DISCUSSION OF KENNEDY ASSASSINATION EVIDENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 19
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 22, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: November 22, 1993
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
RADIO
NREPORTS
FAIRS STAFF
WAT10N ""`-?v raz
The Washington Post
he New York Times _
The Los Angeles Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Washington Times.
USA Today
Associated Press
UPI
Reuter
PROGRAM The Diane Rehm Show CITY Washington, D. C.
DATE November 22, 1993 10:05 AM AUDIENCE
SUBJECT
PUBLIC AF
Discussion of Kennedy Assassination Evidence
DIANE REHM: Thirty years after the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, many Americans mark that dreadful day as a turning point,
a day after which the world as we knew it was changed forever. In
fact, the early '60s were a time of massive civil rights battles
and even the possibility of nuclear war. But until that moment
when the President was pronounced dead, optimism had been both a
word and a spirit, used freely with reference to our personal lives
and the future of the nation. November 22, 1963 ushered in a new
era, one characterized by suspicion, cynicism and mistrust of
government institutions.
Last week Washington Post staff writers Walter Pincus and
George Lardner, Jr. wrote a three-part series examining the latest
documents made available from previously closed files on the
assassination. These documents indicate how U.S. leaders made
decisions that had the effect of deepening the suspicion that
afflicts us today. They're here in the studio with me. Also,
historian Michael Beschloss, author of "The Crisis Years: Kennedy
and Khrushchev, 1960 to 1963."
We're going to devote our entire hour to a conversation with
these three gentlemen, and we'll take your calls as well. Join us
on 885-8850.
Good morning to all of you....
Michael Beschloss, you wrote a recent Newsweek essay entitled
"The Day That Changed America." Talk about how the assassination
of John F. Kennedy specifically changed America.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Well, the first thing is that people tend
to think that Kennedy's assassination changed American government
policy; that if Kennedy had lived, he would have taken, for
instance, a very different road from Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam. We
might have been spared that tragedy. And also that policy changed
CONTINUED
While Radio TV Reports endeavors to assure the accuracy of material. supplied by it, it cannot be responsible for mistakes or omissions.
Material supplied by Radio TV Reports may be used for file and re?eience purposes only. It may not be renred?rad ...IA ,...,..Li:_L. A__
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
in other ways under Johnson from that it might have been had
Kennedy served a second term.
Another way it changed was that 1963 was really the high
solstice of American dominance in the world and American power.
We've never really regained that point again. And the
assassination is something of a moment when that is seen to have
changed.
Also, in the years since 1963 we have a good deal of reason to
be a lot more skeptical of what our government tells us. That was
not true before Dallas.
And I think the final thing is that Kennedy's assassination
was the kind of thing that until 163 did not really happen in
America. Americans are by nature rationale people. They feel that
there is a logical explanation for everything. The fact that
Kennedy could be assassinated for reasons that to this day remain
very murky, in a way, ushered the United States into the old world,
into the old world of Europe, a world of much more suspicion than
America had been.
REHM: Walter Pincus, did the manner in which the
assassination itself was handled and investigated somehow
contribute, then, to that whole perception?
WALTER PINCUS: Well, I think it helped a great deal, in part
because the investigation was so successful in the beginning, of
isolating Lee Harvey Oswald and tying him to the actual shooting.
The shooting of Lee Oswald, however, was -- at that point, it
became something different. And you could then never prove that he
actually did it and did it alone. You probably would have had a
difficult time doing it anyway. But that laid the groundwork for
what then happened later. And that is that the government wanted
to continue on and move on. There was a new President and the
world was sort of waiting for us to act. We had to prove that
there was stability. And in the interests of having stability and
sort of removing doubts from the public mind and the world mind
that either the Soviets or the Cubans were involved, they rather
quickly tried to close things down: the FBI, the CIA, and then the
Warren Commission.
REHM: But what...
PINCUS: And in that gap was left the sort of soil out of
which all these conspiracy theories then grew.
REHM: George, was this rush to put it behind us and move on,
as Walter has just said, to get on with the business of governing,
not only this country but making our continued impact in the world,
did that perhaps push us to act too quickly in regard to finding
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
conclusions, to reaching those conclusions and to making sure that
the American public agreed with-those conclusions?
GEORGE LARDNER, JR: Yes. I think it promoted the very thing
that officials were trying to prevent. By rushing to close the
case, they left angles unchecked and suspicions not investigated.
So that in the long run they created the very doubts about the
investigation, about what happened, that they were trying to cure
and resolve. They took, I think, an almost "Here no evil. See no
evil" attitude once Ruby killed Oswald. They said, "Okay. Let's
shut it down." Because, I think, there was apprehension about what
they might find, and so they didn't want to find it.
