Lessons Learned from 40 Years of CoverupRex Bradford

November 17, 2004

INTRODUCTION

In this talk, I’d like to make some general remarks on the state of the case as I see it. I hope you’ll find them useful. As a relative newcomer to the scene, and in another decade or two I’ll have to stop calling myself that, I’ve learned a great deal that’s very troubling, and haven’t lost my outrage yet.

The first JFK conference I attended was in 1998, and it was a pretty good-sized affair and really galvanized an interest that had been growing fast in me at that time. And it was around that time that the Assassination Record Review Board’s medical releases came out. And so I bought a set, and I was truly astounded by what I read, and then I just sat back and waited for it all to show up on page one of the New York Times……..I stopped waiting after a while, sadder but wiser. And so I did what any proud citizen with a scanner and computer skills would do, and I made a CD-ROM of all the medical releases and put it out there. And that’s what got me started on my project of creating electronic copies of JFK records online and on CDs.

ARRB MEDICAL RELEASES

I want to spend a few minutes talking about those medical documents, and about some of the other things that came out of the archives in the 1990s, because it’s truly amazing what’s been learned in the last decade. Pretty much everything except who killed John F. Kennedy.

This is because, as we’ve learned time and again, the investigations did their best to avoid answering that question. Sometimes you’ll hear people say that “eventually the government will tell the truth” about the assassination. I think this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work. I don’t believe the government knows who killed JFK. I doubt anybody on the Warren Commission did. I think there was a lot of whistling in the dark.

Now, if the President was murdered by multiple gunmen, then his body would more than likely show evidence of that. And if honorable men, for the good of their country, needed the solution to the crime to be a lone gunman, then what has to happen? The medical evidence must be suppressed, lied about, misrepresented, in some cases destroyed and perhaps even altered. And so lo and behold, this is what we find.

1

We learned in the early 90s that the House Select Committee wrote a flat-out lie in its Medical report, something that is pretty unusual actually, since usually there are more subtle ways to mislead without the risk of telling complete falsehoods. The HSCA wrote that “all of those interviewed who attended the autopsy corroborated the location of the wounds as depicted in the photographs; none had differing accounts.” But instead, suppressed witness statements, complete with drawings, show that most autopsy witnesses actually reported a gaping wound in the rear of Kennedy’s head, or a large one extending from the rear all the way around the side.

But the autopsy photographs show no such damage in the back of the head, so that’s a puzzle. Thus it was interesting to learn that the House Select Committee’s authentication of the photos had a little problem that was suppressed and misrepresented. The Navy supplied what it said was the camera used at the autopsy, and the photographic panel found that it couldn’t have been used to take the photos now in evidence. So the authenticity of these photos has been called into question by more than just autopsy witnesses who said things like “this looks like its been doctored” when shown a photo of the back of the head.

Then there’s Saundra Kay Spencer, who developed the autopsy photos, and testified to the ARRB that the photos in evidence are not the ones she developed. My belief is that this was a second set unrelated to the controversy over the authenticity of the photographs in the National Archives, a second set possibly taken by Chief Knudsen after the reconstruction of JFK’s body for reasons which are unclear. Though it does show that pictures can be made to disappear…..

The brain photos are also used to support the official theory of the shooting. But we learned that there is circumstantial evidence, written about by Doug Horne of the Review Board, to indicate that two brain exams were conducted, one of the real JFK brain and one of a brain whose damage more closely approximated what would be expected by a shot from the rear. FBI agent Frank O’Neill said “this looks like a complete brain!” when shown the photos. More importantly, John Stringer, the photographer who is supposed to have taken the brain photos, disavowed them in four specific ways at his ARRB deposition.

For what it’s worth, we finally learned that Dr. Humes destroyed both his original autopsy report draft and his original notes from the autopsy, and that the story he had been telling for years about not wanting the President’s bloodstains to go on display was just that, a story. We also learned that Dr. Finck was overhead expressing great dismay that his autopsy notes went missing.

