Washington Decoded

The Politics (and Profits) of Information: The 9/11 Commission

See also: “The Making of a Washington Expert ”

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By Max Holland

 

    The commission that investigated the events of 9/11 has been highly praised and sharply criticized, but one aspect of its task has virtually escaped notice: its responsibility to leave behind a complete, lasting, and easily accessible public record of its investigation. For all the good work that the panel did, some of its decisions have eroded the public’s right and ability to understand what happened on September 11, 2001.

    Raising this issue may seem a quibble, given that the 9/11 Report is one of the best-selling government documents of all time. But history shows that reports of comparable magnitude, and the first reaction to these reports, have been inexorably colored by exigencies of the day. Time has a way of changing initial public opinion. Indeed, one media flap (like the still-unresolved questions about the Pentagon’s ABLE DANGER data-mining program), can destroy a commission’s carefully cultivated reputation in a matter of days. Consequently, the true measure of such investigations is not just their final reports or recommendations. These panels are ultimately judged on the totality of information they bring into the public realm; what they make knowable, in other words.

    Traditionally, this deeper purpose has meant that final reports of important commissions have been supplemented by publication of the public and private hearings, staff reports and the actual documents used to compile the findings. Take a look at the shelf space occupied by some major probes since 1945: these include the 1946 congressional inquiry into the Pearl Harbor attack (40 volumes); the 1964 Warren Commission investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination (27); and the 1975-76 Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies (15).

    By contrast, the 9/11 Commission climaxed in the publication of a single, 567-page volume—without an index. The relative poverty of this effort at the culmination of a twenty-month, $14 million investigation reflects a downward trend in the government’s obligation to disseminate information to the public. This policy began in the 1980s, when, for ideological reasons, the Reagan administration reduced the number and availability of government publications. The worrisome tendency has accelerated with the advent of the Internet.

    Much of this story concerns the US Government Printing Office (GPO), whose lineage as the principal agent for delivering public information goes back to 1860. “Keeping America Informed” is the GPO’s motto, and over the years its imprimatur has acquired symbolic and legal significance. The sober look of a GPO volume conveys weight and authenticity. The symbolism is embedded in the law as well. The US Code still states that “all [federal] printing . . . shall be done at the Government Printing Office.”

    The 9/11 Commission’s first departure from customary practice was its decision not to use the GPO. On May 19, 2004, the commission announced that W.W. Norton, a private New York publisher, would publish the “authorized edition” of its final report. According to the commission’s press release, Norton was selected based on the criteria “affordability, accuracy, availability, and longevity.” There was no mention of a role for the GPO, which had long done a sterling job by these standards.

    Nothing in the law stops private publishers from also printing government documents, as such documents are not covered by a copyright. Sometimes several different publishers will put out an edition of the same report. About 35,000 commercial copies of the Warren Report were in bookstores one day after the GPO published it in 1964, and there was every reason to believe the same phenomenon would occur with the 9/11 Report. Certainly, never before had a publisher other than the GPO been the first to publish the report of a comparable government investigation.

    Five days after the commission’s announcement, The New York Times pointed out that Norton had a long-standing relationship with Philip Zelikow, the commission’s executive director. This relationship was not known to the commissioners when they selected Norton; nor had Zelikow, who was responsible for pushing the idea of a commercial publisher, recused himself during the process.

    While Zelikow was not in a position to receive a tangible benefit from the 9/11 contract, the fact remained that anointing Norton was akin to giving his publisher a license to print money (Norton’s gross proceeds would amount to approximately $6 million). After the Times article ran, the commission altered its stated plans. It was announced that the GPO would post the final report on-line the day of release and would also print an “official government edition.”

    Two factors in the commission’s decision to privilege a private publisher were the supposed cost and availability of a GPO edition. But the GPO edition ended up costing only $8.50, while the retail price of the Norton paperback, an inferior book in terms of its manufacture (binding, paper quality, and size), was $10. Nor was it true, as Zelikow reportedly presumed, that the GPO would produce something that would be hard to get. There is no provision in the law that prohibits GPO-published works from being sold in chain stores or local bookshops.

