In our first class on September 8, we'll do short introductions, by answering in one sentence the question of either Who Killed JFK? or How do you feel about JFK’s presidency?
We'll then orient ourselves to the task ahead by going through the timeline below which covers the major highlights of America's investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. There is a lot of material here, about 26 pages worth, and you might want to read it twice so that it sticks. I have a generated podcast which walks through the material which you may want to listen to, perhaps as you read the material; it might be an alternative way to absorb the material.
Click HERE for a printable copy of this chapter
CLICK HERE to listen to a 40 minute podcast of this chapter. If you get a Google warning that the file is too big to scan for viruses, you can Play Anyway, since the file was generated and stored by Google.
On Friday November 22, 1963 at 12:30PM CST, as President Kennedy’s motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) on Elm Street in Dallas, several shots rang out. The President was mortally wounded with gunshot wounds to his head, neck and back, and Texas Governor John Connally was wounded in his his chest, wrist and leg. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Hospital where emergency resuscitation procedures were performed, but the President was declared dead at 1PM. Governor Connally recovered from his wounds.
Immediately after the shooting motorcycle officer Marrion Baker, who saw pigeons fly off the roof of the TSBD during the shooting, parked his bike and ran into the TSBD. He and Roy Truly, Superintendent of the TSBD ran up the stairs and to the roof, looking for a shooter without success. That evening, Patrolman Baker wrote an affidavit which included the statement: "As we reached the third or fourth floor I saw a man walking away from the stairway. I called to the man and he turned around and came back toward me. The manager [Roy Truly] said, "I know that man, he works here." I then turned the man loose and went up to the top floor. The man I saw was a white man approximately 30 years old, 5'9", 165 pounds, dark hair and wearing a light brown jacket." The next day Baker revised his statement to say that he saw a man standing in the second floor lunch room.
Shortly after the shooting several bystanders on Elm Street reported that they had seen a person shooting a rifle from the sixth floor east window of the TSBD. Another reported that he saw a man fleeing the building shortly after the shooting. We'll return to what happened in the Texas School Book Depository in Week 4.
At 12:45pm, 15 minutes after the shooting, the Dallas Police Department broadcast a description of the subject: "Attention all squads. The suspect from Elm and Houston is reported to be an unknown white male about thirty, slender build, five feet ten inches tall, one hundred sixty-five pounds, armed with what is thought to be a 30-30 rifle. No further description at this time, or information. " No one has satisfactorily explained where this description came from. In a letter to the Warren Commission in January 1964, the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover stated that the original broadcast by the Dallas Police of the description of the assassin of President Kennedy was: “initiated on the basis of a description furnished by an unidentified citizen who had observed an individual approximating Oswald’s description running from the Texas School Book Depository immediately after the assassination. Although the citizen was requested by Dallas authorities to proceed to the Sheriff’s office for further questioning he apparently never appeared, as the Dallas Sheriff’s Office can locate no record of this citizen. Information regarding the unidentified citizen whose information initiated the Dallas Police Department broadcast on November 22, 1963, was obtained from Inspector J.H. Sawyer, Dallas Police Department by our Dallas Office on January 9, 1964.”
The presidential motorcade arrived at the hospital at 12:38pm. JFK was taken into Trauma Room 1 while Texas Governor John Connally was taken into Trauma Room 2 and then surgery. JFK was attended to by a team of doctors including Dr. Kemp Clark a neurosurgeon and Dr. Malcolm Perry, a surgeon. When he arrived, there was no consistent heartbeat or blood pressure and only agonal respirations. Dr. Perry observed two wounds, a small hole, appearing to be a wound of entrance in the lower portion of the neck. He opened that wound with an incision to perform a tracheotomy to help JFK' s breathing. Dr. Clark observed a large gaping wound in the back right of JFK's skull with considerable loss of scalp and bone, and damaged cerebral and cerebellar tissues extruding from the wound. Dr. Clark determined that the wound was not survivable. A priest arrived and gave JFK last rites, and he was pronounced dead by Dr. Clark at 1pm. JFK's body was cleaned and placed into a bronze ceremonial casket and the Secret Service, ignoring the objections of Dallas County medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, took it to Air Force One, to be returned with LBJ to Washington.
There was a press conference at Parkland hospital later that afternoon in which acting Press Secretary, Malcolm Kilduff, when asked how JFK died, said that it was a simple matter of a bullet through the head. Dr. Clark described the head wound as a "tangential wound" where the bullet struck the skull at an oblique angle and Dr. Perry described a bullet wound of entrance in the neck. These statements later led to great consternation, as they conflicted with the autopsy results, which we'll discuss in Week 3.
Malcolm Kilduff at Parkland Press Briefing
Around 1:10pm, Dallas Officer J.D. Tippit was driving his patrol car in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. He stopped his car to speak with a man on the sidewalk, and then got out of his car and walked around the front of the car, whereupon he was shot four times by the man. Officer Tippit died instantly, and the man walked off at a brisk pace, discarding the spent shells from his pistol. Many police cars descended on Oak Cliff amid an intense search for the killer. At 1:22pm police broadcast a description of the suspect as "White male, thirty, five eight, black hair, slender build, wearing white jacket, white shirt, dark slacks." (page 16)
Shoe store salesman Johnny Calvin Brewer noticed a suspicious looking character loitering outside his store, and followed as the man allegedly snuck into the nearby Texas Theatre. He persuaded the ticket taker, Julia Postal to call the police at 1:45PM. (page 18) Several dozen police officers surrounded the Texas Theatre. Officer Armstrong went up to Lee Harvey Oswald, who was pointed out to him by Johnny Brewer and a scuffle ensued. They arrested Oswald at 1:50pm, with police shouting “Kill the President, will you?” and took him into custody. As he was being escorted out of the theater, a police officer told Julia Postal Oswald’s name and said that they had their man on both counts, including the murder of Officer Tippit.
In the patrol car on the way to DPD headquarters, the police allegedly removed Oswald’s wallet from his pocket and found ID for both Lee Harvey Oswald and Alek Hidell, although no mention of the name Hidell occurs in any police department reports or transcripts until the following day.
We’ll examine the Tippit killing and Oswald arrest more closely in Week 4.
At about 1:20PM, a search of the sixth floor of the TSBD turned up three expended shells and a rifle with one unexpended bullet, originally identified as a Mauser, but later corrected to a 6.5mm Italian Mannlicher Carcano. A 38" long bag was photographed being removed from the TSBD around 3pm. Police theorized that Oswald carried the rifle into the TSBD in the bag. Oswald's co-worker, Buell Wesley Frazier, had driven Oswald to work that day and testified that Oswald was carrying a brown paper bag which Oswald claimed had curtain rods in it. Later that day Frazier was arrested and told to sign a confession of complicity in the assassination plot. Frazier insisted that the package Oswald carried was not much longer than two feet long and could not have held the rifle. He was released after passing a lie detector test. The rifle evidence is in an optional chapter.