REHM: Michael, there was initial fear that the public would
actually believe that the Soviets were directly involved, and there
was a great deal of concern. Even though, apparently, U.S. and
allied intelligence investigation said something else.
BESCHLOSS: That's right. You know, once it was revealed that
Oswald was someone who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and
then come back -- that was something that was very unusual,
needless to say, in 1963 -- that that might lead people to believe
that he had assassinated Kennedy on behalf of Nikita Khrushchev,
the head of the Soviet Union, or Fidel Castro, because he had ties
to Cuba. And as a result, the Johnson Administration was very
eager to make sure that people were calmed about this. Because if
they were not calm about it, they would have demanded retaliation
against Cuba or the Soviet Union.
We look at the conversations that Lyndon Johnson had privately
during the first week to ten days after he took the presidency.
Over and over again he's saying, "I want to get this thing,"
essentially, "papered over. Because I don't want to start a
nuclear war that could lead to the deaths of tens of millions of
people.
REHM: There's also an emphasis that both of you point out in
your pieces in the Washington Post, an emphasis on Oswald as madman
rather than Oswald as conspirator, George.
LARDNER: Yes. I think his early years show, you know, that
he was a very unstable individual, arrogant, very preoccupied with
his own importance, or sense of importance, in the world. At the
same time, he was not entirely friendless. And the associations he
had, I think, were pushed to the back of the bus, as far as any
investigation was concerned.
REHM: But there's also a concern on the part of high
government officials that Oswald appear as that madman, rather than
as anything which might have implied conspiracy, be brought
forward. An I right about that, Walter?
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
PINCUS: Oh, no. They isolated very quickly on Oswald, but
they had a couple reasons to do it. It's not just trying to close
it down quickly to satisfy the need to keep the public calm. But
also, both the FBI and the CIA had vulnerabilities, themselves.
Not. that they were involved in the assassination per se, but that
there were failures in their-own activities. Either, in the case
of the FBI, in being closer to understanding what Oswald was about.
They had had some earlier information from the CIA on what he had
done in Mexico City that should have encouraged them to have
greater interest. Not that they saw him as an assassin, but they
saw him as somebody that they should have paid closer attention to.
They were in the process of looking into his activities. They just
sort of let it drag along.
The CIA was in the process of a plot, the second of a series
of plots, to kill Castro. And although today they say that they
saw no connection between that plotting and the assassination, they
clearly had to see it a different way.
And so those kind of cover-ups took place and they, again,
helped people think something was amiss.
I think there's one other thing which I think you can't leave
out, and that is that this provided -- it's a terrible word to use,
in my own mind. This provided a playpen for people to raise doubts
for their own personal reasons. And that is not just financial
reasons, but political reasons. Some people are just on the outs
and decided to take a certain view of what went on and play that
up.
And with the public really, if you were there in that time,
really upset about what happened and really not thinking conspiracy
-- I was here at the time and covering the White House, as a young
reporter, and we were not thinking conspiracy. We were not
thinking anybody else but Oswald. We were thinking about this
enormous loss to the country and a President coming on who was
totally different than John Kennedy. John Kennedy had defeated
Kefauver, Humphrey, Johnson to get the nomination, defeated Richard
Nixon in the campaign. A whole new generation came here. And one
of the things that happened is that, almost seriatim, we got
Humphrey -- we got Johnson, we got Humphrey and we got Nixon. And
it was stunning. And people were much more concerned about the
politics and what had happened to the country than they were
looking for a conspiracy or a plot.
BESCHLOSS: They were.
And I think the other thing is that it's become sort of a
blank slate on which people project their own obsessions. You've
got people who connect the Kennedy assassination to almost
everything that's happened under the sun, all the way through Iran-
Contra and more recent episodes. And to an extent, that really
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
does show you more about the person involved, sometimes, than it
does about the assassination itself.
REHM: [Reintroduction of guests]
I'd be interested in your perceptions, Mr. Lardner, as to
whether you learned anything new by the most recently released
documents regarding the assassination.
LARDNER: New in detail, in precision of what was known
before. But in broad brush, no, nothing yet.
But you've got to remember, the production of documents under
this new law that was passed in response to Oliver Stone's movie
has not been very good. Only about 10 to 20 percent of the
documents covered by the law have been sent over to the National
Archives. It's going to take, apparently, a couple of years to get
it all over there, decades more to read it. You'll get new detail.
I doubt if you'll get any smoking gun. But people will keep
looking.
REHM: Is there still frustration being experienced by those
who are and were hoping that these documents would have been
released a lot sooner? There was an article last Friday talking
about the fact that there are mountains of material that have still
not been released.
