Lane Mark - Rush to Judgment


Author : Lane Mark
Title : Rush to Judgment A Critique of the Warren Commission's Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D.Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald
Year : 1966

Link download : Lane_Mark_-_Rush_to_Judgment.zip

The assassination of President Kennedy during a visit to Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, sent a shock through the whole world. The known policies of the President, and the known politics of many in the city of Dallas, had made some of his friends doubt the prudence of his visit, which was, in some sense, a gesture of defiance or at least of confidence. The tragic result naturally provoked a flood of rumors and speculation; and this speculation was multiplied beyond control when, only two days later, on November 24, the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald—who had stoutly denied the charge—was shot dead in front of the television cameras by an intruder into the jealously guarded Dallas gaol. This intruder was Jack Ruby, the proprietor of a Dallas club, an intimate of the Dallas police. The record of the Dallas police in those two days had indeed been remarkable- It had failed to prevent the assassination. It had failed to protect the suspect. In the general indignation caused by this double failure, the new President, Mr Lyndon B. Johnson, procured an order transferring the investigation from the State to the Federal Government, and set up a special commission of investigation. This commission was a lay body consisting of Senators, Congressmen and administrators from both parties, assisted by professional attorneys. Its chairman was the most respected figure in the American judiciary, the Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren- The Warren Commission started its work by receiving, on December 9, 1963, a five-volume report from the FBI, followed by all the supporting evidence on which that report was based. On this basis it worked out its programme and on February 3, 1964 it began its hearings. In the course of the next seven months it held 51 sessions. Directly or indirectly, it examined thousands of documents and took the testimony of 552 witnesses. The Commissioners, being mainly active politicians or administrators, were naturally somewhat irregular in their attendance. Mr John J. McCloy, for instance, attended only 16 out of the 51 sessions, and Senator Russell, of Georgia, only five. No member of the Commission was constant in attendance, although the Chairman scarcely ever failed. It is clear that the bulk of the work fell upon the Chairman and upon the assistant counsel and staff, who were divided into six panels to work on particular aspects of the case. By mid-September 1964 the last depositions were being received, and on September 24, thanks to a truly remarkable burst of speed, the Commission presented its conclusions to the President in a long report, since known as 'The Warren Report'. How did the Commission carry out its investigation? It is important to note that, by its original terms of reference, the Commission had no independent machinery for finding facts. Its function was to pass independent judgment on facts collected for it and witnesses proposed to it. Of course, one fact might suggest another, one witness lead to another, and the Commission had power to summon whom it would, and to pursue any matter to its conclusion by further examination. But for the initial -selection of witnesses and collection of evidence it was inevitably dependent on the existing agencies—that is, on the FBI, the Secret Service and the police. This limitation of the Commission's powers is perfectly understandable, but it remained a serious limitation. It was perhaps particularly serious because, by the time the Commission effectively took over from the FBI, the FBI had already reached its own conclusions, and the enormous mass of evidence which it had collected, and which formed the basis of those conclusions, must have had some effect on the thinking of the Commission. What were the conclusions with which the FBI ended and the Commission, in a sense, started? They are clear enough from the evidence which Mr J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, gave to the Commission when he appeared before it on May 14, 1964. Mr Hoover was nothing if not explicit. The conclusions of the FBl, he said, were final. They were: 'No. 1: that Oswald shot the President. No. 2: that he was not connected with any conspiracy of any kind, nature or description.' There was no "scintilla of evidence' of any conspiracy. The only unresolved question was whether Oswald had actually aimed at the President or at Governor Connally; but even that was hardly in doubt: 'I personally,' declared Mr Hoover, 'believe it was the President, in view of the twisted mentality the man had.' Of course, Mr Hoover admitted, there would always be some extremists who would not yield to such reasoning, but the Commission must not be misled by them- For instance, there was Mrs Marguerite Oswald, Oswald's mother. She was 'emotionally unstable': she believed her son to be innocent and had gone about saying so for money: i.e. she had given public lectures. Mr Hoover believed that she had made 'a substantial sum'. For these reasons Marguerite Oswald must not be heeded. On the contrary, Marina Oswald, Oswald's widow, was 'a far more reliable person': she believed that her husband was guilty. Mr Hoover did not mention that she had made ten times as much money by insisting on Oswald's guilt as her mother-inlaw had made by protesting his innocence. He preferred to rely on a knock-out proof of Marguerite Oswald's unreliability: 'the first indication other emotional instability', he said, 'was the retaining of a lawyer that anyone would not have retained if they really were serious in trying to get down to the facts'. This lawyer was the author of this book, Mr Mark Lane. Mr Lane so annoyed Mr Hoover because, even at that time, he had ventured to suppose that Oswald might be innocent. He believed that before any tribunal which was, inevitably, judging a man's guilt or innocence, that man had the right to legal counsel; and he was disturbed by the fact that the Warren Commission, by its very structure, seemed likely to presume Oswald's