Breach of Trust

How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why

Gerald D. McKnight

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780700619399
• eBook ISBN: 9780700622474
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

The Warren Commission's major conclusion was that Lee Harvey Oswald was the "lone assassin" of President John F. Kennedy. Gerald McKnight rebuts that view in a meticulous and devastating dissection of the Commission's work.

The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy was officially established by Executive Order to investigate and determine the facts surrounding JFK's murder. The Warren Commission, as it became known, produced 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits, more than 17,000 pages of testimony, and a 912-page report. Surely a definitive effort. Not at all, McKnight argues. The Warren Report itself, he contends, was little more than the capstone to a deceptive and shoddily improvised exercise in public relations designed to "prove" that Oswald had acted alone.

McKnight argues that the Commission's own documents and collected testimony—as well as thousands of other items it never saw, refused to see, or actively suppressed—reveal two conspiracies: the still very murky one surrounding the assassination itself and the official one that covered it up. The cover-up actually began, he reveals, within days of Kennedy's death, when President Johnson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach all agreed that any official investigation must reach only one conclusion: Oswald was the assassin.

While McKnight does not uncover any "smoking gun" that identifies the real conspirators, he nevertheless provides the strongest case yet that the Commission was wrong—and knew it. Oswald might have knowingly or unwittingly been involved, but the Commission's own evidence proves he could not have acted alone.

Based on more than a quarter-million pages of government documents and, for the first time ever, the 50,000 file cards in the Dallas FBI's "Special Index," McKnight's book must now be the starting point for future debate on the assassination.

Among the revelations in Breach of Trust:

Both CIA and FBI photo analysis of the Zapruder film concluded that the first shot could not have been fired from the sixth floor

The Commission's evidence was never able to place Oswald at the "sniper's nest" on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting.

JFK's official death certificate, signed by his own White House physician and contradicting the Commission's account of Kennedy's wounds, was left out of the official record.

The dissenting views of the naval doctors who performed the autopsy and those of the government's best ballistic experts were kept out of the official report.

The Commission's tortuous "Single Bullet" or "Magic Bullet" theory is finally and convincingly dismantled.

Oswald was probably a low-level asset of the FBI or CIA or both.

Commission members Gerald Ford (for the FBI) and Allen Dulles (for the CIA) acted as informers regarding the Commission's proceedings.

The strong dissenting views of Commission member Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia) were suppressed for years.

1 Assembling the “Official Truth” of Dallas

The facts are often “developed” to support a predetermined outcome. In the perhaps apocryphal exhortation attributed to J. Edgar Hoover, “Fire that man! No. Get the facts. Then fire him!”

—Christopher Kerr (a veteran FBI agent), “Ruby Ridge Investigation Astray,” Washington Times, September 15, 1995

For a year Texas lingered like a black cloud over President John F. Kennedy when he took time to strategize about his 1964 reelection campaign. According to the midterm election results the celebrated JFK mystique had virtually bottomed out in the Lone Star State. The faction-ridden Democratic Party had lost Dallas by more than sixty thousand votes. Cold War defense spending in the state had spawned a newly emergent corporate elite that propelled Texas, especially Dallas, in a rightward political direction. Texas right-wingers viewed Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis as a sellout to Castro’s Cuba rather than a last-minute reprieve from nuclear disaster. After considering the 1962 election results, a disgruntled Kennedy told Texas governor John Connally, “I don’t know why we do anything for Dallas.” The equally glum Democratic governor retorted, “I’m telling you, they just murdered all of us.” The following November President Kennedy made his fateful trip to Texas to try to heal his party’s factional wounds and give a boost to his approval ratings, which were languishing under 40 percent in the polls.¹

Air Force One touched down at Love Field, Dallas, at 11:40 a.m. (CST) on Friday, November 22, 1963. The weather, as if by executive order, had turned fair for the presidential party. The November sky was a sparkling blue, and the only hitch to a perfect day was a wind that was gusty at times. Dallas turned out to welcome the thirty-fifth president and to get a close look at the First Lady. This was the first time she had accompanied her husband on the campaign trail. As the motorcade made its way through a gauntlet of 250,000 cheering spectators, Mrs. Connally turned to the president and remarked, “Mr. President, you can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you.” The throng of well-wishers delighted the Kennedys, but for the Secret Service members detailed to protect Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, it was an unsettling assignment.