    According to historian Ernest May, a consultant to the commission, the unprecedented arrangement with Norton precipitated a “dreadful moment” the day before publication. Writing in The New Republic, May recalled that “an aide to a powerful member of the House telephoned the commission asking angrily about a rumor that the report would be issued by a private publisher. “It’s a report to Congress,” the aide thundered. The person on our end of the line remarked that stories about the commission’s publication plans had been featured in The New York Times weeks earlier. “We don’t read The fucking New York Times,” was the reply. “Fortunately,” observed May, “the individual decided not to pursue the complaint.”

    The 9/11 Commission’s second departure from long-standing tradition is possibly even more troubling. It concerned how the panel chose to disseminate other aspects of its inquiry, ranging from its staff reports to its public hearings. Historically, only the GPO could be expected to publish the entire opus of an investigative body at anything approaching an affordable price to the public. Of greater significance, GPO publication also assured inclusion in the permanent holdings of the 1,250 institutions that participate in the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), an arrangement between research libraries and the federal government that dates back to 1813. Every depository library, in return for free copies of GPO publications, becomes legally bound to make these authentic documents freely available to all citizens without discrimination. Depository libraries, which are scattered across the nation, are thus the bedrock upon which public access to government information has always rested.

    The 9/11 Commission, however, never submitted a printing requisition to the GPO for publishing the many supplemental volumes that are in fact part of the report. The panel regarded this obligation as having been discharged when it made its staff monographs, interim reports, and public hearings available on the Internet. To be sure, such access is highly desirable and ought to be part of standard procedure now. But should web publication alone be the new norm? The American Library Association (ALA) thinks not, with respect to significant government documents.

    The ALA’s “Key Principles on Government Information” make clear that Internet access is no substitute for publication of a work in that most venerable of forms: a book. Information should be presented in a format that promotes usefulness, and that means complex information must be disseminated in a printed and bound volume. The reasons are not hard to understand. For one, publication via the Internet discriminates against citizens without on-line access, as well as those without a broadband connection. Reading a document amounting to hundreds of pages is unwieldy on a computer, even one with a fast connection. Printing it out is one solution, but that unfairly shifts the burden and cost of production onto readers, and still results in something less accessible than a bound book. Internet publication, argues the ALA, should complement the printed dissemination of government information, not replace it, particularly when the subject is something as critical as the September 11 attacks.

    A May 2005 article, “Government Information in the Digital Age,” written by three University of California–San Diego librarians, also makes some important points about the problems inherent in Internet-only publication. In contrast to the robust FDLP system, which establishes multiple collections of printed documents, Internet publication concentrates power in the government’s hands, allowing it to retract information whenever it sees fit.

    Some small publishers have bridged the gap left by the 9/11 Commission. For a hefty price of $395, Oceana Publications is putting out a complete, four-volume set of the 9/11 Commission’s hearings. Hillsboro Press has published the commission’s staff monograph on terrorist travel, and PublicAffairs Reports has printed twelve of the seventeen initial staff studies and excerpts from some of the commission’s hearings. Such entrepreneurship is desirable, but runs against the grain of long-standing practice regarding the dissemination of vital government documents.

    Because there is no GPO version of them, two of the staff monographs, one on terrorist financing and the other on civil aviation, will probably never be published in book form. The commission’s hearings—which represent the inquiry’s only unscripted venue—are not likely to be purchased by many libraries given the cost, a sum well in excess of what the GPO would likely have charged. Put another way, for the foreseeable future, the one-volume final report is the only guaranteed bibliographic entry to be found for the 9/11 Commission at depository libraries.

    If making a private publisher the printer of first resort and relying exclusively on the Internet for dissemination of supplements to the report were the first two departures from accepted practice, what the 9/11 Commission chose not to publish at all is at least equally remarkable.

    Comparable investigations have made available at least some portion of the raw information upon which the respective reports were erected, even at the risk of challenging the very conclusions a particular report might have drawn. The Warren Commission, for example, decided it was far better to present the entirety of the evidence in all its rich complexity than be charged with hiding information. Other, comparable panels have weighed the evidentiary part of their responsibility differently, but in no instance was a final report released without publication of some portion of the primary documents accumulated during the investigation. This is the only method by which the public can assess the accumulated evidence and judge the soundness of the investigation itself.

    The overwhelming majority of records cited in the 9/11 Report are not only unpublished—worse yet, by the commissioners’ collective hand they are closed to the public until at least January 2009. Undoubtedly, there is highly classified information about intelligence sources and methods that must remain secret. But it is equally certain that the great bulk of this information could be released sooner. There is no better authority for this assertion than Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission. “You’d just be amazed at the kind of information that’s classified,” Kean told The New York Times. “We’re better off with openness.”

    It’s easy to talk about openness, of course, but harder to do something about it. In this case, there is a real chance to do it. The National Security Archive in Washington has filed Freedom of Information Act requests for all the documents cited in the 9/11 Report’s footnotes; the results to date prove that the release of redacted documents was, after all, feasible. That the commission made no effort in this direction speaks volumes about the nature of its bipartisanship, because the timing of the availability of sources always has meaning.

    What is the meaning of opening the files, now in the possession  of the National Archives, only after January 2009? Well, that is the month that a new president will be inaugurated, which means vital information will have been denied at least through the November 2008 election. Neither George W. Bush nor a likely candidate related to Bill Clinton will have run for president having faced a public steeped in the primary information from the government’s own files.

    Postscript: While Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean were conspicuously lacking in discipline when it came to making their panel’s documentary trail available, they nonetheless found the time and energy to reap the benefit of  their service. In August 2006, the co-chairmen published Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission. Not to be outdone, Ernest May, in February 2007, published his own edited and abridged version of the 9/11 Report, complete with a “first-hand account” of how the panel went about its work.

    Exploiting one’s service for personal gain is hardly a new phenomenon, and not even objectionable most of the time. But in this case, the behavior of these public servants leaves a bad odor given the 9/11 Commission’s lack of respect for a fundamental obligation.

         This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 1 November 2005

                                                        © 2005 by Max Holland

An Old Schism Haunts the 9/11 Commission

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By Max Holland

    Although attention largely focused on the solemn ceremonies, the most remarkable feature of the events marking the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks may have been the 9/11 Commission's reversion to its repressed partisanship.

    The precipitating factor was the seal of approval Thomas Kean bestowed on a controversial ABC miniseries that tended to ascribe a larger portion of the blame for 9/11 to the Clinton administration (although, in truth, the Bush administration did not go unscathed). Kean, a Republican former governor who chaired the commission, had been instrumental in keeping the panel on a more or less bipartisan page. But the price of unity had always been that everyone within sight was described as in some way to blame, which is another way of finding that no one was. The docudrama strove to accomplish the opposite. Thus, Kean's endorsement of The Path to 9/11 as "true to the spirit" of what had happened was tantamount to tearing up an agreed-upon script, a provocative thing to do just weeks before a national election. Some of his former Democratic colleagues responded in kind.

    Generating an aura of political bipartisanship had never been easy. In April 2004, during the public-hearings phase of its investigation, the panel gave every sign of becoming unhinged, with the sessions in Washington coming to resemble an intensely combative congressional investigation. Democratic members sought to pin the lion's share of responsibility for 9/11 onto the Bush administration because it had ostensibly disregarded an ample warning. Republicans countered by depicting a Clinton administration that had vacillated after U.S. embassies and the USS Cole burned.

    Under increasing criticism, the commission managed to close ranks, and in July 2004 it delivered a report that was an instant and widely praised best-seller. The government's subsequent, and massive, reorganization of the intelligence community, instigated in part by the report, also burnished the commission's image.

    In the two years since the report's publication, some of the sheen has worn off, as it has become apparent that to achieve unanimity the commission took a bipartisan dive. The report is compelling when the subject is Al Qaeda and its plot. But whenever the issue is how Washington let that plot be carried out, the historical analysis is underwhelming. The narrative reads like "an elephant rolling a pea," as a review by Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia political scientist, put it. "Especially disturbing [was] the inability of the commission—or, more likely . . . its unwillingness—to assign any blame among intelligence managers or policymakers." The only thing worse than this lack of accountability was the commission's decision to deny the public access to the information it had assiduously collected from government files. This barring of access insures that the panel's non-interpretation will reign supreme until at least January 2009.