Why is that, Walter?
PINCUS: Well, this is part of the bureaucracy that creates
the problem. The documents we read over the summer, and to some
degree read in the last few months, raise real questions as to why
on earth they weren't released years ago. And just the lack of
production creates just another whole sort of development in this
thing.
The FBI has hundreds of thousands of pages released of their
investigation but now they still have more to come. Why are they
holding them back? It lets people create, you know, fears or
doubts that there is something that people know.
I mean the polls show that only 10 percent of the people think
Oswald acted alone and 80 percent of the people think the
government is hiding something from them. And the government is
keeping things. But generally it's their own mistakes, or they
have this -- particularly the intelligence and the investigative
field think that they-have rules, that if they allow this kind of
information out it's going to be used to make them release
information about other activities that have nothing to do with the
assassination. But it creates a problem and an opening for people
to question whether the government is honest or not.
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
REHM: Michael, as a historian, you must be frustrated by that
kind of withholding.
BESCHLOSS: Yes. Every scholar would like to see everything
that is actually possible to. be released. And it's very hard to
see how the government can argue that very many of these things are
left that can damage national security.
But you know, this business with the documents is so strange.
I can remember when I was a child, when the assassination occurred,
and reading about the fact that the autopsy photographs of John
Kennedy would not be released until his two living descendants were
no longer alive. And I can remember at the age of eight thinking
of that as sort of one definition of something I will never see,
since his children were younger than I was, and therefore it
probably would be released after I died, myself. And these autopsy
photographs were smuggled out and put on national television in
1988. I think it's still not known exactly how that happened.
But it gives you a little bit of a sense of the atmosphere,
which is that, as well as scholars who are eager to get this for
perhaps, you know, more elevated reasons, there is an entire
industry that is pulling and hauling and generating great pressure
for this kind of openness.
REHM: As far as you are concerned, is the sort of
obsessiveness about Kennedy's assassination justified, considering
what we know and don't know? I mean some people have said, "Why
not just forget this? Why not put it behind us?" And as I said
earlier, I think, as a population, we're divided into those who
think, "Let it alone. Forget it. Put it behind us," and those who
want to continue to investigate year after year.
Michael?
BESCHLOSS: In general, my instinct is that, overall, it's a
sign of health. I mean in a democracy, to be healthy, you have to
have a lot of people who are willing to speak truth to power and be
critical of what they're told by their government, especially
because in the last 30 years, Lord knows, they've been given so
many reasons to mistrust what they hear.
So, in that large sense, I think it's a good thing.
I think where it begins to get a little bit counterproductive
is when you have people, as Walter suggested earlier, who are doing
this for motives that-are perhaps not of the highest and who play
on these national doubts and exploit this kind of thing for their
own political or, in some cases, financial purposes. And that's
where there's a very difficult dividing line between those who
believe that there are legitimate and troubling questions raised by
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
the assassination and by the associations of Oswald and Ruby.
Those can't be denied.
But then, on the other hand, to take the rather ambiguous
evidence of all that and escalate it into a theory that the-Cubans
killed Kennedy through Oswald, or there were three marksmen in
Dealy Plaza, and the like.
REHM: George and Walter, did you begin with similar views,
different views, differing views? Where'd you begin, where'd you
end up?
George?
LARDNER: Well, I began with a longstanding belief that Oswald
had killed Kennedy, but longstanding doubts or uncertainty about
whether he acted alone. I think that's still an open question and
one that probably will never be answered, because Ruby did it to
us. He closed the door.
And I guess that's still where I come out.
REHM: And you, Walter?
PINCUS: That's one reason why we had an interesting time
writing it. I sort of believed the Warren Commission and still do.
I think Oswald did it alone and I don't think there is any real
evidence that there was a plot.
What's interesting about it is that -- and I had never really
studied it very much until this last four or five month period.
The reason you can keep it going as long as you can is because, in
fact, there's more information out there about it than anybody
could ever really read by himself. The idea that not everything is
out yet. I mean they just released 130,000-some-odd pages of CIA
documents. It took George and I two weeks to read 23, 000 pages
that were released last year and that nobody had really looked at.
And now -- and the first day the 100-some-odd thousand were
released, the press was all over it, a lot of cameras, photographs.
There've been stories about how there's nothing new. And nobody
could say whether there's, quote, nothing new in it because
nobody's read it all. And there's more to come.
So, as George says, it'll go on and on.
But there's more information about this than, I think, about
almost any other thing that's happened in government.