We learned more about Dr. Burkley, the President’s personal physician, the only doctor present at both Parkland and Bethesda, who signed the

2

President’s death certificate, itself suppressed because it placed the back wound at the third thoracic vertebra, out of single-bullet-theory range. Burkley is the man the Warren Commission apparently never heard of, because you will search the 26 volumes in vain for him. What we learned from the HSCA files was that Burkley had his lawyer contact the Committee in its early days, in March of 1977, with the news that he had knowledge that “others besides Oswald must have participated.” Luckily for the ongoing coverup, HSCA Chief Counsel Sprague was ousted within days of receiving this letter from Burkey’s lawyer, and replaced by Robert Blakey, and then things were back to normal. Burkley was not called to testify by that most uncurious of bodies, the HSCA Medical Panel. And for those who haven’t heard, there’s an oral history of Burkley from October of 1967 in which he is asked “Do you agree with the Warren Report on the number of bullets that entered the President’s body” and Burkley replies “I would not care to be quoted on that.” To which the questioner’s follow-up reply is “I see.”

MEDICAL MESS

And what I’ve talked about so far doesn’t begin to scratch the surface. Ok, so if we learned so much about the medical evidence, then did we finally learn how many shots there were, and from what direction? Of course not. The medical evidence is an unholy mess. I could come up with a theory of what really happened in the shooting and at the autopsy, but I seriously doubt I could get 5 out of 10 people in this room to agree to it. This is the legacy of so much cover-up and misinformation and disinformation and I believe also in some instances evidence alteration and perjury. The truth is buried under lies.

To illustrate this point, I want to challenge the notion, shared both by the lone nutters and by conspiracy-oriented medical experts, that the Kennedy autopsy was “bungled,” was what Harold Weisberg termed unworthy even of a “Bowery bum.”

I couldn’t agree more that the reporting which came out of the autopsy is grossly inadequate. But I think what happened at the autopsy itself remains more mysterious than the “bungled job” usually assumed. Take for instance the idea that the autopsy doctors didn’t know that there was a wound in the neck until after they were done, when they belatedly called Dallas, and that’s supposedly when the light bulbs went on and that’s when they said “oh, that’s where the bullet in the back, or the neck—or the back of the neck, whatever—went out.” This story about Saturday calls to Dallas is received wisdom at this point, repeated by everybody on both sides of the conspiracy debate, and I just don’t think it’s true. Way back in 1964 Dr. Perry told the Warren Commission “Dr. Humes called me twice on Friday afternoon” and Arlen Specter told him didn’t he mean Saturday, and Dr. Perry was accommodating, but did slip in again “I seem to remember it

3

being Friday, for some reason.” It turns out John Ebersole, the Acting Chief of Radiology at the autopsy, told the HSCA Medical Panel that “by 10 or 10:30 a communication had been established with Dallas.” Nurse Audrey Bell of Parkland Hospital told the Review Board in 1997 that on Saturday morning after the assassination she saw Dr. Perry and “he looked like pure hell” because he didn’t get enough sleep “between the calls to Bethesda that came in during the night.” What were these calls about? Dr. Perry had explained to Nurse Bell, “Oh, whether that was an entrance wound or an exit wound in the throat—they were wanting me to change my mind.”

Why did the Friday night calls need to be changed to Saturday? Otherwise there would be no excuse for not having dissected the back and neck wounds and traced the bullet path. What Pierre Finck admitted under cross-examination at the Clay Shaw Trial, that he was ordered not to dissect the neck, would not have played well at a Warren Commission hearing. So there are reasons to believe that the autopsy was not as shoddy as it appears today, but that it may actually have been deceptive in real-time. Along with this, it may have been more complete than we now think, but that the completeness has been buried for reasons of State. A case in point here is the testimony and other indications that pictures were taken with probes in the body, probes which showed the paths of wounds.

White House photographer Robert Knudsen, who was involved in the processing of autopsy photographs, was greatly disturbed in his previously suppressed HSCA interview that no pictures with such probes were in the Archives. He had a very distinct memory of at least one, and he thought multiple, such pictures. Autopsy witness Dr. Karnei told the Review Board in 1996 that he was certain he recalled a photograph being taken with a probe in the President’s body. An internal CBS memorandum published by the Review Board shows that Dr. Humes himself told a CBS employee who went to the same church, that a photograph was taken of the body with a probe in it illustrating a bullet path.