    The authors of the 9/11 report tried to mask this deficit with a catchy theme: 9/11 happened, first and foremost, they maintained, because of a "failure of imagination" in two successive administrations. Problem is, the facts the commission presented not only failed to support this idea, they eviscerated it. If there truly was a failure of imagination, how was it that CIA director George Tenet declared war on Al Qaeda in 1998? Similarly, on August 29, 2001, an FBI agent (identified only as "Steve" in the report) e-mailed an FBI analyst (named "Jane") and demonstrated a very lucid conception of the stakes. "Steve" angrily wrote that "someday [Americans] will die [and] the public will not understand why we were not more effective" in tracking down Khalid al Mihdhar. Thirteen days later, al Mihdhar helped crash American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

    There was no failure of imagination. But there was a failure of will and implementation, an inability to come to grips with a lethal, implacable threat. What the ABC docudrama managed to do was reopen a political divide that the 9/11 commissioners had so scrupulously sought to paper over.

     Another notable feature of the fifth anniversary is the rise of conspiracy theories about what happened on September 11. According to recent polls, about 36 percent of Americans now believe that the U.S. government had an as-yet-undisclosed hand in the catastrophic events.

    This development, in one sense, was entirely predictable five years ago, and nothing can be done about it. Nearly 65 years after the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor, there still exists a hard-core group who believe Franklin Roosevelt knew about the exact coordinates of the surprise attack, but let it proceed because he was hell-bent on entering the war.

    The "paranoid style," as historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed it in 1964, has always been a feature of American politics. Still, there is something unsettling when, two years after release of the 9/11 report, the doubters total more than one-third of those polled. The reason for this may be the report's failure to satisfy Americans' thirst for a coherent explanation for the calamity. Here, the aftermath of the 1941 assault on Pearl Harbor provides some insights.

    After the surprise attack on the base, Roosevelt appointed the so-called Roberts Commission, headed by Justice Owen Roberts of the Supreme Court, to investigate why the United States was caught unawares. As with any such inquiry, the selection of who would do the investigating was of paramount importance. That would turn out to be the panel's Achilles' heel, in addition to the brevity of its probe and lack of access to critical information. Roberts, a Republican, was chosen because he had made his mark investigating the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s. The four other panel members were military men, two hand-picked by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and two by Secretary of War Henry Stimson. What made this odd was that Knox and Stimson headed the very departments that were the subjects of investigation. One of the generals selected by Stimson, moreover, was a close personal friend of thirty years' standing.

    Critics rightly pointed to these built-in conflicts when they charged the panel with having a hopeless bias against the U.S. commanders in Hawaii, while de-emphasizing, if not ignoring, equal or greater mistakes that had been made in Washington. Ultimately, the Roberts Commission did not put questions about the attack to rest; its performance generated controversy and spawned conspiracy theories.

    Something of the same phenomenon may be happening with the 9/11 panel, and for similar reasons. It would have been more appropriate for Jamie Gorelick, who served for three years as Clinton's deputy attorney general, to appear before the panel solely as a sworn witness; instead she was one of the most active of the ten commissioners who shaped the report.

    Likewise, historians will one day ponder why Philip Zelikow was selected as the commission's executive director. A friend of Condoleezza Rice's since their days together on the National Security Council under George H.W. Bush, Zelikow was a key member of Rice's transition team in 2000 and 2001 and was instrumental in the pivotal decision to demote counter-terrorism "czar" Richard Clarke. After 9/11, Zelikow remained an outside adviser to Rice, helping to draft the administration's 2002 national security blueprint for unilateral, pre-emptive military action—the framework for the invasion of Iraq. Without Precedent is the title of Kean's recently co-authored memoir about the commission's work, an apt choice considering that the panel featured a staff director who had to oversee the investigation, testify, and recuse himself simultaneously.

    Since February 2005, Zelikow has been counselor to now Secretary of State Rice. It's a textbook case of what Ralph Nader calls Washington's "deferred bribe syndrome." [Disclosure: From 1999 to 2003, this author worked at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs while Zelikow was its director.]

    The fifth anniversary of 9/11 also afforded George Bush a natural opportunity to deploy a president's ultimate asset, an address to the nation from the Oval Office. And once again, Bush used the occasion to promote his foreign policy of crackpot Wilsonianism.