REHM: I thought it was interesting to learn, as I did reading
your pieces, that there was great reluctance on the part of Earl
Warren to even serve as part of that commission, much less to chair
it.
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
Michael, was that something that clearly made a difference, as
far as the formulation of that group to look at the evidence?
BESCHLOSS: I am a great admirer of Earl Warren's career, and
I think his judgment was generally impeccable. And his judgment in
that he should not get involved with this was probably pretty
impeccable too, in retrospect. Because he, as a canny politician
-- he had been Governor of California, had run for Vice President
with Thomas Dewey in 1948 -- he was rather astute and he knew that
Lyndon Johnson wanted to bring him in not merely as the head of an
impartial investigation that could follow every path wherever it
may lead. Johnson was very clear when he brought Warren into his
office. He said, "I want you to lead this investigation, not
because I'm seeking the truth but because the American people-have
to be calmed down. We're in danger of a nuclear war. Only you,
Mr. Chief Justice, can do that."
And Warren at first refused. Johnson used his famous powers
of persuasion and said, "I saw you put on a uniform in World War I
and you did not refuse to serve your country, and how can you
refuse now?"
By now I assume that Johnson's nose was perhaps a half an inch
from Warren's. And Warren finally consented.
In retrospect, historically -- tragically for Warren -- he
will probably be remembered by the American people, more than
anything else, for the fact that he led this very flawed commission
in this very flawed investigation.
REHM: George?
LARDNER: That reminds me of a little incident where Bill
Alexander, who had been the prosecutor in Dallas -- he would have
prosecuted Oswald and he ended up prosecuting Ruby. He came up to
the Warren Commission -- I think this was in early '64 -- and he
was telling Warren how he had seen this "Impeach Earl Warren"
poster on the way to the airport, or something like that, and then
hastily realized he shouldn't be telling Warren this. So he said,
"It was just a very small sign, Mr. Chief Justice."
And Warren replied, "Well, it may be small to you but it's the
biggest sign I've ever seen."
REHM: And, of course, one of the people who was very
influential in bringing in the idea of a commission to immediately
study the assassination was Deputy Attorney General Nick
Katzenbach.
I guess one of the things that sort of distressed me the most
was the memorandum, perhaps that a lot of other people had already
seen but it was the first time I had seen it, a memorandum from
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
Katzenbach, in the files, that says, quote, "The public must be
satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, that he did not have
confederates who are still at large, and that the evidence was such
that he would have been convicted at trial. Speculation about
Oswald's motives ought to be. cut off. We should have some basis
for rebutting the thought that this was a Communist conspiracy.
Or, as the Iron Curtain press is saying, a right-wing conspiracy to
blame it on the Communists."
In other words, while I certainly understand the concern about
the public's fear of war or the public fears of the Communists
somehow doing this and taking over the world in the process,
doesn't that sort of direct the way the investigation is going to
go, when it comes from the Deputy Attorney General, Mr. Pincus?
PINCUS: Well, I think at that point -- and that was only
three days after the assassination but the day after Oswald had
been shot, himself. In fact, Nick Katzenbach had been thinking
along those lines almost from the day of the assassination and that
he pretty well had formulated that in his mind and began a campaign
to convince the President, Lyndon Johnson, that they had to do
this.
The question that arises is his motive and the motive of a
whole group of people in government around him who felt exactly the
same way. And I think they were operating the way the
Establishment -- quote, Establishment -- always does operate.
Which is, they make up their own mind, based on what they think is
the best evidence that they have, and then they think, in this
case, and I'm sure in the case of Nick Katzenbach, "What's the best
thing for the country?" And in this case, his judgment was, I
think, flawed. But he had used language similar to that the day
before.
The head of the FBI was totally convinced, and convinced the
President, and I'm sure convinced Katzenbach, that Oswald was the
man. They had intelligence that eliminated the notion of foreign
powers being directly involved. And the question that's so
prevalent now about the Mafia was really not totally on their mind.
The people around Robert Kennedy at first considered maybe the
Teamsters, but quickly set that one aside.
And as I said before, they were interested in, first and
foremost, getting the country running.
BESCHLOSS: And that, oddly enough, was not entirely
uncharacteristic of the Kennedy Administration. And in this,
Katzenbach was really a product of that period. Because so often
during those 2 1/2 years, the Kennedy Administration, especially in
foreign policy, had made efforts to conceal certain effects from
CONTINUE..
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
American public opinion in order to keep from exciting Americans
and causing them to pressure the Administration to do certain
things in the world that it didn't want to do.