Around 1:20pm Oswald's supervisor, Roy Truly pointed out to Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas Police that Oswald was missing, even though Truly and Marrion Baker had allegedly seen him just after the assassination. This story seems strange because at that time a number of people were missing from the TSBD. Nevertheless, Will Fritz sent Detective Guy Rose and several others out to the address that Truly had given Fritz which was the home of Ruth Paine in Irving Texas. Oswald's Russian wife Marina was staying with Ruth Paine to help Ruth practice her Russian, while Oswald stayed in a rooming house in Dallas during the week and visited Marina on weekends. According to Rose, "just as soon as we walked up on the porch, Ruth Paine came to the door. She apparently recognized us--she said, "I've been expecting you all," and we identified ourselves, and she said, "Well, I've been expecting you to come out. Come right on in."
Mr. BALL. Did she say why she had been expecting you?
Mr. ROSE. She said, "Just as soon as I heard where the shooting happened. I knew there would be someone out."
At that point, according to her own testimony, Ruth Paine thought Oswald was working at a different TSBD building–not the one at 411 Elm Street, where the Warren Commission ultimately placed Oswald and his rifle, but one that was located several blocks from Dealey Plaza.
Either the same day or the following day, a strange phone call was intercepted between Ruth Paine’s phone and that of her husband Michael, who said he felt sure that Oswald had killed the President but did not feel Oswald was responsible, and further stated “We both know who is responsible.”
The search of the Paine residence turned up a lot of incriminating evidence. A search the following day turned up incriminating photos of Oswald with a rifle, and over the next few months, more evidence turned up which had previously been overlooked. Many researchers are highly suspect of the Paines and the fact that so much of the circumstantial evidence incriminating Oswald appeared from their house. Even the Secret Service apparently told Marina Oswald not to associate with Ruth Paine because she was sympathizing with the CIA.
Two FBI agents, Francis O'Neill and James Siebert witnessed the autopsy and wrote a brief report. The autopsy was performed by Navy Dr. James Humes and his assistant Dr. J. Thornton Boswell. Boswell reported that Oswald had been captured and they just needed the bullet to complete the case, however after examining the body and taking X-rays, no bullets were found. A shallow wound, no more than one inch deep was found in the back. A bullet hole was found in the back of the skull, and lead fragments were found in the brain which suggested a bullet hit the skull from behind and blew out the right side of JFK's head. A call to the FBI lab revealed that a bullet had been found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, so Humes concluded that the stretcher bullet had worked its way out of the shallow wound in JFK's back and the other bullet had traversed the skull.
Either later that evening, or the next morning, Humes talked with the doctors at Parkland and heard about the entrance wound in the front of the President's neck. Humes wrote the autopsy report on Saturday with this in mind. However later in the day on Saturday he burned that copy of his autopsy report together with the notes taken during the autopsy and wrote a second report. There are suggestions that that report was also discarded. The autopsy report that is in evidence concludes that JFK was struck by two bullets, both from behind. The bullet which hit his back came out the front of his neck and the bullet which hit him in the back of his head came out the top right side of his head. The medical evidence is endlessly debated, but perhaps we can get to the bottom of it when we examine the evidence in Week 3.
From Friday to Sunday of the assassination weekend, Oswald was interrogated by a variety of people for a total of 12 hours. It does seem a little peculiar that while we have sworn statements, affidavits and testimony of hundreds if not thousands of people in the case, there were no notes, recordings or statements by the principal suspect in the case, other than statements that Oswald made to reporters requesting legal representation and stating that he was "Just a patsy." A number of people wrote later reports summarizing the interrogations, most notably Homicide Captain Will Fritz, FBI Agents James Hosty, James Brookhout and Manning Clements, Secret Service Inspector Thomas Kelley, and Postal Inspector H.D. Holmes. The reports differ in reporting where Oswald was when JFK was shot. Fritz' report and Brookhout's confirms the second floor lunchroom drinking a cola story. The Hosty/Brookout report says Oswald was on the first floor when JFK passed the building. In the 1990's the ARRB released a set of handwritten notes by FBI Agent James Hosty in which Oswald indicated that he "returned to 1st floor to eat lunch. Then went outside to watch P. [presidential?] Parade" . Also in the 1990's some handwritten notes by Homicide Captain Will Fritz turned up. These notes say "to 1st floor had lunch... out with Bill Shelly in front." In Week 4 TSBD we'll see if we can determine where Oswald was when the President was shot.
Throughout the interrogation, Oswald denied owning a rifle and claimed that pictures of him holding a rifle were faked. The rifle evidence is in an optional chapter.
During the weekend Oswald was placed in several line ups. The star witness to the Tippit murder, Helen Markham testified to the Warren Commission but was quite incoherent; AssistantWarren Commission Counsel Liebeler has described her testimony as "contradictory and worthless", while Assistant Counsel Ball described her as "an utter screwball". In her testimony she stated six times that she recognized nobody in the line up until Assistant Counsel Ball finally got her to say "I asked... I looked at him. When I saw this man I wasn't sure but I had cold chills run all over me ... when I saw the man. But I wasn't sure."
Howard Brennan was the other star witness who claimed to have seem a shooter on the sixth floor of the TSBD but he failed to identify Oswald in the line up. Several months later he testified that he recognized Oswald but had been afraid for his life and thus refused to identify him.
At 6:30pm on Saturday, November 23, Police Chief Jesse Curry announced that Oswald would be transferred from the Dallas city jail to the Dallas county jail, probably Sunday morning. Between 2 and 3am Sunday morning four calls went out to the Dallas Police, the Dallas Sheriff’s office and the FBI warning that if they moved Oswald the way they were planning he would be killed. The Dallas Police officer who took the call recognized Jack Ruby’s voice. Dallas Police Chief Curry ignored the warnings. At 11:21 am on Sunday, while Oswald was being transferred, Jack Ruby jumped out and delivered a fatal shot to Oswald. Ruby said he shot Oswald to spare Jackie Kennedy the burden of coming to Dallas to testify and also to show that a Jew had guts. We'll look more at Jack Ruby and his Mafia connections in Week 8.
JFK's funeral was held on Monday November 25. On Sunday afternoon, 300,000 people watched a horse-drawn caisson carry President Kennedy's flag covered casket from the White House to the Capitol Rotunda to lie in state where another 250,000 people paid their respects. The next day one million people lined the route of the funeral procession, from the Capitol back to the White House, then to St. Matthew's Cathedral, and finally to Arlington National Cemetery. 1,200 invited guests, including leaders from around the world attended JFK's funeral mass in the cathedral.
