Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (99 page)

As with the later House Select Committee on Assassinations, many
experts with lengthy credentials were called upon by the Warren Commission to substantiate various assassination evidence, such as Oswald's
fingerprints and ballistics. And, as with the House Committee, while these
experts supported the government's conclusions, none of them could later
state with any certainty that the materials they were given by the Commission were the original materials. But the possibility that someone within
the government would substitute or fabricate evidence never seemed to
have crossed the minds of the experts or commissioners.

There was also controversy over Oswald's connections. Rankin told the
commissioners: "We have no evidence that is clear that Oswald was
connected with anybody but we also have very great problems .. ." In
regard to the Oswald's life in Russia, Rankin commented: That entire
period is just full of possibilities for training, for working with the Soviets,
and its agents ... "

Rankin also briefly discussed Jack Ruby and his associations with crime
figures:

He had all kinds of connections with the minor underworld, I think you
would call it, in Dallas and in Chicago, but I don't-it isn't apparent
that any of the important people in the underworld would have given
him any consideration at all.... Now it would seem that he might
have-he might be the kind of person they might try to use. He was a
habitue apparently of the police department and was able to go to any
part of it at any time, and they knew him . . .

On February 24, 1964, Warren, Senator Cooper, Representive Ford,
Dulles, and Rankin met for about ten minutes. Rankin reported no significant progress in the problem area of Oswald's possible connection with the
FBI. He said affidavits from Hoover, FBI agents, and even Dallas officials
"show negative." However, he also reported one instance of the Bureau's
lack of candor with the Commission, saying:

As you recall, we informed you before that the address in the telephone
book of Lee Oswald had in it the name of ]FBI agent James] Hosty and
his telephone number and his automobile license, and that it wasn't in
the transcript of that information which was furnished to us by the FBI.
And we have written to the FBI to ask them, an official inquiry, how
that could happen, and to furnish us all of the information concerning
that occurrence. And we have not received a reply yet.

On March 16, 1964, three and a half months after its inception, the Warren
Commission met again. This three-minute session was to approve a resolution
governing the questioning of witnesses by Commission staff members. Only
Warren, Senator Cooper, Representative Ford, McCloy, and Rankin attended.

Jack Ruby's trial had ended on March 14, and at this point the real
Warren Commission investigation began. On March 18, Commission staff
attorneys flew to Dallas and set up a field station in the offices of U.S.
attorney Barefoot Sanders.

Also in March the "more important" witnesses were called to testify
over a period of fourteen days. By April, the number of days spent hearing
testimony had dropped to seven.

On April 30, 1964, the Commission met again. Commissioners Ford,
Boggs, and Russell were absent. Senator Cooper left the two-hour meeting
after only thirty minutes.

Despite the passage of nearly five months, Commissioners were still
concerned about the contradictions in the investigative material. The question of Oswald's involvement with the FBI and CIA remained unresolved.

Senator Cooper even expressed his concern over contradictions between
the testimony of witnesses to Commission attorneys and news media
reports of interviews with the same witnesses.

The questions raised by Senator Cooper remain valid today. Only a few
assassination researchers have seen fit to study the problems between what
some Commission witnesses actually said and what was reported.

Yet if basic conflicts exist in the Warren Commission testimony then all
of it-used as primary evidence in all studies of the Kennedy assassinationmust be reevaluated.

In fact, a close scrutiny of this issue brings out deeply troubling instances of suppression of evidence and intimidation of witnesses in this
case.

The first problem with Warren Commission testimony is omissions.
Despite what was hailed at the time as one of the most thorough investigations of all time, a review of the Warren Commission's performance
reveals glaring deficiencies.

In their report, commissioners devoted more than a page to a detailed
discussion of Lee Harvey Oswald's pubic hair. In their volumes, several
pages are used to reproduce Marguerite Oswald's tax and house payment
receipts, some dating back into the 1930s, and the dental records of Jack
Ruby's mother.

