After
the death of John F. Kennedy, his deputy,
Lyndon
B. Johnson,
was appointed president. He immediately set up a commission to "ascertain,
evaluate and report upon the facts relating to the assassination of
the late President John F. Kennedy." The seven man commission
was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren
and included Gerald Ford, Allen
W. Dulles, John J. McCloy, Richard
B. Russell, John S. Cooper and Thomas
H. Boggs.
Lyndon
B. Johnson
also commissioned a report on the assassination from J.
Edgar Hoover.
Two weeks later the Federal
Bureau of Investigation produced
a 500 page report claiming that Lee Harvey
Oswald was the sole assassin and that there was no evidence of
a conspiracy. The report was then passed to the Warren
Commission.
Rather than conduct its own independent investigation, the commission
relied almost entirely on the FBI report.
Mark
North (Act of Treason) and George
O'Toole (The Assassination Tapes)
both believe that J.
Edgar Hoover
either knew
of plans to kill Kennedy and did nothing to stop them, or he helped
to organize the assassination. In his book, Deep
Politics and the Death of JFK (1993) Peter
Dale Scott
provides information
that Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
helped to cover-up the real identity of the people who assassinated
John
F. Kennedy.
In
his book, Best Evidence, David
Lifton claims
that members of the Secret Service agents were involved in the killing
of Kennedy. This included providing the assassins with a good opportunity
to kill Kennedy. Lifton was highly critical of the behaviour of William
Greer,
Roy
Kellerman
and Winston
G. Lawson
during the
assassination. Lifton believes that after the assassination of Kennedy
they
hijacked the body in order to alter the corpse. In the book, Mortal
Error, Bonar Menninger,
claims that SS agent George Hickey killed
Kennedy by accident.
James
H. Fetzer
believes the Secret Service played a role in the assassination. In
his book, Assassination Science,
he writes: "I have discovered at least fifteen indications of
Secret Service complicity in the assassination of John F. Kennedy,
from the absence of protective military presence to a lack of coverage
of open windows, to motorcycles out of position, to Secret Service
agents failing to ride on the Presidential limousine, to the vehicles
arranged in an improper sequence, to the utilization of an improper
motorcade route, to the driver bringing the vehicle to a halt after
bullets began to be fired, to the almost total lack of response by
Secret Service agents, to the driver washing out the back seat with
a bucket and sponge at Parkland Hospital, to the car being dismantled
and rebuilt (on LBJ's orders), to the driver giving false testimony
to the Warren Commission, to the windshields being switched, to the
autopsy photographs being taken into custody before they were developed".
Clint
Hill, Roy
Kellerman,
and William
Greer
after
giving evidence to the Warren
Commission (March, 1964)
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(P1)
William
Manchester, The Death of a President (1967)
There was
a sudden, sharp, shattering sound. Various individuals heard it differently.
Jacqueline Kennedy believed it was a motorcycle noise. Curry was under
the impression that someone had fired a railroad torpedo. Ronald Fischer
and Bob Edwards, assuming that it was a backfire, chuckled. Most of
the hunters in the motorcade - Sorrels, Connally, Yarborough, Gonzalez,
Albert Thomas - instinctively identified it as rifle fire.
But the White
House Detail was confused. Their experience in outdoor shooting was
limited to two qualification courses a year on a range in Washington's
National Arboretum. There they heard only their own weapons, and they
were unaccustomed to the bizarre effects that are created when small-arms
fire echoes among unfamiliar structures - in this case, the buildings
of Dealey Plaza. Emory Roberts recognized Oswald's first shot as a
shot. So did Youngblood, whose alert response may have saved Lyndon
Johnson's life. They were exceptions. The men in Halfback were bewildered.