. Berlin was a very good example. Kennedy very carefully. leaned
over backwards to keep from getting Americans to demand that the
Berlin Wall be torn down when it went up. The settlement of the
Cuban Missile Crisis involved, we now know, a secret aspect that,
if revealed at the time, would have probably generated great
demands that the American government invade Cuba. And even
Vietnam. Those partisans of John Kennedy who argue that he would
not have done what Johnson did in Vietnam after 1964 argue that
Kennedy in '63 was playing something of a double game: in public
saying he was committed to the survival of the regime in Saigon,
and privately saying "After '64 I'll simply pull out American
troops."
REHM: George, you said earlier that you felt that we're
probably never going to know who or all the facts involved in this.
Does that mean that as you look through all the varieties of
theories about who did it, that nothing stands out in your mind as
being somehow weight to one theory as opposed to another? You
continue to come back to Oswald as the lone gunman and Ruby as his
assassin?
LARDNER: Well, I come back to Oswald as the gunman. I'm not
sure, as I say, that he was alone or was uninfluenced by anyone.
But you can name your flavor when it comes to who else might have
been involved with him. That's what we would never know, even if
you convince yourself that he had help. He had his foot in so many
different places. He wanted to go to Cuba. He, according to one
account, offered to kill Kennedy at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico
City. He pulled out a gun at the Russian Embassy because he wanted
to go back to Moscow. He had been a defector. He had grown up in
New Orleans, and people have written all sorts of things about his
associations there and suspicions that he might have had ties to
organized crime there.
So that you can just name your poison, as far as the theories
REHM: Are all of you sort of of the belief that 30 years from
now, 60 years from now, these same questions will in fact be on the
minds of people, much as there is still a lot of question about
Lincoln's assassination?
PINCUS: The reason we did the series is because -- I hate to
admit the Oliver Stone movie had such an impact on a generation
that wasn't alive when the assassination happened -- we thought it
was very important to try to give them some perspective. Because
it's clear the movie had a tremendous effect.
CONTINUEri
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
My instincts are, and certainly my hope is, that this thing
will die down. It will never be settled. It can't be settled.
You have to settle it in your own mind and come to grips with it
yourself, if it's important to you. And I think to our generation
-- in other words, my generation -- that was here in the '50s and
'60s, it is important.
REHM: George?
LARDNER: I think Walter is exactly right. And I'm brought to
remember a line from Bob Blakey which parallels something Michael
said, too. Bob Blakey was the chief counsel for the House
Assassinations Committee, and he said the problem with the
assassination is that when you look at it's like a Rorschach test.
It tells you more about yourself than it does about the ink blot.
REHM: Michael?
BESCHLOSS: I think the questions will linger, probably, 30
and 50 years from now. But I think the controversy will not be as
hot. Twenty or 30 years after Pearl Harbor, for instance, you
could get a very sulphurous argument among many in this country
over whether Franklin Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor in advance
and encouraged or was glad about the Japanese bombing of Pearl
Harbor because it allowed him to do what he wanted to do and bring
the United States into World War II. The controversy exists today
but there are not the same emotions, largely because many of the
people who lived at the time of Pearl Harbor are no longer alive
now.
That, I think, will be true with the Kennedy assassination as
REHM: All right. We have a number of callers....
Good morning, Betty. You're on the air.
BETTY: I would like to simplify things somewhat by making
this statement and asking two questions.
One, how can we prevent a similar thing from happening again?
And two, there is just passing reference to Kennedy's brain.
That, to me, is unbelievable. Why can't we find out what happened
and trace this very important bit of evidence?
And the third thing is, all the papers that are released and
everything else have been in the hands of people for years. They
can be changed or they can -- portions of it could have been
removed. Why can't we just repeat the exact sequence of things
that happened on that day physically? I mean physics would dictate
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
where a bullet would go if fired at a certain spot into something
of certain density.
REHM: All right, Betty. I'll stop you right there.
What about the question of prevention? The notion not only of
the Secret Service, with all its might and all its efforts, not
being able to protect John F. Kennedy, but also several years later
Ronald Reagan?
PINCUS: Well, I think the cold fact is that all the
protection in the world cannot stop an individual acting by
himself, probably, from assassinating almost any government leader.
It's a terrible fact. But this is a democracy. Our leaders appear
in public. You have to believe in your society and that people are
not going out to do such things.
REHM: And, George, what about the question regarding the
President's brain? There have been a lot of theories about that.
LARDNER: Yes, there have been. I'm a little dubious about
how much it would show if it appeared. I don't know that it's that
important a piece of evidence anymore. There was a lot that was,
unfortunately, left in Dallas when he got shot.
