Fer­nando Val­ley State Col­lege in Cal­i­for­nia, Kennedy was dra­mat­i­cally con­fronted by a woman heck­ler, who called out, “We want to know who killed Pres­i­dent Kennedy!” Kennedy responded by say­ing, “I stand by the War­ren Com­mis­sion Report.” But at a later cam­paign appear­ance, days before his assas­si­na­tion, Bobby Kennedy said the oppo­site, accord­ing to his for­mer press spokesman Frank Mankiewicz. When asked if he would reopen the inves­ti­ga­tion into his brother’s death, he uttered a sim­ple, one-word answer: “Yes.” Mankiewicz recalls today, “I remem­ber that I was stunned by the answer. It was either like he was sud­denly blurt­ing out the truth, or it was a way to shut down the ques­tion­ing — you know, ‘Yes, now let’s move on.’”

His pub­lic state­ments on the War­ren Report were obvi­ously freighted with polit­i­cal and emo­tional — and per­haps even secu­rity — con­cerns for Bobby Kennedy. But we have no doubt what his pri­vate opin­ion of the report was — as his biog­ra­pher Evan Thomas wrote, Kennedy “regarded the War­ren Com­mis­sion as a pub­lic rela­tions exer­cise to reas­sure the pub­lic.” Accord­ing to a vari­ety of reports, Kennedy sus­pected a plot as soon as he heard his brother had been shot in Dal­las. And as he made calls and inquiries in the hours and days after the assas­si­na­tion, he came to an omi­nous con­clu­sion: JFK was the vic­tim of a domes­tic polit­i­cal conspiracy.

In a remark­able pas­sage in “One Hell of a Gam­ble,” a widely praised 1997 his­tory of the Cuban mis­sile cri­sis based on declas­si­fied Soviet and U.S. gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments, his­to­ri­ans Alek­sandr Fursenko and Tim­o­thy Naf­tali wrote that on Nov. 29, one week after the assas­si­na­tion, Bobby Kennedy dis­patched a close fam­ily friend named William Wal­ton to Moscow with a remark­able mes­sage for Georgi Bol­shakov, the KGB agent he had come to trust dur­ing the nerve-wracking back-channel dis­cus­sions sparked by the mis­sile cri­sis. Accord­ing to the his­to­ri­ans, Wal­ton told Bol­shakov that Bobby and Jacque­line Kennedy believed “there was a large polit­i­cal con­spir­acy behind Oswald’s rifle” and “that Dal­las was the ideal loca­tion for such a crime.” The Kennedys also sought to reas­sure the Sovi­ets that despite Oswald’s appar­ent con­nec­tions to the com­mu­nist world, they believed Pres­i­dent Kennedy had been killed by Amer­i­can ene­mies. This is a stun­ning account — with the fallen president’s brother and widow com­mu­ni­cat­ing their chill­ing sus­pi­cions to the pre­em­i­nent world rival of the U.S. — and it has not received nearly the pub­lic atten­tion it deserves.

Both Khrushchev, who had been work­ing with JFK to ease ten­sions between the super­pow­ers, and his spy chief shared Kennedy’s dark view of the assas­si­na­tion. KGB chair­man reacted incred­u­lously to the news that Oswald, a man whom his agency had closely mon­i­tored after he defected to the Soviet Union, was the cul­prit: “I thought that this man could not pos­si­bly be the mas­ter­mind of the crime.” And accord­ing to Fursenko and Naf­tali, “Intel­li­gence com­ing to Khrushchev in the weeks fol­low­ing the assas­si­na­tion seemed to con­firm the the­ory that a right-wing con­spir­acy had killed Kennedy.” This assess­ment was shared by the gov­ern­ments of Cuba, Mex­ico and France, where Pres­i­dent DeGaulle, when briefed by a reporter on the lone-nut the­ory reacted with Gal­lic skep­ti­cism, laugh­ing, “Vous me blaguez! [You’re kid­ding me.] Cow­boys and Indians!”