They glanced around uncertainly. Lawson, Kellerman, Greer, Ready,
and Hill all thought that a firecracker had been exploded. The fact
that this was a common reaction is no mitigation. It was the responsibility
of James J. Rowley, Chief of the Secret Service, and Jerry Behn, Head
of the White House Detail, to see that their agents were trained to
cope with precisely this sort of emergency. They were supposed to
be picked men, honed to a matchless edge. It was comprehensible that
Roy Truly should dismiss the first shot as a cherry bomb. It was even
fathomable that Patrolman James M. Chaney, mounted on a motorcycle
six feet from the Lincoln, should think that another machine had backfired.
Chaney was an ordinary policeman, not a Presidential bodyguard. The
protection of the Chief Executive, on the other hand, was the profession
of Secret Service agents. They existed for no other reason. Apart
from Clint Hill - and perhaps Jack Ready, who started to step off
the right running board and was ordered back by Roberts - the behaviour
of the men in the
follow-up car was unresponsive. Even more tragic was
the perplexity of Roy Kellerman, the ranking agent in Dallas, and
Bill Greer, who was under Kellerman's supervision. Kellerman and
Greer were in a position to take swift evasive action, and for five
terrible seconds
they were immobilized.
Why
was William Manchester critical of the way the Secret Service responded
to the shooting at the motorcade in the Dealey Plaza?
(P2)
William
Greer interviewed by Arlen
Specter on behalf of the Warren
Commission (9th March, 1964)
Arlen Specter: Now,
how many shots, or how many noises have you just described that you
heard?
William Greer: I know
there was three that I heard - three. But I cannot remember any more
than probably three. I know there was three anyway that I heard.
Arlen
Specter: Do you
have an independent recollection at this moment of having heard three
shots at that time?
William Greer: I knew that
after I heard the second one, that is when I looked over my shoulder,
and I was conscious that there was something wrong, because that is
when I saw Governor Connally. And when I turned around again, to the
best of my recollection there was another one, right immediately after.
Arlen
Specter: To the best
of your ability to recollect and estimate, how much time elapsed from
the first noise which you have described as being similar to the backfire
of a motor vehicle until you heard the second noise?
William Greer: It seems
a matter of seconds, I really couldn't say. Three or four seconds.
Arlen
Specter: How much
time elapsed, to the best of your ability to estimate and recollect,
between the time of the second noise and the time of the third noise?
William Greer: The last
two seemed to be just simultaneously, one behind the other, but I
don't recollect just how much, how many seconds were between the two.
I couldn't really say.
Arlen
Specter: Describe
as best you can the types of sound of the second report, as distinguished
from the first noise which you said was similar to a motorcycle backfire?
William Greer: The second
one didn't sound any different much than the first one but I kind
of got, by turning around, I don't know whether I got a little concussion
of it, maybe when it hit something or not, I may have gotten a little
concussion that made me think there was something different to it.
But so far as the noise is concerned, I haven't got any memory of
any difference in them at all...
Arlen
Specter: Did you
step on the accelerator before, simultaneously or after Mr. Kellerman
instructed you to accelerate?
William Greer: It was about
simultaneously.
According
to William Greer, how did he react when he first heard the shots being
fired at President John F. Kennedy?
(P3)
Roy
Kellerman
interviewed by Arlen
Specter, John
S. Cooper
and Gerald
Ford on behalf of the Warren
Commission (9th March, 1964)
Arlen
Specter: When was
it that Mrs. Kennedy made the statement which you have described,
"My God, what are they doing?"
Roy
Kellerman:
This occurred after the
flurry of shots.
Arlen
Specter: At that
time you looked back and saw Special Agent Hill across the trunk of
the car, had your automobile accelerated by that time?
Roy
Kellerman:
Tremendously so; yes.
Does Roy
Kellerman agree with the testimony of William Greer?
(P4)
Michael
L. Kurtz, Crime of the Century: The Kennedy Assassination From
a Historians Perspective (1982)
The Zapruder and
other films and photographs of the assassination clearly reveal the
utter lack of response by Secret Service agents Roy Kellerman and
William Greer, who were in the front seat of the presidential limousine.