Interestingly, Humes said that these pictures were taken with FBI agents and others out of the room. This leads to the possibility that the autopsy was at once somewhat more thorough that we now give it credit for, but that it also was purposefully conducted in such a way as to keep most of the observers in the dark. Perhaps the autopsy team, or at least Humes and maybe Boswell, got a version of the big National Security Crisis treatment that we now know Earl Warren got. Maybe they were told that they should do their job, but that they didn’t want the observers to come away certain that this was a big multi-shooter Communist conspiracy that would kick us into a war which could kill 40 million Americans etc. etc.

But this is speculation, of course. That’s my point, that the goal of “clarifying the medical evidence” undertaken by the Review Board only served to underscore what a deep hole it is. Richard Russell saw it coming all the way back

4

in January of 1964, when at the end of a brief medical discussion he said “This isn’t going to be something that would run you stark mad.”

FRIENDS OF OSWALD

Ok, enough about autopsies and bullets. We’ve learned a little more about the web of intelligence that surrounded Oswald. Over the years one by one of the “friends and acquaintances” of Oswald turn out to be intelligence agents or friends of agents or “witting assets.” Oswald’s friend George DeMohrenschildt admitted before his death that his friend the local CIA officer had him keeping tabs on Oswald. About 6 months before DeMohrenschildt’s death, he wrote a letter to CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush, almost literally pleading for his life. Bush noted in a memo to his subordinates that “yes, I know this man” – Bush roomed at Andover with DeMohrenschildt’s nephew and had first met DeMohrenschildt in the 1940s – and then Bush personally drafted a letter back, saying “have a nice life”, or not, as it turned out. So we have two degrees of separation between Oswald and the current President’s father.

We learned from the files awhile back that when another friend, Ruth Paine, couldn’t remember before the Warren Commission which agency of government her sister worked for, the department whose name she couldn’t remember turned out to be the Central Intelligence Agency. Easy thing to forget. And in the New Orleans Grand Jury transcripts that were supposed to be burned but were saved in a garage and made it to the ARRB, Marina Oswald Porter was asked why she cut off contact with Ruth Paine. Her answer? “I was advised by Secret Service not to be connected with her, seems like she was…..not connected…..she was sympathizing with the CIA. She wrote letters over there and they told me for my own reputation, to stay away.”

Speaking of the Garrison investigation, we learned more about the CIA’s monitoring and intense fear of that effort. In a 1967 meeting of high-level CIA officials, CounterIntelligence’s head of Research & Analysis, Ray Rocca, predicted that Garrison would obtain a conviction.

Declassifications of the 1990s show that Priscilla Johnson, one of the two journalists to interview Oswald during his alleged defection to the Soviet Union and author of Marina and Lee, applied to work for the CIA and was considered by some in the agency to be a witting asset of theirs. Priscilla Johnson, you may remember, was the person who happened to be present in August of 1964 when Marina Oswald “found” a bus ticket in a magazine. This precious bus ticket was found just in time to help the Commission prove that Lee Oswald had indeed been to Mexico City, and had also not traveled out by car as the original reports had said. The bus ticket had somehow been overlooked earlier by the police and FBI, something Senator Russell had a hard time swallowing when he grilled Marina in the last witness interview the Commission would conduct.

5

Also during the 1990s a photograph surfaced which finally proved that David Ferrie and Lee Oswald were together in the Civil Air Patrol. And so on.

We also learned, courtesy of Jeff Morley, that the CIA officer brought out of retirement to serve as liaison to the House Committee turns out to have been the man in charge of running the DRE, the Cuban exile group that included Carlos Bringuier, who had the scuffle with Oswald in New Orleans. Robert Blakey has since said that if he knew at the time who Joannides was, he would have had him on the witness stand and not serving document requests.

There are no documents which prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was an agent of U.S. intelligence. But it you look at his friends, he was either an agent or was being surrounded and watched by those who were.

