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In my circle of friends, I'm the only one I know of who actually listened to the testimony and questioning of Ken Starr before the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee on November 19, 1998. The hearing was broadcast on public radio, and I followed the exchanges right up to the vote to retire into executive session. The importance of the topic, the questions asked, and the procedures of the House brought into stark relief the messiness of government in a representative democracy --- if that is in fact how we are governed. As I listened, I thought back to Watergate, when Congress last debated the removal of a President, and before that, the removal of President Kennedy, without debate.
And the next day I was in Dallas, for the Coalition on Political Assassinations conference.
It has been 35 years since President Kennedy was gunned down. The era when witnesses were silenced through outright murder has passed. The coverup by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s is behind us as well, and we have entered a new phase, the age of disclosure. After battling secrecy for decades, we have reached the stage where:
All government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy should carry a presumption of immediate disclosure.
The quote above appears on the cover of the Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board.
This milestone, the declassification of the files, shows us how far we have come and how far we have to go. Speakers and listeners alike were mindful not only of disclosure in the murder of President Kennedy, but of ongoing non- disclosure in the murders of Dr. Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy. And extra-governmental secrecy, the self-censorship of the news industry, persists on these issues. News agencies of record show few signs of understanding the material available today, and they have yet to figure out what happened in Dallas 35 years ago.
Beyond the assassination itself, the releases by the ARRB have given us a broad and detailed look at an era. Documents on actions against Cuba have emerged, along with information on Kennedy's planned withdrawal from Vietnam. The personalities, the associations, the maneuverings in and around government are all much clearer than ever before. None of it is very comforting. All of it speaks to the power of secrecy and propaganda --- the pillars of the security state. Rule maintained by such measures erodes legitimate government. At COPA, Dr. Gary Aguilar highlighted the issue of secrecy with a delightfully ironic quote from Richard Nixon:
When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and, eventually, incapable of determining their own destiny.
The connection between secrecy and political influence is illustrated by Operation Zapata, the invasion of Cuba. Created under Eisenhower and Nixon, Zapata was a cover-story inside a cover-story inside a cover-story. When Nixon failed to win the presidency, Zapata became an effort to stampede the Kennedy adminstration into support for the plan. The Bay of Pigs came back to haunt Nixon a decade later with burglaries and blackmail. And since I have learned that reporter Bob Woodward was once Naval Lieutenant Bob Woodward, one of Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer's briefing officers (See Silent Coup, by Colodny and Gettlin), I have started to wonder exactly what was behind Watergate and the powerful influence of the still-secret witness, Deep Throat.
While full disclosure in the murder of Dr. King has not been achieved, information is still finding its way out to the public. Judge Joseph Brown talked about the case and specifically about the alleged murder weapon, a brand new rifle. But the scope had not been sighted-in, meaning it was not properly aligned with the barrel. Brown found an interesting item in the files:
And it was a note that had red writing on it. It said [to] be aware that this may cause a problem with the official version of facts. When tested by the local office, it was discovered that the weapon shoots six feet to the right and four feet low at one hundred yards.
Problem? What problem?
The COPA conference was well attended and conducted; the venue was gracious; and the food was good. All the ingredients of success were there. At the dinner on Saturday night, CyriI Wecht jokingly asked from the podium if one of the attendees --- all the way from New Zealand --- had an interpreter! (Teenagers were there, too, and a baby! I couldn't believe it! It was bad enough that we let a foreigner in!) First-timers and old-hands alike enjoyed equal access to top-rate minds in the field, and there was a powerful sense of transition in the air. Mark Lane and Vincent Salandria, two of the earliest critics, brought depth and solidity to events. William Turner, who collaborated with Jonn Christian on work in the investigation of Senator Robert Kennedy's murder, was there along with Lawrence Teeter, Sirhan Sirhan's attorney.
The earliest Warren Commission critics got a foot in the door before it was slammed shut. Garrison's investigation in New Orleans tugged hard on the door knob; and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, quite without intent, opened the door a little bit more. It opens more freely today, and a largely unexplored collection awaits. The third advance is now building, as more details from the "new" (in other words, "old") documents surface and the assassination recedes into history.