In early December, Jackie and Bobby Kennedy sent a trusted friend, William Walton, on a secret diplomatic mission to the Soviet Union. Walton carried a message for the Soviets from Robert Kennedy: Although President Lyndon Johnson was a "sabre-rattling anti-communist", Kennedy assured the Soviets that Johnson was nothing more than a "clever time-server incapable of realizing Kennedy's unfinished plans".[76] Kennedy also informed the Soviets through Walton that he intended to run for president in 1968, and that if he won there would be a significant thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations.[77] Finally, Walton conveyed the Kennedy family's belief that John F. Kennedy had been the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy and not a Soviet assassination.[32]
from David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government Kindle location 9667
After returning from Kennedy’s November 25 funeral in Washington, de Gaulle gave a remarkably candid assessment of the assassination to his information minister, Alain Peyrefitte. “What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me,” confided the French president. “His story is the same as mine…. It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS (Secret Army Organization) story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.”
“Do you think Oswald was a front?” Peyrefitte asked de Gaulle.
“Everything leads me to believe it,” he replied. “They got their hands on this communist who wasn’t one, while still being one. He had a sub par intellect and was an exalted fanatic – just the man they needed, the perfect one to be accused….The guy ran away, because he probably became suspicious. They wanted to kill him on the spot before he could be grabbed by the judicial system. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen exactly the way they had probably planned it would….But a trial, you realize, is just terrible. People would have talked. They would have dug up so much! They would have unearthed everything. Then the security forces went looking for [a clean-up man] they totally controlled, and who couldn’t refuse their offer, and that guy sacrificed himself to kill the fake assassin – supposedly in defense of Kennedy’s memory!”
“Baloney! Security forces all over the world are the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare that the justice system no longer needs to be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder.”
“America is in danger of upheavals. But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over those shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.”
J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo to his lieutenants at 1:42pm EST (12:42 PM Dallas time) on November 22, 1963, giving an overview of the case. He had just broken the news of the shooting to JFK’s brother Bobby who was at the Hickory Hill compound.
Hoover’s mutual loathing of Bobby was in evidence when he called Bobby back shortly after 2PM EST, announced “The President’s dead.” and hung up, leading Bobby to note later, that Hoover’s voice was oddly flat – “not quite as excited as if he were reporting the fact that he had found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University.”
However, this story conflicts with Hoover’s report that RFK told Hoover JFK was dead:
2:10 PM From J. Edgar Hoover memo: “called RFK to advise him of President’s condition and was told by RFK that JFK was dead; repeated all information from phone calls from Shanklin.”
In the above memo, Hoover notes that the Dallas FBI Special Agent in Charge, Gordon Shanklin “stated that a Secret Service agent had also been killed. He stated they did not mention that at first but an agent at the Police Department advised that one died. He did not know the name of this Secret Service agent.” The report of a killed Secret Service agent was repeated throughout the afternoon by the press including Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, with attribution from the Dallas Police Department.
The origin of this false rumor has been a mystery to assassination researchers. Regardless of its origin it may have had the result of moving the jurisdiction of the investigation from Dallas to Washington DC. As William Manchester outlined in his book, The Death of a President, in 1963 there was no Federal law against killing a President. There were laws against conspiracy to kill a President, or killing a Secret Service agent, but no laws against killing the President himself. Thus the FBI lacked jurisdiction in the case, and the Secret Service forcibly and illegally removed JFK’s body from Parkland Hospital despite protestation from Earl Rose, the Dallas County medical examiner who insisted that by Texas law he was to conduct the autopsy.
At 4:01PM EST (3:01PM Dallas time) Oswald had been in custody for 1 hour and 11 minutes. At this point there was little evidence against him, except for an eyewitness report that he entered a movie theater without paying. Despite this, Hoover called Bobby Kennedy again and told him “I thought we had the man who killed the President down in Dallas.” and “since the Secret Service is tied up, I thought we should move into the case. .. I related that Oswald went to Russia and stayed three years; came back to the United States in June, 1962, and went to Cuba on several occasions but would not tell us what he went to Cuba for.” [note: there is no evidence that Oswald ever went to Cuba].
Also at 4PM, Hoover put out a teletype to all FBI offices: “All offices immediately contact all informants, security, racial and criminal, as well as other sources for information bearing on assassination of President Kennedy. All offices immediately establish whereabouts of bombing suspects, all known Klan and hate group members, known racial extremists, and any other individuals who on the basis of information available in your files may possibly have been involved.”
At 5:15pm J. Edgar Hoover put out an internal memo stating that LHO was the principal suspect, seemingly based only on his leftist views and travel to Russia. This premature conclusion, as well as Roy Truly's fingering of Lee Harvey Oswald is suspicious. There were many other suspicious characters who were taken into custody but then quietly released, including:
Eugene Hale Brading, a career criminal from California who was arrested after the assassination in the Dal-Tex building in Dealey Plaza for acting suspiciously.
Charles Murphy in Fort Worth says on NBC that a “car wanted in connection with the assassination” has been stopped in Fort Worth at an intersection, suspect in custody.
Buell Wesley Frazier was arrested and pressured to sign a confession
1:35 PM In Fort Worth, police picked up a man who looked somewhat like Oswald; this resulted from a phone tip from a woman in a town not far from Dallas who said that the car the man was driving (she gave the license number) was linked to the assassination. The suspect told the FBI that he had driven 100 miles from his home in Ranger, Texas, to Dallas hoping to surprise an old friend with a visit. He was unable to reach his friend on the phone, and decided to watch the presidential motorcade, and parked his car on Commerce Street. After the shooting, the man left downtown Dallas in his green and white 1957 Ford; after receiving the tip from the woman caller, police at 1:35pm broadcast a description of the man’s car and his license number. He was detained a few minutes later; after Oswald’s arrest was announced, he was let go. (Dallas Morning News 8/20/1978; Cover Up 88; H 19 523; CD 301 p111-12) A short time later, Dallas police received a report that a man in a residential section of Dallas was seen removing a rifle from a light green, two-tone car. Police discovered that the car in question was registered to a man who had the same last name as the “friend” the suspect had tried to telephone. (Senate Select Committee Final Report, book 5, p884-5; Cover Up 88) Gary Shaw has tried to interview the young man about this issue and has “met with extreme hostility.” (Reasonable Doubt 126)
1:50PM reported second suspect arrested with Oswald at Texas Theater
CBS reports (approx 1:40 PM) that police are not satisfied the man they brought in is the right suspect. They are searching for a white man, about 30, 165lbs, used a 30-30 rifle. Assassin shot from the 5th or 6th floor. JFK was shot “in the right temple.” Bulletin from Dan Rather in Dallas that DPD has arrested a 30 year old man who was found with a weapon
12:38pm Dallas police detain a Latin man whom they have seized on Elm Street. (Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig states that this is the same man he will see driving a Rambler station wagon that picks up a man in front of the TSBD a few minutes later.) The Latin man is released when he indicates he cannot speak English.