MEXICO CITY

We learned a lot more about Oswald’s purported trip to Mexico City, which in my view is the Rosetta Stone of the case. Only I’m afraid that this is another one of those areas where the more you stare, the more you go blind.

We learned that Earl Warren was reluctantly brought on board the President’s Commission by Lyndon Johnson telling him “something that Hoover told me about Mexico City.” Whatever the something was caused Warren to begin crying. That first week Johnson was bandying about the figure of 40 million Americans dead in a nuclear exchange with the Soviets.

We learned that, despite denials by the CIA and FBI, a tape recording of someone phoning the Soviet Embassy and calling himself Lee Oswald was listened to by FBI agents in Dallas while Oswald was still alive, and those agents reported that the voice on the tape did not match Oswald’s.

We learned that FBI Director Hoover informed the new President Johnson of all this on the morning after the assassination, and that the tape of this phone call has itself been erased.

We also learned that the first tapped call involving “Oswald” between the Cuban Embassy and the Soviet Embassy was probably a fabricated tape or transcript, as neither embassy was open that day.

We learned that the CIA’s translators, as well as David Phillips, remembered a “third call”, a lengthy call, with Oswald speaking in English and asking the Soviets for money. Such a call, if it existed, has disappeared from the record. Perhaps it was what scared the federal government into a National Security coverup, not the more innocuous “visa calls” in the record.

John Newman and Peter Dale Scott have both written about the “cables of October.” When Mexico City sent a cable on Oswald’s visit in early

6

October of 1963, Headquarters sent back a cable to Mexico City which included false information about Oswald, for example noting that the last info on Oswald was from 1962. At the same time, the same officers sent a cable to other agencies including FBI and State, passing along an incorrect description of Oswald. When officer Jane Roman was confronted in 1995 with the cables in an interview by Jeff Morley and John Newman, she admitted “I’m signing off on something I know isn’t true” and said that this indicated information held very tightly on a “need to know” basis.

We learned that the CIA, besides its telephone tapping and photo surveillance operations, had at least two human informants in the Cuban Embassy, bugged it with microphones, picked its trash, followed Embassy-related people around in vans, monitored all flights to and from Havana and obtained the passenger lists, and on an on. If anybody plotted to murder President Kennedy inside the Cuban Embassy, the CIA would certainly have been the first to know.

The HSCA did a much better job pursuing Mexico City, in my opinion, than it did the medical evidence – there are a few pretty searing letters from the head of the Committee to CIA head Stansfield Turner. Though in the end the Committee buried most of what it learned. And it also chased the same “Castro did it” boogeyman that the CIA trotted out for the Church Committee earlier.

I could go on with tidbits of things we’ve learned, but the problem is that it’s hard to fit them together into a coherent whole. When CIA employees interviewed by the HSCA weren’t busy not being able to remember anything, what they said usually conflicted with the written record. Even Anne Goodpasture, who in the early 70s wrote the CIA’s 133-page Mexico City Chronology, presumably for the purpose of keeping its falsehoods straight, started out her 1995 Review Board testimony by saying that she might say things that conflicted with the written record, because of faulty memory. When Ray Rocca, head of the Research and Analysis section of CounterIntelligence in CIA was shown the October cable traffic, he had a great deal of trouble answering questions and finally asked “where are the earlier cables?” Win Scott, the famed Mexico City CIA Chief of Station, wrote in his memoirs the following, which was quoted by Chairman Louis Stokes of the HSCA in a strongly worded letter to CIA Director Stansfield Turner. Scott wrote:

“Persons watching these embassies photographed Oswald as he entered and left each one; and clocked the time he spent on each visit.”

The CIA has never adequately explained why it could never produce a photo of Oswald, nor has it ever offered a believable story about the tapes.

7

So from all that is now available, can we piece the story together? I think the attempt is important, because it’s my belief that what happened in Mexico City, if known, has great explanatory power for the rest of the assassination story. But this is precisely why it’s been subjected to the same level of obfuscation as the medical evidence.

Smarter people than I have studied the Mexico City evidence, and so far we still have more questions than answers. Peter Dale Scott’s Deep Politics II asks most of the good questions – new releases since then have added a few more questions but precious little in the way of answers. The central issues, I think are:

Was Lee Oswald impersonated in Mexico City, either telephonically, or in person, or both? Related to this, who was the “mystery man” in the photos?

Was the record of activities more sinister than visa-shopping on the part of “Oswald” in Mexico City covered up in the wake of the assassination? By this I don’t mean the Alvarado story of taking $6500 to kill Kennedy. I mean the question of whether Oswald, or someone pretending to be him, threatened the life of Kennedy in the Cuban Embassy; also whether there is a missing tape transcript with more sinister content than is now in the record?

Were the “Oswald” activities part of a “legitimate” intelligence operation, part of an assassination frame-up plan, or both?

The only answer to these questions that I feel confident of is that Oswald was impersonated telephonically at least. Beyond that, questions beget more questions. Just as in the medical evidence, you find that the expert witness accounts vary widely from what is in the written record.

One example of how deep the rabbit hole goes. It’s tucked away in a lengthy 3-part Mexico City Station history written by Anne Goodpasture in 1970, after Win Scott had died. Only three HSCA staff members were allowed to see even a heavily redacted version of this document. If it is ever fully declassified, it will tell the details of the massive surveillance the Cuban Embassy was under. As of now, all we have is what Blakey, Cornwell, and Goldsmith were allowed to see. As I read through this mostly-blacked out document, I kept waiting for the Oswald visit to show up. Finally, this: “A man with a US accent, speaking broken Russian, telephoned both the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban Embassies on 26 September and 6 October 1963.” This is better than Hoover’s famous mistakes. In one sentence, we have two wrong dates and the notion of a call to the Cuban Embassy, something not “in the record” and of great importance. But the next sentence is even better: “He identified himself as Lee Oswald and Harvey Oswald.”

8

Enough said. Ms. Goodpasture later wrote the 133-page CIA chronology. I wonder if she was picked to write the chronology because she was an expert, or if instead the point was to get Ms. Goodpasture to read the “record,” and learn just what it was she was supposed to be remembering as the truth of what happened.

FOREIGN POLICY

The document releases of the 90s had some very interesting foreign policy revelations. We learned that the prime organizers of the Bay of Pigs invasion thought that the date had been “blown” and told their superiors, but nobody apparently told Kennedy and the event went ahead as planned.

We got confirmation of the spring 1963 Vietnam withdrawal plans in the form of the May SecDef Conference on Vietnam. This included a printed timetable for withdrawal and an admonition from McNamara that it was not fast enough.

The big surprise probably was Operation Northwoods, the Joint Chiefs’ plan to simulate or create actual terrorist attacks on the US that could be blamed on Castro, and which could then be responded to by an invasion of Cuba.

Red Fay, a friend of Kennedy’s appointed to be Undersecretary of the Navy, wrote a book called The Pleasure of His Company. Fay describes being on a yacht with JFK after Kennedy had read Seven Days in May, and JFK described the conditions under which the U.S. military might overthrow an American President. He said it would have to be a young president (Kennedy was elected at age 43), and he would have to have a Bay of Pigs-type failure. This would make the military nervous and engage in a little criticizing behind his back. Then if there was a second Bay of Pigs, they might get really antsy and “stand ready” to do their patriotic duty to protect the nation. And then if there was a third one, they would act. Kennedy concluded this unusual musing by saying “But it won’t happen on my watch.”

Well, Kennedy had the Bay of Pigs of course. And later there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the Joint Chiefs, not to mention Dean Acheson, Richard Russell, and other people, thumping on the table to invade Cuba. For the third “failure”, take your pick – the opening of a “second track” channel of rapprochement with Castro, done behind the back of the rest of the government but certainly not unknown to them, or the Vietnam withdrawal plans we now know were on the books in the spring of 1963. The possibility of 13 more years of Kennedys in the White House would not have been attractive to some very powerful people.

WHO KILLED KENNEDY?