Just a month earlier U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson had been physically accosted in Dallas by a mob of right-wing hecklers. Roy H. Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in charge of Kennedy’s Texas outing, told his FBI debriefers a week after the assassination that security arrangements for the trip had been “the most stringent and thorough ever employed by the Secret Service . . . to an American city.” However, Kennedy’s decision to give politics priority over security made protection for the president and his party even more complicated for the critically undermanned Secret Service White House detail. The fastest and safest route for the presidential motorcade from Love Field to the Trade Mart, where the president was to speak, was only four miles, but this route was rejected for a longer (ten miles) and more circuitous drive through downtown Dallas to allow more people to see President and Mrs. Kennedy. Politics also persuaded JFK to order the Secret Service to remove the plastic bubble from the presidential limousine. The plastic dome was not actually bulletproof, but the Secret Service took some comfort in the notion that it might serve to deflect bullets fired at certain angles.²

The presidential limousine slowed almost to a stop in taking a sharp left-hand turn from Houston onto Elm Street, heading for the Dallas Trade Mart, where President Kennedy was scheduled to speak that afternoon. William Greer, a thirteen-year Secret Service veteran who was JFK’s driver, recalled that the massive blue-black Lincoln Continental was just picking up speed when shots rang out. Sitting next to Greer, Kellerman turned to his left and heard Mrs. Kennedy cry out, “What are they doing to you?” Within seconds Secret Service agent Clint J. Hill jumped from the left running board of the backup car, which was “tight close at hand,” and sprinted to the presidential limousine, narrowly escaping being run down and crushed by the backup car. Hill climbed onto the rear bumper of the Lincoln in time to push Jackie Kennedy, who had climbed out of her seat and was reaching to the right rear of the slippery trunk lid (it had rained earlier that day) for a piece of her husband’s skull. Hill pulled Mrs. Kennedy back and forced her to the floor of the limousine. He recalled that she gasped, “They’ve shot his head off.” Kellerman had already radioed the lead car: “We’ve been hit, lead us to a hospital immediately.” As Greer floored the Lincoln, he noticed that Governor Connally had slumped over onto his wife’s lap. Kellerman then made a quick check on “Lancer,” the Secret Service’s code name for JFK, heard him gasping and struggling for breath, and then faced front for the five-minute dash to the hospital, praying that it was not too late.³

Back in Washington at “Seat of Government,”⁴ FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had just returned from lunch when a call came from J. Gordon Shanklin, the FBI special agent in charge (SAC) of the Dallas office, that the president had been shot.⁵ Hoover spent the afternoon on the phone to Dallas and Washington officials. His first call was to the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was holding a luncheon meeting at his Hickory Hill home in McLean, Virginia. Hoover informed the attorney general that his brother had been shot. Kennedy remembered this first of two Hoover calls as clipped, coldly official, and without a hint of sympathy. What is historically important about the director’s second call to Hickory Hill, which came at 4:01 p.m. (EST), was that the director told RFK that the assassin was in custody. “We,” Hoover grandly announced, “had the man,” overlooking the fact that it was the Dallas police who had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald.⁶ Hoover also made calls to James J. Rowley, the head of the Secret Service, and Norbert A. Schlei, assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel.

Cartha D. “Deke” DeLoach, the assistant director in charge of the Crime Records Division, the bureau’s well-oiled and effective public relations machine, leaves us with the image of “the Director” as a natural leader able to rise to the occasion and surmount any crisis. DeLoach’s Hoover faced national traumas with “a cold and analytical eye,” transforming himself into a high-performance machine “spitting out orders . . . measuring his words with the precision of a jeweler.”⁷ Nevertheless, on the day of the assassination DeLoach’s unerring, machinelike director unaccountably broke down. Before that shattering day was over, virtually every fact he reported to high government officers was wrong. He had shots coming from the fourth and fifth floors of the book depository building and a Winchester rifle as the murder weapon rather than the now familiar Mannlicher-Carcano allegedly owned by Oswald. He had Oswald shuffling back and forth to Castro’s Cuba, when in fact Oswald’s one effort to get to Cuba from Mexico in the fall of 1963 had proven futile. There is no FBI or any other government record made public that documents Oswald ever being in Cuba. Hoover told Rowley that the assassin had gunned down a Secret Service agent when it was actually a Dallas cop, J. D. Tippit, who was killed.⁸

Before the day was over, Hoover, despite his record of factual error, had envisioned the solution to the crime—Oswald, “a nut of the extreme pro-Castro crowd,” was the lone assassin.⁹ The director’s tenuous grip on the facts was partly because the FBI’s Dallas field office was in a state of wild confusion, relaying erroneous information back to Seat of Government. One FBI report had Vice President Johnson down with a heart attack and near death. FBI Washington headquarters’ (FBIHQ) first information on the alleged assailant came from military intelligence in San Antonio and not from the Dallas field office. The 112th INCT Group’s releases from its intelligence file on Oswald alerted FBIHQ that Oswald was an ex-marine, a defector to Russia, and married to a Russian woman. According to the military’s Oswald file, when he had returned to the United States with his wife and child he had denounced capitalism and praised communism. The releases also noted that the suspect in the Kennedy assassination was on record with military intelligence in New Orleans for distributing “Hands off Cuba” literature in that city.¹⁰