After the first two shots, Greer actually slowed the vehicle to less
than five miles an hour. Kellerman merely sat in the front seat, seemingly
oblivious to the shooting. In contrast, Secret Service Agent Rufus
Youngblood responded instantly to the first shot, and before the head
shots were fired, had covered Vice-President Lyndon Johnson with his
body.
Trained to react instantaneously,
as in the attempted assassinations of President Gerald Ford by Lynette
Fromme and Sara Jane Moore and of President Ronald Reagan by John
Warnock Hinckley, the Secret Service agents assigned to protect President
Kennedy simply neglected their duty. The reason for their neglect
remains one of the more intriguing mysteries of the assassination.
Does Michael
L. Kurtz agree with the accounts of William Greer (P2) and Roy Kellerman
(P3)?
(P5)
Joachim
Joesten,
How Kennedy Was Killed (1968)
One of the most eminent authorities on the subject, former Secret
Service chief U.E. Baughman, who headed that agency from 1948 to 1961,
has publicly taken issue, in several newspaper interviews, with the
lack of adequate precautions which is so painfully apparent in the
Dallas tragedy.
A UPI dispatch from Washington,
dated December 8, 1963 quoted Mr. Baughman as saying that "there
are a lot of things' to be explained" concerning the assassination.
One thing Baughman wanted
to know - nobody has explained it yet - is why Lee H. Oswald was permitted
to leave
the Book Depository after the shooting.
He asked, also, assuming
that the shots did come from the sixth-floor window of that building,
why the Secret Service didn't immediately pepper that -window with
machine gun fire?
This is one of the most
obvious - and least asked - of all "unanswered questions"
about the Kennedy murder. Why, indeed, was all the shooting done only
by one side - that of the assassins?
There were dozens of Secret
Service men on the scene, all former FBI agents and tested marksmen,
quick on the trigger and with their service guns and submachine guns
at the ready - to say nothing of the hundreds of Dallas policemen
who were also present when the President died in a hail of bullets.
And not a single shot was fired by any of these alert guardians of
the law!
Had the Secret Service
men reacted as Baugham says they should have, by instantly 'peppering'
the TSBD window with machine gun fire, the sniper crouching behind
that window would certainly not have been able to get off a second
or third shot, as the Commission says he did.
In a subsequent interview
with Seth Kantor of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, Mr. Baughman
declared that it was a "basic, established rule" of the
Secret Service to see to it that people were kept out of the upper
stories of buildings along a presidential parade route. The manager
of the Texas School Book Depository therefore "should have been
under firm instructions by the police" to close the upper floors
of that building to unauthorized persons...
The Secret Service couldn't
spare a man either for checking the grassy knoll, a textbook location
for a guerilla-type ambush. This breathtaking deficiency came to light
when there were reports that a man who identified himself as a member
of the Secret Service was encountered near the knoll just after the
assassination. These reports drew a firm denial from the Secret Service
which stated explicitly that it had no man posted there. It would
have been better for the Secret Service to have said that the knoll
had been swarming with agents who didn't notice a damn thing than
thus to admit another such glaring dereliction of duty.
According
to former Secret Service chief U.E. Baughman, what mistakes were made
during the visit to Dallas?
(P6)
Evidence of four police officers protecting the motorcade about what
the presidential car did when the shots were fired in the Dealey Plaza.
James Chaney (motorcyclist on motorcade): "From the time the
first shot ran out, the car stopped completely, pulled to the left
and stopped."
Bobby Hargis
(motorcyclist on motorcade):
"The car stopped immediately after that and stayed stopped for
about half a second, then took off."
Earle Brown (police officer
on overpass): "When the shots were fired, it (the car) stopped."
J. W. Foster (police officer
on overpass): "Immediately after Kennedy was struck... the car
pulled to the curb."
Do these
accounts support the testimony of William Greer and Roy Kellerman?