9

Speaking of who killed Kennedy. If anybody was hoping that the Archives would open and then “they” would finally have to tell us what happened, I’m sorry to report that you need to move to another country or perhaps another planet. Perhaps there’s a Star Chamber Vault somewhere that keeps the real history – my feeling is that it’s almost worse than that, that there isn’t even anybody around to tell you what happened. The government, if by that you mean the people you see on the TV and all, doesn’t know who killed Kennedy. Some of them would be very curious to know.

Speaking of speculating, I’ve noted in some recent conferences that there is a distinct trend away from talking about who killed President Kennedy. The debate is mired in forensics. I don’t want to pooh-pooh this, and I don’t take the position that “oh, all the evidence is faked so don’t pay attention to it”, but I still think that with all we’ve learned about the bigger picture, it’s a little sad that 40 years later for instance we’re still debating where the fatal bullet entered Kennedy’s skull. I’ve been fascinated actually to watch the “lone nut community” now reverting back to the low entrance location of Warren Commission days, the most recent example being a three-part article in NeuroSurgery. This one even cites the HSCA Medical Panel, which must be rolling in its grave to hear the head wound being moved 4 inches back down the skull after they worked so hard to move it up.

I am not a doctor. I don’t even play one at conferences. I will only say that the most revealing aspect of the entire matter is that the location where the fatal bullet entered is not known with absolute certainty, down to the centimeter. I do not believe the record on the medical evidence, or on Mexico City, or on any of the other tangled matters, is a mess because of sloppiness on the part of autopsy doctors, or FBI agents, or Warren Commission staffers. And it’s not “assassination buffs” who moved the wound 4 inches from where the autopsy report put it, either. The “record” is a mess, and it’s a mess for good reason, because if it wasn’t a mess we would know who killed President Kennedy.

The answer to who killed John Kennedy is not provable by the record, which can only serve to prove that the government worked assiduously and intensely to avoid finding out. But it can rule out certain suspects. I don’t believe that it’s any longer credible to say that Carlos Marcello got a stone in his shoe, and thought to himself, hey there’s this CIA false defector named Oswald back from the Soviet Union in my city, why don’t I send him to Mexico City to be caught speaking on telephone lines which are being tapped by US intelligence, and maybe then I can set up him to take the fall for killing Kennedy. Oh, and I must remember to figure out a way to get the FBI to take Oswald off the watch list right before he goes down there.

Besides the Mob, Fidel Castro is of course the favorite fallback. Read the 3-volume history of the CIA Mexico City station, or at least the parts that aren’t

10

blacked out, and tell me that Cuban agents could have planned what to have for breakfast without the CIA knowing about it. One of the transcripts of tapped phone calls provided to the Warren Commission was between Cuban President Dorticos and Ambassador to Mexico Armas, and the most striking thing about the call is how much trouble the two men have making each other heard. Maybe it has too many taps on it, I don’t know, but if these guys had plotted murder over that line they might have whacked the President of Venezuela by mistake. And how Castro’s people impersonated Secret Service agents behind the grassy knoll has never been adequately explained to me.

It’s my belief that at this juncture, the range of credible explanations for the assassination have narrowed considerably, thanks to the tenacious and intelligent work of the citizen researchers including people in this room. In my view, the “low end” range of plots has people at the level of David Phillips and David Morales and Johnny Roselli pulling it off, with local Texas help too. And on the other end, you can take it on up to the Joint Chiefs and the people inside and outside the government that they call friends. The assassination itself was a class operation on the ground, and it was run by people in the government who knew a great deal about intelligence and with enough clout to have their fingers on the system in the lead-up to the assassination.

But to untangle this with any specificity and certainty, well, I don’t want to stop anybody……..But I think it’s instructive to look at the Church Committee’s efforts to figure out exactly what was going on with the plots to kill Fidel Castro. It’s a credit to their tenacity that they got as far as they did, but they still ended in uncertainty about whether Presidents knew and whether CIA Directors were even told or not. They ran into a system of plausible deniability and compartmentalization and need-to-know and insulated layers, not to mention the phrase “I don’t recall” when all else fails. William Harvey, in charge of these plots, left behind a memo which referred to “backstopping” the record with a forged and backdated 201 file, something we may keep in mind as we inspect the records of one Lee Harvey Oswald.