Hoover was not happy that his agency was lagging behind army intelligence on the information curve. The FBI had a fairly extensive preassassination file on Lee Harvey Oswald, but the first reports on Oswald to cross the director’s desk originated with military intelligence. Hoover imposed his own interpretation on the army’s intelligence reports on Oswald that fitted neatly into his version of assassination history. Two hours later, while on the phone with Assistant Attorney General Schlei, Hoover gave the Justice Department official the benefit of his reading of U.S. history and the political leanings of presidential assassins. It was the director’s considered opinion that such killers were always either “anarchists” or “communists.” Later in the day the Dallas field office, after prodding from FBIHQ, started compiling biographical material from Oswald’s FBI file and interview sessions at Dallas police headquarters with the alleged assailant. An FBI agent lifted some of this material from Oswald’s wallet when the suspect left the interrogation room to relieve himself. One of the items receiving special attention was a “Fair Play for Cuba, New Orleans Chapter” membership card issued to L. H. Oswald by chapter president A. J. Hidell, which was assumed to be a fictitious name for Oswald himself. Later that same day FBIHQ had a chance to review the agency’s preassassination file on Oswald. The salient biographical data in the file strengthened Hoover’s conviction that Oswald was the assassin: In 1959 Oswald had told U.S. Embassy officials in Moscow that he was a “Marxist” and wished to renounce his American citizenship. In exchange for Soviet citizenship, he offered to tell the Soviets what he knew about the U.S. Marine Corps and his specialty as a radar operator. The ex-marine had distributed pro-Castro “Fair Play for Cuba” literature in New Orleans and, according to a “confidential informant,” Oswald subscribed to The Worker, the East Coast organ of the American Communist Party.¹¹

Before the day was over the biographical details about Oswald were fitted to Hoover’s profile of a presidential assassin. That same day, the word went out from FBIHQ to the Dallas field office that Oswald was not just the principal suspect; he was the only suspect. A Richardson, Texas, law officer called the FBI Dallas office the afternoon of the assassination with the name of a possible suspect, Jimmy George Robinson, and other members of the white supremacist National States Rights Party because of their open hatred for President Kennedy. Before the office memo recording the call was serialized and filed—and it was filed the day of the assassination—it carried the handwritten notation: “Not necessary to cover as true suspect located.” In short, within a few hours of the assassination, the FBI was not interested in any possible conspiracy or any suspect other than Lee Harvey Oswald. No action was taken on the lead from Richardson, although the call came in before the Dallas authorities charged Oswald with killing President Kennedy. He was not charged with JFK’s murder until 11:25 p.m.

Given Hoover’s administrative style, where the line of command from the director’s office to all fifty-six field offices was uncompromisingly rigid, it is inconceivable that a supervisor or street agent in the Dallas office would have consigned this lead to archival oblivion without FBIHQ’s direct approval. The dismissal of the Richardson alert indicated that the lines of communication from FBI Washington to FBI Dallas carried one directive: The Hoover bureau was interested only in Oswald with a smoking rifle and nothing else. By late morning of the following day, the FBI’s New Orleans office, which held a considerable preassassination file on Oswald, was directed to drop all contacts with “informants and other sources with respect to bombing suspects, hate groups and known racial extremists.” The New Orleans office was to concentrate only on “Lee Harvey Oswald or anything possible on his background; to obtain handwriting, records; all personnel and all Agents should be made to obtain this immediately.”¹²

It is puzzling why Hoover felt compelled to rush to judgment when the situation called for cautious reticence until he could be more positive about any information he reported to official Washington. In large part the explanation may rest in the fact that Hoover was a captive of his own carefully cultivated public image of supranational hero above politics, and in this moment of national confusion and profound distress he feared that his and the FBI’s reputation would suffer unless there was a quick resolution of the crisis. A related concern growing out of Hoover’s tireless public relations campaign of FBI omniscience and infallibility in combating crime and political subversion and rooting out conspiracies was that the public might blame the FBI for failing to prevent JFK’s assassination. If Oswald was part of a Communist conspiracy, and nothing that Hoover learned about him that day and the following week argued against that possibility, then the FBI had been caught unawares. Part of the storied reputation of the Hoover bureau during the height of the Cold War was its celebrated sleepless vigilance in protecting the nation by thwarting the nefarious domestic plots of the Red Menace at every turn. But even a worshipful public could not expect Hoover to anticipate and frustrate the sick fantasies of a lone nut. The director’s rush to judgment in identifying Oswald as the lone assassin would preserve the Hoover legend built on his FBI’s ability to penetrate any conspiracy.

