The Context of the Warren Commissions Investigation of Kennedys Autopsy Evidence
It is useful to put the Commissions handling of the Presidents medical and autopsy evidence into the context of its overall management of the murder investigation. Its work on the latter was far from exemplary. So unexemplary, in fact, that the Commissions shortcomings later gave rise to scathing criticism not only from the predictable, omnipresent malcontents, but also, extraordinarily, from two independent groups of experienced government investigators those of the 1976 Senate Select Committee (eponymously named the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church), and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978.
Though the mainstream press has repeatedly lauded the Warren Commission, it has been oddly quiet about these remarkable, official rebukes. This, despite the fact they amounted to no less than the government twice, independently, impugning its own work. The HSCAs comment that, It is a reality to be regretted that the [Warren] Commission failed to live up to its promise,[118] pretty much sums up the conclusions of both the Church Committee and the HSCA. The reasons both groups found for the failure are as similar as they are straightforward. The Warren Commission never assembled an independent investigative staff of its own. Instead, it unwisely turned to the FBI, and to a lesser extent, to the Secret Service and the CIA. The interests of these agencies happened to lay with a no conspiracy finding, lest they be accused of failure to foil the worst-case scenario.
The Committee has developed evidence, the Church Committee concluded, which impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination, and by which they provided information to the Warren Commission. This evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient and that facts which might have substantially affected the course of the investigation were not provided the Warren Commission or those individuals within the FBI and the CIA, as well as other agencies of Government, who were charged with investigating the assassination.
[URL="http://www.history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/How5Investigations/How5InvestigationsGotItWrong_1b.htm#_edn119"][119][/URL] Regarding the FBIs endeavors, the House Select Committee was blistering: 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.
[120]
Hoover, it turns out, succeeded in swiftly disseminating his pre-investigative epiphany to a powerful lobby, one that closed ranks, minds evidently shut, even before the first Commission member had been appointed. Almost immediately after the assassination, the Church Committee said, Director Hoover, the Justice Department and the White House exerted pressure on senior Bureau officials to complete their investigation and issue a factual report supporting the conclusions that Oswald was the lone assassin
.
[121] That conclusion has found abundant confirmation in a flurry of formerly suppressed documents, many of which were only unsealed finally in the 1990s.
For example, in an 11/24/63 memo to LBJ, Homer Thornberry, an associate of the acting Attorney General Katzenbach, reported that, I have talked with Nick Katzenbach and he is very concerned that everyone know that Oswald was guilty of the Presidents assassination.
[122] The next day, in a memo to presidential assistant Bill Moyers, Katzenbach himself 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.
[123] As historian Michael Kurtz has observed, the day before Katzenbach wrote this memo, on the same day Thornberry dispatched his communiqué, Hoover had called presidential adviser Walter Jenkins and had said, anticipating Katzenbach, The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.
[124][125] [Additional internal FBI memos, literally from the day of the murder, reflect the same monogamous passion for Oswald evident in Hoovers, Katzenbachs and Tornberrys memos. This is explored in detail in an essay by author Aguilar, Max Holland Rescues the Warren Commission and The Nation.
[126])
Perhaps Katzenbach was guided by his belief that, as he explained it to the HSCA, [T]here is no investigative agency in the world that I believe compares with the FBI then [in 1963] and I suppose it is probably true today.
[127] And so, very simply, if that [Oswalds guilt] was the conclusion that the FBI was going to come to, then the public had to be satisfied that was the correct conclusion.
[128]
Such faith is difficult to fathom. As second-in-command to mob arch nemesis, Bobby Kennedy, one might have expected Katzenbach to have had a less exalted view of the Bureau chief. For by the time he took control of the Kennedy case, Hoover had already been exposed as a bit of a laughingstock for opining that organized crime didnt exist in America. And by the time Katzenbach testified to the HSCA, the Bureau had gone on record declaring that it had proved Nixon innocent of Watergate after what then-Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, with unintended irony, had described as the greatest FBI effort since the assassination of President Kennedy.
[129]
Katzenbachs personal judgments aside, the Warren Commission apparently did not have the sort of cooperative relationship with the FBI one might have wished for in so important an investigation. The evidence, the HSCA discovered, indicates that Hoover viewed the Warren Commission more as an adversary than a partner in a search for the facts of the assassination. The HSCAs chief counsel, Robert Blakey, an experienced criminal investigator and prosecutor himself, was impressed with neither the Commissions vigor nor its independence from the FBI. What was significant, Blakey has written, was the ability of the FBI to intimidate the Commission, in light of the bureaus predisposition on the questions of Oswalds guilt and whether there had been a conspiracy. At a January 27 [1964] Commission meeting, there was another dialogue [among Warren Commissioners]:
John McCloy:
the time is almost overdue for us to have a better perspective of the FBI investigation than we now have
We are so dependent on them for our facts
.
Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin: Part of our difficulty in regard to it is that they have no problem. They have decided that no one else is involved
.
Senator Richard Russell: They have tried the case and reached a verdict on every aspect.
Senator Hale Boggs: You have put your finger on it. (Closed Warren Commission meeting.)
[130]
Hoover may have succeeded in intimidating the Commission by employing one of his favorite dirty tricks. [D]erogatory information pertaining to both Commission members and staff was brought to Mr. Hoovers attention, the Church Committee discovered.
[131] During an appearance before the HSCA in 1977, no less than Warren Commission chief counsel J. Lee Rankin sheepishly conceded, Who could protest against what Mr. Hoover did back in those days?
[132] Apparently not even presidential appointees.
Thus, with the exposes of the Church and Select Committees, the government has itself granted one of the more potent criticisms of Warren Commission skeptics: that its final conclusions had been determined even before work had commenced. Looked at this way, the reasons for the Commissions inattention to clear conflicts in the medical and autopsy evidence can be seen as of a piece with the Commissions general disinterest in anyone other than Oswald, an orientation that is well explored in the works of skeptics such as Sylvia Meagher, Harold Weisberg, Josiah Thompson, Henry Hurt, Peter Dale Scott, Robert Blakey, etc.
How Five Investigations into JFK's Medical/Autopsy Evidence Got it Wrong - I-B. The Warren Commission Examines Kennedy's Medical Autopsy Evidence