Washington Decoded

The Secret Assassination Records and the Story They Tell

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By Max Holland

    In 1994, five presidential appointees embarked on an unprecedented exercise in the history of federal record-keeping: the declassification of the paper explosion that occurred inside the federal government after the gunfire subsided in Dealey Plaza. The Assassination Records Review Board – a Minnesota federal judge, two historians, a college dean, and a university librarian – had the daunting task of collecting documents from more than 30 federal entities, from the obvious (FBI) to the seemingly tangential (National Labor Relations Board). By September 30, when the Board closed its doors for the last time, the panel’s legacy was a collection of more than 4 million pages in the National Archives in Washington.

    The Review Board did not discover a single fact that in and of itself altered the conclusion reached in the first instance by Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas Police Department. As board member Dr. William Joyce, a librarian at Princeton University, put it, “I haven’t seen any document that lends credibility to any kind of conspiracy. Not one.”

    Although the paper mountain erected by the Review Board mostly serves to buttress the official verdict, there are some documents that deepen our understanding of the crimes and provide an unfettered look at our government three decades ago.

    One of the most heart-rending documents unearthed by the ARRB was the diary kept by Clay Shaw, the urbane businessman whose good life was destroyed by Oliver Stone’s white knight, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. To read the diary is to vicariously suffer along with Shaw as he lives a nightmare.

 “. . . I am still dismayed to find myself charged with the most heinous crime of the century,” Shaw wrote in March 1967, after his arrest. “But I am completely innocent, and the feeling of being a stunned animal, which marked the first part of the month, seems to have gone now. It would appear that one can get used to living with anything, even the bizarre situation in which I find myself.”

    Clay Shaw’s only “contact” with Lee Harvey Oswald was that Oswald was once arrested in front of the building where Shaw worked. Garrison’s “witnesses” included a heroin addict who was about to give himself an injection when he allegedly saw Clay Shaw – more than 100 yards away – give Oswald a wad of bills. Yet an out-of-control DA forced Shaw to stand trial for masterminding the American crime of the century.

    In a legal battle that reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the review board also obtained Garrison’s original prosecution files and sealed court records, including previously secret transcripts of the more than 40 grand jury witnesses. The current DA, Harry Connick, sought to conceal, if not destroy, many of the records. But the Review Board prevailed, and the result is that Garrison is utterly damned by his own paper trail.

    Apart from the exposure of Garrison’s folly, there are many documents that reveal how tantalizingly close history came to being dramatically different – like the handwritten notes of Captain Fritz, head of the DPD’s Homicide Department during that never-to-be-forgotten weekend.

    After Oswald’s apprehension, Dallas police learned that he was well-known to the FBI, particularly to agent James Hosty, who told them he had no reason to believe Oswald was a threat to JFK. (Hosty and the authorities were not then aware of Oswald’s attempt to kill retired Major General Edwin Walker seven months before.) In fairness, everyone’s attention that November was riveted on Dallas’s increasingly vocal far right extremists, not one of the city’s handful of Marxists.

    Nevertheless, Oswald was so agitated at Hosty’s two visits to the Irving residence where his wife, Marina, was living that he hand-carried a threatening note to the Dallas FBI offices 10 days before the assassination. The note threatened unspecified actions to counter the FBI “harassment.” Hosty interpreted it to mean that Oswald would take his protest to the ACLU.

    Oswald’s note was quickly flushed down a toilet after the assassin’s murder. The note’s existence, and explosive history, remained a deep secret until 1975, when The Dallas Times Herald made the disclosure.

    Captain Fritz’s notes clearly indicate, however, that during his interrogation on Friday, Oswald “admit[ted to] writing Russian Embassy & to Hosty.” If Fritz had only pursued this thread, it is possible that the Bureau’s cover-up would have unraveled in 1963 with far-reaching consequences. J. Edgar Hoover himself might have been forced to resign, as the note’s destruction on November 24 was an obvious expression of the impunity with which the Bureau sometimes operated.

    Another important document excavated by the board has to do with the President Kennedy’s brother Robert. RFK’s behavior after the assassination has always been one of the case’s great puzzles. Bobby was devastated by the event, of course, but seemingly never responded in character, even after the initial shock wore off. The attorney general was famous for his ferocious pursuit of criminals via every means at his disposal. Yet toward the killer or killers of his brother he displayed marked indifference. At the time this posture was explained as the reaction of a brother who simply found the subject too painful.

    The document that challenges this interpretation is a mere three pages, dated November 27, 1963. It lists innocuous information about Jack Ruby, developed by informants in Chicago, and confirms in writing what former Justice Department aides to Bobby now concede. Their boss was never willing to leave certain angles of investigation in the hands of anyone else, not even the Warren Commission.

    Within hours of the assassination, the attorney general asked his trusted network of organized crime/Teamster investigators, led by Walter Sheridan, to conduct a secret investigation of the assassination. This occurred two days before Ruby’s vigilante killing, and that act only underscored the urgency of investigating possible mafia and/or Hoffa links to the assassination.

    Yet by Christmas 1963, the hand-picked team of investigators in Robert Kennedy’s employ reported that they were drawing blanks. They had been unable to tie either Oswald or Ruby to Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa or mobsters like Chicago’s Sam Giancana. Moreover, Sheridan was confident there was no linkage. Robert Kennedy’s passivity stemmed not from a lack of interest but from a fundamental truth: He and men he trusted were satisfied.

    There is nothing more Washington can do. The release of documents is the last chapter in the Kennedy tragedy. If Americans who lived through that weekend cannot find closure, then at least the raw history will have been preserved intact, so future generations can appreciate the somber portrait the documents paint of our government and ourselves.

