The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination Read Free Page A

Commission testimony “for the good of the country.” As I first discovered (with the help of the National Archives), Powers’s perjured affidavit was taken by Commission counsel Arlen Specter, the leading proponent of the single bullet theory, an important detail the Warren Commission omitted when it published Powers’s affidavit.
    It’s important to stress that much of my information came not only from exclusive interviews with more than two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy but also from former FBI, Secret Service, military intelligence, and Congressional personnel, including those critical of how their agencies handled the investigation. All of those sources provided crucial firsthand information. While some of their disclosures have been detailed in my previous books dealing with the Kennedys— Ultimate Sacrifice (2005; updated 2006), Legacy of Secrec y (2008; expanded 2009), and several chapters in Watergate: The Hidden History (2011)—many important new revelations are detailed in this book for the first time.
    It has taken almost fifty years for the full story of JFK’s assassination to emerge, for reasons of national security that are detailed later, compounded by the reluctance of agencies such as the FBI and CIA to reveal their own intelligence failures and unauthorized operations.
    Government agencies and officials withheld many hundreds of thousands of pages of relevant files and information on covert operations from the Warren Commission, but neither the public nor most journalists knew that when the Warren Report was issued in September 1964. The sheer volume of information publicly availabletoday that was hidden from the Warren Commission is staggering: the CIA’s plots with dangerous mob bosses to kill Fidel Castro, the attempt to kill JFK in Tampa four days before Dallas and in Chicago before that, Jack Ruby’s work for the Mafia, Oswald’s many links to Carlos Marcello, and much more. Instead, the American news media embraced and helped to disseminate the Report since it had been approved by a distinguished panel headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.
    Many people don’t realize that in addition to the best-selling one-volume Warren Report , the Commission also issued twenty-six volumes of supporting material. By 1966 authors and journalists were pointing out that the evidence contained in those twenty-six volumes didn’t support the Warren Report ’s own conclusions. A flurry of critical books began to appear, starting with former Congressional investigator Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report , followed by The Unanswered Questions about President Kennedy’s Assassination by veteran reporter Sylvan Fox, who soon joined the New York Times . Next came Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest , which even former JFK aides found compelling. Best-selling books followed: Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment and Harvard professor Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas , as well as Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories after the Fact . All of those authors used the Warren Commission’s own information, along with fresh interviews and overlooked news accounts, to undermine the Warren Report’s “lone nut/single bullet” conclusion.
    Those efforts helped to spark major investigations by the New York Times and major weekly magazines such as Life, Look , and the Saturday Evening Post . However, declassified files now show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helmsimmediately began a significant public relations counteroffensive, issuing detailed instructions on how to smear critics of the Warren Report . For example, in a January 4, 1967, CIA memo in which the Agency gives fifty-three pages of specific instructions on how to counter the growing tide of books and articles questioning the “lone nut” conclusion, a domestic operation far outside the bounds of the Agency’s charter. In many ways, those PR counteroffensives by the FBI and CIA would