DIGGING FOR TRUTH

At this stage 40 years later, I’m not sure that “who killed JFK” is even the most important question anymore. Certainly it matters that in 1963 the democratic process was subverted by gunplay. But I think what happened afterwards was probably worse. The society’s finest, men of “unimpeachable reputation,” put the most impressive face on utter nonsense. The media and the rest of “responsible society” lined up behind them and has ever since. The damage done is untold.

The most positive aspect of all this has been the ordinary people who never bought the story, despite the most intense and sustained public relations campaign in modern history. Pundits often lament the modern loss of faith in government, which is of course traceable to the time of the Kennedy assassination and the

11

Vietnam War which happened to follow it. The unfortunate truth is that the loss of faith in government is a sign of mental health.

Another positive aspect of all the digging that the Kennedy assassination inspired in so many people, is that this has helped to open up a whole world, unfortunately the real world, for a lot of people. Think of the names that are household words now to so many of us: Richard Helms, William Harvey, James Angleton, Johnny Roselli, Allen Dulles. I’m always amazed at how the names keep coming up; how recent this event still is in some ways. Porter Goss, the new CIA head who’s now conducting a purge of those in the agency not considered loyal to the White House, was a covert operator in Miami in the 1960s. He also served for a time in Mexico City. Maybe he has a photo of Oswald!

But the society’s failure to come to grips with this assassination is troublesome, and it would be so nice to get it corrected. And there’s a ways to go yet.

Open up a history textbook or an encyclopedia right now in 2004 and you find the same nonsense from 40 years ago. Microsoft Encarta, the most popular electronic encyclopedia in the world, used by millions upon millions of students, is improving, I guess. A few years ago it used to say “Two shots were fired and the President fell forward.” In the new edition, they’re now up to three shots, but he’s still falling the wrong way.

The problem is that to confront the Kennedy assassination honestly is to confront American society honestly. And this is not easy.

Last month PBS had on a documentary about Robert Kennedy. It was ok, pretty much what you’d expect, covering the transformation of RFK from McCarthy aide to President’s right-hand man to his grief in the aftermath of his brother’s murder. But, you know, you reach that part where JFK is killed tragically, and it’s like, it might as well have been a freak elevator accident or something the way they present it. And at the end of the documentary Robert runs for President, and boom, another elevator accident.

The real story of Robert Kennedy is the most poignant Greek tragedy in American politics, and it can’t be told on American television. The real story is of a man who grows up in his brother’s shadow, and Bobby is the bulldog side of cool brother Jack, pushing the fight against organized crime and the covert action in Cuba and so on. And one day boom, all that’s gone. Robert Kennedy’s no idiot – he knows that his brother’s political enemies have killed him. And they haven’t gone away – they’re out there, unseen but very real. Bobby stays in politics—it’s what he knows, but he’s bored in the Senate so he goes to South Africa, and he hangs with Cesar Chavez, and he turns against the Vietnam war, and along the way something happens to him. He finds his own vision, and it’s frankly a better and more compassionate vision than his brother’s. But here’s the Greek tragedy. In 1968 the path to the Presidency opens up for him, and after a lot of agonizing he

12

picks up that mantle and he starts walking up a hill that he has to know has the strongest likelihood of his own death at the end of it. There are guns waiting at the end of that road. But he takes it anyway.

In the book 85 Days, Jules Witcover tells the story of when RFK was on the campaign trail, in April of 1968, one week after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. And the word comes to campaign aide Fred Dutton that a rifleman has been seen on a rooftop. So Dutton enters Kennedy’s hotel room and quietly closes the window curtains. And Bobby Kennedy turns to him and says “Don’t close them. If they’re going to shoot, they’ll shoot.”

There are a lot of stories that RFK intended to re-open the investigation into his brother’s murder upon achieving the Presidency, despite his studious avoidance of comment on the matter. If this is true, to me it shows the folly of the idea of denying the truth now, in favor of achieving power in order to tell the truth later.