    Bush's cleverness (and presumably Karl Rove's) rests on his dressing up an untenable, insolvent policy with words that tug at the heart and mind of nearly every citizen. What American would declare him- or herself squarely opposed to democracy? Or against freedom?

    Immediately after 9/11, the administration faced a choice: to address, via politico-military means, the threat posed by Al Qaeda, or to exploit the occasion to smite all of America's real or presumed enemies. The president has repeatedly assured Americans that what he is doing is only the contemporary version of FDR's call to arms to defeat fascism, or Harry Truman's policy of containing communism. Ten years from now, Condoleezza Rice has claimed, the Bush era will be seen as the flowering of a new golden age of U.S. power and diplomacy, akin to the period when the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO laid the groundwork for a prosperous and democratic Western Europe.

    The only thing more astounding than the administration's staggering hubris is the smugness of its ignorance. Bush has not reinvented a contemporary version of containment but rather is engaged in a twenty-first-century version of rollback, an aggressive policy of combating communism that had been discredited by the mid-1950s.

    Bush's latest mantra is that the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein stripped of power. Who would deny that? It's also true that the world would have been a better place in 1950 if Joseph Stalin had been deposed. But presidents from Truman to Bush's own father moved cautiously against the citadels of communist power, avoiding war until the Soviet empire imploded because of its own internal weakness. Bush and Rice would have Americans believe that the same nation that contained the Soviet empire for forty-five years was incapable of keeping Saddam Hussein in check.

    By invading Iraq pre-emptively and under a false premise, Bush opened a second front before defeating Al Qaeda, giving it another theater of operations, a powerful recruiting tool, and training grounds. Meanwhile, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. Widening the war to include Iraq also squandered much international goodwill toward the U.S. in the wake of 9/11. World opinion, although intangible, always matters, but seldom as much as it does here.

    Judging from the president's fifth-anniversary address, he remains bent on exaggerating Al Qaeda's deadly but limited menace into a polarizing, world-historical clash. His analysis threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the ideology of jihad has been, if anything, spreading. Five years into what Bush initially termed a crusade, there is a growing mismatch between the president's aim of remaking the world and America's not unlimited means.

    If this isn't crackpot Wilsonianism, then it's a simpleton's view of history from a president who has watched one too many John Wayne movies.

      This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 15 September 2006
                                                       © 2006 by Max Holland

Commissions Shed Light on Darkest Days

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By Max Holland

    Three of this nation’s worst catastrophes--the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 9/11 terrorist acts--have all been investigated by special federal commissions, with decidedly mixed results.

    It is extraordinarily difficult for the federal government to investigate itself, which is, unavoidably, what all of these panels attempted to do. That raises the question of whether such commissions warrant the public’s trust at all, given their congenital conflicts of interest.

    The President’s Commission on Pearl Harbor was, in retrospect, the most problematic of the three. Known as the Roberts Commission, after its chairman, Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts, this five-man panel was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt nine days after the December 7th Japanese surprise attack.

    Justice Roberts was joined by two Army generals and two Navy admirals. The panel was handed a very narrow mandate--to determine whether there had been any “derelictions of duty or errors of judgment” by the commanding officers in Hawaii--and a very limited period in which to accomplish this task.

    After five weeks of meetings, including a trip to Honolulu, the Roberts Commission issued its findings in January 1942 and, to no great surprise, identified two scapegoats. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter C. Short, the commanding officers in Hawaii, were both deemed derelict in the performance of their duties.

    While neither officer was blameless, the failure to examine what had gone wrong in Washington tainted the Roberts Commission’s findings almost immediately. But there was a war to be fought, and the matter was not revisited until 1946, when a Republican-controlled Congress launched a bitterly partisan investigation. To this day, books and articles publish the false claim that Mr. Roosevelt knew about the pending Japanese attack but did nothing because he wanted America to enter the war.

    The inquiry by the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, or the Warren Commission, was exhaustive in comparison to the Roberts Commission. Headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, this seven-man panel was initially expected to spend only two or three months reviewing an FBI investigation already under way into Mr. Kennedy’s killing (41 years ago today) and the subsequent shooting death of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, on November 24.

    Instead, the Warren Commission sat for 10 months and effectively mounted its own, unprecedented investigation, ultimately concluding that there was no evidence of a foreign or domestic conspiracy involved in either killing.