In the years after his brother’s death, Bobby Kennedy was over­whelmed by grief. But the com­mon per­cep­tion that he found it too painful to focus on the assas­si­na­tion is belied by the fact that Kennedy main­tained a search­ing curios­ity about crit­ics of the War­ren Report, using sur­ro­gates like Mankiewicz, Wal­ter Sheri­dan, Ed Guth­man and John Siegen­thaler to check out their work and dis­patch­ing his for­mer aides to New Orleans to eval­u­ate Jim Garrison’s inves­ti­ga­tion. In fact Kennedy him­self phoned New Orleans coro­ner Nicholas Chetta at his home after the death of key Gar­ri­son sus­pect David Fer­rie to ques­tion Chetta about his autopsy report. And while Sheri­dan — a trusted friend of Kennedy’s who had worked closely with him on his Jimmy Hoffa inves­ti­ga­tion — famously repu­di­ated Gar­ri­son in a 1967 doc­u­men­tary for NBC, RFK appar­ently still kept ties to the Gar­ri­son camp. Accord­ing to William Turner, a for­mer FBI agent who worked as a Gar­ri­son inves­ti­ga­tor dur­ing the Kennedy case, in April 1968 he received a call in the New Orleans prosecutor’s office from an RFK cam­paign aide named Richard Lubic. “He said, ‘Bill, Bobby’s going to go — he’s going to reopen the inves­ti­ga­tion after he wins.’ I went in imme­di­ately and told Jim [Gar­ri­son]. He didn’t seem surprised.”

Bobby was not the only m

ember of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s inner cir­cle who believed there was a con­spir­acy. Pres­i­den­tial aides Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Pow­ers, key mem­bers of JFK’s Irish Mafia, were in a trail­ing lim­ou­sine in the Dal­las motor­cade. Both of them later told House Speaker Tip O’Neill that they heard two shots from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. “That’s not what you told the War­ren Com­mis­sion,” a stunned O’Neill replied, accord­ing to his 1989 mem­oir, “Man of the House. “You’re right,” O’Donnell said. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have hap­pened that way and that I must have been imag­in­ing things.” So not want­ing to “stir up more pain and trou­ble for the fam­ily,” O’Donnell told the com­mis­sion what the FBI wanted him to.

Speak­ing of the FBI, its deeply sin­is­ter strong­man J. Edgar Hoover might have “lied his eyes out” to the War­ren Com­mis­sion, as panel mem­ber Hale Boggs, the Louisiana con­gress­man, mem­o­rably told an aide, pres­sur­ing and maneu­ver­ing the com­mis­sion to reach a lone-assassin ver­dict. But again, in pri­vate, Hoover told another story. The sum­mer after the assas­si­na­tion, Hoover was relax­ing at the Del Charro resort in Cal­i­for­nia, which was owned by his friend, right-wing Texas oil tycoon Clint Murchi­son. Another Texas oil crony of Hoover’s, Billy Byars Sr. — the only man Hoover had called on the after­noon of Nov. 22, 1963, besides Robert Kennedy and the head of the Secret Ser­vice — also was there. At one point, accord­ing to Anthony Sum­mers, the invalu­able prober of the dark side of Amer­i­can power, Byars’ teenage son, Billy Jr., got up his nerve to ask Hoover the ques­tion, “Do you think Lee Har­vey Oswald did it?” Accord­ing to Byars, Hoover “stopped and looked at me for quite a long time. Then he said, ‘If I told you what I really know, it would be very dan­ger­ous to this coun­try. Our whole polit­i­cal sys­tem could be disrupted.’”

Blunt skep­ti­cism about the War­ren Report was a bipar­ti­san affair, with lead­ers on both sides of the aisle air­ily dis­miss­ing its con­clu­sions. On a White House tape record­ing, Pres­i­dent Nixon is heard telling aides that the War­ren Report “was the great­est hoax that has ever been per­pet­u­ated.” One of Nixon’s top aides, White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Halde­man, shared his boss’ skep­ti­cism. In his 1978 mem­oir, “The Ends of Power,” Halde­man, who “had always been intrigued with the con­flict­ing the­o­ries of the assas­si­na­tion,” recalls that when the Nixon team moved into the White House in 1969, he felt that they finally “would be in a posi­tion to get all the facts.” But Nixon, per­haps wary of where all those facts would lead, rejected Haldeman’s suggestion.