GOALS

So what’s the goal here for us in 2004? One goal many people share is obviously to learn the truth about the Kennedy assassination. I have in this talk expressed some pessimism about reaching a full understanding of that event that even most of us in this room could agree on, let alone the people who will simply refuse to believe anything they don’t want to believe. But I’m more than happy to be proved wrong here. A lot of the declassified files have barely been looked at. I know John Hunt has been finding some amazing stuff related to the medical and ballistics evidence. The voluminous HSCA files are hopefully going to be fodder for an incredible postmortem book or two on that investigation. The CIA segregated collection has volumes of information on Cuban exiles and various other participants in our larger story. Jeff Morley is dragging out the story of CIA obstruction of the House Select Committee. And I think Don Thomas has shown with his acoustics work that even the basic core evidence hasn’t been fully utilized. So I hardly want to be here discouraging the people who have done the heavy lifting to move this case forward year after year.

For me, the goal is less about figuring out who killed Kennedy, and more about communicating what’s already been learned about the societal dysfunction in truth-telling which surrounds the affair. In this respect the JFK case is hardly unique of course. But the case has great value because so much digging has been done and so much is known. The record on this case is a window onto a world that we seldom get such good glimpses of.

I have some optimism about the “final verdict of history” in this case. That’s not to say that I expect that “the truth will come out” suddenly or that the media and the historians will all of a sudden notice that they’ve been peddling nonsense all these years. Respect for truth is not exactly at its high water-mark

13

these days, if you’ve noticed. Any honest analysis of the JFK assassination runs smack into the incredible dishonesty of the “investigations.” And that is the fundamental showstopper now—it’s not like 1967 when responsible media could say “Well, maybe the Warren Commission overlooked something or made a mistake counting the number of shots.” I think Earl Warren captured the problem very well in his memoirs. He noted how FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Secret Service Chief Rowley, cabinet members, and others all testified that there was no sign of any conspiracy. Thus, Warren wrote:

“To say now that these people, as well as the Commission, suppressed, neglected to unearth, or overlooked evidence of a conspiracy would be an indictment of the entire government of the United States. It would mean the whole structure was absolutely corrupt from top to bottom, with not one person of high or low rank willing to come forward to expose the villany.”

Well, who am I to dispute the words of a man of “unimpeachable” reputation? Though I do think Warren could have given a little credit to some people of “low rank” who tried to make themselves heard to a deaf Commission: Lee Bowers, Arnold Rowland, Sylvia Odio, Roy Kellerman, various Parkland Hospital doctors. Even Jack Ruby tried.

But I think the longer term verdict of history is still up for grabs. Perhaps some major breakthrough may occur, or the books being now written will slowly win the day, or perhaps it may simply have to wait until the JFK assassination is old and safe like the Lincoln assassination is today, and when every major figure alive at the time is dead, and the Cold War is some curious historical antiquity. When it is finally safe to do so, I think the historical profession will be the first institution to pick up the threads we are laying down, and it will lead the mainstream reassessment, slowly and incrementally. And we can help that process, by providing an easily accessible record, analyzed by the best experts the country has, i.e., us. And more immediately, there are always new students and citizens who can learn a great deal of relevance to the present as well as the ancient 1960s.

So that’s where I put my energies. My particular passion is to use my skills to make as much of the declassified record available as possible via the Internet and CD-ROMs. There are many other useful things people can do if they think this cause is worthwhile. As an example, one thing I never realized till studying this case was how many “oral histories” there are of various people of importance. I think the experts on this assassination deserve their own detailed oral histories, telling what they know for the rest of us and posterity. The goal as I see it is to lay down the most compelling analyses of this material as possible, for history if nothing else.

14

The Kennedy assassination may be 40 years old and thus seemingly irrelevant to many people. But I think every important political event where lies become the accepted wisdom needs to be challenged. The Kennedy assassination is special, because we’ve broken through the crap and exposed the naked emperor in incredible detail for anyone who cares to look. For that reason alone, the story is too important to let slip down the memory hole.

15