AMERICAN SCHOLAR Magazine – In response
to Howard Willens and Richard Mosk – “The Truth About Dallas” (Summer 2016) Dr.
Cyril Wecht and Dr. Gary Aguilar wrote:
November 22nd marked the 53rd anniversary
of JFK’s assassination. As usual, several mainstream outlets commemorated that
dark day with reassurances that the Warren Commission was right that
Lee Harvey Oswald, alone, had done it, and that the doubters, who have been in
the majority since the mid 60s, can be dismissed as silly conspiracy theorists.
That is the recent message of a featured authority who is still active on the
case, attorney Howard Willens. One of the few still-living Warren
Commission staffers, Willens followed up his 2013 anti-conspiracy book, “History
Will Prove Us Right,” with a staunch defense of the Commission in
the summer, 2016 issue of the journal, The American Scholar.[i] His article,
co-written with another Commission staffer, attorney Richard Mosk, is modestly
entitled “The Truth About Dallas.”[ii] It’s a self-congratulatory
tribute of the work and conclusions of their original investigation.
But Willens’ and Mosk’s defense of the Commission they
served on is more notable for what they omit from the official record than what
they include. “What the critics often forget or ignore,” they write, “is that
since 1964, several government agencies have also looked at aspects of our
work,”[iii] as if the Church Committee and the House Select
Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had reviewed and applauded the Commission’s
work. Indeed, they did look at it. But rather than plaudits, they
issued stinging rebukes, principally for the Commission’s having been
rolled by J. Edgar Hoover, and to a lesser extent, by the CIA and the Secret
Service. These later probes were unexpected, astonishing "admissions
against interest," admissions by two independent teams of experienced,
government investigators that the Warren Commission's work was shoddy,
unreliable, and had perhaps been compromised.
“It must be said that the FBI generally exhausted its resources in
confirming its case against Oswald as the lone assassin,” the HSCA concluded,
“a case that Director J. Edgar Hoover, at least, seemed determined to make within
24 hoursof the of the assassination.”[iv] In essence, the experienced
investigators concluded that Hoover had divined the solution to the crime
before starting the inquiry, and then his agents confirmed the boss’s epiphany.
The intimidated Commission went right along. And with good reason,
only part of which Willens and Mosk tell.
They admit that the “FBI had originally opposed the creation of
the Warren Commission” and that Hoover “ordered investigations of
commission staff members.” But they don’t tell that Hoover deployed one of his
favorite dirty tricks to deal not only with support staffers, such as Willens
and Mosk, but also with the commissioners, including the Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court and sitting congressmen and senators. “[D]erogatory information
pertaining to both Commission members and staff was brought to
Mr. Hoover’s attention,” the Church Committee reported.[v] (emphasis
added)
Willens and Mosk also forgot to mention that Hoover had a personal
spy on the Warren Commission, former President, but then Reperesentative,
Gerald Ford, who tattled on Commissioners who were (justifiably) skeptical of
the Bureau’s work. "Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as
to the activities of the Commission," FBI Agent Cartha DeLoach wrote in a
once secret memo. "He stated this would have to be done on a confidential
basis, however he thought it should be done."[vi] At the bottom of
the memo, Hoover scrawled, “Well handled.”[vii] The success of Hoover’s
machinations was obvious to subsequent government investigators.
The HSCA’s chief counsel, Notre Dame Law Professor Robert
Blakey, a criminal investigator and prosecutor with vastly better credentials
than either Willens or Mosk, was impressed with neither the Commission’s
vigor nor its independence. “What was significant,” Blakey determined, “was the
ability of the FBI to intimidate the Commission, in light of the Bureau’s
predisposition on the questions of Oswald’s 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.)”[viii]
Testifying before the HSCA, the Commission’s chief
counsel J. Lee Rankin shamefully admitted, “Who could protest against what Mr.
Hoover did back in those days?”[ix]
Apparently not the President’s
commissioners. The HSCA’s Blakey also reported that “When asked if he was
satisfied with the (Commission’s) investigation that led to the (no conspiracy)
conclusion, Judge Burt Griffin said he was not.”[x] And author Gus Russo
reported that Judge Griffin also admitted, “We spent virtually no time investigating
the possibility of conspiracy. I wish we had.”[xi]
Thus, despite their clear misgivings, the Commissioners bowed
to the imperious Bureau chief rather than investigate. Notably, the Commission
never once employed one of the rudimentary investigative tools that are often
essential in conducting any hard-hitting probe. “The Commission,” the HSCA discovered,
“failed to utilize the instruments of immunity from prosecution and prosecution
for perjury with respect to witnesses whose veracity it doubted.”[xii] This
policy had serious repercussions when the Commission confronted two key
issues: published claims that Lee Harvey Oswald had been an FBI informant, and
the possibility Jack Ruby was a mobbed up.
“The Commission did not
investigate Hoover or the FBI, and managed to avoid the appearance of doing
so,” the HSCA determined. “It ended up doing what the members had
agreed they would not do: Rely mainly on the FBI's denial of the allegations
(that Oswald had been a Bureau informant).”[xiii] Hoover merely sent
the Commission his signed affidavit declaring that Oswald was not an
informant and also “sent over 10 additional affidavits from each FBI agent who
had had contact with Oswald.”[xiv] And with that, the Commission blinked.