guilt. He noted that although the Commission had set up panels to investigate why Oswald had shot the President, no panel had been set up to determine whether he had shot him. The fact seemed to be taken for granted. He therefore resolved, if possible, to represent Oswald's interests before the tribunal. However, the tribunal did not see eye-to-eye with him on this nice legal point, and his services were not admitted. The interests of Oswald, it was announced, would be adequately protected; and the tribunal appointed, as their protector, Mr Walter Craig, the President of the American Bar Association, who was invited to participate in the inquiry 'fully and without limitation', being allowed to crossexamine, to recall witnesses, and to make proposals. Mr Craig certainly gave the Commission much less trouble than Mr Lane would have done. According to the official record, he only attended two out of the 51 sessions of the Commission, and none of the separate hearings, and he only opened his mouth at one of the two. His interventions at that session were not on behalf of Oswald. So the Commission went to work and the case of Oswald, in Mr Lane's view, went by default. But Mr Lane went to work too. The Commission worked faster than he did—it had, after all, larger resources—and its report was published on September 27, 1964. First in the field, it received the prize. The applause was almost universal. To dissent was heresy, and Journalists—many of whom seem only to have read the convenient 'Summary and Conclusions' which were printed before the text and published separately by the New York Times—vied with each other in their praise. Mr Louis Nizer, who wrote a panegyrical preface to the Report (portentously described as an 'analysis' of it), asserted confidently that the issue was now closed and only 'neurotics' clinging to 'pride or a more sordid interest' would refuse to submit. He thus repeated the assertion of Mr Hoover, just as the Report endorsed the conclusions of the FBI. The Commission, he concluded, had rendered an 'incalculable service' in 'effectuating domestic tranquility and overcoming foreign skepticism. This is its contribution to history.' But what about its contribution to historical truth ? For ultimately the Warren Report must be judged not by its success as a tranquillizer but by the validity of its argument. I must confess that, when I first read the Report, I found myself unable to join the cry of triumph. It seemed to me that there were grave defects in it. Moreover, when one pressed the weak parts of the Report, they seemed even weaker. I ventured to draw attention to these weaknesses. I am afraid that, by doing so, I did not increase my popularity. What most dismayed me, on reading the Report, was not the minor inconsistencies which can be found in it: those are to be expected in any work depending on a variety of human testimony, and it would be wrong to make too much of them. It was the evidence, rather, of a subtle but discernible process: the process whereby a pattern was made to emerge out of the evidence, and having emerged, seemed to subordinate the evidence to it. In order to be aware of this process, it is not enough to read the Report (although a reading of the Report is enough to sow the original doubt); one must turn to the 26 volumes of 'Hearings' which were published shortly after the Report and which I was able to procure and read in America. I found it fascinating reading- But it was also disquieting reading. To follow the same question through the three successive levels of 'Hearings', 'Report' and 'Summary and Conclusions' is to see, sometimes, a quiet transformation of evidence- Let me take a concrete instance. One of the most important questions in this whole problem is, on what evidence did the Dallas police suspect Oswald ? Oswald was arrested in a cinema for the alleged murder of a Dallas policeman, Patrolman Tippit: it was only later that he was identified as the man wanted for the murder of the President. But why then did Patrolman Tippit encounter Oswald ? We are led to suppose that Tippit was seeking to arrest Oswald as the murderer of the President. But allowing this to be so, how was it that, in all Dallas, the police, in the person of Patrolman Tippit, contrived, almost at once, to pounce on one man and one man only, and that man, according to their subsequent insistence, the real murderer? According to the 'Summary and Conclusions', the attempted arrest was made in consequence of a description broadcast by the police, and this description in turn was based 'primarily' on the observation of one Howard L. Brennan, who is said to have seen Oswald, through the sixthflour window of the Dallas Book Depository, from the street. 'Primarily' implies that Brennan's observation was the principal among several positive sources. But when we turn from the Summary to the full Report to discover these other sources, we find that they have disappeared, and that the identification of Oswald rested not 'primarily' but 'most probably' on Brennan's evidence. Thus there is no evidence of connexion, only probability. However, in the Report, this probability is supported by the statement that Brennan, having seen Oswald in a police lineup, made a 'certain identification', 'a positive identification' of him as the man he had seen fire the shots,! But, when we look closer into the Report, and still more when we trace this episode still further back to the 'Hearings', we discover that this is a very misleading version of the facts- For there Brennan, whose description of Oswald, as seen momentarily through a window six storeys up, is alleged to have enabled the police to pick him out of the whole city of Dallas, himself failed to identify Oswald in the police line-up—in spite of the fact that he had by then seen Oswald on television. Only afterwards, when Oswald was dead, did Brennan say that, as a matter of fact, though he had failed to pick him out in the line-up, he could have done so had he wished, had he not been afraid of 'communist' reprisals'. This is the evidence which, in the Report, is transformed into a 'positive', 'certain' identification, and which, in turn, transforms Brennan into a 'primary' source in the Summary. ...

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Balder Ex-Libris