Newspaper Clippings on Jfk Assassination

LFASHINGTON STAR ,...,
.L MAY 1975 '
F
GARRY WILLS '
AWo1"d for ‘vVan"en Commission
It is time to say a word for the Warren
Commission; Even those who believe
that Oswald was the sole assassin of
President Kennedy are beginning to
grant that the Warren Commission did a
bad job. They say we should “reopen
the case," if for no other reason, just to
resolve doubts caused by sloppy detec-
tive work. But most doubts are caused
by two classes of men - those who have
not really read what the Warren
Commission said and those whose
doubts would not be resolved by the Sec-
ond Coming (which they would treat as
a CIA plot). '
.
.
The attacks on the Warren Commis-
sion come from three main directions:
1". Some think the commission was
part of the plot itself. These people are
at leastconsistent. If one could mobilize
all the resources most conspiratorial
theories demand‘, then controlling the
commission should have been no prob-
lem at all. But this, like most such
theories, proves too much. If one can
“control” a chief justice, a future presi-
dent-, a bunch of prominent lawyers on
the make, an attorney 'genera.l'who hap-
pens to be the assassinated man's broth-
er, then one controls everything, and
ithere is no _longer any need to hide -
i.e., to be a conspiracy-. . _
2.‘ Others think the CIA and/or the
FBI bamboozled the commission -
which is a rather touching exercise in
credulity. Even if those agencies were
efficient, they would have to tread care
fully where so many other factions and
rival interests were at play - and
where the results were going to be pub-
lished in 26 volumes. But. of course, the
record of both the FBI and the CIA is
enough to make anycriticism of the
-commission look like praise. If the con-
spiracy depended on the FBI and the
CIA, then Howard Hunt's whole career
tells us what would have happened to it.
3. Others, by far the most numerous,
think the commission just fumbled the
job out of haste, incompetence or uncon-
scious prejudices. Most of the evidence
for this is the citing of "leads" that the
commission did not track down. In fact,
many of these were tracked down, or
.were patently false leads from the start.
A fair example is Mark Lane's use of
testimony by Nancy Perrin Rich. He de-
voted a whole chapter of this book to
this woman's bizarre tale. He neglected
to tellthe readers that the same woman
appeared two other times, in two differ-
ent places, to volunteer evidence to the
commission. The investigators listened
politely, though-she told three totally
di.fferent'stor_ies. At one of these appear-
ances, deliberately omitted from Lane's
chapter, she took (and flunked) a poly-
graph test. "
_
Ovid Demaris and I, back in~the*'60s,
took Lane's advice and followed up this
woman's testimony. We found that she
was an-unstable woman, had been in
and out of psychiatric care. and police
stations, that she loved to "testify"
about all her famous friends in mob
trials and other celebrated crimes. We
also found that Lane knew all this, that
he told the woman's husband he would
not be ‘able to make-anything of her
testimony. But he made an entire ten-
dentious chapter out of one third of that
testimony. . - -
_
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4
.-Here is a simple rule of thumb for
dealing ‘with conspiratorialists: If they
question.the integrity of the Warren
Commission yet quote Mark Lane with
approval, they are iihtellectually very
ill-equipped or intellectually dishonest, _
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