This article first appeared in D Magazine, November 1998
                                                   © 1998 by Max Holland                                                 

Three Decades’ Doubt About the JFK Assassination Will Now Get Three Years’ Scrutiny

 

It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it.

                                                                                        Goethe

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By Max Holland

    For three days last month about 250 conspiracy buffs met in Washington to observe the 30th anniversary of their reverse Bible – the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Speakers at the meeting referred to what they believe is the non-defining, if not deliberately misleading, document on that tragedy as “The Warren Omission.”

    The “Three Decades of Doubt” conference convened by the Coalition on Presidential Assassinations, or COPA, a recent alliance of several smaller groups, brought together a virtual Who’s Who of the “JFK research community,” as they prefer to call themselves.

    It included such students of alleged conspiracies as Gary Aguilar, a practicing ophthalmologist who takes exception to the official interpretation of the JFK autopsy; James DiEugenio, a writer billed as the “reigning authority on the New Orleans aspects of the case”; Robert Groden, a consultant to Oliver Stone and author of a book of photographs that allegedly expose the cover-up; Mark Lane, a Washington lawyer who pioneered conspiratorialism; Jim Marrs, an author and Stone consultant who has recently become intrigued with the possible multiple identities of Lee Harvey Oswald; John Newman, a retired Army major who advances the thesis that JFK was murdered, in part, because he wanted to end the Vietnam war and abandon South Vietnam; David Scheim, a mathematician at the National Institutes of Health who believes the Mafia did it; and Peter Dale Scott, an English professor at Berkeley who argues, in Deep Politics, that the assassination was “the product of ongoing relationships and processes within the deep American political process.”

    What is this deep process? It is a political wonderland linking the CIA, the FBI, drug dealers, Anastasio Somoza and Oliver North, among others – as Scott details in just two pages of his book.

    Ordinary citizens came to the conference, too, paying a convention registration fee of $150. But the meeting was far from a gathering of the conspiracy-consumed John and Jane Does. Many fervent conspiracists are highly educated people – physicians, diplomats, lawyers, and PhD’s. Given the variety of their views, it was striking to observe their comity and the courtesies they extended to each other. In some haughtier academic settings, scholars who present such wildly incompatible views often go for each other’s throats, flinging aspersions and ridicule. Here there was respect and democracy with a small “d.” All conspiracy buffs were given equal time.

    The real heretics are always elsewhere. They are everyone who does not believe in an assassination conspiracy theory. To fully appreciate this phenomenon it helps to recall a classic lecture given by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter in 1963. The earmarks of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadter said then, were “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

    While the paranoid style is not exclusively an American phenomenon, it is an old and recurring reaction here to sweeping social change, economic disorder and national traumas. It surfaced in the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s, in the anti-Catholicism of the 1850s, among some Populists at the turn of the century, with Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and more recently in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “immense conspiracy” of the 1950s. The conference in Washington confirmed that while the Kennedy conspiracy choir has a few members on the far right, the majority hold liberal or leftish political views. Several spoke of “an enslaved nation” that has “lost control of its government” and “lost its nationhood.”

Dashed Dreams

    In the aftermath of Kennedy’s death, the advocacy of conspiracy across the liberal political spectrum may be traceable to immediate post-assassination myths. Even though President Kennedy was cautious domestically and, in foreign policy, was a militant cold-warrior, the myth of Camelot made him in death a martyr of liberal causes at home and abroad. A sense of political dispossession still drives many liberal conspiracy buffs. For them, it is as if every wrong in America for three decades is attributable to a future that died in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

    The COPA conference had its share of the absurd. During an hourlong “breakout” panel entitled “Whodunit?” an unsuspecting hotel guest who detoured into the meeting room might have thought it was a rehearsal for a Saturday Night Live skit about Sotheby’s auction house. Conspiracy buffs were outbidding each other.

    “Whodunit?” the chairman asked, and his audience responded energetically with more and more dazzlingly competing suspects: the Federal Reserve banks and Wall Street because an independently wealthy Jack Kennedy was challenging the capitalist system; the Israelis (no reason given); the local police because Dallas was a font of right-wing hatred; H.L. Hunt, the right-wing Texas oil millionaire; the KGB; pro-Castro Cubans; anti-Castro Cubans; and/or the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. There was a conspiracy for every contingency.

    To judge from the steadfast attendance at the larger plenary sessions of this non-stop, three-day conference, the conspiracy movement has never been stronger. For two days running, in the huge, top-of-the-line Washington Sheraton Hotel, the sessions went from 8:30 AM to 10 PM. Books, newsletters, organizational advertisements and JFK paraphernalia were widely on sale.

    And to the great satisfaction of the conspiracy buffs, public opinion polls seem to confirm their growing strength and ardor. Speakers repeatedly cited polls asserting that “90 percent of the public” believes that there was some kind of conspiracy to kill JFK and that its lurking mystery saps American confidence. One of the most popular handouts at the conference was a page copied from Kevin Phillips’s new book, Arrogant Capital, with a graph showing Americans’ trust in Washington starting a headlong plunge in 1964.

Getting Recognition

    As recently as 1991 the movement to prove a conspiracy was getting nowhere. Rebuffed in their efforts to gain access to classified government files, conspiracy theorists were endlessly analyzing the same old information. Then, while motion picture director Oliver Stone was filming the movie JFK, a conspiracy buff wrote Stone a letter reminding him that the records of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which in 1979 re-investigated both the assassination and the Warren Commission’s work on it, were sealed until 2029.

    According to Jim Lesar, head of a group called the Assassination Archives Research Center, that information prompted Stone to insert a tag line at the end of his film demanding that all government files be opened. A blizzard of letters from moviegoers fell on Washington, and in 1992 Congress passed an extraordinary statute in hopes of alleviating public suspicion about the federal government’s response to the Kennedy assassination.

