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 I have just lost another weekend trying to solve the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 46 years ago yesterday. Again, I admit defeat. It is beyond me. Unless Peter Falk comes out of retirement to reprise his “Columbo” role, the case may go unsolved forever.
But if it is beyond me, it was also beyond the Warren Commission. “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards were already dotting the landscape in some regions of the country when Lyndon B. Johnson, on his eighth day as President of the United States, named the Chief Justice chairman of the special commission he appointed to the task of investigating all aspects of the assassination and reporting to him, the American people, and the world who did what to whom and for whom and why to bring about the killing in broad daylight of the President as he rode triumphantly in a motorcade under the midday sun in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
The commission’s report was a rush job, as it was meant to be. Johnson wanted it out of the way in advance of his coronation for a term of his own at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City the following summer. The original June deadline came and went without a final report. Meanwhile, rumors abounded of contradictions between the commission’s adherence to the lone assassin theory and the physical evidence that had been coming to light piecemeal ever since that incredible November weekend, unlike any other in our nation’s history.
It began, of course, with questions about the number, source, and direction of the shots. The official version, which seemed fixed from the day of the shooting, was that all the shots came from the lone assassin as he perched in his makeshift sniper’s nest of cardboard boxes at a sixth-floor window in the southeast corner of the Texas Schoolbook Depository Building, which was to the rear of the President’s limousine when the shots were fired. But many of those on the scene believed that at least some of the shots came from behind the wooden stockade fence atop a grassy knoll in front and to the right of the limousine. And it was not a later reconstruction of events in their respective memories, as if born of a desire to add more intrigue to the stark, dramatic event. Their reactions at the time, recorded in photos and on film show people running in the direction of the knoll and the fence to find and, presumably, capture, the assassin or assassins.
Now that also raises some interesting questions. If the people believed the shots came from a sniper’s nest atop the grassy knoll, why would they go charging, unarmed, up that knoll as though they were Roosevelt’s Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill? Their patriotic zeal is admirable, but would they not have been afraid of charging the sniper’s nest of one or more trained, or at least successful, assassins? Perhaps it is just further evidence that none of us knows what he or she will do under extreme pressure or provocation. Let tyrants beware!
As we have long known, the people who rushed to that scene, both lay and law enforcement personnel, did not encounter assassins — at least they did not encounter anyone they recognized as an assassin. (Question: What does an assassin look like?) But there were people in the railroad yard behind the fence. And several people reported seeing Secret Service personnel back there. Now it is possible that ordinary citizens, seeing well dressed people who appeared calm and seemed to know what they were doing in the vicinity of where the President of the United States had just been shot, simply concluded that they were Secret Service. But some of those who reported meeting Secret Service agents at that critical moment were law enforcement personnel. And at least one of them said one of the people he encountered in the railroad yard only moments after the shooting “showed me that he was a Secret Service agent.” We may reasonably assume that when the officer said “showed me,” he meant the man in question produced some sort of badge or credentials. So there apparently was good reason to believe there was a Secret Service presence at that location at the time the shots were fired at the President’s limousine.
What is surprising is that there was not. Why there was not is one of the great questions, both under-asked and never-answered, in the 46 years since President Kennedy’s assassination. We have heard enough of how the agents had been out drinking until the early hours of the morning on the day of the assassination. That hardly explains how, in the days leading up to the event, their planning of the motorcade route failed to take into account a natural sniper’s nest, offering a cover of leaves and trees, a fence barricade to slow down potential pursuers, and a clear shot at the motorcade, a far easier shot than could be made from a window six stories up at a target that was moving away from the alleged gunman.
But there was no Secret Service or local or state law enforcement personnel behind the fence in an area that could have been easily observed, had it not been somehow overlooked. The Warren Commission report was definite on that point. All the Secret Service personnel at the scene, including the head of the Dallas Secret Service office, went with the motorcade as it sped to Parkland Hospital. Therefore, people who thought they saw Secret Service agents in the area behind the fence in the moments after the assassination were simply mistaken. End of story.
Whoa! Wait a minute. The mere fact of reports, at least some of which must be considered reliable, of Secret Service in the area should have raised some very troubling questions in the minds of commission members, who would otherwise have to be numbered among the least curious people on the planet. Why were there people in the area apparently impersonating Secret Service agents? At least one, apparently, had forged credentials. Strange, remarkably strange, they would be there at all, involved in such bizarre activity so near the scene and so soon after the President of the United States had been fatally shot by a “lone assassin.”
What is even more remarkable is that the Warren Commission professed not to find it strange at all. The people who testified to the presence of Secret Service personnel on the scene were mistaken, that’s all. On a Friday afternoon in Dallas, Texas, they just happened to run into people who happened to be impersonating members of the Secret Service on the same day the President of the United States was shot and killed in the motorcade that had passed a short distance away. Who knew?
The commission apparently saw no red flag in that, had no alarm bells go off inside their busy, prestigious heads, the kind of alarm bells that might have caused Yogi Berra to say, “If you can’t hear that, you must be blind.”
No, it was a lone assassin, unaided by confederates, and any evidence to the contrary must of necessity be dismissed as the commission forged ahead with the terribly important business of assuring the President, the nation, and the world that the assassination had been the work of a lone crackpot who was no longer alive to threaten the nation and its President again. And this commission was headed by the Chief Justice of the United States!
Columbo would have had a lot of questions to ask. This one would not have been solved in 90 minutes. Nor in ten months. The report of the commission was released to a waiting press and public on September 24, 1964. It was hailed by a stampede of correspondents, columnists, and commentators as the most thorough, painstaking investigation, leaving no stone unturned, since God interrogated Cain at the scene of the world’s first murder. It was all very simple. The weirdo did it. As the President’s brokenhearted widow sobbed when news came of the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights… It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.”
Some “silly little communist.” Well, that at least is the official version of how the President of the United States, who had enraged both Castro’s Cuba and anti-Castro Cubans, and who — assisted by his brother, Bobby, the attorney general — prosecuted mob leaders while he slept with their molls was killed. Killed by a defector to the Soviet Union and Fair Play for Cuba member who, of course, had nothing to do with any of those controversies. Still, the rumors persisted and persist to this day. Jacqueline Kennedy was not the only one who thought her husband should not have been martyred by “some silly little communist.”
Some folks, including Chicago gangster Sam Giancana's half-brother Chuck, thought it might have been a mob hit, and some thought that invisible power brokers behind our government had Kennedy killed because he would not follow the plan laid down for him. Few serious students of the mystery, however, accepted that “some silly little communist” could pull off the assassination all on his own.
The truth may by now be so buried that it will never be uncovered.
Jack Kenny is a freelance writer living in New Hampshire. Send him an email at jkenny2@netzero.com.
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