BESCHLOSS: And the other part of this is that, as was argued
in both the Newsweek and Washington Post pieces, there was an
effort by a lot of people, for their own reasons, to inhibit the
investigation, beginning with the autopsy. Robert Kennedy,
entirely understandably, did not want his brother's brain, other
aspects of this crime to be displayed in a museum case somewhere,
especially during his children's lifetimes. One theory is that he
had the brain disposed of in another way so that this would not
happen.
Also, at the time of the autopsy, Robert Kennedy was very
worried that there would be revealed John Kennedy's Addison's
disease, which was not known at the time. John Kennedy himself and
his aides had flatly said in public that he didn't have it. Robert
Kennedy was not terribly eager to have his brother demonstrated to
have not told the truth during the 48 hours after his
assassination. And, understandably, at the time of the autopsy he
caused the autopsy, the people who were doing it to sort of stay
away from that aspect of things.
REHM: Michael, what about our caller's concern regarding
alteration of documents?
BESCHLOSS: Alteration of documents. I think there are a lot
of reasons to distrust the investigations, plural, into the Kennedy
assassination over the last 30 years. I think alteration of
documents is probably one of the least reasons. There has been
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
some talk about the documents that were generated by the autopsy
and in some other cases. But among all the reasons to be skeptical
of the investigations, I would put alteration of documents at about
number 452.
REHM: And finally, the other question that has taken up a lot
of print and airtime, the whole question of ballistics and the
motion of bullets. And she's asking why can't the whole thing be
somehow reenacted in such a sequence as to give us a definitive
answer as to how many bullets we're talking about.
PINCUS: Well, I think it's been reenacted at least three or
four times already. And there was unanimity until the very end of
the House Assassination Committee investigation, when some of their
people came up with the idea that there somehow was a fourth shot.
George and I sort of disagree about that.
But what happens is you generally make up your mind, and
people have done it ever since.
REHM: When you say you and George disagree about that, where
you on that?
And where are you, Walter?
LARDNER: Well, I tend to think that the acoustics experts for
the House Assassinations Committee did a good job. There was a
subsequent panel of the National Academy of Sciences that
disagreed. But as I've said before, I think the acoustics experts
for the House Committee had a more plausible argument. They found,
or said, that there was a fourth shot from the grassy knoll, that
it missed, by their tracing of the echoes and so forth. And I
thought their work was quite well done.
PINCUS: You pick your own panel. I sort of stick with the
panel that looked into that. And there's a certain practicality to
it all. A shot from the grassy knoll. You really have to be a
miserable shot to have missed everything, because that's a
broadside shot. It's much closer. So it's just very difficult for
me to believe that.
REHM: Barbara, you're on the air.
BARBARA: I wanted to make a point about the long-term
consequences of the assassination on the country. William Greider
interviewed the President and did a big interview in Rolling Stone,
at the end of which the President exploded in anger, apparently,
about "Why am I not getting the credit I deserve for all the
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
results I produced in the first year of my Administration?" And
I'm an ardent supporter of both of the Clintons and I'm wondering
the same thing.
. And I just was wondering what your panelists would think about
the idea of the country being unable to get behind another
Kennedyesque-like figure, such as Clinton, and support him openly.
It's almost like happens to a child when they lose, you know, a
beloved parent. They can't trust again, they can't believe again,
etcetera.
REHM: All right, Barbara. Thanks for your call.
BESCHLOSS: I think, actually, Bill Clinton has basically
benefited from the parallels that he's drawn between himself and
both John and Robert Kennedy and the very great impact that that
has had on both of his -- both his life and his career.
But I think the caller is absolutely right in the sense that
we are now very skeptical and critical of every single leader. I
don't think it's an accident that we've had awfully few Presidents
elected to a second term since 1963. I think that's going to
continue. And I think one reason is that before 1963 we tended to
trust Presidents and governments unless given reason to do
otherwise, and now it's basically the opposite.
REHM: And it is very much the press's role, or the press sees
itself now as doing far more probing investigations of whatever is
going on with the President than perhaps was done during JFK's term
in office.
BESCHLOSS: And the U.S. Government did that to itself. The
Warren Commission did this by not doing as good an investigation as
it should have. Johnson officials did it by not being as frank on
Vietnam as they should have been with the American people. Richard
Nixon did this in Watergate, Reagan and Bush on Iran-Contra.
Every time you have a President who, for short-term political
reasons of self-protectiveness, begins to shade the truth in
speaking to the American public, it may serve him in the short run
but it really is damaging American democracy over the long run.
Each time this has happened it has, very rationally and logically,
caused the American media to be more and more skeptical of what
they hear.
Bill Clinton is, to some extent, the unhappy beneficiary and
victim.
REM: Exactly. Exactly.
