Harold
Weisberg, the son of Jewish immigrants
from Russia, was born in 1914. After graduating
from the University of Delaware, he wrote articles for the Wilmington
Morning News and the Philadelphia
Ledger.
Weisberg
also worked as an investigator Robert
M. La Follette (Jr) when he was a leading figure in the Progressive
Party. During the Second World War he served
in the Office of Strategic Services. Later
he became a State Department intelligence analyst. He
was also a successful poultry farmer in Montgomery County.
Weisberg
became one of the leading experts on the killing of John
F. Kennedy
and
Martin
Luther King.
He collected in his home more than 250,000 government papers on the
Kennedy assassination. His first book on the Kennedy assassination,
Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report (1965), sold
over 30,000 copies.
Other
b books by Weisberg include Whitewash II:
The FBI-Secret Service Cover Up (1966), Oswald
in New Orleans: Case of Conspiracy with the C.I.A. (1967),
Photographic Whitewash (1967),
Frame-Up: The Martin Luther - James Earl
Ray Case (1970), Post Mortem:
JFK Assassination Cover Up (1975), Martin
Luther King: The Assassination (1993), Selections
from Whitewash (1993), Never Again!
The Government Conspiracy in the JFK Assassination (1995)
and Case Open: Unanswered JFK Assassination
Questions (1996).
Although
a conspiracy theorist, Weisberg was highly critical of Oliver Stone's
film, JFK. He commented "To
do a mishmash like this is out of love for the victim and respect
for history? I think people who sell sex have more principle."
Harold
Weisberg died at his home of kidney failure on Frederick on 21st February,
2002.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Harold Weisberg,
Whitewash: The Report on the
Warren Report (1966)
Assassination is
a political crime. Even in the rare, remote cases where the assassin
had no comprehensible political objectives, the crimes had political
consequences. Whether it is the head of a state or a lesser official,
the assassination has immediate political effects. With the head of
state murdered, the changes in the political structure and situation
are more immediate and far-reaching. A policy change by the head of
state has national and international implications. Even when his successor
follows the same basic policies, there nonetheless are changes in
the implementation of these policies. No two men work, think or act
in exactly the same way.
Nations and people are
reluctant to believe that any among them is capable of the horrible
crime of assassination. It is less uncomfortable to believe the assassin
was insane or at least unbalanced. Individually and nationally, thinking
about assassinations turns toward the search for "explanations
more acceptable than the obvious. No one wants to believe a political
murder was committed for personal gain, or that any segment of society
is capable of such a monstrous deed for selfish ends. Shocking and
paralyzing as assassination itself is to decent people, the traumatic
feeling that, somehow, the nation itself is guilty may be even more
stunning.
(2)
Harold
Weisberg,
Whitewash (1965)
The Commission was reconstructing
the crime, ostensibly to find out what happened, not to prove that
Oswald alone committed it. When the motorcade turned toward the Depository
Building on Houston Street, for several hundred feet there was a completely
unobstructed view of it from the sixth-floor window. The police photographs
and the forgotten Secret Service reconstruction of 1963 also show
this. There was not a twig between the window and the President. There
were no curves in that street, no tricky shooting angles. If all the
shots came from this window, and the assassin was as cool and collected
as the Report represents, why did he not shoot at the easiest and
by far the best target? Why did he wait until his target was so difficult
that the country's best shots could not duplicate his feat?
(3)
Harold Weisberg,
Whitewash: The Report on the
Warren Report (1966)
There is in neither
the Commission's Report nor in any of the 26 printed volumes of its
hearings and exhibits any sign that the Commission considered this
assassination as a political crime, an unvarying characteristic of
all assassinations. Likewise, despite the great amount of space devoted
to the subject of conspiracy, there is no sign of any real quest for
evidence of conspiracy in the broad or political sense. Both the FBI
and the Commission decided, as
had the police before them, that Oswald was their legitimate prey.
Nowhere in the Report is there any evidence that any other assassin
or assassins were ever sought or considered. Can anything be logically
concluded other than that nobody wanted to find a different assassin
or any additional assassin?
Yet there were abundant
and obvious indications of both suspicion of a conspiracy and of its
existence. The Report
was able to avoid them, a task made easier by the nature of the hearings.
It was as successful in avoiding both the
obvious indications and the even more obvious suspicions, some of
which are dealt with in this book.
The superficial and immature
manner in which the Report deals with the possibility of a conspiracy
or of a different assassin is only one of the ways in which the Commission
may have crippled itself. Despite references in both the Report and
the press to the Commission's investigators, the fact is that, in
the accepted sense, the Commission had
no investigators of its own. It drew upon the men available in the
Executive Branch, chiefly the FBI and Secret Service,
who were not employees of the Commission and whose primary responsibilities
were to those who did employ them.