Accord­ing to Halde­man, Nixon did play the assas­si­na­tion card in a mys­te­ri­ous way against CIA direc­tor Richard Helms, long regarded by War­ren Report crit­ics to have some con­nec­tion to the gun­shots in Dal­las. Seek­ing to pres­sure the CIA into help­ing him out of his Water­gate mess, Nixon had Halde­man deliver this cryp­tic mes­sage — appar­ently a threat — to Helms: “The pres­i­dent asked me to tell you this entire (Water­gate) affair may be con­nected to the Bay of Pigs, and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown.” This prompted an explo­sive reac­tion from the spy­mas­ter: “Tur­moil in the room, Helms grip­ping the arms of his chair lean­ing for­ward and shout­ing, ‘The Bay of Pigs had noth­ing to do with this. I have no con­cern about the Bay of Pigs.’” Halde­man spec­u­lates that “Bay of Pigs” must have been Nixon’s code for some­thing related to the CIA, Cas­tro and the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion. But what­ever dark card Nixon had played, it worked. Halde­man reported back to his boss that the CIA direc­tor was now “very happy to be helpful.”

Nixon was not will­ing to pub­licly reopen the box of assas­si­na­tion demons. But many of them began fly­ing out when the Church Com­mit­tee started inves­ti­gat­ing CIA abuses in the 1970s, includ­ing the unholy pact between the agency and the Mafia to elim­i­nate Fidel Cas­tro. (The bomb­shell head­lines pro­duced by the Church Com­mit­tee would, in fact, lead to the for­ma­tion of the House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions in 1977.)

Among those in Wash­ing­ton who were par­tic­u­larly curi­ous about the rev­e­la­tions con­cern­ing the CIA and the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion was George H.W. Bush. As Kitty Kel­ley observes in her new book about the Bush fam­ily, while serv­ing as the CIA direc­tor in the Ford admin­is­tra­tion, Bush fired off a series of memos in fall 1976, ask­ing sub­or­di­nates var­i­ous ques­tions about Oswald, Ruby, Helms and other fig­ures tied to the assas­si­na­tion. “Years later, when [Bush] became pres­i­dent of the United States, he would deny mak­ing any attempt to review the agency files on the JFK assas­si­na­tion,” writes Kel­ley in “The Fam­ily: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty.” “When he made this claim, he did not real­ize that the agency would release 18 doc­u­ments (under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act) that showed he had indeed, as CIA direc­tor, requested infor­ma­tion — not once, but sev­eral times — on a wide range of ques­tions sur­round­ing the Kennedy assassination.”

One of the most aggres­sive inves­ti­ga­tors on the Church Com­mit­tee was the young, ambi­tious Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tor from Col­orado, Gary Hart, who along with Repub­li­can col­league Richard Schweiker began dig­ging into the swampy murk of south­ern Florida in the early 1960s. Here was the steamy nurs­ery for plots that drew together CIA sabo­teurs, Mafia cut­throats, anti-communist Cuban fanat­ics and the whole array of patri­otic zealots who were deter­mined to over­throw the gov­ern­ment of Cuba — the Iraq of its day. “The whole atmos­phere at that time was so yeasty,” says Hart today. “I don’t think any­body, Helms or any­body, had con­trol of the thing. There were peo­ple clan­des­tinely meet­ing peo­ple, the Mafia con­nec­tions, the friend­ships between the Mafia and CIA agents, and this crazy Cuban exile com­mu­nity. There were more and more lay­ers, and it was hon­ey­combed with bizarre peo­ple. I don’t think any­body knew every­thing that was going on. And I think the Kennedys were kind of rac­ing to keep up with it all.”

Schweiker’s mind was blown by what he and Hart were dig­ging up — there is no other way to describe it. He was a mod­er­ate Repub­li­can from Penn­syl­va­nia and he would be cho­sen as a vice pres­i­den­tial run­ning mate by Ronald Rea­gan in 1976 to bol­ster his chal­lenge against Pres­i­dent Jerry Ford. But Schweiker’s faith in the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment seemed deeply shaken by his Kennedy probe, which con­vinced him “the fin­ger­prints of intel­li­gence” were all over Lee Har­vey Oswald.