Re Jack Ruby, the FBI had his phone records, yet failed to spot
Ruby’s obvious, and atypical, pattern of calls to known Mafiosi in the weeks
leading up to the assassination. After performing the simple, obvious task of
actually analyzing those calls, the HSCA determined that, if not a sworn
member of La Cosa Nostra, Ruby had ongoing, close links to numerous
Mafiosi.[xv] Thus the HSCA roundly rejected the Commission’s conclusion
that, “the evidence does not establish a significant link between Ruby and
organized crime.”[xvi]
The list of Commission shortcomings that the HSCA assembled
is not short. A brief summary of them runs some 47 pages in the Bantam
Books version of the report (p. 289--336), which outlines what required
much of the 500 pages of HSCA volume XI to cover (available on-line).[xvii] “The
evidence indicates that facts which may have been relevant to, and would have
substantially affected, the Warren Commission's investigation were
not provided by the agencies (FBI and the CIA). Hence, the Warren
Commission'sfindings may have been formulated without all of the relevant
information.”[xviii]
The Church Committee said that the problem
was that “… the Commission was perceived as an adversary by both
Hoover and senior FBI officials.” “Such a relationship,” the Committee dryly
observed, “was not conductive to the cooperation necessary for a thorough and
exhaustive investigation.”[xix]
But the FBI did more than just withhold evidence from the Commission.
Although they admit that the FBI destroyed a note Oswald wrote to Agent Hosty,
and withheld that information from the Commission, Willens and Mosk don’t
mention that Agent Hosty reported that his own personnel file, and other FBI
files, had been falsified.[xx]
Nor that author Curt Gentry learned from
assistant FBI director William Sullivan that there were other JFK documents at
the Bureau that had been destroyed.[xxi]
Perhaps one of the reasons the public has remained skeptical of the
government’s conclusions, and the mainstream media’s embrace of it, is the sort
of selective presentation of evidence by ax grinders like Willens and Mosk who
get heralded by the “responsible media.”
[i] Willens H, Mosk R., The Truth About Dallas. The
American Scholar, summer, 2016. on-line at: Onhttp://howardwillens.com/hwil/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/052WillensMosk.pdf
[ii] Willens H, Mosk R., The Truth About Dallas. The
American Scholar, summer, 2016. https://theamericanscholar.org/the-truth-about-dallas/#
[iii] Willens H, Mosk R., The Truth About Dallas. The
American Scholar, summer, 2016, p. 59. on-line at: Onhttp://howardwillens.com/hwil/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/052WillensMosk.pdf
[v] In: Final Report of the Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations, Book V, p. 47, on-lline at:https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1161#relPageId=53&tab=page. Also cited by: Curt Gentry. J. Edgar Hoover--The Man
and His Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991, p. 549.
[vi] Ford Told FBI of Skeptics on Warren Commission
By Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 8, 2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/07/AR2008080702757_pf.html
[vii] See copy of actual memo at Mary Ferrell: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=61488#relPageId=100
[viii] In: R. Blakey and R. Billings. Fatal Hour--The
Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime. New York, Berkley
Books, 1992, p. 29. This testimony was also published in: Mark North. Act
of Treason. New York, 1991, Carroll and Graf, p. 515--516.
[ix] House Select Committee on Assassinations, Vol. XI, p. 49,
on-line at: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=83#relPageId=55&tab=page
[x] Blakey and R. Billings. Fatal Hour--The Assassination of
President Kennedy by Organized Crime. New York, Berkley Books, 1992, p.
94.
[xi] Gus Russo. Live by the Sword. Baltimore: Bancroft
Press, 1998, p. 374.
[xii] In: The Final Assassinations Report--Report
of the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. House of Representatives. New
York: Bantam Books edition, 1979, p. 334.
The Commission admitted it: “Immunity under these
provisions (testifying under compulsion) was not granted to any witness during
the Commission’s investigation.” (In: Report of the President’s Commission
on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1964, p. xi.)
[xiii] HSCA, Vol IX, p. 41. On-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol11/pdf/HSCA_Vol11_WC_2_FBI_CIA.pdf
[xiv] HSCA, Vol IX, p. 41. On-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol11/pdf/HSCA_Vol11_WC_2_FBI_CIA.pdf
[xv] See excellent discussion in: House Select Committee
on Assassinations Final Report, p. 148-156, on-line at: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=800#relPageId=178&tab=page
[xvi] Warren Report, p. 801. On-line at: http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/appendix-16.html
[xviii] HSCA, Vol. XI, p. 59. On-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol11/pdf/HSCA_Vol11_WC_2_FBI_CIA.pdf
[xix] In: Final Report of the Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations (Church Committee) , Book V, p. 47, on-line at: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1161#relPageId=53&tab=page
[xx] James P. Hosty, Jr. Assignment: Oswald. New
York: Arcade Publishing, 1996, pp. 178--180, 184--185, 243--244.
[xxi] Curt Gentry. J. Edgar
Hoover--The Man and His Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991, p.
546, footnote.
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