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

vices Committee, made eight secret of his disenchantment with the commission's report and encouraged private investigators to challenge its findings. "I never believed that he [Oswald] did it without any consultation or encouragement whatsoever." Russell said in 1970. "Too many things caused me to doubt that he planned it all by himself." And then there were the witnesses to the assassination itself. Fifty-two of them insisted that at least some of the shots that killed President Kennedy came from in front of him, from the direction of the infamous grassy knoll. The commission discounted all of them.

Small wonder, then, that the commission's report proved a breeding ground for skeptics. In the years immediately following the assassination, 26 books and dozens of articles, some of them serious, some simply scurrilous, challenged the finding that Oswald acted alone or, in the opinion of many of the doubters—including Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher, author of the seminal Accessories After the Fact—at all. By 1967, the holes in the Warren Commission report had become so numerous and obvious, and the public furor about them so great, that several congressmen were demanding a new investigation. Then, another one of those coincidences. In New Orleans a district attorney named Jim Garrison, a figure of large ambition and unsavory reputation, indicted Clay Shaw, director of the New Orleans Trade Mart, for conspiracy to murder John Kennedy. Garrison claimed that Shaw was the ringleader of a CIA cabal. He proved only that Clay was a devotee of kinky homosexuality. After a ludicrous trial, in which Garrison made almost no attempt to produce evidence, Shaw was acquitted. Subsequently, Shaw died and Garrison was driven from office. The Warren Commission's critics were scattered in disarray.

Now the critics have returned stronger than before. Armed with sophis-

beace new technology and a raid of Freedom of information lawsuits, they have uncovered additional evidence pointing to the existence of a conspiracy—a conspiracy in which Lee Harvey Oswald was not involved, if indeed there ever was a Lee Harvey Oswald. Within the last few months, Congressman Henry Gonzalez, a Democrat from San Antonio, has introduced a resolution calling for a congressional investigation of the assassination. A petition backing it has collected more than 250,000 signatures on the West Coast alone. A bootlegged copy of the long-suppressed Zapruder film, showing President Kennedy being driven violently backward by a shot that rips off the top of his head, has been shown on national television twice. Perhaps most significant of all, the Justice Department, according to reliable sources, has very quietly begun a high-level, internal review of Oswald's background. In the past, rumors have circulated that Oswald was an agent of one or more intelligence agencies, perhaps including the FBL. Now, the rumors are taking on some substance.

Much of the evidence that is being gone over today is precisely the same ground that the critics went over a decade ago. What has changed is belief. The strongest selling point of the Warren Commission is not what it said but the people who said it: some of the most respected men in the land, among them the chief justice of the United States, two directors of the CIA and a man who a decade later would assume the presidency. Gerald R. Ford. If a senior public figure stated something in 1964, there was a tendency to take him at his word. In the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam, few people are prepared to believe anything that comes out of Washington. In a sense, that is part of the problem. As Mark Lane, who has returned to investigating the assassination after sojourns into Vietnam protests and Indian rights struggles, puts it: "It's not a question any longer of persuading people to disbelieve the War-

can Commission reason. They are ready to believe almost any explanation, however crazy, as long as it does not come from the government.

wouldn't acting alone has always seemed a little crazy. Because, if he wasn't, then there must have been a conspiracy, a word that does not go down easily among many Americans. And, if there was a conspiracy, then there must have been an effort to cover it up, an effort to monumental that it would have had to include the Dallas police, the CIA, the Secret Service, the FBI and, yes, possibly the President of the United States. Ten years ago, that was a little hard to swallow. Even now, it is a story one would rather not believe. But there are the questions that won't go away. And there is Watergate: a conspiracy involving the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice and, yes, the President of the United States. Suddenly, it becomes possible.

## The commission and the critics

Impossible, said the commission, from the moment it began its work. Conspiracy was the one thing the commission did not want to bear, much less discover. Earl Warren, who had accepted the chairmanship of the commission only after considerable arm-twisting from President Johnson, made it clear at the first, secret staff meeting of the commission that his mission and theirs was more political than investigatory. He had taken the job. Warren told the commission, because the President had convinced him that if rumors about a conspiracy were not squelched, it could conceivably lead the country into war. As Melvin Eisenberg, a commission lawyer, later recalled the chief justice's charge in a memo, "He placed emphasis on quenching rumors, and precluding further speculation such as that which has surrounded the death of Lincoln."

Thus, under extreme political pressures, the commission set about its task.