(P7)
The
Warren Commission Report (September, 1964)
The
Commission has concluded that some of the advance preparations in
Dallas made by the Secret Service, such as the detailed security measures
taken at Love Field and the Trade Mart, were thorough and well executed.
In other respects, however, the Commission has concluded that the
advance preparations for the President's trip were deficient.
Although the Secret Service is compelled to rely to a great extent
on local law enforcement officials, its procedures at the time of
the Dallas trip did not call for well-defined instructions as to the
respective responsibilities of the police officials and others assisting
in the protection of the President.
The
procedures relied upon by the Secret Service for detecting the presence
of an assassin located in a building along a motorcade route were
inadequate. At the time of the trip to Dallas, the Secret Service
as a matter of practice did not investigate, or cause to be checked,
any building located along the motorcade route to be taken by the
President. The responsibility for observing windows in these buildings
during the motorcade was divided between local police personnel stationed
on the streets to regulate crowds and Secret Service agents riding
in the motorcade. Based on its investigation the Commission has concluded
that these arrangements during the trip to Dallas were clearly not
sufficient.
The
configuration of the Presidential car and the seating arrangements
of the Secret Service agents in the car did not afford the Secret
Service agents the opportunity they should have had to be of immediate
assistance to the President at the first sign of danger.
Within
these limitations, however, the Commission finds that the agents most
immediately responsible for the President's safety reacted promptly
at the time the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository
Building.
What
criticisms did the Warren Commission make of the Secret Service on
22nd November, 1963?
(P8)
House
Select Committee on Assassinations
(1979)
Findings of the Select Committee on Assassinations in the Assassination
of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963.
The
committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it,
that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result
of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman
or the extent of the conspiracy....
Agencies
and departments of the U.S. Government performed with varying degrees
of competency in the fulfillment of their duties. President John F.
Kennedy did not receive adequate protection. A thorough and reliable
investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy was conducted. The investigation
into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate.
The conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith,
but presented in a fashion that was too definitive.
The
Secret Service was deficient in the performance of its duties.
The
Secret Service possessed information that was not properly analyzed,
investigated or used by the Secret Service in connection with the
President's trip to Dallas; in addition, Secret Service agents in
the motorcade were inadequately prepared to protect the President
from a sniper.
In
what ways was the House Select Committee on Assassinations critical
of the Secret Service?
(P9)
James
H. Fetzer, Assassination
Science and the Language of Proof, included in Assassination
Science (1998)
I have discovered
at least fifteen indications of Secret Service complicity in the assassination
of John F. Kennedy, from the absence of protective military presence
to a lack of coverage of open windows, to motorcycles out of position,
to Secret Service agents failing to ride on the Presidential limousine,
to the vehicles arranged in an improper sequence, to the utilization
of an improper motorcade route, to the driver bringing the vehicle
to a halt after bullets began to be fired, to the almost total lack
of response by Secret Service agents, to the driver washing out the
back seat with a bucket and sponge at Parkland Hospital, to the car
being dismantled and rebuilt (on LBJs orders), to the driver giving
false testimony to the Warren Commission, to the windshields being
switched, to the autopsy photographs being taken into custody before
they were developed, and more.
What
evidence does James H. Fetzer provide to support his view that the
Secret Service might have been involved in the assassination of John
F. Kennedy?
(P10)
Edward
Jay Epstein,
Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (1978)
The possibility that
Oswald was encouraged or assisted in the act by some unknown party
can certainly not be excluded. But there is one piece of evidence
which strongly argues against the possibility that Oswald was part
of an intelligent and purposeful conspiracy - the note which Oswald
purportedly wrote to the FBI a week or so before Kennedy arrived in
Dallas.
In this note, Oswald threatened
to blow up the local FBI headquarters in Dallas unless FBI agents
stopped harassing his wife. The note itself was never divulged to
the Warren Commission. Instead, after Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby,
the local FBI agent, undoubtedly on orders from his superiors destroyed
the note. Its existence was only admitted by FBI officials in 1975
when FBI employees in Dallas, who had seen the note, revealed its
contents. They testified, moreover, that Oswald had delivered the
note to the FBI office.