Long before the nation was neck deep in the media age, the Hoover FBI public relations machine operated under the assumption that image always triumphed over reality. Hoover’s influence derived from his iconic hold on the popular imagination, and Kennedy’s murder posed an immediate threat to the director’s “nation savior” image. Hoover received hundreds of letters from deeply distraught Americans. Most craved assurance that the government was not going to hell in a handbasket. Others were bitterly angry and wanted to know how the government, especially the vaunted FBI, could have allowed the head of state to be brutally gunned down in broad daylight. Most of the letters could have been filed in the “Take care of yourself. We need you in America” category.

But there were also many letters blaming the FBI for failing to prevent Kennedy’s foul murder and, unfairly, compounding this dereliction by not keeping the alleged assassin alive so he could be brought to trial. A letter from a woman in Irvington, New Jersey, telling the director, “The FBI has lost the confidence of the nation” was not an isolated reaction. A man from Whitehall, Michigan, asked Hoover, “How could the FBI have goofed” by failing to have a man with Oswald’s record under “surveillance until President Kennedy was safely on his plane back to Washington?” A telegram from an outraged citizen from Santa Monica, California, unloaded on the director: “What were you doing today playing golf or looking for Communists.” An Allentown, Pennsylvania, resident asserted that if Hoover “was doing his job the President wouldn’t be dead today.” Some telegrams demanded that Hoover resign immediately. A few were downright nasty. A telegram from the American heartland, Wichita, Kansas, upbraided the sixty-eight-year-old director: “Now old man do you realize the danger always was . . . [that] this right wing thing was every bit as dangerous as the Communists you have talked so profitably about. Now let’s see your people get cracking or you get out and let another man in.”¹³

National syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, who spent more time at the top of Hoover’s “son-of-a-bitch list” than most other media types, wrote a column blaming both the Secret Service and the FBI for “squabbling over jurisdiction and headlines” and leaving the protection of the president to fall between the cracks. DeLoach’s immediate instinct was to unleash the FBI’s “news media friends” to “take Pearson apart.” Uncharacteristically, Hoover restrained his assistant director, confessing, “Unfortunately we are not in a position to completely contradict Pearson.” Hoover’s hesitation to launch a counterstrike against the offending columnist was not rooted in any debilitating or paralyzing reaction from JFK’s brutal slaying. The FBI director was fearful that the FBI, especially the Dallas office, had failed to alert the Secret Service to potential threats in Dallas to President Kennedy, in particular by failing to provide the Secret Service with the information from the FBI’s preassassination file on Lee Harvey Oswald.¹⁴

The day of the assassination, as soon as Hoover and Associate Director Clyde Tolson had an opportunity to review Oswald’s preassassination file, they knew the FBI had a monumental problem. Oswald’s Dallas field office files carried the slug line “Internal Security—R (Russian)—Cuba case.” These early incomplete and raw files revealed that the only suspect in the JFK assassination case was a defector to the Soviet Union; he had threatened to turn over military secrets to his Soviet hosts in exchange for citizenship; he was a self-declared Marxist; and after his return to the United States in 1962, Oswald had started a Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), a pro-Castro organization, in New Orleans. These salient facts prompted the director and his top executive officer to ask why Oswald was not on the bureau’s “Security Index.” Had Oswald been indexed as a security threat the Secret Service would have been alerted and he would have been placed on an “alert list” and den...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Assembling the “Official Truth” of Dallas
• 2 Creating the Warren Commission
• 3 Oswald in Mexico—Seven Days That Shook the Government
• 4 The Warren Commission Behind Closed Doors
• 5 The Warren Commission Confronts the Evidence
• 6 The Warren Commission’s “Smoking Guns”
• 7 The JFK Autopsy
• 8 Birth of the “Single-Bullet” Fabrication
• 9 Politics of the “Single-Bullet” Fabrication
• 10 FBI Blunders and Cover-Ups in the JFK Assassination
• 11 Senator Russell Dissents
• 12 Was Oswald a Government “Agent”?
• 13 JFK, Cuba, and the “Castro Problem”
• Conclusion
• Appendix A. FBI Damage Control Tickler
• Appendix B. J. Lee Rankin’s Memorandum
• Appendix C. A Brief Chronology and Summary of the Commission’s Case against Oswald
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover