By William Kelly
It’s been 60 years since U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren handed President Lyndon Johnson the final report on the official investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but there’s nothing final about it.
President Johnson took the report and said, “It’s heavy,” and indeed it was, but it’s conclusion, that the president was killed by one man acting alone for no apparent reason has still not been accepted by the majority of people. The issues the report presented are still reverberating in the halls of government and debated by conspiracy theorists and dedicated “lone nutters” on the internet.
The final report of the Warren Commission was actually written by Pentagon historian Alfred Goldberg, who died last week at the age of 105. When I interviewed Goldberg over the phone when he was still working at the Pentagon he told me Warren called him in and asked him to write the report so ordinary people could read it, as each chapter was to be composed by different attorneys and he didn’t want it to read like a legal brief.
On Sept. 27, 1964, three days after Warren handed the report to President Johnson at the White House, the report, along with 24 volumes of documents and testimony, were published and released to the public. While the report became a bestseller, the supporting documents were also read by independent researchers who picked the report apart, including Joshiah Thompson, Sylvia Meagher, Penn Jones, Mae Brussell and others.
In the late ’60s New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began investigating the Big Easy connections to the assassination, as the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was from New Orleans and lived there in the summer of 1963 shortly before the murder. Oswald had dropped out of high school and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, as his older brother had done. In the Marines, Oswald obtained his high school diploma and also learned the Russian language, not an easy thing to do.
He was stationed in Atsugi, Japan, home of a secret CIA base and from where the super secret U-2 spy plane took off for overflights of the Soviet Union. Oswald was a radar operator and was also trained in radio communications. When he was honorably discharged after two years of service, he traveled to Moscow and defected to the Soviet Union, saying he wanted Russian citizenship and was interested in learning the Soviet economic system.
While living in the city of Minsk, he met and married a Russian woman, Marina Nikolayevna, and they had a baby girl. He also decided to return to the United States, and did so with his wife and baby. He was not charged with any crime and according to the records, was not even debriefed about his stay behind the Iron Curtain. The CIA’s top brass, led by Counter-Intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, kept close tabs on Oswald and shared the information with other high ranking intelligence officials.
In Texas, Oswald was befriended by oil engineer George de Mohrenschildt and his rabid anti-communist associates, one of whom, Volkmar Schmidt, suggested to Oswald that right-wing U.S. Army Gen. Edwin Walker should be shot, like Hitler should have been killed before he got too powerful. Oswald then ordered a rifle and pistol through the mail under the alias Alek Hidell, though he could have obtained the weapons from any department or sporting goods store without any ID or leaving a paper trail.
The Warren Report states that Oswald did take a pot shot at Walker one night but missed. He then took Marina to his hometown of New Orleans, where he started a Fair Play for Cuba Committee, sympathetic to Fidel Castro, the communist dictator of Cuba. After getting into a fist fight with anti-Castro Cubans on a street corner and getting arrested, Oswald participated in a radio debate with two CIA-trained propagandists.
After visiting the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City and failing to get a visa to Cuba, Osawld returned to Dallas, where his wife was living with Ruth Paine sho arranged for Oswald to get a job at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD), where he handled textbooks.
When President Kennedy visited Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza, right in front of the TSBD, where he was shot and killed, and Texas Gov. John Connolly was wounded. Leaving work, Oswald returned to his rooming house in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, where a Dallas policeman, J.D. Tippit was shot and killed. Oswald was arrested in a movie theater and charged with murdering both Tippit and the president, though he denied shooting anyone. He was later killed while in police custody by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.
Oswald was 24 years old at the time.
A week later, President Johnson ordered Earl Warren to conduct an investigation into the assassination, but the reluctant Warren balked. Johnson said that if the public were convinced there was a conspiracy, it could lead to a nuclear war with millions of people killed. LBJ used the same reasoning to convince the other Warren Commission members to serve, including former CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom President Kennnedy had fired over the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Dulles kept secret the fact that the CIA had engaged the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, something still living Warren Commission attorney Sam Stern said would have resulted in their conducting a different type of investigation.
The Warren Commission was also kept in the dark about a threatening note the accused assassin had sent to FBI agent James Hosty, who had been questioning Oswald’s wife Marina. In the end, then as now, most people never accepted the Commission’s conclusion that Oswald alone was responsible for the assassination.
Then a major motion picture was released, “Executive Action,” starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, a screenplay by once blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo that portrayed the assassination as a conspiracy by rich Texas oil men and covert operatives. It ended with a list of witnesses who died suspiciously, further fueling the public’s imagination.
Other movies were also made, including “Ruby,” which focused on the mob-connected man who killed Oswald, and Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” which became a popular hit. As a trailer in the end of the film, Stone mentions the fact that many of the assassination records were still secret, which sparked a public outcry and forced Congress to unanimously pass the JFK Act of 1992, which established the Assassination Record Review Board (ARRB) to identify and declassify the assassination records, all of which were required to be released in full 20 years after the passage of the law.
When the JFK Act was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, he included a rider that the president and only the president could continue withholding assassination records after that date, which was set as Oct. 26, 2017, when Donald Trump was president.
Trump repeatedly said and tweeted that he would release the records in full, but then, at the very last moment, listened to his CIA director and Chief of Staff United States Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, and agreed to delay the release for another two years. Joe Biden was president then, and he, too, agreed with the CIA and the Pentagon to continue withholding key assassination records, allowing the CIA to draw up what they called the “transparency plan,” an oxymoron if there ever was one, that can withhold records indefinitely.
Two lawyers, Bill Simpich of San Francisco and Larry Schnapf of New York then sued both President Biden and the National Archives in Federal Court for failure to uphold the JFK Act, a legal case that continues today.
Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father and uncle were victims of political assassinations, made the release of the records a campaign issue, and former President Trump, also a candidate, agreed, and once again has promised to release the sealed and secret records if elected. Trump also convinced RFK, Jr. to drop out of the race and endorse him in exchange for being promised a position to head a new Assassinations Commission that would investigate all assassinations and attempted assassinations, including the two recent attempts on Trump’s life.
The Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has not expressed her views on the release of the records, but she is expected to maintain President Joe Biden’s view that the still-sealed records should remain secret.
In any case, it is quite clear that the Warren Commission’s attempt to lay the assassination debate to rest failed. If anything it backfired, evolving into a lingering source of mystery, suspicion and political intrigue 60 years later.
My JFK journey
For me the assassination of President Kennedy began a personal journey that isn’t over, ever since I was let out of grade school early, and my father, then a Camden, N.J. police officer, called me and ordered me to stay in the yard.
“The president’s been killed and we don’t know what it all means,” he said. Now, more than 60 years later, we still don’t know what it all means.
In college in 1969 I began to study the assassination as an historical event, but it soon became apparent that it was still impacting our society.
I lobbied for the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations and co-founded national organizations Coalition on Political Assassinations and Citizens Against Political Assassinations. I was the third person to testify before the Assassinations Records Review Board and interviewed a dozen obscure but significant witnesses.
For those interested in this subject I have documented and posted the results of my 50 years of research at my blog http://JFKCounercoup.bogspot.com
– BK