Many other pages were filled with meaningless and irrelevant testimony,
such as that of Mrs. Anne Boudreaux, who knew a woman who once
babysat for the infant Oswald (Mrs. Boudreaux never met either Oswald or
his mother); that of Mrs. Viola Peterman, a former neighbor of Marguerite
Oswald who had not seen her for twenty-seven years; and that of Professor
Revilo Pendleton Oliver, who took up thirty-five pages of testimony to
discuss an article he had written that had no bearing on factual matters.

Yet many of the more pertinent witnesses were never asked to tell what
they knew. These included:

JAMES CHANEY, the motorcycle policeman closest to Kennedy during the
assassination who told newsmen he saw the President "struck in the
face" by the final shot.

BILL and GAYLE NEWMAN, two of the bystanders closest to Kennedy at the
time of the fatal head shot, who have consistently said that shots came
from directly behind them on the Grassy Knoll.

CHARLES BREHM, a former U.S. Army Ranger combat veteran and one
of the closest bystanders to Kennedy when he was shot.

J. C. PRICE, who from his bird's-eye perch on top of the Terminal Annex
building witnessed the entire assassination and then told of seeing a man
with a rifle running behind the wooden picket fence on top of the Grassy
Knoll.

MILTON JONES, who told the FBI that he was on a Dallas bus that was
boarded and searched by Dallas police after Oswald had gotten off,
although at that time no one knew that Oswald was a suspect.

MARY DOWLING, a waitress at Dallas's Dobbs House restaurant who told
the FBI that Policeman Tippit had been in the restaurant on November
20, when Oswald was there making a fuss over his food.

JAMES SIMMONS, a Union Railroad employee who supported Sam Holland in his contention that shots came from behind the picket fence on
the Grassy Knoll.

RICHARD DODD, another railroad employee who told of hearing shots and
seeing smoke come from behind the picket fence.

ALONZO HUDKINS, the Houston newspaperman who reported that Dallas
officials told him that Oswald was an informant for the FBI.

RAY RUSHING, an evangelist who claimed to have ridden in an elevator at
Dallas Police Headquarters with Jack Ruby about two hours before
Ruby murdered Oswald and at a time when Ruby reportedly was at his
home.

LT. GEORGE BUTLER, the Dallas police official in charge of Oswald's
transfer November 24 and who was reported to have been in an extremely agitated condition by newspaperman Thayer Waldo.

ADMIRAL GEORGE BURKLEY, Kennedy's personal physician who rode in
the motorcade, was with Kennedy at Parkland Hospital, rode with Air
Force One on the trip back to Washington, was present at the Bethesda
autopsy, and received all of the official medical evidence, much of
which is now in controversy.

JOHN T. STRINGER and LT. WILLIAM PITZER, who photographed and X-rayed
Kennedy's body at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

JAMES SIBERT and FRANCIS O'NEILL, two FBI agents who attended Kennedy's autopsy and made a report that contradicts some of the official
conclusions.

RICHARD RANDOLPH CARR, a steelworker who reported seeing two men
run from behind the Texas School Book Depository and drive off in a
Rambler station wagon.

MARVIN ROBINSON, a motorist in Dealey Plaza who corroborated Deputy
Sheriff Roger Craig's claim that Oswald entered a west-bound Rambler
station wagon in front of the Depository minutes after the assassination.
SENATOR RALPH YARBOROUGH, who rode beside Lyndon Johnson in the
motorcade and smelled gunpowder as they passed the Grassy Knoll.

The omission of these people's testimony appears to go far beyond
inefficient oversight. It seems rather to support the charges by Warren
Commission critics that the panel avoided information that conflicted with
their preconceived determination that Oswald was the lone assassin.

Most of the conclusions reached by the Warren Commission-notably
the single-bullet theory-were contradicted by medical evidence, the
witnesses, and Governor John Connally. Therefore, the Commission chose
to simply ignore them.

Some witnesses who were questioned by the Commission-either directly
or by deposition-have told researchers and newsmen that their testimony
was altered. Others simply shrugged off their superficial questioning.
Railroad supervisor Lee Bowers later said: "I was there to tell them only
what they asked and when they wanted to cut off the conversation, I
figured that was the end of it-."

