Harold Weisberg - Whitewash II: The FBI-Secret Service Cover-Up

H AROLD W EISBERG

F OREWORD BY D AVID R. W RONE

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Copyright 1966 by Harold Weisberg Reprinted with permission of Hood College.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62873-572-7

Printed in the United States of America

by David R. Wrone

Rare it is to find a book on a dynamic and vital social crisis published in the heat of controversy that stands the test of time, yet Harold Weisbergs Whitewash II: The FBI-Secret Service Cover-Up published in 1966 does just that. It is an American classic as important then as it is today. Yet those words do not tell the story of his struggle to publish. Commercial publishers refused to publish a book critical of the Warren Commission, forcing Weisberg to self-publish. Then, he found it blacklisted by officials and shunned by the intelligentsia, refused by book review editors, and never mentioned in most major newspapers. Yet by word of mouth the public made it into an underground best seller.

From the limited sources available to him at the time Weisberg researched and studied the assassination, largely Warren Commission records and newspaper clippings. Since that time the federal release of voluminous materials associated with the inquiry, the information generated by several federal investigations, and the findings of numerous studies of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have only served to validate his analyses and conclusions.

Having analyzed the Warren Report in his first book, Whitewash I, Weisberg here focuses on the misdeeds of the investigative agencies utilized by the Commission. Only when we understand the burdens it labored under can the power and impact of these systems upon the integrity of the inquiry be appreciated.

The Warren Commission suffered from structural and personal weaknesses that hampered its work. At the composition level, President Lyndon Johnson appointed seven of the busiest men in government and public life who had little time to study the facts and probe crucial areas. In addition to the hobble of time attached to the membership, the commissioners had been selected for the Commission for political reasons, not for their expertise in criminal investigation.

The Commission further compounded its structural flaws with a failure to have its own team of investigators and criminal experts. Instead it hired a staff of 84 assistant counsels and assistants, largely attorneys, headed by a chief counsel J. Lee Rankin, who analyzed the information mainly furnished them by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, resolved problems, and wrote the Warren Report.

The staff lacked abilities to investigate murders. None of the assistant counsels had been criminal investigators or possessed the street smarts born of experience that they needed to probe a crime, especially one of this magnitude and complexity. In addition no one on the staff had a passion for justice or a drive for objectivity. Most were young, came from top law schools and promising legal careers in administrative law, tax law, and similar fields. Most importantly, they had been schooled and practiced law in an adversarial system, one of the great glories of the American system of law, where an attorney pursued a clients interest with full force in the secure knowledge that checks and balances of an opposing counsel would correct and guide the outcome along proper channels toward the end of truth. In their investigation of JFKs murder adversarial procedures did not exist, but the attorneys consistently functioned as if this great engine of truth, in the celebrated words of the philosopher of law Wigmore, were present. Thus, they had no checks or criticisms built into their approach.

Furthermore, to these severe flaws of little experience and ethical and structural weaknesses must be added a motivational problem that encumbered a critical approach to the assassination investigation. Many Commission assistant counsels had an intense desire to advance themselves in the world with credentials from service on this prestigious body. Dissent from official doctrines, criticism of procedures and scientific tests, and powerful pursuit of the evidence in the teeth of federal agencies that provided it would prove fatal to these aspirations. How valid this supine posture was. In years to come federal judgeships, professorships, high political office, and successful legal careers, personal honors, honorary doctorates, and many awards tumbled out of their ranks.

The Secret Service, FBI, and CIA provided most of the information utilized by the Commission, and performed most of the investigations the Commission required. There is no convincing evidence they were connected with the assassination of President Kennedy, but each of them had reasons to cover up the facts, as Weisberg would say. They had been responsible for protecting him, ferreting out assassination attempts, with the FBI and CIA having a curious relationship with the accused assassin over the years. They could not be expected to investigate themselves.

A remarkable affirmation of Weisbergs thesis put forth in Whitewash II came thirty years later when, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, a critic obtained an amazing document from the FBI files. The Bureaus internal inquiry on its role in the assassination investigation had concluded it had not really done its job. Among its many devices to avoid a serious, responsible inquiry, it had split the investigation into five parts, assigning each to a separate desk with no contact between them. In addition to an organization designed to fail it had not gone after evidence but had waited for it to fall into their hands or as they expressed it stood around with their pockets open waiting for evidence to fall in

Weisberg details many instances of the failure, as well as the corruption, of the inquiry made by the federal investigative agencies and the Commission counsels. Illustrations of this achievement convey the quality of his research and the importance of the book for our understanding of what happened to our thirty-fifth president.

Weisberg shows that the FBI made no effort to and did not search the crime scene of Dealey Plaza. Within a few hours of the murder Hoover had decreed from his headquarters in Washington, D.C., that only one assassin existed who fired from the School Book Depository. In a few more hours he asserted Oswald was that assassin. Most agents also seemed to have believed it. Those few who might have disagreedand none appear in the recordscould not go against the dictate at risk to their jobs and other retributions. Flowing from this brutal edict the agents ignored the south and north grassy knoll, the pergola and the various buildings, the marks and details on the street, the automobiles, and similar areas.