While there is no suggestion
that these agencies were in any way involved m the assassination,
they were, nonetheless, subject to Commission criticism and they were,
in fact, so criticized. In addition, the Secret Service was directly
responsible for the President's welfare and safety, and he was killed
while they were protecting him. Besides its normal duty of aiding
the Secret Service, the FBI had Oswald under surveillance or investigation
at the time the President was killed. He was what might be called
an "active" case.
Therefore, both agencies
and their employees had personal involvements in the investigation
that amounted to conflicts of interest. On one hand was the need for
a complete, impartial and exhaustive investigation regardless of where
it led and what it showed. On the other, the reputations of the agencies
and their employees could have been at stake, for any error, no matter
how innocent, could have made the Dallas tragedy possible. This situation
was unfair to the agencies, which did not create it, and could have
burdened them with impermissible conflicts and temptations, no matter
how unconsciously. Further, the Dallas representatives of these agencies
had ties of friendship and sometimes long association with the local
police and, when the investigation of the assassination was over,
faced the need for continuing, day-to-day working associations with
them. Contemporarily and historically, it would have been better if
the Commission had had its own staff of investigators in the field
and had restricted its use of the FBI and Secret Service to technical
services.
(4)
Harold
Weisberg , Whitewash
(1965)
The narrative continues
with Mrs. Linnie Mae Randle, Frazier's sister with whom he lived,
noticing Oswald approaching with a "heavy brown bag," in
the Commission's words rather than Mrs. Randle's. "He gripped
the bag in his right hand, near the top. 'It tapered like this as
he hugged it in his hand. It was . . . more bulky toward the bottom
than toward the top." If this seems like a novel or dangerous
way to carry a rifle, especially with the metal portion not attached
to the stock and more likely to punch a hole in paper, it did not
seem so to the Commission. And if Oswald's "gripping" and
"hugging" might be expected to leave marks of at least crumpling
on the bag, the Commission did not so expect and the bag itself shows
no markings of the shape of a rifle, assembled or disassembled. The
creases where it was folded in four are still sharp and clear. After
untold handling, examination and testing, these creases are strong
enough to keep the bag from lying flat when extended to its full length...
Knowing Oswald's sleeve
length and height, as the Commission did, measuring the length of
a package he could have held in his grip without touching the ground
was simple and provided an accurate means of approximating the length.
Actually, it requires a tall man, which Oswald was not, or a man with
abnormally short arms (we don't know his arm length), for a 28-inch
package to even barely clear the ground. The Commission had a passion
for reconstructions. All of them had unsatisfactory results and at
best jeopardized the Commission's findings. Some disproved the Commission's
theories. The minimum length of the disassembled rifle was 34.8 inches.
The Report does not quote a package reconstruction...
The only suggestion of
any connection between Oswald and the bag was through fingerprints.
Because Oswald worked where the bag was reported to have been found,
the presence of his fingerprints was totally meaningless. Sebastian
F. Latona, supervisor of the FBI's Latent Fingerprint Section, developed
a single fingerprint and a single palmprint he identified as Oswald's.
More significantly, "No other identifiable prints were found
on the bag".
After all the handling
of the bag attributed to Oswald, first in making it, then in packing
it, then taking it to Frazier's car, putting it down in the car, picking
it up and carrying it toward if not into the building for two blocks,
and then, at least by inference, through the building, and when removing
and assembling a rifle Marina testified he kept oiled and cleaned,
how is it to be explained that he left only two prints? The only thing
as strange is that this bag was also handled by the police and was
the only evidence they did not photograph, according to their testimonies,
where found. Yet the freshest prints, those of the police, were not
discovered.
(5)
Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker
(June 1967)
When the
Warren Report was published, some ten months after the assassination,
most Americans seemed to accept its conclusions, most editorialists
praised it for its thoroughness and clarity, one or two reviewers
criticized it as taking the form of a brief for the prosecution, and
perhaps a dozen obscure citizens, unaware of each other’s existence,
began to pore over it to prove that it was wrong. Eventually, of course,
critical books were written on the Report by professional journalists
such as Léo Sauvage, an American correspondent for Le Figaro,
and Sylvan Fox, the former city editor of the World-Telegram &
Sun; Mark Lane, the author of Rush to Judgment, and Harold
Weisberg, the author of Whitewash and Whitewash II,
became more or less professional critics; Edward Jay Epstein, whose
book on the alleged bungling of the Warren Commission investigation,
Inquest, is generally considered the single greatest contribution
to making criticism of the Report respectable, entered the field through
the orthodox routine of scholarship - in order to earn a Master’s
degree by analyzing the workings of a governmental commission; and
James Garrison, operating on the premise that the Warren Commission
failed to fulfill its duties, launched an investigation of his own
as district attorney of New Orleans. But in the two and a half years
between the assassination and the publication of Epstein’s book,
most of the hours spent examining the official version of the President’s
murder were spent by people who had no professional reason for their
interest and no plans to make a full-time career out of criticizing
the Warren Report. They tend to refer to themselves (and the professionals)
as “investigators” or “researchers” or, most often,
“critics.” They are also known as “assassination buffs.”
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