“Dick made a lot of state­ments inside the com­mit­tee that were a lot more inflam­ma­tory than any­thing I ever said, in terms of his sus­pi­cions about who killed Kennedy,” recalls Hart. “He would say, ‘This is out­ra­geous, we’ve got to reopen this.’ He was a blowtorch.”

Hart too con­cluded Kennedy was likely killed by a con­spir­acy, involv­ing some fever­ish cabal from the swamps of anti-Castro zealotry. And when he ran for pres­i­dent in 1984, Hart says, when­ever he was asked about the assas­si­na­tion, “My con­sis­tent response was, based on my Church Com­mit­tee expe­ri­ence, there are suf­fi­cient doubts about the case to jus­tify reopen­ing the files of the CIA, par­tic­u­larly in its rela­tion­ship to the Mafia.” This was enough to blow other people’s minds, says Hart, includ­ing rem­nants of the Mafia fam­ily of Florida god­fa­ther Santo Traf­fi­cante, who plays a key role in many JFK con­spir­acy the­o­ries. “[Jour­nal­ist] Sy Hersh told me that he inter­viewed bud­dies of Traf­fi­cante, includ­ing his right-hand man who was still alive when Hersh wrote his book (‘The Dark Side of Camelot’). He didn’t put this in his book, but when my name came up, the guy laughed, he snorted and said, ‘We don’t think he’s any bet­ter than the Kennedys.” Mean­ing they were keep­ing an eye on Hart? “At the very least. This was in the 1980s when I was run­ning for pres­i­dent, say­ing I would reopen the (Kennedy) inves­ti­ga­tion. Any­body can draw their own conclusions.”

Hart, of cou

rse, never made it to the White House. But another politi­cian who had been deeply inspired by JFK did — William Jef­fer­son Clin­ton. And like per­haps every other man who moved into the White House fol­low­ing the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion, he too was curi­ous about find­ing out the real story. “Where are the Kennedy files?” the young pres­i­dent report­edly asked soon after he went to work in the Oval Office.

And what about the other JFK from Mass­a­chu­setts, who also met Pres­i­dent Kennedy as a young man — John F. Kerry? If he’s elected in Novem­ber, will he be tempted to launch an inquiry and try to find out what really hap­pened to his hero in Dal­las? Hart says he doubts it. “You almost had to go through it like I did with the Church Com­mit­tee and get all the con­text. Oth­er­wise, you have to be very care­ful about falling into the con­spir­acy cat­e­gory. I at least had some cre­den­tials to talk about it. But if Kerry were to bring it up, peo­ple would just say he’s wacky, he’s obses­sive.” As Hart observes, there are other ways to kill a leader these days — you can assas­si­nate his character.

And so 40 years after the War­ren Report, with the country’s polit­i­cal elite still wracked with sus­pi­cions about the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion, yet immo­bi­lized from doing any­thing about it by fears of being polit­i­cally mar­gin­al­ized, and with the media elite con­tin­u­ing to dis­dain even the most seri­ous jour­nal­is­tic inquiry, the crime seems frozen in place. It is now up to his­to­ri­ans and schol­ars and authors to keep the spirit of inquiry alive.

For decades the only pub­lic crit­ics of the War­ren Report were a heroic and indomitable band of citizen-investigators — includ­ing a cru­sad­ing New York attor­ney, a small-town Texas news­pa­per­man, a retired Wash­ing­ton civil ser­vant, a Berke­ley lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor, a Los Ange­les sign sales­man, a Pitts­burgh coro­ner — all of whom refused to accept the fraud that was per­pe­trated on the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Undaunted by the media scorn that was heaped upon them, they devoted their lives to what pow­er­ful gov­ern­ment offi­cials and high-paid media man­darins should have been doing — solv­ing the most shock­ing crime against Amer­i­can democ­racy in the 20th cen­tury. Their names — Mark Lane, Ray Mar­cus, Harold Weis­berg, Sylvia Meagher, Vin­cent Salan­dria, Mary Fer­rell, Penn Jones Jr., Cyril Wecht, Peter Dale Scott, Jim Lesar and Gae­ton Fonzi, among oth­ers — will find their hon­ored place in Amer­i­can his­tory. It is these every­day heroes, and their suc­ces­sors, whose best work will some day come to replace the heavy, coun­ter­feit tomes of the War­ren Report.
(“The Mother of all Cover-ups” by David Tal­bot; Salon.com; 9/15/2004; pp. 1–3)