It 0 :1- ~.14
C 0 14T i,
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
Jane, you're on the air.
JANE: I've been studying the assassination for over 15 years
and I have about 20 books on it in my library. And I just recently
acquired one by Charles Crenshaw, M.D., who apparently was one of
the surgeons in the trauma room when they brought both Kennedy and
Oswald in. I won't go into all the details of what he says. Just
to summarize, one quotation: "I have wanted to shout to the world
that the wounds to Kennedy's head and throat that I examined were
caused by bullets that struck him from the front, not the back, as
the public has been led to believe."
Crenshaw goes on to describe how Lyndon Johnson personally
called Parkland Hospital at the moment that Oswald was dying and
demanded to speak to one of the surgeons. And Crenshaw happened to
be the one he spoke to. And Johnson insisted that, one way or
another, they should extract a deathbed confession out of Oswald.
So I would suggest that, you know, along with Nicholas
Katzenbach, the motive force to pin responsibility for the
assassination entirely on Oswald came right from the top, from LBJ.
REHM: All right, Jane. Thanks for your call.
George?
LARDNER: Well, I think that the record will show that Dr.
Crenshaw never got any such call. There's no evidence that Johnson
called Parkland, as Dr. Crenshaw states. My memory is -- and I may
be wrong on this -- is that Dr. Crenshaw was not one of the
surgeons but was a second-year resident, or something like that, in
the room; and also that a number of the other doctors who were
there dispute Dr. Crenshaw's statements.
PINCUS: This is also, I think, part of the problem. And that
is that since the Warren Commission, and even before the Warren
Commission, the only literature that has poured out for almost 30
years has been literature questioning, raising questions, and in
some cases just going off the deep end, of people writing all sorts
of things.
I mean right after the movie -- and the movie is outrageous in
terms of what it makes up. The movie, in effect, pins the blame on
the CIA and President Johnson for what took place and has made up
language and avoids a lot of the evidence. And a lot of the books
have done the same thing. So you have a whole generation -- if you
had been studying this and reading the literature that's come out
in the past 30 years, you are going to be a conspiracy believer.
REHM: Sharon in Olney. You're on the air.
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
SHARON: Speaking of books which have come out in the past 30
years, there was a very interesting one which I read last year by
Robert Morrow. It was called "Firsthand Knowledge: How I
Participated in the CIA/Mafia Murder of President Kennedy."
I wondered if your guests have heard of that book or have
tried to contact Robert Morrow.
And a second comment I have is, in light of various facts
which have come out about J. Edgar Hoover, do you think he had any
role at all, if there was an assassination plot?
REHM: All right. Thanks for your call?
LARDNER: I don't think Hoover had any role in any
assassination plot. Hoover's main interest, I think, throughout
this whole investigation, as throughout his whole life, was in
protecting the reputation of the Bureau. And that is what drove
Hoover and that is what preoccupied him throughout the
assassination investigation. He didn't want the Bureau to look
bad. And when it ended up being criticized in the Warren Report,
he took punitive action against people down the line, as he was
wont to do.
I haven't read the Morrow book. I've heard of him. I, to be
short about it, do not regard him as particularly credible.
REHM: Any other comments?
All right. Let's take a call in the District.
Norman, you're on the air.
NORMAN: I'd just like to say that even if the President
didn't know that the CIA was trying to eliminate Castro, he was
certainly chargeable with knowledge of what the CIA was trying to
do. And that could easily have led to the missile Crisis. After
all, Castro could argue that he had a right to defend himself in
any way possible. And the missile placement was one way.
REHM: Any comments on that? Michael?
BESCHLOSS: Yes, that's absolutely true. And one -- I mean to
connect that to the Kennedy assassination, one argument is that
Operation Mongoose, which our caller is referring to, which was the
Kennedy Administration's secret effort to undermine and overthrow
Castro, involved assassination attempts that might have caused
Castro to retaliate by trying to have Kennedy killed. And indeed,
in September of 1963, Castro went to the Brazilian Embassy in
Havana and said, essentially, "If there are plots against me, I
will do the same thing against the plotters." That has increased
the suspicion today.
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
REIN: Isn't there also some speculation about a so-called
false Oswald, Walter?
LARDNER: Well, that's among the many theories that people
have raised because of -- in_ fact, because of intercepts that we
had of phone conversations that took place in Mexico City when
Oswald was there in September or October, a month and a half before
the assassination.
But it also has to be said that there was concern in the White
House for the first week to ten days about what may have gone on in
Mexico City. And at one point somebody walked into the embassy and
claimed to have seen Oswald take money in the Cuban Embassy in
Mexico City. And it was investigated, and this particular
individual eventually was given a lie-detector test, failed it, and
finally sort of confessed he had made it up.