    It is all but forgotten now, but when the Warren Report was published in September 1964, it was almost universally hailed for its probity and thoroughness. The news media considered it the very model of what a dedicated commission could accomplish. This honeymoon lasted two years.

     Beginning in 1966, a series of books and articles began raising questions about the Warren Commission’s procedures and findings. Some of the criticism was deserved--the Warren Report is not a letter-perfect document--but most was dishonest and unwarranted.

    As one disinterested reviewer noted in the late 1960s, the best tribute to the solidity of the Warren Report was, in fact, the deviousness of its critics. Three congressional investigations in the 1970s clarified the outstanding issues, but one of those panels, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, also happened to be one of the greatest travesties ever visited on the American public by Congress. It concluded, from unreliable evidence, that President Kennedy was “probably” killed as a result of a conspiracy. Yet the Warren Commission’s core findings were not and never have been impeached. They have stood up to the most important test of all, the test of time.

    The 9/11 Commission, of course, is more akin to the Roberts Commission than the panel headed by Justice Warren. There was no mystery to be solved about who was responsible for the attack. To be sure, there are some skeptics who now claim that, like Mr. Roosevelt, President Bush knew or should have known beforehand and only let the attack happen so that he could carry out a preordained foreign policy.

    But in general, the 9/11 Report is enjoying a honeymoon not unlike the reception accorded the Warren Report immediately after its publication. Because there is no “whodunit,” however, the 9/11 Report is unlikely to fall into the kind of disrepute, even ridicule, that is now common whenever the Warren Report is mentioned. Yet, if history is any guide, the 9/11 Report is not the last word, nor should it be regarded as such.

    Getting at the truth in Washington is arduous, and a modern-day Diogenes probably would be tempted to drop his lantern and throw up his hands. Still, even conflicted commissions play an invaluable role in what should be seen as an ongoing process.

     This article first appeared in The Baltimore Sun, 22 November 2004
                                         © 2004 by Max Holland

The Russell (and Warren) Commission

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By Max Holland

 

    The assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the wounding of  Texas Governor John Connally, in November 1963, have incited more debate and controversy than anyone could have imagined at the time. The notion of a conspiracy quickens the pulse, but there was none. All reliable evidence leads to the conclusion that there was one shooter acting alone.

    Why then is the report of the Warren Commission – which was supposed to be the federal government’s “last word” on the assassination – so widely disbelieved, if not ridiculed? Part of the answer, to be sure, lies in what we do not know, and can never know, about Lee Harvey Oswald. He took some secrets to the grave. Yet it is also true, but not well understood, that part of the disbelief stems from the internal politics of the commission. One striking example of how politics affected, or perhaps infected, the work of the commission can be found in its description of the sequence of events in Dealey Plaza.

What Really Happened?

    After the assassination, most of the spectators in Dealey Plaza – and there were upwards of four hundred people there – reported hearing three distinct shots. And initially, the FBI and Dallas police believed, based on witnesses’ testimony, that the first of the three shots wounded President Kennedy; the second wounded Governor Connally; and the third fatally hit the president in his head. But is that what happened? Could it have happened that way? For the definitive answer we must weigh the best evidence, namely, the medical/forensic reports about the wounds suffered by the two men.

    The third shot, which penetrated President Kennedy’s rear skull, is the easiest to analyze. The direction of such a missile is determined by the “beveling effect” on its target. “Beveling” or “coning” always occurs on the target’s surface of exit. In this instance, when doctors at the Bethesda Naval Hospital conducted a postmortem on President Kennedy’s body, they found that the surface of exit was the interior surface of the president’s rear skull.  In other words, the beveling proved that the third shot came from above and behind the president as he sat in the limousine.

    The second shot is far more complicated. It is commonly known as the “magic bullet,” but there was nothing genuinely magical about it. The muzzle velocity of a bullet leaving Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle was about 2,100 feet per second. After piercing President Kennedy’s upper back it exited his throat right above the knot of his tie. At that point of exit it was traveling at 1700 feet per second. Governor Connally was sitting directly in front of the president, no more than thirty inches away. One must consider the question: If this missile did not hit Connally, where did it go? In point of fact it had to hit the Texas governor. Otherwise one is left trying to explain a high velocity bullet that disappeared altogether. Such a missile would truly have been a “magic bullet,” as opposed to one that wounded both men, which is precisely what military-style ammunition – the kind Oswald happened to use – is designed to do.