1:05 PM On Interstate 45, a few miles south of Dallas, highway patrolmen stopped a black car for speeding; witnesses to the incident say it contained three men in suits, one of whom identified himself to an officer as a Secret Service agent. This man reportedly said, “We’re in a hurry to get to New Orleans to investigate part of the shooting.” (Conspiracy of Silence 96) There is no record of Secret Service personnel being dispatched to New Orleans on the day of the assassination.
On the afternoon of the assassination, LBJ flew from Dallas to Washington DC on Air Force 1, and the President’s cabinet plane flew from Hawaii to Washington. Both planes were in frequent contact with the White House Situation room, manned by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. Jim Bishop (The Day Kennedy Was Shot) and William Manchester (Death of a President) made the claim that the transcripts of the radio conversations reported that the assassination was the work of one individual and that there was no conspiracy. Obviously there is no way the White House Situation Room could have known this. LBJ was reportedly in frequent radio contact with Bundy prior to AF1 taking off, so perhaps the message came from LBJ. We have heavily edited versions of these tapes, and on the current versions there is no mention of Oswald as a lone assassin. Either this has been edited out of the tapes or it was perhaps never there.
Like J. Edgar Hoover's reaction, it is hard to understand how anyone could maintain on Friday, the day of the assassination, that there had been no conspiracy.
The Warren Commission Report tells us that two months prior to the assassination, on Friday September 27, 1963, Oswald had arrived in Mexico City. He immediately checked into the Hotel del Commercio, and visited the Cuban Consulate in an attempt to obtain a transit visa to Cuba, which he wanted to visit on his way back to Russia. The Cuban Consulate told him he would need a Russian visa before giving him a Cuban transit visa, so he visited the Russian Embassy, who told him it would take at least six weeks to obtain a Russian visa and the decision would have to come from the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC. Repeated visits and telephone calls to the embassies over the next few days proved fruitless, so after a few days of sightseeing, Oswald departed Mexico City the following Wednesday October 2, on a bus back to Dallas. We have transcripts of four telephone calls from Lee Oswald to the Soviet Embassy since the CIA was bugging their phone lines, and they seem at first glance to be innocuous, although the date of the last call is October 3, after Oswald departed.
The day after Kennedy’s assassination, these transcripts appeared anything but innocuous. The CIA identified one of the names mentioned on the transcripts, a Soviet consular official named Valeriy Kostikov, as not only a member of the KGB, but indeed, a member of KGB’s Department 13 which was in charge of assassinations and sabotage. Tennent Bagley, the Acting Chief of Soviet Russia Division at the CIA immediately issued an explosive memo entitled “Contact of Lee Oswald with a member of Soviet KGB Assassination Department.” The CIA subsequently emphasized the danger with a memo dated January 21, 1964 to the Warren Commission stating that the Assassination Department 13 "conducts interviews or, as appropriate, file reviews on every foreign military defector to the USSR to study and to determine the possibility of utilizing the defector in his country of origin". And on February 28, 1964, the CIA sent Warren Commission counsel Lee Rankin a memo outlining grisly assassination techniques, labeled "Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping."
It should be noted that James Jesus Angleton, a top CIA employee in charge of counter-intelligence and a lifelong proponent of the Soviets killed Kennedy theory disputed the allegation that Kostikov was involved in assassinations both before and after the assassination, but approved sending the Kostikov story to the Warren Commission nonetheless.
The Kostikov incident prompted a huge reaction within the CIA because it implied that Oswald may have assassinated JFK on orders from Russia.
Edgar Hoover of the FBI was on top of this. The evening of the assassination he had sent an FBI agent down to Mexico City to obtain the original tapes of the phone calls as well as photographs of Oswald which were taken by CIA surveillance as he went in and out of the Soviet and Cuban Embassies:
As you can see, the photograph is of someone else; assassination researchers call him the Mystery Man and he has not yet been identified. On Saturday, November 23 at 10 AM Hoover had a phone call with LBJ who asked him for an update on the “Mexico City incident”. Apparently LBJ had been briefed on this at some earlier point, but we have no record of that discussion. See the Hoover LBJ phone transcript:
(6) Lyndon B. Johnson: Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September?
(7) J. Edgar Hoover: No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing, for this reason – we have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there.
Interestingly enough, this conversation between LBJ and Hoover is the only one of the LBJ telephone tapes at the LBJ Presidential Library that seems to have been deliberately erased, so that revealing as it is, we can’t be sure that it reflects their actual conversation or if other parts of the conversation were not transcribed.
As of Saturday morning 11/23, it appeared to LBJ and Hoover that someone impersonating Lee Oswald had made these calls which were causing so much conspiracy concern. We know it probably wasn’t Oswald not only due to the FBI voice match, but also because the translator said the man spoke “terrible, hardly recognizable Russian” while Oswald was quite fluent in Russian. Perhaps the Mexico City CIA station had made a mistake with the photos, but the three most senior personnel: David Atlee Phillips, CIA station chief Win Scott, and Ambassador Thomas Mann (as well as James Jesus Angleton) were strongly pushing the Soviets-killed-Kennedy story long after Washington had settled on the lone nut theory, so it would seem that if they had surveillance photos of the real Oswald, they would have found them. The fact of Oswald’s impersonation would seem to strengthen Oswald’s claim that he was just a patsy and indicate that there was a conspiracy, if not to assassinate JFK, at least to implicate Oswald with Kostikov. Tennent Bagley’s memo also seems overly inflammatory, perhaps indicative of a plan to frame Oswald. We’ll look at revelations of strange things happening in the CIA files between Oswald’s Mexico trip and the assassination later, in Week 9.
The idea that Oswald had met with a Soviet KGB Assassination expert must have been extremely threatening. Following their Saturday morning phone call, both Hoover and LBJ actively moved to dismiss any rumors of conspiracy in JFK's killing. On Saturday Hoover put out a teletype to all offices stating “Lee Harvey Oswald has been developed as the principal suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy. He has been formerly charged with the President’s murder along with the murder of Dallas Texas patrolman J.D. Tippit by Texas State authorities. In view of developments all offices should resume normal contacts with informants and other sources with respect to bombing suspects, hate group members and known racial extremists. Daily teletype summaries may be discontinued.”