    The law instructed the National Archives to gather all assassination-related records into a single massive collection, open to the public with the latest high-tech retrieval aids. It established guidelines for the release of federal records that are among the most liberal in existence today. Thanks to Hollywood, conspiracy buffs now stand on the verge of their biggest archival bonanza, and the assassination research community is re-energized.

    A high point of the COPA conference came on its last day when two officials from the JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), the panel newly commissioned by Congress to oversee and compel the release of assassination records, addressed the audience. John Tunheim, the ARRB chairman, stressed the board’s independence from intragovernment interference. Tunheim and David Marwell, an experienced archivist who is the board’s executive director, answered questions for another half hour. The legislation creating the ARRB guarantees it a life span of only two years, but if need be, the board itself can extend its existence for another year, to October 1997. Tunheim said it probably will do that. The board’s presumption will always be in favor of immediate disclosure, Tunheim also said.

    The COPA conference was almost totally ignored by the press. But the presence of the two ARRB officials was proof that the assassination research community is finally being taken seriously. The gathering ended with a three-hour open hearing during which the full board took formal and stenographically recorded testimony from all who asked to appear. (The board announced its second formal hearing, scheduled for November 18 in Dallas at the Earle Cabell Federal Building.)

    It is easy to foresee future controversy, though. Several critics cited the disclosure law’s exemption of the JFK autopsy records from forced public release. At the Kennedy family’s insistence, the ARRB is not empowered by law to require the release of them. Suspicions may persist. And one witness warned the board to watch out for self-servingly forged government documents – newly released as genuine antiques. Because the board’s mandate expires in 1997, questioners also asked how the panel could pry loose documents proving CIA or FBI complicity when “all the agencies need to do is stonewall for another three years.”

    It is easy to make fun of the conspiracy buffs. But they are responsible for legislation that is on the verge of accomplishing something important. The truth that will eventually emerge from the secret records is that the assassination and its subsequent investigations are misunderstood because they have been persistently divorced from their context. Once history is restored to the terrible events that began on November 22, 1963, they will cease to seem an unfathomably continuing conspiratorial evil. They will be seen instead as another bitter consequence of the Cold War.

The Cold War Chill

    Although nearly every researcher looking at newly released documents will be trying to find new clues to an ostensible cover-up by the FBI, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Warren Commission or all of them, the genuine story waiting to be discerned is that Cold War considerations drove and sometimes bent the first and subsequent investigations of the JFK assassination.

    These investigations pitted the government against itself. They cut across the entire national security apparatus. In the clashes that ensued between the Warren Commission, for example, and Cold War establishments like the CIA, the latter agencies always won. Cold War dictates overrode the official search for answers because the national trauma of the assassination could not be allowed to add new tensions to the 45-year East-West struggle or disclose covert activities against the Communist bloc. For example, the CIA argued that if specific evidence of no Soviet involvement in the Kennedy assassination – which was quickly available – were to be made public, it would compromise intelligence sources and methods.

    So Cold War secrets were kept. They could be kept because they did not change the essential finding that Oswald did it, and he did it alone.

    If public doubts about the assassination and its aftermath now begin to subside, and if suspicions about the motives of a heinous government cover-up are reduced, perhaps we can finally hold the only debate about the assassination worth having. It is the one that has always been lacking. It is about full disclosure in a democratic society.

    In the 1960s, the CIA was obligated to tell the Warren Commission – not to mention the American people – about its clandestine efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro, including its proposed assassination plots. That was one big secret held back in 1964. If the word “conspiracy” must be uttered in the same breath with the Kennedy assassination, then the conspiracy that existed then was a conspiracy of silence designed to keep secret the  US government’s covert actions against Castro.

    The CIA had every reason to be concerned about a no-holds-barred investigation of the events of November 22 that went beyond a criminal inquiry. The exposure of its anti-Castro operations would have had predictable consequences, including a propaganda windfall for the Communist bloc that would have lasted for years and strong condemnations by the international community, plus an intense investigation of the CIA and officials of two administrations who had directed the anti-Castro efforts.

    It was surely not President Lyndon Johnson’s intention to exacerbate Cold War intrigues when he announced the Warren Commission’s formation. Indeed, his intention was the opposite: to cool fervently anti-Soviet rhetoric in Congress that might heighten East-West fears of nuclear attack.

    Even if there was a risk that condemnation of the Warren Commission’s report would follow if the information being withheld leaked out, there was deemed to be no contest between damaging the commission’s reputation by limiting its scope and raising Cold War risks by allowing full disclosure.

    Former President Gerald Ford, a member of the Warren Commission, explained in a recent interview that government officials believed that Cold War exigencies gave them the right to withhold the truth, in whole or part, to protect national security. No complete federal investigation of the Kennedy assassination could be conducted publicly in the political pressure vessel of the Cold War. It is naïve to believe otherwise. Yet Americans believe that secrecy per se poisons official verdicts.

    Ultimately, whether or not the rationing of the truth to protect “national security” was an all too common and outrageous act during the 45-year-long Cold War struggle depends on one’s perspective. There is no doubt that it was done. Some secrets were shared with the commission but not made public. No doubt referring to US communications intercepts, Chief Justice Earl Warren told the press shortly after publication of the report bearing his name that there were “things that will not be revealed in our lifetime.”

    As former President Ford now acknowledges, “[T]oday, with the totally different atmosphere, those judgments might seem improper . . . [But] it was inappropriate in the atmosphere of [1964] to divulge” certain information.