    But what of the first shot, since the consensus was that three rifle retorts were heard in Dealey Plaza? The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination showed a little girl in a red dress and white coat running alongside the motorcade while the president and Mrs. Kennedy drive by. Shortly before the president is obviously wounded, this little girl stops abruptly in her tracks. When later asked why, she said she stopped because she heard a loud noise. I believe, as many other students of the subject do, that this loud noise was in fact the first shot, and that it missed the occupants of the limousine entirely.

The Warren Panel’s Investigation

    The Warren Commission was established exactly one week after the assassination, and deliberated ten months before publishing its report. The key to understanding the report, and its ambiguity about such critical sequences as the shots in Dealey Plaza, lies in the relationship between the chief justice after whom the commission was named, and the other senior member of the panel, Senator Richard B. Russell (D-Georgia).

By 1963, Russell was serving his fifth term. Staunchly conservative, and an exceptionally powerful and influential senator, Russell was a reluctant member of the commission. Although as interested as anyone in finding out who was responsible for the tragedy in Dallas, his problem was Earl Warren. He did not respect Warren and did not want to serve with him, even on such an important mission. Warren’s remarks immediately after the assassination typified why Russell so disliked Warren. About forty minutes after the news was broadcast, Warren held a press conference at the Supreme Court. The chief justice ascribed the murder to “hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of the nation by bigots.” At the time, “bigots” was often used as a code word for southerners. Then, to compound matters, Warren repeated his preferred formulations when he gave a eulogy for President Kennedy on November 24th. For Senator Russell, this “rush to judgment” was all too typical of Warren’s liberal jurisprudence and all the more grating because the alleged assassin was in fact a self-described “Marxist-Leninist” and not a “bigot” at all.

    Why did President Lyndon Johnson want Richard Russell on the commission? Immediately after the president was killed, and especially after the vigilante slaying of the alleged assassin two days later, passions were running dangerously high in the country. There were two schools of thought. One held that because the assassination occurred in Dallas, a city known for its opposition to President Kennedy, extreme right-wingers simply had to be behind Lee Harvey Oswald. The ex-marine had been framed in order to allow the real killers to go free. In contrast, persons of a more conservative bent asserted that since Oswald was an avowed Marxist-Leninist with links to Cuba and the Soviet Union, a secret communist agency had to have been responsible.

    In this situation, President Johnson believed that if he could get both Earl Warren and Richard Russell to serve jointly, ninety percent of responsible opinion in the United States would be satisfied with any conclusion that these two men endorsed. To their respective constituencies, Warren and Russell represented everything that was virtuous and respectable.

    Initially, during the commission’s organizational meetings in December, there was surprisingly little friction between these two most important members of the panel. The first sign of profound differences surfaced in January when the commission was being staffed. Warren wanted the staff to be geographically diverse, and initially selected, as being representative of the South, a Georgia civil rights lawyer named Morris Abrams. Russell knew Abrams all too well. The fellow Georgian had instigated a state reapportionment case that had vast racial and political implications. In sum, Morris Abrams was anathema to Russell and undoubtedly the senior senator from Georgia was insulted by the notion that Warren deemed Abrams representative. In a private note, Russell wrote that “for some reason, Earl Warren is stacking this staff with extreme liberals.” The probable explanation was that Warren intended to soft-pedal communist involvement in the assassination.

    Russell’s estrangement deepened in February 1964 once the first witnesses began testifying before the commission. He became especially disturbed over the kid-glove treatment accorded Oswald’s wife, Marina. Russell felt that she was perhaps the only witness who could testify about Oswald’s activities in the Soviet Union. Moreover, she was known to have been less than candid during FBI interviews, only admitting to certain facts when confronted with incontrovertible evidence. Yet Warren insisted upon treating Marina Oswald with great deference and solicitude, explicitly banning any tough cross-examination by commission staff.