Also on November 23, Hoover sent a memo to LBJ outlining the case against Oswald. As the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) later put it, “It must be said that the FBI generally exhausted its resources in confirming its case against Oswald as the lone assassin, a case that Director J. Edgar Hoover, at least, seemed determined to make within 24 hours of the of the assassination.” The abrupt change in Hoover's thinking: from exploring evidence of conspiracy to shutting down such inquiries may well have been a deliberate decision shared with LBJ due to the implications of Tennent Bagley's memo linking Oswald with Kostikov.
During the weekend, hundreds of telegrams poured in to J. Edgar Hoover’s office, many of them critical of the FBI. Here is one example. The Director, always sensitive to criticism of his beloved organization, took the time out of his busy schedule for a personal response.
Over the weekend of November 23, Walt Rostow, future National Security Advisor and others lobbied Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach with the idea of a Presidential commission appointed to investigate the President’s assassination and calm public opinion. On Sunday Walt Rostow called Johnson aide Bill Moyers to pitch the idea; you can listen here to the recording.
That Sunday evening, Katzenbach drafted the infamous Katzenbach memo to Moyers which was typed and issued the next day. The memo urged that “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, that he did not have confederates who are still at large, and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.”
LBJ was resistant to the idea of a Presidential commission. As LBJ told Hoover on Monday, November 25, “Apparently some lawyer in Justice (Katzenbach) is lobbying with the Post because that’s where the suggestion came from for this Presidential Commission which we think would be very bad and put it right in the White House. Now we can’t be checking up on every shooting scrape in the country.”
LBJ’s suggestion was for Hoover to issue a full report on the assassination to Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General who would then release it publicly. LBJ apparently told Hoover to issue his report by the next day, Tuesday, November 26.
On Monday, Hoover issued a statement to the press, “’Not one shred of evidence has been developed to link any other person in a conspiracy with Oswald to assassinate President Kennedy,’ Hoover said in a statement.”
Also on Monday, Hoover issued a deadline for the report on the assassinations of both JFK and Oswald to be issued by Wednesday, November 27.
On Tuesday, November 26, FBI Assistant Director in Charge of Special Investigations Courtney Evans wrote a Memo to his boss Alan Belmont: “From the facts disclosed in our investigation there is no question that we can submit in our report convincing evidence beyond any doubt, showing Oswald was the man who killed President Kennedy.” … “The problem is to show motive. A matter of this magnitude cannot be investigated in a week’s time.”
Hoover scribbled “Just how long do you estimate it will take? It seems to me we have the basic facts now.”
During the week, LBJ warmed to the idea of a Presidential Commission and by Friday, November 29 he had announced the Warren Commission.
Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren had initially refused to serve, until LBJ told him that rumors of Castro or Khrushchev’s involvement could cause a nuclear war which would cause the deaths of 40 million Americans. LBJ told Senator Russell that after Warren refused several times to head the commission, Johnson called him to the Oval Office and told him "what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City," whereupon Warren began crying and told Johnson "well I won't turn you down, I'll just do whatever you say."
Conversation between LBJ and Senator Richard Russell “It has already been announced and you can serve with anybody for the good of America and this is a question that has a good many more ramifications than on the surface and we’ve got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and chuck us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour. “
Johnson told Russell that: “The Secretary of State came over here this afternoon. He’s deeply concerned, Dick, about the idea that they’re spreading throughout the Communist world that Khrushchev killed Kennedy. Now he didn’t. He didn’t have a damned thing to do with it.”
Johnson now took the view that the public must not be allowed to know that Kennedy has been killed as a result of a communist conspiracy. He made the same point to Charles Halleck, House Minority Leader. “This thing is getting pretty serious and our folks are worried about it … it has some foreign complications … CIA and other things” and “this is a question that could involve our losing thirty-nine million people”.
Hoover’s FBI report which was originally due Tuesday November 26 was indeed delayed by various conspiracy rumors, such as the Gilberto Alvarado allegation and the Pedro Charles letters.
The FBI report was finally issued on December 9 but was never published by the Warren Commission, in part because the Warren Commission disagreed with the FBI shot analysis of three shots/three hits.
The Warren Commission’s organizational outline was proposed by Earl Warren to the other commissioners in a memo dated January 11, 1964. Some have proposed that the framework of the investigation suggests a preconceived conclusion that Oswald was the lone assassin.
The Warren Commission began in January 1964 and was slated to complete its work and issue a report within a few months. It was hoped that the report would, in the words of Assistant Director of the FBI, Alan Belmont "settle the dust, in so far as Oswald and his activities are concerned, both from the standpoint that he is the man who assassinated the President, and relative to Oswald himself and his activities and background, et cetera." This would hopefully pave the way for LBJ's election in November 1964.
The Warren Commission was designed to review the evidence gathered by the FBI. It had the ability to subpoena witnesses and get their testimony under oath, but the bulk of the investigatory process was handled by the FBI. The FBI report, which had been delayed by the investigation of conspiracy rumors involving Fidel Castro, was finally delivered to the Warren Commission on December 9, 1963. In Hoover’s eyes, this was a simple, albeit circumstantial case: the rifle found in the TSBD was linked to Oswald who had purportedly ordered it by mail order using an alias, through a post office box. Three shots were fired at the motorcade: one hit JFK in the back, one hit Governor Connally, and the third and fatal shot hit JFK in the head. Incriminating photos showing Oswald with the rifle were found. Ballistics evidence matched bullet fragments and a pristine intact bullet found at Parkland hospital to the rifle, and the pistol cartridges allegedly found at the scene of the Tippit murder were matched to Oswald’s pistol. Importantly, Oswald, while not a card carrying communist, had leftist leanings, was a self-avowed Marxist, who had lived in the Soviet Union, and attempted to visit Cuba. However, while it was difficult to prove a negative, no evidence was found that Oswald was part of an international communist conspiracy, rather, he was deemed a malcontent loner, or a lone nut. Any evidence suggesting a link between Oswald and foreign sources such as Kostikov were suppressed. (See the FBI Report)
In contrast to the 400 pages of the FBI report and exhibits, the Warren Commission report was a massive undertaking: an 888 page report, together with 26 volumes, totaling 18,462 pages of hearing transcripts and exhibits. The report was issued on September 24, 1964, prior to the upcoming presidential election in November and was lauded by the media at that time and still today as the final word on the assassination. At first glance, the Warren Commission report appears to be completely comprehensive. It includes a report of a dental exam of Jack Ruby’s mother, but it does not include Oswald’s tax returns for 1962 which is unfortunate because of the persistent rumors that Oswald was a paid FBI informant (we'll examine in Week 5). Neither does the Warren Commission (hereafter WC) report include a copy of the FBI report. This is perhaps because the WC realized in the spring of 1964 that the FBI’s three shots/three hits scenario was incompatible with the shot timing and trajectory evidence from the Zapruder film and the eyewitness evidence of a missed shot. The Warren Commission had a great deal of difficulty fitting the Dealey Plaza eyewitness and film evidence to their hypothesis. Fortunately, a young WC staffer and future Senator Arlen Specter, was able to rationalize the medical evidence with the trajectory evidence with his Magic bullet theory, which postulated that the pristine bullet found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital had hit JFK in the back, exited his neck, and continued on to shatter Governor Connally’s rib, break his wrist and lodge in his thigh. Specter ran a re-enactment in Dealey Plaza as late as the end of May 1964 to show that a shot from the sixth floor snipers nest could have hit both JFK and Connally. The final conclusion of the Warren Commission was that one shot missed, one shot hit both JFK and Connally and the final shot killed JFK. Three of the seven WC Commissioners: Senator Richard Russell, Senator John Sherman Cooper, and Congressman Hale Boggs disagreed or had serious misgivings about the single bullet theory but were persuaded to sign the report with some last minute weasel wording. Here is a picture of Commission Exhibit 399, the so called Magic Bullet which allegedly passed through both JFK and Connally and emerged almost completely pristine:
The Warren Commission Report, as impressive as it was, did not sufficiently settle the dust of American opinion. The mainstream media have vigorously defended its conclusions consistently from 1964 until today, yet a majority of the American public has believed that JFK was killed as a result of a conspiracy. It has been claimed by John Judge that when Alan Dulles was asked by Hale Boggs about releasing the evidence, he replied, “Go ahead and print it, nobody will read it anyway.” However early critics such as Sylvia Meagher, Harold Weisburg, Mark Lane and Josiah Thompson did read the report, found problems in it, and starting speaking out and writing about their findings.