But again, the Administration at the time took solace in the
fact that they had intercepted phone conversations, they'd
intercepted calls between Moscow and Havana in which Castro, the
Castro government, the President of Cuba, all were showing both
surprise and fear that this had taken place and that somehow
there'd be retaliation against them.
REHM: Marie, you're on the air.
MARIE: I was interested in the comment about people not
trusting the President, and the press has had a large role in this.
I worked from the Truman Administration, and the press was on his
back all the time. He couldn't do anything right. And when he
left office, his favorability rating was 27. And it's taken 40
years for him to recover from -- his reputation to recover from the
pounding that the press gave him.
So, I wouldn't say that it began with Nixon or LBJ. People
have not trusted the President simply because the press sees to it
that only negative information is reported.
REHM: Michael?
BESCHLOSS: I guess I would disagree. I think the press --
the press certainly was very critical, you're absolutely right, of
Harry Truman, as it was of Lincoln and Jefferson and everyone else.
REDS: And it wasn't until almost the McCullough biography
that Truman...
BESCHLOSS: That Truman really began to come up again. Yes.
Which came out in 1992.
I think the difference is that Harry Truman was criticized in
the press, above all, for two things. One is ideological. A lot
~tN
(Alt
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
of people just did not like the things that Truman stood for in
foreign policy and domestic affairs. And also competence: There
were a lot of journalists and columnists, especially, of the time
who felt that Truman was, as an accidental President, not someone
who.really was of the stature that should have occupied the oval
Office.
What you didn't have and what you tend to have nowadays is
skepticism of the President's truthfulness, and also skepticism
about the President's motives. There were very few people, even
among Truman's critics, who would have said that Truman was an
untruthful person or verged on deceiving the American people or
that he had underhanded motives that were not what they appeared to
be in public.
Those two threads are what you see very much in the writing
about American Presidents, contemporary writing, since 1963. And
I think that's the difference.
REHM: Gordon, you're on the air.
GORDON: One of your panelists almost answered my question
regarding the effect of the Oliver Stone movie. It seems to have
added to the whole conspiracy theory. And is that helpful? I mean
here we have the silver screen, which is far more influential than
books.
I'd be interested in your other panelists' thoughts on that.
REM: George?
LARDNER: Well, Stone produced this movie a couple of years
ago in a $40 million budget, and it's easy to get attention that
way. I think you're absolutely right. His film will probably
endure much longer than many of these conspiracy books. But I
think it was an absolutely irresponsible movie, and it's been shown
to be that. He made up things. He had conversations,
conspiratorial conversations taking place and admissions being made
that never happened.
REHM: Michael?
BESCHLOSS: George is right. People don't tend to listen to
historians and books all that much, especially when you compare it
to Hollywood.
REHM: Dean in Reston. You're on the air.
DEAN: I hope I can do this properly and efficiently. I've
never talked on the air before.
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0
I was in the Marine Corps about the same time Lee Harvey
Oswald was. In fact, I went in a month and a day after he did. I
went through the same boot camp that he went through and I was in
the same battalion. Of course, I didn't know him. In the Marine
Corps you didn't know people outside of your own platoon in boot
camp. I fired the same rifle-he fired, the same type, on the same
rifle course that he fired on. And I tend to get very upset about
claims that Oswald was a poor marksman. He fired a sharpshooter,
which is a 210 score. That's an 84 percent score on the A course,
where the closest you get to the target is 200 yards. You fire 10
rounds or 20 rounds at 200 yards, 30 rounds at 300 yards, and 10
rounds at 500 yards.
I believe, although maybe your guests can verify this, that
the range from Oswald to the President was like 135 yards. The
rifle you fire in the Marine Corps has an open sight. Oswald was
using a rifle with a telescopic sight, which is much different.
In the latest book about the assassination, which I have but
can't find, the author, in the latter part of the book where he
shows charts and pictures and diagrams, says that Oswald had an
efficiency up to 200 yards.
Again, that was as close as he got to the target. And 200
yards is a long way. Five hundred yards is a much longer way.
I would be very, very unwilling to stand in front of somebody
at 135 or 200 yards that had a 74 percent accurate range, which
included firing from 500 yards, with somebody with a telescopic
sight.
REHM: All right, Dean. I'm sorry, we're out of time. And I
do want to thank you for your contribution to this morning's
conversation. I think it sort of leaves us where we began, with
doubts that continue.
I appreciate the work that all of you have done, not only in
the writing that you've done but in the thinking that you've done
on this. And I want to thank you all so much for being here.
CONTINUED
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000402200001-0