Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

who had been there. That is the power it has in who will look upon it. Under that power reference is made to the fact that

D. I. H. R. S. is on its behalf that Hurly. In a commission debate even give us with a mandate to go beyond the FBI on this question. For a moment, it seemed as if though Senator Russell went up the commission's dilemma. "It seems to me we have two alternatives," says Russell. "One is we can just accept the FBI's report and go on and write the report based on their findings and supported by the raw materials they have given us, or else we can go and try to run down some of these collateral rumors that have just not been dealt with directly in this raw material that we have."

The members seem inclined to want to go beyond the FBI. But then McCloy points out that some "sheet" he has in front of him (judging from a prior reference, it is probably a copy of Harold Feldman's probing article in the Nation, "Oswald and the FBI," January 27th, 1954) "is designed to be an attack on the FBI." Says McCloy, "We don't want to be in the position of attacking the FBI."

With this, the commission does a quick about-face. Forgetting their only client, truth, the commissioners agree that none of them wants to attack the FBI. They decide on a "marriage" of Senator Russell's two alternatives: They end up resolving to ask Hoover about the relationship between Oswald and the FBI end to perform their own independent investigation.

But the commission did very little independent investigation. Equating that with an attack on the FBI, the commission let the FBI investigate itself.

Rackin thought this was pretty controversial material. He confiscated the stenographers' notes of the January 22nd meeting—and they remain sealed to this day. Rackin specifically requested no stenotypist at all for the January 24th meeting with the Texas officials and filed an affidavit with Judge Gerhard Gesell's court in Washington in 1974 (when Harold Weisberg was going to see the transcript) saying he had instruction from the Warren Commission to keep the January 27th meeting under a top-secret classification. Weisberg says there's nothing in any commission record to support Rackin.

## III. THE SERIOUS CRITICS AND THEIR NEW EVIDENCE

Though Rankin tried to hide the ma- trifle, some critics managed to die it. They learned to find their way around the National Archives, they used the commission's working pat- tern, compared drafts of the report's papers and examined internal memos. They the commission staffers and lit- ters between the commission and the PAL.

In the case of the Warren Commission, Hooch shows how Hoover received information to the commission only when necessary, tried to defuse the informant relationship out of existence, declined to answer substantive questions about the basis of the FBI's relationship to both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Kow and presented daily contradictory explanations to the Warren Commission without finishing. Hooch's highly documented and readable story shows how the commission knew Hoover was hiding something—and how the commission let him get away with it, "at considerable cost," concludes Hooch, "to the integrity of the investigation."

The best of the Warren Commission critics are as serious as Hech and their names may well go down some day on an honor roll of those who cared enough to get involved: Vincent Salandria, Harold Weisberg, Sylvia Meagher, Josiah Thompson, Edward Jay Epstein, David Lifton, Lillian Castellano, Fred Newcomb, Perry Adams, Ray Marcus, Marjorie Field, Shirley Martin, Mary Ferrell, Richard Popkin, Bill Turner, Richard Sprague and the early Mark Lane.

Among the most important critics still hard at work and making new contributions are:

Bernard Fensterwald, a successful Washington D.C. lawyer, who out of his own well-haderdasheder pocket, finances the activities of something he calls the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, a loose confederation of citizens whose worry about the assassination of two Kennedys and a King was once signalized by the flag they printed on their metered mailings: Who Is KILLING OUR LEADERS? Fensterwald helped set up a special assassination archive at Georgetown University and was the chief honcho for a conference at Georgetown on the tenth anniversary of JFK's assassination. With attorney James Lesar, he is handling legal appeals for James Earl Ray, having been brought into the Ray case by Harold Weinberg. Though Fensterwald has avoided entangling his assassination conspiracy theories with the Ray case, Weinberg says that was the strategy behind the move to get a new trial for Ray. "If we walk Ray, then the government will have to find Dr. King's real killers." This seems to be the committee's basic trust, to push the government to find the real killers—or JFK, MLK, RFK.

* Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, coroner of Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) and director of the Institute of Forensic Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, the

the presidents of the United States and the Archivist of the Archives of the United States. In this regard, the evidence presented the world, in support of the N.S. are photos of the victims. Nevertheless, even with all theaving materials, Dr. Wecht concludes that the physical evidence which he has examined does not support the Warren Commission's findings. "More than one person," he says, "was involved in the shooting of President Kennedy."

Wecht says he bases his conclusion on an analysis of the famous single bullet (Commission Exhibit 399) which the Warren Commission said was supposed to have entered the right side of the president's back, coursed through the uppermost portions of the thorax and mediastinum and emerged just over the knot of the president's tie —then entered the right side of Governor Connally's back (breaking his right fifth rib), emerged from his chest, shattered a bone in his wrist and entered his left thigh. After all this the bullet had only lost two grains from its original weight and, said Wecht, the upper two centimeters of the bullet "show no grossly visible deformities, areas of mutilation, loss of substance or any kind of significant scathing." There is one small piece that was removed from the bullet's jacket by an FBI agent "for spectrographic analysis" (which analysis might show that JFK and Connally were not hit by the same bullet).

Furthermore, says Wecht, there was something strange about the trajectory of that bullet from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. It was supposed to have been traveling downward and passing through JFK from right to left. It should, therefore, have missed Governor Connally completely. Under the Warren Commission's hypothesis the bullet may have made an acute angular turn in midair. Wecht believes a second assassin may have been firing at JFK from the rear, possibly even from the front, but he says he cannot know for sure until he examines the materials that are missing.

Robert Groden, a young expert in optics from New York City, has magnified the central part of each frame of the Zapruder film and produced what he calls a refrained copy. The result is like a new film of the assassination, made through a zoom lens, with much of the jiggle removed. Now, even more starkly than before, to the lay observer at least, it appears that the shot which took off the top of the president's head and splattered two trading police motorcycles came from the front. The president's head clearly snaps back and to the left. Mrs.

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