2. Next, the broad­cast high­lights mate­r­ial from Bill Davy’s book Let Jus­tice Be Done. The pro­gram presents parts of the House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions’ inves­ti­ga­tion that sup­port New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Garrison’s the­sis. Note that a deputy counsel’s report on the New Orleans aspects of the inves­ti­ga­tion asserted that Clay Shaw might very well have been involved with the assas­si­na­tion. (Shaw was tried by Jim Gar­ri­son after Ferrie’s sud­den, sus­pi­cious death.) “HSCA Chief Coun­sel, G. Robert Blakey, once referred to the Committee’s work as ‘the last inves­ti­ga­tion.’ As such, it is only proper that the HSCA have the last word on Clay Shaw. On Sep­tem­ber 1, 1977, staff coun­sel Jonathan Black­mer, authored a 15-page mem­o­ran­dum addressed to Blakey, as well as staff mem­bers, Gary Corn­well, Ken Klein, and Cliff Fen­ton. Black­mer was the lead coun­sel for team 3, the HSCA team respon­si­ble for the New Orleans and Cuban angles of the inves­ti­ga­tion. After an inves­tiga­tive trip to New Orleans, Black­mer con­cluded in his memo: ‘We have rea­son to believe Shaw was heav­ily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960’s and [was] pos­si­bly one of the high level plan­ners or ‘cut out’ to the plan­ners of the assas­si­na­tion.’”
(Let Jus­tice Be Done; by William Davy; Copy­right 1999 [SC]; Jor­dan Pub­lish­ing; ISBN 0–9669716-0–4; p. 202.)

3. The House Select Com­mit­tee appears to have obtained a film of a train­ing facil­ity for anti-Castro Cuban exiles, which con­nects some very inter­est­ing peo­ple. Guy Ban­is­ter, his inves­ti­ga­tor David Fer­rie and their rela­tion­ship to Oswald were a major ele­ment of Garrison’s inquiry. “It is pos­si­ble that a film once existed of this train­ing camp. The for­mer Deputy Chief Coun­sel of the House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions, Robert Tan­nen­baum, recalled that the com­mit­tee viewed the film and to Tan­nen­baum it was a shock to the sys­tem. ‘The movie was shock­ing to me because it demon­strated the notion that the CIA was train­ing, in Amer­ica, a sep­a­rate army,’ he said. ‘It was shock­ing to me because I’m a true believer in the sys­tem and yet there are noto­ri­ous char­ac­ters in the sys­tem, who are funded by the sys­tem, who are absolutely un-American! And who knows what they would do, even­tu­ally. What if we send peo­ple to Wash­ing­ton who they can’t deal with? Out comes their secret army? So, I find that to be as con­trary to the Con­sti­tu­tion as you can get.’ What is even more shock­ing is what the film reveals. Accord­ing to Tan­nen­baum, depicted in the film among the Cuban exiles were Guy Ban­is­ter, David Atlee Philips and Lee Har­vey Oswald. Inex­plic­a­bly, the film would later dis­ap­pear from the Committee’s files.” (Ibid.; p. 30.) The Ban­is­ter “detec­tive agency” was also involved with col­lect­ing intel­li­gence on the Amer­i­can civil rights move­ment, and was deeply involved with white suprema­cist orga­ni­za­tions. (For more on this sub­ject, see also: L#3, RFA#12, FTR#188.)