As Sylvia Meagher wrote in her classic book, Accessories After the Fact:
“Study has shown the (Warren Commission) Report to contain:
1. statements of fact which are inaccurate and untrue in light of the official Exhibits and objective verification;
2. statements for which the citations fail to provide authentication;
3. misrepresentation of testimony;
4. omission of references to testimony inimical to findings in the Report;
5. suppression of findings favorable to Oswald;
6. incomplete investigation of suspicious circumstances which remain unexplained;
7. misleading statements resulting from inadequate attention to the contents of Exhibits;
8. failure to obtain testimony from crucial witnesses; and
9. assertions which are diametrically opposite to the logical inferences to be drawn from the relevant testimony or evidence.
In this constellation, as in the case of the “mistaken” witnesses, there is one constant: the effect of each inaccuracy, omission, or misrepresentation is to fortify the fragmentary and dubious evidence for the lone-assassin thesis and to minimize or suppress the contrary evidence.”
Just to give one example: the Warren Commission chose not to believe Seth Kantor, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who knew Jack Ruby when Kantor testified that Ruby approached him at Parkland Hospital and spoke with him. This was despite a second independent witness of Jack Ruby at Parkland Hospital, Wilma Mae Tice, who testified that she saw a man at Parkland Hospital who was addressed as “Jack” by another man, who she subsequently recognized as Jack Ruby when he shot Oswald.
In contrast to this the Warren Commission chose to believe Howard Brennan when he said that he recognized Lee Harvey Oswald, a man he didn’t know, having seen him for a few seconds in the window of the sixth floor TSBD during the assassination while Brennan was six floors below him on the street, and despite the fact that Brennan did not give a positive identification of Oswald in a police lineup later that day.
Another example of slanting evidence is the Warren Commission’s reliance on Helen Markham who was the star witness linking Oswald to the Tippit killing. Warren Commission Assistant Counsel Joseph Ball later described her testimony as being “full of mistakes” and called her an “utter screwball”.
Meagher’s analysis was made under the assumption that the testimony to the FBI and Warren Commission could be relied upon. As time went on, many examples emerged of FBI and the Warren Commission pressuring witnesses to change their story to fit the lone assassin scenario. As Kenny O’Donnell, one of JFK’s closest advisors told House Speaker Tip O’Neill when asked why he had testified that the shots came from the TSBD, “I told the FBI what I had heard [two shots from behind the grassy knoll fence], but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.” It appeared that many witnesses who saw or heard shots from the grassy knoll told investigators what they had seen but their FBI reports ommitted those statements.
Other critics read the Warren Commission Exhibits closely and found that Dr. Alfred Olivier had been hired as a ballistic wound consultant. He fired bullets from a Mannlicher Carcano rifle, similar to the one that Oswald ostensibly used, in order to test the Magic Bullet theory. While bullets fired through goat meat came through relatively unscathed, those fired through cadavers that broke the radius bone (the same bone that was broken in Connally's wrist) were extensively deformed:
Edward Jay Epstein wrote the book Inquest in 1966, which found evidence published in the Warren Commission exhibits which seemed to contradict the conclusion of the Warren Report:
Several witnesses in Dealey Plaza saw several men on the sixth floor of the TSBD prior to the shooting.
Many witnesses reported hearing a shot and seeing smoke from behind the fence on the grassy knoll, west of the Texas School Book Depository, suggesting more than one assassin.
Analysis of the Zapruder film and testimony of John Connally suggested that JFK and Connally were hit by two different bullets, which were less than 2 seconds apart, and testing had showed that it took at least 2.3 seconds to fire, reload, aim and fire again.
Many ear-witnesses in Dealey Plaza claimed that two shots were fired so close together, they could not have been fired by the same shooter unless he was using an automatic weapon instead of the Manlicher-Carcano.
The Warren Commission conducted tests by Army sharpshooters to see if they could accurately fire the Mannlicher Carcano rifle three times in 5.6 seconds. Most could not. The telescopic sight on the rifle was not aimed correctly and could not be adjusted without the FBI mounting shims underneath it to bring it into alignment. There was no evidence that Oswald had ever been an excellent shot, nor was there evidence that he had practiced shooting in the past few years. Thus there were doubts that Oswald could have been the assassin.
In late 1966 Jim Garrison, District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, began an investigation into the JFK assassination. He received several tips from Jack Martin, a private investigator, who implicated his boss, Guy Banister, and David Ferrie and businessman Clay Shaw, together with Lee Harvey Oswald in an assassination conspiracy to kill JFK which was purportedly planned when Oswald was in New Orleans during the period May to September 1963. Oswald's association with Banister, Ferrie, and Shaw made little sense since Oswald was ostensibly a Marxist and pro-Castro, while those associates in New Orleans were rabid anti-communists and had worked to overthrow Castro. This suggested that perhaps Oswald was playing a role for unknown purposes.
The story is recounted in Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins, as well as Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK. Garrison’s case was hampered by Banister’s heart attack death in 1964 and Ferrie’s death by “natural causes” shortly after news of Garrison’s investigation broke. Ferrie was reportedly afraid he would be killed and typed two suicide notes before dying of natural causes.