Butch Burroughs, Jean Hill, Phil Willis, Orville Nix, James Tague, and
others have stated that their testimony as presented by the Commission did
not accurately reflect what they said.

While every Commission witness was given the opportunity to review
his testimony for accuracy, as far as can be determined, few took
advantage of the offer. As one person put it: "I trust you ... "

One Warren Commission witness voiced her complaints to the FBI.
Mrs. Nancy Powell, better known as Ruby stripper Tammi True, talked to
agents in August of 1964. In their report, the agents stated:

Mrs. Powell complained that she did not feel that her testimony had
been recorded accurately in the deposition. It was explained to Mrs.
Powell that persons, while conversing, give meaning to their words
through voice inflections, and that reading the words without inflections
sometimes gives different meaning to the words which was not meant... .
At that time she stated to me that the deposition as written was not
acceptable to her, particularly in the area where she was questioned
relative to Jack Ruby and to any part that Ruby may have played in the
assassination. . . . Mrs. Powell stated it would be impossible for her to
make corrections in the deposition as written because to make her
testimony "sound right I would have to change the questions of
[Commission attorney Burt] Griffin."

Witness Sam Holland was one of the few to attempt to correct his
Warren Commission testimony. Holland told author Josiah Thompson he
and his attorney attempted to correct the transcript: "We red marked .. .
red penciled that statement from beginning to end because there were a lot
of errors in it." Holland later told Thompson that apparently his corrections must have been lost somewhere along the line because "the statement that I made, as well as I remember, isn't in context with the Warren
Commission." He told Mark Lane: "The Warren Commission, I think, had
to report in their book what they wanted the world to believe. . . . It had to
read like they wanted it to read. They had to prove that Oswald did it alone."

Ronald Fischer, one of the bystanders who saw a man in the sixth-floor
window in the minutes preceding the assassination, later said he almost got
into a fight with a Commission attorney who was trying to get him to
change his story. In an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 1978,
Fischer said Assistant Counsel David Belin tried to intimidate him:

[Belin] and I had a fight almost in the interview room over the color of
the man's hair. He wanted me to tell him that the man was dark-headed
and I wouldn't do it. [Oswald's hair] doesn't appear to me in the
photographs as light as the man that I saw and that's what Belin was
upset about. I see it now, but I didn't see it at the time.

Roger Craig, the Dallas deputy sheriff who claimed to see Oswald
escape in a station wagon, years later wrote about his experience with the
Warren Commission:

Combine the [harassment at his work] with the run-in I had with Dave
Belin, junior counsel for the Warren Commission, who questioned me
in April, 1964, and who changed my testimony fourteen times when he
sent it to Washington, and you will have some ideas of the pressure
brought to bear.

Julia Ann Mercer, the woman who claimed to have seen Jack Ruby
behind the wheel of a truck in Dealey Plaza about an hour and a half
before the assassination, subsequently told investigators for New Orleans
district attorney Jim Garrison that several key portions of her statement
were altered by the FBI and that even her signature was forged on
a Dallas County sheriff's report that supported the altered FBI documents.

Phil Willis, who took a series of photographs of the assassination, was
surprised when he was asked only to give a deposition rather than testify.
He told this author:

This guy came to Dallas and took my deposition. He took down only
what he wanted to hear. I tried to tell him about the shots and the echoes
but he wasn't interested. He just seemed to want to get it over with. The
Warren Commission never subpoenaed any photographer. They weren't
interested in talking to me or Zapruder. It seems strange to me. It's not
much of a way to conduct an investigation.

Willis's daughter, Mrs. Linda Pipes, also was a witness to the assassination. She said:

I very much agree [with Willis] that shots came from somewhere else
other than the Depository. And where we were standing [across Elm
from the Depository], we had a good view. . . . [Representatives of the
Warren Commission] talked to me later, but they didn't seem to be
investigating very thoroughly.