If there was a conspiracy,
it is difficult to understand why it should risk revealing itself
to the FBI by having Oswald, their; main actor, walk into the FBI
office with a threatening note. He might have been arrested on the
spot, or at the very least, the FBI could have been expected to warn
the President security force that Oswald, who was employed on the
President's route, had made a violent threat to federal officials.
Even if the conspirators only meant to frame Oswald, the delivery
of the note would jeopardize that plan since it risked having Oswald
arrested prior to the President's arrival. It therefore seems reasonable
to assume that, if the note is authentic, Oswald was not part of a
conspiracy.
Why does
Edward Jay Epstein believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a FBI agent?
(P11)
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and
the Death of JFK (1993)
The House Committee
on Assassinations confirmed that the Hosty entry had been deleted
in the retyping of the memo. It called the incident "regrettable,"
but "trivial", even though what was at stake was an apparently
false statement by FBI officials under oath....
The FBI's handling of Hall,
and of the whole Odio story, suggests they had something to hide.
To begin with, the agents they sent to interview Silvia Odio, and
who asked no questions about the "double agent" story, were
James P. Hosty, Jr., and his partner, Bardwell D. Odum. Hosty also
interviewed Juan B. Martin, the man Odio had been interested in buying
arms from; yet his write-up of this interview is utterly trivial and
makes no reference to gunrunning at all.
James Hosty was hardly
the right agent to send for an impartial investigation. As the FBI
agent assigned to handle both arms trafficking and the Oswalds before
the assassination, Hosty quickly became a party to some of the FBI's
most serious cover-up activities. On November 24, 1963, long before
he finally interviewed Silvia Odio in December, Hosty had already
destroyed a threatening note which Oswald had left for him at the
Dallas FBI office. He had done so on orders from his boss, Gordon
Shanklin, which almost certainly came from Washington.
Why does
Peter Dale Scott believe it was significant that the FBI employed
James Hosty to interview Silvia Odio and Juan B. Martin?
(P12)
Jim
Garrison,
On the Trail of the Assassins (1988)
According to Dallas Police Lieutenant Jack Revill, an F.B.I, agent
came up to him at Dallas police headquarters at 2:50 P.M. and said
that the Bureau had "information that this suspect was capable
of committing the assassination." The agent who brought this
welcome news and was the first to mention the name of Lee Harvey Oswald
was none other than James Hosty.
Was Hosty merely an innocent
messenger, or had he and possibly others in the Bureau been involved
in a plot to set up Oswald as the patsy? If F.B.I, employees had been
part of the conspiracy, then that might explain why the Bureau had
mysteriously failed to act on the warning sent over its telex system
five days before the assassination and why no one responded to the
letter of warning that Richard Case Nagell claimed to have sent to
J. Edgar Hoover. It also might explain why Oswald, who evidently did
not get along with Hosty and may have sensed that he was being set
up, had sent a telegram to the secretary of the Navy ten days before
the assassination.
I began to formulate a
possible scenario. Long in advance, the engineers of the assassination
had selected the idealistic and gullible Oswald as a patsy. His close-mouthed
intelligence background helped assure not only success in the venture
but subsequent support from the government, which would not want to
admit that the assassination originated in its own intelligence community.
If Oswald was on the government
payroll as a confidential informant in Dallas and New Orleans, he
might well have believed that his job was to penetrate subversive
organizations, including Fair Play for Cuba and perhaps Guy Banister's
apparatus, in order to report back to the F.B.I, about them. Along
the way, he was allowed to penetrate a marginal part of the assassination
project, again with the idea that he was engaged in an officially
sponsored effort to obtain information about it. He may even have
filed reports on the plot to kill the President with his contact agent,
James Hosty. When Oswald sensed that Hosty was not responsive, he
may have gone over his head and telegraphed some kind of warning to
the secretary of the Navy, who in turn may have informed the F.B.I.'s
Washington headquarters, which then sent out its warning telex.