    As a consequence, Russell’s attendance during commission deliberations began to flag. Discontent with Warren’s leadership was not the only reason though. Another factor was LBJ’s determination to push a very strong civil rights bill through Congress. Russell was intent on fighting such legislation to the bitter end, and the demands of the commission – which had grown far beyond anything contemplated in December – greatly impeded his plan to filibuster the bill to death. A conscientious man, Russell did not want to affix his signature to any assassination report he could not fully endorse, and he did not trust Warren to produce such a document. Consequently, he decided to quit the commission in late February and even drafted a letter to the president declaring his intention. Ultimately, however, he decided not to quit, perhaps recognizing that his resignation would strike a great blow against the Johnson presidency, not even yet a hundred days old.

    From March until late August, Russell was missing in action at the commission. He seldom if ever attended hearings and was rarely seen in the offices. Every night though, he meticulously weighed and sifted through the copious evidence, reading both raw transcripts and superb memos prepared by Alfreda Scobey, a young lawyer from Georgia hired to help him digest the huge mass of information being generated. Not until Labor Day weekend of 1964 did Russell re-enter the commission’s deliberations. With two other panel members, he flew down to Dallas and cross-examined Marina Oswald himself. It marked the toughest examination she would undergo, but in the end Russell did not discover anything of great moment.

    On September 18th the Warren Commission met for the last time to decide upon the language in its intensely-anticipated final report. Earl Warren believed it was critical to deliver a unanimous report in all respects, and rightly so. Anything less might render the whole effort worthless because the press would surely zero in on the differences in opinion. It would be especially troublesome if Richard Russell were to dissent.

    Warren’s fears were realized when Russell announced his intention to dissent on two key issues, one of which was the sequence of shots in Dealey Plaza. The problem here was John Connally’s testimony, and Russell’s misplaced pride. In Connally’s testimony before the commission, the Texas governor had been absolutely adamant about one thing: he wanted his own bullet. He refused to believe that he had been injured incidentally. According to Connally, the president was injured by the first shot; then he, Connally, was wounded separately by the second shot; then the third and final shot hit the president in the head. It did not matter that this explanation, carried to its logical conclusion, meant that a missile, after striking the president, disappeared into thin air. The staff of the commission, conversant as they were with all the forensic details, recognized that to accept Connally’s account was tantamount to saying that there were two shooters and therefore, by definition, a conspiracy. In addition to positing the disappearance of a bullet, Connally’s account made it impossible for Oswald to get off two shots in such a short period of time, thus raising the specter of two shooters. And if there were two shooters, ipso facto, there was a conspiracy.

    Despite these considerations, Richard Russell would not budge from his position. He would not permit the report – Warren’s report – to contradict the sworn testimony of an honorable Southern governor, no matter how impossible the testimony was. Accordingly the language proposed by the staff was changed so that it found as follows. First, the report concluded that three shots were fired in total. Second, the report stated that the shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were all fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. And third – in a paragraph that defies common sense – the report was written to assert:

 Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally, there is very persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet which pierced the president’s throat also caused Governor Connally’s wounds. However, Governor Connally’s testimony and certain other factors have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability but there is no question in the mind of any member of the commission that all the shots which caused the president’s and Governor Connally’s wounds were fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.[1]

    With respect to the single bullet conclusion, both Richard Russell and John Connally went to their deaths steadfastly maintaining that Connally had been injured by his own bullet. But every test, and there have been many since 1964, shows that the single bullet conclusion is the correct one.

    The politics inside the commission – in particular, the antipathy and distrust that existed between Richard Russell and Earl Warren – garbled a pivotal finding of the commission’s hard-working staff. Indeed, it was really the only genuine contribution to the forensic facts that the commission actually made. Consequently, the commission itself bears some responsibility for the disbelief attached to its labors.

    Yet, even if the relationship between Warren and Russell had not intruded, and the final report presented with greater clarity what happened in Dealey Plaza, that surely would not have been enough to keep the conspiracy pot from boiling. For no matter what Russell and/or his colleagues did or did not do, this matter could not have been laid to rest in 1964.

    On the day the Warren Report was made public, a reporter asked Russell this question: “Are you glad it’s over?” Shrewd and wise in the foibles of human nature, Russell responded, “Do you really think it’s over? They’ll be debating this thing for a hundred years.”

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Miller Center Report, Spring 1999
                                          © 1999 by Max Holland

[1] President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964), 19.

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