If there was a failing at COPA this year, it was in the panel presentations on the authenticity of the Zapruder film. On Friday, I learned of a possible explanation for the double-exposed areas between the sprocket holes. The explanation hinged on the shape of a specific part of Zapruder's camera, the aperture gate, information which the proponent did not provide. And unfortunately, no one who spoke on the Sunday panel disclosed that information, if they possessed it. According to Life magazine, "Of all the witnesses to the tragedy, the only unimpeachable one is the 8-mm movie camera of Abraham Zapruder." Yet the reliability of the Zapruder film is a matter of some contention in the research community today. The ARRB did not arrange to expose a film through Zapruder's camera, which would have been very useful in determining the camera's characteristics. A weak custody argument for authenticity was advanced at COPA, but it assumed the good faith of Life. Life magazine lost and damaged frames of the Zapruder film, misrepresented in print what the film showed, and withheld it with the claim that the public wasn't ready for it. For what was the public not ready? How are we to understand Life's behavior?
Time and again at this conference, because of quandaries like the one outlined above, I thought about George Seldes, journalist and early media critic. Seldes published Facts and Fascism in 1943, analyzing fascist influences before World War II. Part One dealt with the funding behind the regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Part Three, Our Press as a Fascist Force, described instances of news manipulation in the United States. One was the suppression of Vice-President Henry Wallace's "Century of the Common Mano/oo speech in May of 1942; another was the suppression of information on the effects of tobacco. (Hard to imagine, isn't it?) To drive home his argument, Seldes quoted an acknowledged expert in the field of news management (emphasis added):
...the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them more easily victims of a big lie than a small one, because they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.
Such a form of lying would never enter their heads. They would never credit others with the possibility of such great impudence as the complete reversal of facts.
Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most impudent lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying in this world know only too well, and therefore they stop at nothing to achieve this end.
If Adolph Hitler, who made those obervations in Mein Kampf, had gone into advertizing, modern history would have turned out very differently. But he went into politics. Here in the United States, bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying hid the truth about the assassinations of the 1960s and 70s, the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, and many other events. More than one speaker at COPA observed that it is against the law for a citizen to lie to the government, but it is not against the law for the government to lie to the citizens. The relationship between secrecy and legitimate government is at the heart of President Kennedy's murder. His legacy resides today in model legislation for combatting official secrecy. The Final Report of the ARRB notes that:
The Review Board's mandate represented a new frontier...an entirely new declassification process applied to the most sought after government secrets. (p. 169)The Review Board's recommendations are designed to help ensure...that the experience of the Review Board be turned to the larger purpose of addressing the negative consequences of the excessive classification of federal records. ...[T]here can be no doubt about our committment to making the JFK Act and an independent Review Board a model for the future. (p. 176)
The ARRB acquired files from government and non-government sources. The daughter of the late Edwin Wegmann, a defense lawyer for Clay Shaw, donated his assassination-related papers to the JFK collection. The family of Jim Garrison donated 15,000 pages of material. Vincent Palamara conducted interviews with former Secret Service personnel and donated three audio cassettes to the collection. In its Final Report, Chapter 7, Pursuit of Records and Information from Non-Federal Sources, page 134, the ARRB had this to say about:
16. Gerald PosnerGerald Posner, author of the book Case Closed, testified before Congress during debate over the JFK Act that he had interviewed both Navy autopsy prosectors, Drs. Humes and Boswell. When asked if he would donate his notes of those interviews to the JFK Collection and if he had any audiotapes of those interviews, Posner responded, "I would be happy, Mr. Chairman, to ask Drs. Humes and Boswell if they would agree for their notes to be released to the National Archives." The Review Board's initial contact with Posner produced no results. The Review Board never received a response to a second letter of request for the notes.
Considering Dr. Gary Aquilar's tape recording of his conversation with Boswell, wherein Boswell denied having been interviewed by Posner, Posner's failure to respond to the Board seems understandable.
The contest tomorrow is in the marketplace of ideas. The goal is discosure as the rule, not the exception. The 1998 holiday period is behind us, and it is time to get to work. Peace and freedom to you all.
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