Features: The Warren Commission, The Truth, and Arlen Specter: Part 2

EDWARD EPSTEIN writes in Inquest: "If there was no evidence of more
than one assassin, there was evidence that precluded the possibility. The conclusion that alone was predicated on two assumptions: first, that all the pertinent evidence was brought before the Commission for its evaluation; and
that the staff’s investigation had tested all possibilities after making an exhaustive analysis of all evidence reports that might possibly indicated the presence of a second assassin."

Arlen Specter asks: "What did we fail to do to develop information on the second assassin? What thing did we fail to do? If there was anything else that could have been done we would have done them. If I wanted to take up other questions I had plenty of time. Were we under pressure? You bet we were under pressure. If you turn back the clock two years ago, you’ll recall what enormous concern there was in country and all over the world to have
this report out, and we were under one deadline after another. But if there had been any productive investigative work to do along any line, I would have done it."

That is Specter’s attitude today. He says he firmly believes that all the important questions about the assassination have been resolved satisfactorily. ‘They have been," he asserts, "in a very comprehensible way."

Yet a close study of the evidence which the Warren Commission itself turned up makes the conclusions drawn in its final Report seem, in part, implausible; in part, improbable; and, in part, impossible.

Too many questions are not answered, both in and out of Specter’s area of investigation. Why, for instance, didn’t anyone bother to check to see if Oswald’s rifle had been fired on the day of the assassination? Why, as the FBI report showed, did the three shells found near the sixth-floor window indicate they had been loaded twice and possibly once in another rifle?  Why didn’t any evidence turn up about anyone, anywhere, selling Oswald ammunition? Why weren’t Oswald’s fingerprints found on the surface of the rifle, on the shells, or on the remaining bullet in the rifle, and how come the print that was found was an old one and on a part of the rifle only exposed when disassembled? Finally, what could account for the numerous cases of seemingly reliable and objective witnesses seeing Oswald, in the weeks before the killing, in one spot when the Commission had evidence he was somewhere else? These are questions the Report never answers.

Yet Specter says, "The basic factor of Oswald being the assassin is established beyond any question."

Sylvia Meagher, an independent researcher, in her review of Epstein’s book in the current Minority of One magazine, contends: "There are no heroes in this piece, only men who collaborated actively or passively — willfully or self-deludedly — in dirty work that does violence to the elementary concept of justice and affronts normal intelligence."

That’s harsh. A critical evaluation of the Report need not lead to the conclusion that the members of the Commission and their staff consciously deceived the public as to what they really thought the bulk of the evidence pointed to. It is difficult to believe that would be the truth.

As Specter points out, the investigation was led by seven "smart guys," the Commissioners, who scoured the Country for 14 of the most respected lawyers in their fields and a group of Junior lawyers who came out of the top of their law school classes. "Was there some guiding hand to keep us in the dark?" he asks facetiously. "Was I kept in the dark? Very hard to believe," he chuckles. "Did I have any interest in $75 a day? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Was I prepared to walk off that job at any time and come back to the D.A.’s office or go to private practice? You bet your life. I wasn’t about to subvert my integrity for the Commission."

In evaluating the Report, Dwight Macdonald wrote: "So now we have the Warren Commissioners, neither heroes nor villains, putting their trust in a saturation barrage of factual ammunition. Now Facts are all very well but they have their little weaknesses. Americans often assume that Facts are solid, concrete (and discrete) objects like marbles, but they are very much not. Rather are they subtle essences, full of mystery and metaphysics, that change their color and shape, their meaning, according to the context in which they are presented. They must always be treated with skepticism, and the standard of judgment should be not how many Facts one can mobilize in support of a position but how skillfully one discriminates between them, how objectively one uses them to arrive at Truth, which is something different from, though not unrelated to, the Facts."

Arlen Specter, when questioned and re-questioned about the basic factors which led him, along with the Commission, to believe that Oswald alone was Kennedy’s assassin "beyond any question," always goes back to the facts that established the prima facie case against Oswald: Witnesses who testified to his presence on the sixth- floor of the Depository, the fact that he was seen carrying a package that could have been a rifle to work that day, the proof that he ordered the Mannlicher-Carcano from a Chicago mail-order house, the testimony of his wife that he did, in fact, own that rifle, the ballistic evidence which showed positively that bullet 399 came from that rifle, Oswald’s flight from the scene and the subsequent testimony concerning the murder of Tippit.

Such evidence, says Specter, proves "beyond any question that Oswald was the man who pulled that trigger three times on that floor."

Specter’s attitude is revealing. After a number of fumbling failures to provide adequate explanations for basic contradictions in key pieces of evidence, he confidently and unequivocally asserts conclusions based on facts that are not at all conclusive. And when Specter is confronted with evidence which conflicts with his conclusions, he uses — as the Commission Report often did — a form of reverse logic to refute it. For instance: "Talk about the grassy knoll and shots?" he says. "The bullets didn’t enter from that direction."

Columnist Murray Kempton has said: "The case against Oswald badly needs an unimpeachable eyewitness."