What did
Jim Garrison believe James Hosty's role was in the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy?
(P13)
Peter
Dale Scott,
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993)
Such an explanation
is less plausible for the FBI's interference with leads that appeared
to be guiding its agents to the actual assassins of the President
- a case, seemingly, of obstruction of justice, or worse. How else
should one assess the response of FBI headquarters to a report from
Miami that Joseph Adams Milteer, a white racist with Klan connections,
had in early November 1963 correctly warned that a plot to kill the
President "from an office building with a high-powered rifle"
was already "in the working"? These words are taken from
a tape-recording of a discussion between Milteer and his friend, Miami
police informant Bill Somersett. Miami police provided copies of this
tape to both the Secret Service and the FBI on November 10, 1963,
two weeks before the assassination, and this led to the cancellation
of a planned motorcade for the President in Miami on November 18.20
Although an extremist,
Milteer was no loner. Southern racists were well organized in 1963,
in response to federal orders for desegregation; and Milteer was an
organizer for two racist parties, the National States Rights party
and the Constitution party. In addition he had attended an April 1963
meeting in New Orleans of the Congress of Freedom, Inc.,
which had been monitored by an informant for the Miami police. A Miami
detective's report of the Congress included the statement that "there
was indicated the overthrow of the present government of the United
States," including "the setting up of a criminal activity
to assassinate particular persons." The report added that "membership
within the Congress of Freedom, Inc., contain high ranking members
of the armed forces that secretly belong to the organization."
In other words, the deep
politics of racist intrigue had become intermingled, in the Congress
as elsewhere, with the resentment within the armed forces against
their civilian commander. Perhaps the most important example in 1963
was that of General Edwin Walker, whom Oswald was accused of stalking
and shooting at. Forced to retire in 1962 for disseminating right-wing
propaganda in the armed forces, Walker was subsequently arrested at
the "Ole Miss" anti-desegregation riots. Nor was the FBI
itself exempt from racist intrigue: Milteer, on tape, reported detailed
plans for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Hoover's FBI,
by the end of 1963, had also targeted for (in their words) "neutralizing...
as an effective Negro leader."
Four days after the assassination
Somerset! reported that Milteer had been "jubilant" about
it: "Everything ran true to form. I guess you thought I was kidding
you when I said he would be killed from a window with a high-powered
rifle." Milteer also was adamant that he had not been "guessing"
in his original prediction. In both of the relevant FBI reports from
Miami, Somersett was described as "a source who had furnished
reliable information in the past."
Why was
Peter Dale Scott critical of FBI's behaviour in the weeks leading
up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
(P14)
Matthew
Smith, JFK: The Second
Plot (1992)
One of the outstanding
examples of a witness being frustrated in his attempt to speak out
when he had something important to say is to be found in the story
of Abraham Bolden. Abraham Bolden was a member of the White House
detail of the Secret Service, and was the first negro to be appointed
to that body. Bolden had heard of a Chicago plot to kill the President
and was anxious to tell what he knew. He was also critical of the
personnel appointed to guard the President, claiming they were lax
in their duties. It was believed that an attempt on Kennedy's life
had been foiled on 1st November in Chicago, but three weeks before
he was killed in Dallas, and it would have been extremely embarrassing
to the Warren Commission, heavily involved in establishing their "lone
killer - no conspiracy" theory, to have had Bolden telling of
a Chicago plot. Bolden's superior officers blocked his request. A
few months later Abraham Bolden was charged with soliciting a huge
bribe for disclosing secret information on a counterfeiter, Joseph
Spagnoli, and he was jailed for six years. Spagnoli later confessed
he had lied about Bolden, at the request of Prosecutor Richard Sikes,
he claimed. In spite of this Bolden was made to serve his full sentence.
What is
the significance of the story of Abraham Bolden in the search to discover
who was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
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