    It is now argued passionately that this holding back of some truths was one of the greatest misjudgments in American history because the enduring controversies about the assassination have helped foster deep alienation and a loss of respect among the American people for their government. When all, or most, of the secrets become known, that cynicism, ironically, may be the most lasting wound inflicted by Lee Harvey Oswald.

This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 15 November 1994
© 1994 by Max Holland 

Dealing with Dealey Plaza

America’s Emotional Grand Canyon Draws Millions of Visitors to Dallas Each Year

Editor’s Note: For Texas historian A.C. Greene's critique

                                     of this story, click here.

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By Max Holland

   

    I stopped for gas about 10 miles short of Dallas, not so much because I was running out of fuel but to pause and take a deep breath. Soon I would be arriving in Dealey Plaza, a place I had never been to and a place I had never left.

    In November 1963 I was about to celebrate my 13th birthday, so I am old enough to remember the weekend when such names as Love Field and Parkland Hospital were branded onto a nation’s memory. For me, and I suspect for most Americans sentient in 1963, the assassination became like oxygen: unseen, ubiquitous, yet highly combustible.

    For the past two years, however, I have been immersed in the events of that day, working on a history of the Warren Commission’s investigation. Not another book about the assassination, as I tell everyone, but the largely unknown story of the government’s response. Arriving as a writer, I wonder what I can possibly see or say that hasn’t already been seen and said about this outdoor Ford’s Theatre.

    While several American cities have been assassination sites – Washington (twice), Buffalo, Memphis, and Los Angeles – none has ever been defined so by a political murder. For months, if not years, afterward, to be from Dallas was to invite scorn and abuse nationwide. A Texas drawl was far from welcome in post-November 22 America. And nowhere were the recriminations more wrenching than in Dallas itself.

    There was an almost unbearable symbolism to President Kennedy having been cut down in Dealey Plaza. With its colonnades and gently sloping lawns, the small park celebrated George Dealey, a civic leader and a founding father of The Dallas Morning News. By the 1960s, George’s son Ted had turned the News into one of the most virulent, anti-Kennedy sheets in the nation, contributing mightily to Dallas’s reputation as the city not too busy to hate. Having stoked a climate of intolerance, it seemed cruelly fitting that the name Dealey was then stained by association.

    All this came back to me as I spent my first afternoon walking around haphazardly, somewhat dazed to find that Dealey Plaza exists in real life, not just on television and in old newsreels. I yearned to spend as much time as possible there, to steep myself in the plaza so that it became an ordinary place as much as an extraordinary one. For the next 11 days I walked around it daily, sometimes when it was jammed with tourists and buses but often when there were no other souls. And I came to understand two unspoken aspects of the dread-inducing site, or as a local columnist once labeled it, America’s emotional Grand Canyon.

    Unlike any other city that has suffered such a calamity, it was difficult for Dallasites to avoid the scene of the crime. A Washingtonian could have easily avoided Ford’s Theatre if the memory were too raw. Not so in Dallas. No less than Los Angeles, the city adored the automobile and geared its development to it. The fan-shaped plaza marked a major motor gateway, a triple-road underpass leading from downtown Dallas to all points west. And for every motorist traveling east into the city, Dealey Plaza presented the city’s first face, the tangible welcome to “Big D.”

    Dealey Plaza also represented to Dallasites the core of their city’s identity. The intersection of Elm and Houston Streets, which border the plaza, was proximate to the very spot where Dallas was founded more than 100 years earlier and where traces of those settlers could still be found. The fact that the president was murdered a matter of yards from where the city was born was especially poignant, a seeming rebuke to Dallas, everything it stood for, and everything it could every hope to achieve. It was as if the city were forever branded with the mark of Cain.

    How, I wondered, does a city cope with a birthplace and a gateway smeared by a horrible crime and with a history much larger than any one city normally is expected to address? Dallas took nearly 30 years to answer that question. But the story of how it did so is something of a road map through a national trauma and persistent obsession – that is, if the one and a half million people, young and old, who visit Dealey Plaza annually are any guide.

    Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993, the plaza, underpass, surrounding buildings, and rail yards draw pilgrims for much the same reason Gettysburg does. Something vast and profound happened here, consecrating the ground in the process. The difference, of course, is that for many this event happened within their lifetimes. The mood is invariably somber, broken only by chatty teenagers or the “guides” who loiter around the plaza pushing their interpretation of the assassination for a price. Some two blocks away is a private museum devoted entirely to conspiracies, and for $20, the most dedicated can board a chauffeured van for a complete package tour. It begins at Love Field and follows the motorcade route through downtown Dallas, continuing on to Parkland Hospital and the rundown movie theater where police apprehended Lee Oswald, revolver in hand.

    Long before the tourists arrived, of course, Dallasites themselves thronged the compact plaza. Within minutes of the official announcement that the president was dead, the curious began flocking to Dealey Plaza. People brought or sent flowers, ranging from hand-picked bouquets to massive arrangements, until by Saturday afternoon it was difficult to see the ground. Of no less interest was a squat, seven-story brick building set apart from the others nearby. If undistinguished before Friday, now it loomed as large as a peak in the Grand Tetons. For it was from a sixth-floor corner window that one Lee Harvey Oswald, ex-Marine and self-styled Marxist, fired three shots at the presidential motorcade passing below at the crowd-pleasing speed of 11 m.p.h. Twenty years of ensuing civic debate would pivot on what to do with this building.

    Discussion began even as the Warren Commission started its investigation. The building at 411 Elm had become so instantly known as the Texas School Book Depository that few people realized it was only leased by its namesake, the Texas School Book Company. The building’s owner, local real state magnate Colonel D. Harold Byrd, was besieged with offers as high as $1.5 million for what was suddenly the world’s most infamous building, but he refused to sell, fearful that 411 Elm would become a tawdry, profit-making sideshow. His stance mirrored the prevailing attitude of Dallas’s tightly knit business and civic elite. If nothing were done for a few years, passions would simmer down, visitors would stop coming, and 411 Elm could be handled discreetly; that is, razed. Tearing down this affront to Dallas might not expunge the black mark, but it would be a good start. It was only too bad that significant alteration of Dealey Plaza was out of the question, but who was to say what might be achieved over time?

    Benign neglect became the rule as Dallas tried to forget. The sixth floor was sealed off, and tour bus guides neglected to mention the book depository in their commentaries. But knots of people could be seen in Dealey Plaza every day, and they exerted a pressure on the city akin to Chinese water torture. Eventually the city council memorialized the president’s fate in a one-square-block area two blocks east of Dealey Plaza, and when the Kennedy Memorial Plaza opened in June 1970, civic leaders believed that no one had the right to ask more of Dallas. But the plaza proved to be a failure. Architect Philip Johnson’s stark cenotaph, resembling large Legos, left many visitors cold. It told them nothing about that day, which is why they had to come to Dallas in the first place, and many were confused when they realized the memorial was not actually at the assassination site.

    When an exhibitor of Kennedy kitsch bought 411 Elm from Byrd in 1971, the city finally decided to take action: If the awful reminder was not going to go away, at the very least it had to be handled in good taste. Slowly Dallasites came to realize that the city would be cursed again if it allowed demolition, or exploitation, of the albatross on Elm Street. In 1977, voters approved the purchase and renovation of the building, reserving the sniper’s perch for what is now the Sixth Floor Museum. It has been an unqualified success since opening in February 1989. About 175,000 annual visitors were predicted, but in 1995 the Sixth Floor drew 421,000.

    Almost half of the exhibit is devoted to Kennedy’s “life and times,” and I could not help but note one irony. The city that gave Richard Nixon his biggest margin of municipal victory in 1960 now houses an exhibit that rivals the display at the Kennedy Library. Unlike the library, however, the events of November 22 are center stage. To avoid inadvertently glorifying Oswald’s violent act, the museum chose the assassination artifacts with care and the story is carefully redacted. The famous Zapruder film is edited so that the president’s head is not seen exploding. Nonetheless, the stomach still knots at the crackling AM radio broadcast, “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin … from Dallas, Texas… Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade.”

    Naturally I was curious to see how the museum handled the Warren Report controversy. The museum only presents at length findings from two federal investigations, giving equal weight to the 1964 Warren Report and the 1979 report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. This is a real disservice: While the Warren Report has been roundly criticized for more than 30 years, it still holds up, whereas the thin reed upon which the House report claimed a conspiracy was discredited within months. Putting the two on the same footing has also alienated the dwindling band of Dallas lawmen who investigated the assassination that weekend. Long before the Warren Report confirmed it, they knew they apprehended the right bastard.

    Distrust of the city’s own once-exalted lawmen is a sobering reminder of Dallas’s residual trauma. Somehow it remains emotionally more satisfying to believe that the police got the wrong man— that such a momentous crime had to be plotted by men breathing together, rather than by one individual acting in an unpredictable world. I like to think that someday the exhibit will change, explaining the controversy and disbelief but not lending undeserved credence to it.

    Otherwise Dallas has acquitted itself well. The Hertz sign is gone from the roof of 411 Elm, and a few flagpoles grace the plaza, but Dealey Plaza is frozen in time, more or less as it was on that bright November afternoon. Aside from visiting the museum, visitors current and future will walk the hairpin turn that slowed the president’s motorcade and gaze down Elm Street as it descends toward the triple underpass, where Jacqueline Kennedy anticipated a few moments of cool air and relief from the beating sun. They will experience the plaza’s bowl-like depression, which gives a sense of tragic envelopment much like the effect Maya Lin deliberately sought in her design of the Vietnam Memorial.

    Above all, they will catch themselves, as I did whenever I stood in the plaza, stealing furtive glances at a sixth-floor window sealed ajar in perpetuity at the same height it was raised 33 years ago. An open window that might easily be taken for an open wound.

This article first appeared in Preservation November/December 1996
© 1996 by Max Holland

After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination

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By Max Holland

 

    In the context of other books about the JFK assassination, Deep Politics by Peter Dale Scott is an unremarkable work. The field already brims with books that conjure up fantastic conspiracies through innuendo, presumption, and pseudo-scholarship while ignoring provable but inconvenient facts.  Deep Politics is simply another addition to this literature. Yet there remains something truly remarkable and disturbing about Deep Politics, and it’s not that a tenured English professor wrote its opaque prose.  Rather it’s that Deep Politics is a University of California Press book. According to the UC publicity office, this means an editorial committee consisting of 20 UC professors, including four senior historians, approved Deep Politics for publication. This peer approval by a major university press illustrates the boundless and utter disbelief in the Warren Report that exists even in the highest reaches of the academy, and it also reveals the gross inattention given to the subject by serious historians. 

    It’s instructive to compare scholars’ treatment of the JFK assassination with their output and stance toward the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the other event in recent history that seared the national consciousness. Like the assassination, the attack was the subject of an executive branch investigation followed by a separate congressional investigation. Like the assassination, conspiratorial theories about the surprise attack (mainly, that FDR knew in advance) have always dogged the official story. By and large, historians have promptly exposed distortions of the documentary record and faulty logic, thereby relegating December 7th conspiracy theories to the political fringes where they belong. In stark contrast, historians have forged nothing close to a consensus on the assassination; in fact their voice is rarely raised. Very few of the more than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles that compose the vast assassination literature published since 1964 have been written by historians. And when they do write about the Kennedy presidency history becomes bifurcated. The assassination is treated as a footnote or afterthought if it is addressed at all. Consequently, the field is left by default to the fevered imagination of authors like Peter Dale Scott, who banks on what H.L. Mencken once called “the virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.” 

    Future historians will have to account for this abdication because it carries a meaning, just as the hound who didn’t bark in unlocked Sherlock Holmes’s Baskerville mystery. Of course, in one sense it is too easy to understand why historians have steered clear of the controvery. Any assassination buff worth his or her salt will gladly stupefy a historian with countless variations on the Warren Report or altogether different theories. And any historian who delves deeply into the literature does so at considerable risk to his or her own sanity. JFK assassination literature is the contemporary strain of the resilent paranoid style in American politics, defined so memorably by Richard Hofstadter 30 years ago. Or as one wag remarked after seeing Oliver Stone’s JFK, which feverishly wove several published theories into a meta-conspiracy, it was hard to leave the theater without momentarily double-checking your own whereabouts on 22 November 1963. 

    The disbelief attached to the Warren Report has to be grounded in unfinished business, some yearning that goes well beyond narrow questions like whether all pertinent government documents have been released.  In a letter to The New York Times last year, William Manchester skillfully identified this unrequited need as well as anyone ever has.  The author of Death of a President wrote,

        . . . To employ what may seem an odd metaphor, there is an esthetic principle here. If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and on the other side put the Nazi regime--the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern state--you have a rough balance:  greatest crime, greatest criminals.

         But if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for  something.

          A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely.

    The desire to invest a national trauma with meaning was not something which developed gradually. It was evident within minutes of Kennedy’s death, as Death of a President vividly chronicles. Dallas was a fount of right-wing activity dating back to the 1920s, when it was known as “the Southwest hate capital of Dixie.” That reputation, plus the rough reception accorded U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson in October, prompted anguished presidential aides to assert that unspecified right-wingers were responsible in the hours right after the assassination.  And once Oswald was arrested, there was a marked reluctance to shift the blame from ultraconservatives to a self-styled Marxist; in America, a liberal President being assassinated by a Marxist seemed to make no sense. Jacqueline Kennedy’s first reaction, upon being told by Robert Kennedy of Oswald’s background, was to feel sickened because she immediately sensed Oswald robbed JFK of martyrdom. “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights,” Mrs. Kennedy said, according to Manchester. “It’s--it had to be some silly little Communist.” Significantly, the search for meaning extended outside the immediate Kennedy circle too. It can be seen in such minor details as the media’s use of Oswald’s middle name, as if employing it gave him more stature. Prior to that Friday, no one called him Lee Harvey Oswald.

    If great events demand great causes, as Manchester argues, thirst for a conspiracy will never be satisfied so long as Oswald stands as he does now.  He is unequal to the task of assassinating a President who, fairly or not, is more esteemed in public opinion polls than Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. But perhaps 30 years is sufficient time to re-examine this imbalance, if possible adjust the scales, and make the assassination coherent. In addition to the sheer passage of time, last November marked the first major anniversary since the geo-political rules changed and with them exaggerated passions and fears. New documentary evidence, not only about the assassination but also Kennedy’s Cuba policy, has been released, and many principal officials are talking, some after a long silence. It is more than just possible that our understanding of the assassination, like so much else, has been clouded by cold war exigencies.

    Of course, it’s fashionable now to throw up one’s hands at the slightest mention of November 22nd, and suggest that the truth is unknowable. But one might just as well assert that history doesn’t matter. It is past time to incorporate the assassination into post-war history instead of treating the event as some unfathomable crossroads. 

---

    In his first Weekly published after the assassination, the independent journalist I.F. Stone wrote a piercing column on the fallen President entitled “We All Had a Finger on That Trigger.” 

Let us ask ourselves honest questions. How many Americans have not assumed--with approval--that the CIA was probably trying to find a way to assassinate Castro? How many would not applaud if the CIA succeeded? Have we not become conditioned to the notion that we should have a secret agency of government--the CIA--with secret funds, to wield the dagger beneath the cloak against leaders we dislike? Even some of our best young liberal intellectuals can see nothing wrong in this picture except that the ’operational’ functions of CIA should be kept separate from its intelligence evaluations! . . . When the right to kill is so universally accepted, we should not be surprised if our young President was slain. It is not just the ease in obtaining guns, it is the ease in obtaining excuses, that fosters assassination. 

    Drawing a rhetorical, unproven connection between the cold war mindset and Oswald’s stunning act was vintage Stone. With virtually every American still in shock, or blinded by the fairy tale quality of the funeral, it took a habitual dissenter to hold up the assassination against a backdrop of political violence contributed to by the United States. The only political leader who dared do so was Malcolm X. He pointedly refused to utter consoling words, calling the assassination a case of “chickens coming home to roost.” At the time the remark only served to justify his reputation as an cold-eyed extremist. In retrospect, however, I.F. Stone and Malcolm X were closer to identifying the context of the assassination than anyone at the time.

In a review article in The Nation, Holland discusses how the recent release of documents under the aegis of the Assassination Records Review Board has affected how we view various issues.

    The full story is a bipartisan one and properly begins in the waning years of the Eisenhower Administration, when the correlation of forces seemed to be turning against the West at the core and periphery of the postwar struggle. In Europe, the Soviets appeared determined to alter the status of Berlin unilaterally and a more threatening development was impossible to imagine, short of armed attack. Simultaneously, the postwar revolutionary tide that had begun in China, and was barely checked in Korea, seemed poised to sweep through Africa, Southeast Asia, and even into Latin America. Patrice Lumumba was ostensibly paving the way for a hostile takeover of the richly-endowed Belgian Congo; in Asia, Ho Chi Minh had designs on the balance of Vietnam; and in America’s backyard, Fidel Castro was on the brink of taking power from Juan Batista. In the midst of all this ferment Moscow and Washington were rapidly developing ICBMs that could obliterate both capitals in fifteen minutes.

A.C. Greene on the Texas School Book Depository

 

Editor’s Note: Texas historian A.C. Greene took issue with the article “Dealing with Dealey Plaza” that appeared in the November/December 1996 issue of Preservation magazine. Here is Greene’s January/February 1997 critique, followed by a response.

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    Max Holland’s highly romantic and personal article, “Dealing with Dealey Plaza,” contains a number of factual errors and pays too much attention to the legends and rumors that have accumulated around the former, and infamous (as he puts it), Texas School Book Depository.

    There never was a time, following the Kennedy assassination, when the building was in any real danger of being razed. There were undoubtedly private citizens who, for whatever reason, wished the structure could be torn down, but no Dallas official ever made any kind of formal proposal that this be done. I was editorial-page editor of the late Dallas Times Herald at the time of the assassination. Had there been any significant move to raze the school book depository, I would have been informed quickly, and I had access to the Dallas leaders who would have joined the Times Herald in dismissing anything in that direction.

    Holland writes that “20 years of ensuing civic debate would pivot on what to do with this building.” This glides over a lot of Dallas social and political change and is perhaps based on a 1984 national television interview broadcast during the Republican convention in Dallas, when a Dallas businesswoman stated she wished the building could be razed and the whole event forgotten. Her remark was received with a great deal of popular resentment in Dallas, where a $3.5-million fund-raising effort was underway to create the highly successful “Sixth Floor” exhibition.

    The depository building (which was never called “411 Elm”) was not sold to “an exhibitor of Kennedy kitsch,” as Holland states. That was a building across the street from the depository. The Texas School Book Company remained a tenant of the depository building for a number of years after the assassination and thus was not open to the public. The contention that “tour bus guides neglected to mention the book depository” shows a distinct unfamiliarity with the tour-guide business. And it should be pointed out that the building was purchased in 1977 by Dallas County, not “voter approved” by the city of Dallas, and was made into an office adjunct to the nearby Dallas County Courthouse complex.

    Perhaps the most unfair paragraph is the lengthy one in which Holland states that the late D. Harold Byrd’s refusal to sell the depository building after the assassination “mirrored the prevailing attitude of Dallas’s tightly knit business and civic elite [that] if nothing were done for a few years, passions would simmer down, visitors would stop coming, and 411 Elm could be handled discreetly; that is, razed.” Byrd knew his way around the world of public opinion well enough to realize that the depository building would forever be part of the historical inventory, not just of Dallas, but of the nation. He, along with the mayor and most city council members, understood the assassination was never going to “simmer down” and that people would never stop coming to Dealey Plaza. There may have been people in Dallas, in the first year after the tragedy, who thought that eventually the assassination “would go away,” but they had little or nothing to do with operating the city.

    I recognize that Holland’s article is a personal, emotional view that, were it merely a literary essay, might be acceptable as such. But to have this article appear in Preservation as factual recounting is not fair to history.

                                                                                                        A.C. Greene
                                                                                                        Salado, Tex.

Max Holland responds:

    As a noted historian of Texas, A.C. Greene is more than entitled to criticize my perspective and opinions. But before he casts aspersions on my ability to gather and report facts accurately, perhaps he had better go back and read the more than 30 years of newspaper clippings about 411 Elm that are on file at the Dallas Public Library. It is Greene who has the important facts wrong.

    “The depository building . . . was not sold to ‘an exhibitor of Kennedy kitsch’”? The building was sold in 1970 to Aubrey Mayhew, a Nashville entrepreneur and trashy purveyor of Kennedy memorabilia. On April 17, 1970, Greene’s own former newspaper, The Dallas Times Herald, described Mayhew as having the “largest collection of Kennedy items in the world.” The New York Times of the same day noted that Mayhew was the author of a book, The World’s Tribute to John F. Kennedy in Medallic Art, and that his recent purchase of some personal letters written by Jacqueline Kennedy had caused a furor.

    Mayhew’s ownership was the gaudy threat that galvanized Dallas into action, according to local newspaper accounts. As The Dallas Morning News of November 1, 1971, reported, “there has been a change in attitude by the city’s business leadership on disposition of the Depository. Previously, city leaders tried to ignore the assassination . . . and have not wanted any tangible reminders. They would have been happy if . . . the highest bidder [when Byrd sold it] had been a real estate developer who wanted to tear the building down . . . . Fearing it would become a ‘tourist trap’ over which they had no control, the city’s business and civic leadership finally sat up and took notice.”

    “No Dallas official ever made any kind of formal proposal” to tear down the former depository? In 1972 two Dallas city councilmen, Fred Zeder and Russell Smith, publicly advocated razing 411 Elm and sought to prevent any federal, state, or local tax monies from being spent to preserve the building. Quoting again from Greene’s former employer (September 9, 1972): “Zeder . . . said he was against ‘any memorializing of that day of infamy with that structure’ [and] said he would rather see the building razed and turned into a park.” The next day the Times Herald published an op-ed piece by Zeder making his argument at length. And although Zeder and Smith were in a decided minority on the city council, their sentiments were echoed by organized private citizens. The Morning News of August 2, 1972, reported that Tom B. Rhodes, a businessman representing “Dallas Onward,” told the city council that “we feel strongly it is a mistake to preserve the [building] as it continues to give Dallas a black eye.”