4. The House Select committee’s find­ings rein­forced those of Jim Garrison.“They fur­ther con­cluded that the ‘CIA-Mafia-Cuban plots had all the ele­ments nec­es­sary for a suc­cess­ful assas­si­na­tion con­spir­acy.’ It is prob­a­bly the ulti­mate irony that the U.S. government’s con­clu­sions echoed those of Jim Gar­ri­son a decade ear­lier.” (Ibid.; p. 189.)

5. The pro­gram con­cludes with a Ger­man uni­ver­sity professor’s account of what it was like to live dur­ing the rise of Hitler. Note the sim­i­lar­ity to aspects of the con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal land­scape. Con­sider George W. Bush (whom Mr. Emory views as a point ele­ment and front for the Under­ground Reich) and Hitler. “What hap­pened here was the grad­ual habit­u­a­tion of the peo­ple, lit­tle by lit­tle, to being gov­erned by sur­prise, to receiv­ing deci­sions delib­er­ated in secret, to believ­ing that the sit­u­a­tion was so com­pli­cated that the gov­ern­ment had to act on infor­ma­tion which the peo­ple could not under­stand because of national secu­rity, so dan­ger­ous that even if the peo­ple could under­stand it, it could not be released because of national secu­rity. And their sense of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with Hitler, their trust in him may have inci­den­tally reas­sured those who would oth­er­wise have wor­ried about it. Their trust in him made it eas­ier to reas­sure oth­ers who might have wor­ried about it. This sep­a­ra­tion of gov­ern­ment from peo­ple, this widen­ing of the gap, took place so grad­u­ally and so insen­si­bly, each step dis­guised (per­haps not even inten­tion­ally) as a tem­po­rary emer­gency mea­sure or asso­ci­ated with true patri­otic alle­giance or with real social pur­poses. And all the crises and reforms (real crises and reforms too) so occu­pied the peo­ple that they did not see the slow motion under­neath, of the whole process of the Gov­ern­ment grow­ing remoter and remoter.”
(They Thought they Were Free: The Ger­mans 1933–1945; by Mil­ton Mayer; copy­right 1955 [SC]; Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press; ISBN 0–226-51190–1; pp. 166–167.)

6. “‘The dic­ta­tor­ship, and the whole process of its com­ing into being, was, above all divert­ing. It pro­vided an excuse not to think for peo­ple who did not want to think any­way. I do not speak of your ‘lit­tle men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my col­leagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fun­da­men­tal things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dread­ful, fun­da­men­tal things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with con­tin­u­ous changes and ‘crises’ and so fas­ci­nated, yes, fas­ci­nated, by the machi­na­tions of the ‘national ene­mies,’ with­out and within, that we had no time to think about these things that were grow­ing, lit­tle by lit­tle, all around us. Uncon­sciously, I sup­pose, we were grate­ful. Who wants to think?” (Ibid.; pp. 167–168.)

7. “‘To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of polit­i­cal aware­ness, acu­ity, than most of us had ever had occa­sion to develop. Each step was so small, so incon­se­quen­tial, so well explained or, on occa­sion, ‘regret­ted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the begin­ning, unless one under­stood what the whole thing was in prin­ci­ple, what all these ‘lit­tle mea­sures’ that no ‘patri­otic Ger­man’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it devel­op­ing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn grow­ing. One day it is over his head.’” (Ibid.; p. 168.)

8. “‘How is this to be avoided, among ordi­nary men, even highly edu­cated extra­or­di­nary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all hap­pened I have pon­dered that pair of great max­ims, Prin­cipiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the begin­nings’ and ‘Con­sider the end.’ But one must fore­see the end in order to resist, or even see, the begin­nings. One must fore­see the end clearly and cer­tainly and how is this to be done, by ordi­nary men or even by extra­or­di­nary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn’t, but they might have. And every­one counts on that might.’” (Idem.)

9. “‘Your Lit­tle Men, your Nazi friends, were not against National Social­ism in prin­ci­ple. Men like me, who were, are the greater offend­ers, not because we knew bet­ter (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed bet­ter. Pas­tor Niemoller spoke for the thou­sands and thou­sands of men like me when he spoke too mod­estly of him­self) and said that when the Nazis attacked the com­mu­nists he was a lit­tle uneasy but, after all he was not a com­mu­nist, and so he did noth­ing and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier but still he did noth­ing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Church­man, and he did some­thing, but then it was too late.’ ‘Yes’ I said” (Ibid.; pp.168–169.)

10. “You see,” my col­league went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me this is true. Each act, each shock­ing occa­sion, is worse than the last, but only a lit­tle worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for that one great shock­ing occa­sion, think­ing that oth­ers, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resist­ing some­how. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trou­ble.’ Why not?–Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of stand­ing alone, that restrains you; it is also gen­uine uncer­tainty.” (Ibid.; p. 169.)

11. “Uncer­tainty is a very impor­tant fac­tor, and, instead of decreas­ing as time goes on, it grows. Out­side, in the streets, in the gen­eral com­mu­nity, ‘every­one’ is happy. One hears no protest, and cer­tainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slo­gans against the gov­ern­ment painted on walls and fences. In Ger­many, out­side the great cities per­haps, there is not even this. In the uni­ver­sity com­mu­nity, in you own com­mu­nity, you speak pri­vately to your col­leagues, some of whom cer­tainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re see­ing things’ or you’re an alarmist.” (Idem.)

12. “And you are an alarmist. You are say­ing that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the begin­nings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end and how do you know or even sur­mise the end? On the one hand your ene­mies, the law, the regime, the Party, intim­i­date you. On the other, your col­leagues pooh-pooh you as pes­simistic or even neu­rotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, nat­u­rally peo­ple who have always thought as you have.” (Ibid.; p. 169–170.)

13. “But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off some­where or sub­merged them­selves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meet­ings or gath­er­ings. Infor­mal groups become smaller; atten­dance drops off in lit­tle orga­ni­za­tions, and the orga­ni­za­tions them­selves wither. Now, in small gath­er­ings of your old­est friends you feel that you are talk­ing to your­selves, that you are iso­lated from the real­ity of things. This weak­ens your con­fi­dence still fur­ther and serves as a fur­ther deter­rent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do any­thing, you must make an occa­sion to do it, and then you are obvi­ously a trou­ble­maker. So you wait, and you wait.” “But the one great shock­ing occa­sion, when tens or hun­dreds or thou­sands will join with you never comes. That’s the dif­fi­culty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come imme­di­ately after the first and small­est, thou­sands, yes, mil­lions would have been suf­fi­ciently shocked if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in’43 had come imme­di­ately after the ‘Ger­man firm’ stick­ers on the win­dows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it hap­pens. In between come all the hun­dreds of lit­tle steps, some of them imper­cep­ti­ble, each of them prepar­ing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at step C. And so on to D.” (Ibid.; p.170–171.)

14. “And one day, too late, your prin­ci­ples, if you were ever sen­si­ble of them, all rush in upon you. The bur­den of self decep­tion has grown too heavy, and some minor inci­dent, in my case my lit­tle boy, hardly more than a baby, say­ing ‘Jew swine’ col­lapses it all at once, and you see that every­thing, every­thing, has changed and changed com­pletely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation your peo­ple –is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reas­sur­ing, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the meal­times, the vis­its, the con­certs, the cin­ema, the hol­i­days. But the spirit, which you never noticed, because you made the life­long mis­take of iden­ti­fy­ing it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the peo­ple who hate and fear do not even know it them­selves; when every­one is trans­formed, no one is trans­formed. Now you live in a sys­tem which rules with­out respon­si­bil­ity, even to God. The sys­tem itself could not have intended this in the begin­ning, but in order to sus­tain itself it was com­pelled to go all the way.” (Ibid.; p.171.)

15. “You have gone almost all the way your­self. Life is a con­tin­u­ing process, a flow, not a suc­ces­sion of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, car­ry­ing you with it, with­out any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been liv­ing, more com­fort­ably every day, with new morals, new prin­ci­ples. You have accepted things that your father, even in Ger­many, could not have imag­ined. (Idem.)

16. “Su

ddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accu­rately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do noth­ing).” (Ibid.; pp. 171–172)