Garrison’s trial of Clay Shaw, the last remaining alleged conspirator ended in acquittal. Garrison claimed that his investigation had been compromised by FBI and CIA. See Joan Mellen’s A Farewell to Justice or a critical review of her book.
The evidence regarding Oswald’s actions in New Orleans is long and complicated and will be discussed further in Week 5: Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?. A New Orleans lawyer by the name of Dean Andrews Jr. claimed that on the day after the assassination, someone named Clay Bertrand called him and asked him to provide legal representation to Oswald. When Clay Shaw was arrested and booked he was asked if he had any aliases, and he admitted that he used Clay Bertrand as an alias. See Shaw Bertrand Booking Alias. See the counter argument that the alias listed on Clay Shaw’s fingerprint card was faked. One of the reasons Clay Shaw was acquitted at trial was the judge disallowed this admission. David Ferrie had known Oswald years earlier in the Civil Air Patrol and two witnesses claim that Ferrie loaned Oswald his library card and tried to retrieve it from Oswald’s landlady after the assassination.
Oswald passed out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans with an address stamped on them which was in the same building as Banister’s office.
Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that she saw Banister and Oswald working together and she later told author Anthony Summers that she thought Oswald was working undercover. Former CIA agent William Gaudet told author Anthony Summers, "I do know that I saw him [Oswald] one time with a former FBI agent by the name of Guy Banister... What Guy's role in all of this was... I really don't know. I did see Oswald discussing various things with Banister at the time, and I think Banister knew a whole lot of what was going on. I suppose you are looking into Ferrie. He was with Oswald..."
The Garrison case is often widely derided today by both conspiracy theorists and Warren Commission advocates, however, at the time senior figures in the CIA thought Garrison would be successful obtaining a conviction of Shaw and there were CIA concerns that anti-Castro Cubans could be implicated by Garrison.
This was because perhaps, contrary to Shaw’s testimony, he had had a long term relationship with the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division. In addition, in 1962 Clay Shaw had been approved for a CIA project titled QKENCHANT. Other person approved for this project were E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame and Guy Banister. The QKENCHANT project seems to have allowed its agents to recruit others for CIA operations.
On March 3, 1967 the columnist Jack Anderson wrote a column entitled JFK Assassination Rumored to be Castro Counterplot; Bobby Kennedy said to have Approved Plan to Kill Cuba’s Chief; CIA Scheme then may have Backfired. The article revealed for the first time that the CIA had worked with the Mafia to assassinate Castro and Bobby Kennedy had approved the plans. It further claimed that three assassins were caught by Castro and implies that Castro may have turned them against JFK in Dallas.
The meticulous JFK assassination researcher, Peter Dale Scott, in his book Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House has described this “political H bomb” as an attempt to discredit RFK in his aspirations for the White House. He describes how Anderson wrote the article shortly after meeting with Johnny Roselli’s lawyer. Roselli was a Mafia leader and key player interfacing the CIA with the Mafia in CIA assassination plots against Castro. Anderson’s column was indeed a political H bomb and President Johnson ordered the CIA Inspector General to report the details, although the report was tightly held and not even shown to the President. See Peter Dale Scott’s analysis.
In March 1975, Geraldo Rivera showed a poor bootleg copy of the Zapruder film on ABC’s Good Night America. The film, owned by LIFE magazine, had never been widely shown, although Garrison had subpoenaed the film and showed it at the Garrison trial. The film reignited the controversy around the Warren Commission report, as JFK’s body is seen to be thrown back and to the left after the fatal head shot, which would imply a shot from the front, while Oswald was allegedly firing from the rear. To see the back and to the left motion, click here – Head Shot. The resulting public outcry, coupled with an expose on domestic spying by Seymour Hersh prompted President Ford to launch a new investigation, the Rockefeller Commission (otherwise known as the Presidents Commission on CIA Activities within the United States)
Chapter 19 of the report deals with two narrow allegations surrounding JFK’s assassination. The first is that a veteran CIA agent, E. Howard Hunt (active in the coup d’ etat in Guatemala, head of CIA domestic covert action, and future head of the Nixon Plumbers unit famous in the Watergate affair) and Frank Sturgis, an anti-Castro operative and future Watergate Plumber, were two of the three tramps rousted from a train in Dealey Plaza just after the assassination. The Rockefeller Commission determined the tramps were not Hunt or Sturgis, as did the later House Select Committee on Assassinations.
The Rockefeller Commission determined JFK’s back and to the left movement was due to a combination of neuromuscular reaction and the “Jet Effect”, an idea from Dr. Luiz Alvarez, a Nobel Prize winning physicist. See this video and this rebuttal. We'll try to figure it out in Week 2: Dealey Plaza.
Shortly after the Rockefeller Commission, which was seen by many as a whitewash, Senator Frank Church set up a Senate Committee to investigate abuses by the US intelligence agencies, including assassination and subversion of foreign governments. As part of this extensive and wide ranging investigation, the Church Committee reviewed secret documents relating to the Kennedy Assassination, interviewed over 50 witnesses, and issued what is called the Schweiker-Hart report in April 1976.
Senator Richard Schweiker, co-author of the Schweiker-Hart report, later said regarding the Warren Commission Report, “I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long-run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.”
The Church Committee concluded that both the CIA and FBI “failed in, or avoided carrying out, certain of their responsibilities in the” investigation of JFK’s assassination. With respect to the FBI, they had failed to adequately monitor Oswald (including removing him from a Security List after he allegedly met with a KGB official in Mexico City). Seventeen FBI personnel were disciplined by Hoover following the assassination due to their failure to adequately monitor Oswald as a security risk, but that fact was never passed on to the Warren Commission. The Schweiker-Hart report also noted that the FBI focused exclusively on Oswald, concluded its investigation too quickly, and failed to investigate leads which led to conspiracy. Neither the CIA nor FBI explored Cuban or anti-Castro Cuban leads. The Warren Commission was not told of the CIA’s campaign to assassinate Castro, nor of the Mafia involvement in those plots. Despite the FBI and CIA’s pledge to keep the assassination investigation open after the Warren Commission report was finished, new leads were never followed up. While the Church Commission did not offer an opinion as to whether a conspiracy was involved in JFK’s assassination, they did state that the investigations by the CIA and FBI were deficient and the Warren Commission's investigation was deficient because it relied on the CIA and FBI.
Since many more secret files have been declassified, we now know that the fault for a less than robust investigation should be laid on the Warren Commission as well as the FBI. The FBI in fact offered to share their headquarters file on Oswald with the Warren Commission but Earl Warren refused to take it.