    I did not write, nor did I mean to imply, that a majority of Dallasites ever wanted to tear the building down. And several local political leaders – including former mayor Wes Wise, state senator Mike McKool, and councilman Garry Weber – fought tirelessly over many years to preserve the site with dignity, recognizing explicitly that the former depository was an inseparable element of Dallas’s outdoor Ford’s Theater.

    There is one embarrassing error in the article’s final paragraph. The assassination obviously occurred 33 years ago in November, not 43 as printed. But otherwise I stand by my “emotional” account: The path to the present, almost superb situation was long and tortuous.

This letter first appeared in  Preservation, January/February 1997
© 1997 by Max Holland

 

Conspiracy Theories Keep Coming, But the Plot Gets Thinner

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It is easier to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances.

                                                               H.L. Mencken, 1920

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By Max Holland

    Conspiracy theories are rampant these days. Allegations of government involvement supposedly explain everything from the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the downing of TWA Flight 800. Given this atmosphere, it will take a generation or two for most Americans to appreciate the raw historical data now becoming available on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which remains the main melodrama of conspiracy theorists.

    Taken together, the government records being assembled and made public by the five-member JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) paint a sobering portrait of the federal government. It’s not the idealized version depicted in civics textbooks or the demonized version featured on talk radio. It’s the real federal government – imperfect, plodding, riven by distrust and rivalries, compartmentalized by secrecy, working at cross-purposes or in ignorance, simultaneously guided by elevated national concerns and the most banal of bureaucratic instincts. But it does struggle to do the right thing. The Warren Commission, though established to determine the facts about a heinous crime, was at the same time a window on the vast, clanking machinery of the government.

    It is government not as the American people are accustomed to seeing and hearing about it, but as it really worked in 1963 – and, in many respects, the way it still works today. Despite shortcomings and conflicts, the government did not violate its sacred duty to tell Americans the truth about who murdered the 35th President of the United States.

    Although it is almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media, a fabulously rich record is being laid bare under the terms of the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992, by the panel charged with carrying out the provisions of that law. Now in its third year of operation, the ARRB is asking Congress for another year and an additional $1.6 million. The funds ought to be appropriated. The board is an unprecedented and unheralded success.

    The ARRB’s job is to pull back the shroud covering literally thousands of government records on the November 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. These documents run the gamut from the obvious (FBI and CIA files) to the obscure (records from the Social Security Administration and Army Corps of Engineers). A succession of local, state, and federal investigations of the assassination has generated a mountain of documents, many of them classified “Secret,” “Top Secret,” and higher.

    The national government’s conclusion has long been that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired all the shots that killed the President, and that Oswald, in turn, was murdered by a vigilante named Jack Ruby. The ARRB is not specifically charged with re-investigating the events in Dallas. But nothing the ARRB has turned up alters these findings by one iota. Through the panel’s efforts, all Americans will have access to millions of pages of records relevant to the government’s conclusion.

    The ARRB’s efforts have resulted in the declassification of thousands of records from heretofore secret FBI and CIA files; the release of the Marine Corps’s original personnel file on Oswald; and access to private papers of two key lawyers in the saga, J. Lee Rankin and Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans district attorney.

    Rankin was chief counsel of the Warren Commission, and his papers show that he acted honorably in a difficult situation. Garrison’s papers reveal that he egregiously abused his prosecutorial powers. If justice had prevailed, rather than being sainted by the likes of Oliver Stone in the movie JFK, Garrison would have been sued by the Justice Department’s civil rights division for violating the rights of Clay Shaw, who was wrongfully prosecuted for an alleged role in the Kennedy assassination.

Four Decades of Speculation on the Kennedy Assassination

Lyndon Johnson: “What’s the net of the whole thing . . . that Oswald did it, and he did it for any reason?”

Richard Russell: “Well, just that he was a general misanthropic fella [who] had never been satisfied where he was on earth, in Russia or here, and that he had a desire to get his name in history, and all.”

 

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By Max Holland

    From his first evening as president in November 1963, until his departure from the Oval Office in January 1969, Lyndon B. Johnson secretly recorded many of his telephone conversations.

    When these tape recordings began to be released in 1993 in response to the 1992 John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act, I was eager to study them for new insights about the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and its aftermath. Conspiracy buffs had put forward one theory after another, distorting virtually every primary source of information about the Kennedy assassination, often beyond recognition.

    I thought that the LBJ tapes bearing on the assassination would escape this fate because they would be widely accessible and easily understandable. In retrospect, that was extremely naïve.

Listening Closely

    One of the clearest examples of how the recorded information has been misrepresented can be found in Michael Beschloss’s 1997 book, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964. Beschloss presented a very important conversation between President Johnson and Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia) from the evening of Friday, September 18, 1964. Earlier that day the Warren Commission, on which Russell sat, had met for the last time to settle outstanding differences over the final draft of its written statement, known as the Warren Report.

    One of Russell’s key reservations was that he did not want to rule out a conspiracy. He insisted that since the Warren Commission had not had unhindered access to the records of the Communist governments of the Soviet Union and Cuba, the Report could not state unreservedly that Lee Harvey Oswald, the Kennedy killer, had acted alone.

    The commission’s other members agreed with Russell’s reservation to an extent, and ultimately the language in the final draft was modified to assuage him. As Russell spoke to explain this process to Johnson the evening of September 19, 1964, he said, “I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they’d come ‘round [and] trade me out of it by givin’ me a little old thread of it.”

    Beschloss’s reading of the Russell-Johnson conversation, however, was markedly different. According to Beschloss’s transcription, Russell told the president that “I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they’d come ‘round and trade me out of it by giving me a little old threat.”