Another major investigation of the Church Committee concerned CIA involvement in propaganda, both domestic and foreign, through close relationships with the mass media. (see Operation Mockingbird)
The close relationship between the mass media and their sources in government calls into question the objectivity and truthfulness of the mass media, especially in their reporting of the Kennedy assassination. For those who are interested, here's a link to a short essay on that subject.
In 1976, the US House of Representatives launched a major re-investigation of the murders of JFK and Martin Luther King. The investigation was prompted by the erosion of public trust, since only about 10% of the American public trusted the Warren Commission's findings at that point. Also the new revelations of assassination plots and evidence of conspiracy made a new investigation very popular politically. The House Select Committee on Assassinations was not just a re-examination of the prior record, but involved hiring investigators, taking witness testimony and hiring experts to do scientific studies. The investigation, which took two years and cost $5 million, is described in a book called The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi, one of the Church Committee and HSCA investigators. In it, he describes how the original Chief Counsel Richard Sprague started the investigation with a spirited attempt to obtain information under oath from the CIA. He quickly ran into loggerheads with the Committee Chairman, Henry Gonzales, and as a compromise both of them resigned. The new Chief Counsel, G. Robert Blakey controlled the investigation tightly and the resulting conclusions were close to those of the Warren Commission: Oswald did it alone, but Ruby was tied to the Mob. However, late in the investigation, Mary Ferrell, an assassination researcher in Dallas offered up a Dictabelt audio recording of the assassination, caused by a stuck transmit button on one of the motorcycle radios in the motorcade. When the resultant sound recording was analyzed, the audio experts concluded that three shots were fired from the general location of the TSBD and one was fired from the grassy knoll to the west of the TSBD. Thus, late in its life, HSCA concluded that JFK was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The audio evidence, like everything in the JFK assassination has been subject to great debate, and as of 2025, it is controversial.
The HSCA convened a medical panel to re-evaluate JFK's wounds compared to bullet trajectories. They noticed that in Warren Commission Exhibit CE 388, the bullet trajectory between the back of the head and the exit wound implied that the bullet came from the trunk of the limousine, below JFK, not above him. The HSCA badgered Kennedy's autopsy doctor, Dr. Hume for hours until he admitted that he had probaby been mistaken and adopted the HSCA medical panel's conclusion that the entrance hole in JFK's skull was four inches higher than the autopsy doctors had determined, as shown in HSCA Exhibit F-66:
Over the years, Blakey subsequently came to believe the HSCA was misled by the CIA.” …I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the [Central Intelligence] Agency and its relationship to Oswald…. We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known. Significantly, the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the agencies of the government co-operated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth. We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency. Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story. I am now in that camp.”– Robert Blakey, 2003.
It is interesting in retrospect that James Jesus Angleton, CIA head of counterintelligence, was the CIA's main conduit of information to the Warren Commission. We have subsequently found out that Angleton's CI/SIG Counterintelligence/Special Investigation Group closely held and maintained the earliest CIA files on Oswald, perhaps indicating an operational interest in Oswald when he travelled to the Soviet Union. Similarly, when the HSCA was formed, the CIA called George Joannides out of retirement to be the primary interface between the CIA and the HSCA. Undisclosed was the fact that Joannides had been the case officer for the anti-Castro Cuban group, the DRE during the summer of 1963 when Oswald was very involved with the New Orleans chapter of the DRE. Dan Hardway was a researcher for the HSCA and felt that Joannides and the CIA stonewalled and blocked access to key information held by the CIA. We'll look more closely at the CIA in Week 9.
In December 1991, Oliver Stone released a movie titled JFK, which told the JFK assassination story through the lens of the Garrison investigation. The film was attacked by critics, starting just weeks after filming began and long before as well as after release. However it was a commercial success, grossing over $200 million and being nominated for eight Academy Awards and winning two. The critics accused Stone of taking fictional liberties, which he admits. Much of the dialog is taken verbatim from Garrison trial transcripts and FBI and Warren Report documents, however Stone does portray LBJ as being complicit in the assassination along with the military, a thesis believed by Garrison and Fletcher Prouty, the Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy, as described in his book: JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. We'll look more closely at President Kennedy's relationship with the Pentagon in Week 7: JFK's War with the National Security Establishment.
Public reaction to Oliver Stone's film prompted the federal government again to take action. Given all the problems with the prior investigations, no agency of government was brave enough to take on another investigation, so Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. This law established the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to aggressively find and declassify government documents relating to the assassination. Over a four year period, the ARRB found and declassified several million pages of documents including most of the FBI and CIA files that they could find, all of the Warren Commission Documents and session transcripts and HSCA documents. These documents are stored at the National Archives and can be inspected there by researchers. The National Archives were authorized under Joe Biden to digitize these records and put them on line, but the process will take many years. In the meantime, some organizations, such as www.History-Matters.com and www.MaryFerrell.org have scanned archives of over 2 million pages available for viewing on the internet.
One government organization refused to comply with the ARRB. After being notified by the ARRB, the Secret Service removed all its files pertaining to JFK’s Dallas trip from the National Archives and destroyed them as well as the files for several other JFK trips that fall. We'll look at some other questionable actions by the Secret Service in Week 6.
A few hundred thousand pages of classified documents were withheld for 25 years following the passage of the ARRB act. Many of these were released in late 2017 and 2018, and almost all the rest were released by President Trump in 2025, with most of the redactions removed. As it turns out, most of the documents that the CIA lobbied so hard for 60 years to be kept secret had little to do with JFK's assassination, and were mostly documents which cast the CIA in an embarrassing or negative light, such as this 1961 memo by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., advocating a reorganization of the CIA.
The ARRB arranged for the Federal Government to purchase the physical Zapruder film from the Zapruder family for $16 million (Time Inc. had sold it back to the Zapruder family for $1 in 1975 to settle a lawsuit.) Unfortunately, the government allowed the Zapruder family to keep the copyright, making it illegal for people to distribute or show the film without prior permission. Fortunately, the current copyright holder, the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, has not been aggressively pursuing the blatant copyright infringement taking place on the internet, although high-quality film scans are not available.
Since the ARRB, researchers have combed through the materials and found documents to support their various points of view. Spirited debates among researchers continue on internet forums (see Resources). The mass media remains committed to the Warren Report as demonstrated in many television specials released on the 50th anniversary of the assassination. Several deathbed confessions of Mafia and CIA officials have emerged (see Week 8). Occasionally new bits of evidence come out, such as former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s claim that former President Gerald Ford told him there was a conspiracy.
Absent new revelations, the body of evidence in the case is mostly fixed, and the challenge is now to understand it and decide what really happened in 1963.
In the next week, we’ll delve into the evidence surrounding What Happened in Dealey Plaza?