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HISTORY PROFESSORS STUDY OUR GREATEST MURDER MYSTERY
Nearly 44 years after the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963,
what do academic historians who have stud
ied the assassination think about the Warren
Commission and its conclusion that one person,
Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, murdered JFK,
and that there was no conspiracy behind the as
sassination?
The answer is that many conspiracy theorists
and critics of the Warren Commission now stand
vindicated. Professional historians who teach
in colleges and have researched the assassina
tion are increasingly of the view that the Warren
Commission failed to uncover the basic truths of
the assassination, that major conclusions of the
Warren Report itself are questionable at best,
and that, in retrospect, it does indeed appear far
more likely than not that JFK's death resulted
from a conspiracy. Two recent books by his
tory professors, Breach of Trust: How the Warren
Commission Failed the Nation and Why (University
Press of Kansas, 2005) and The JFK Assassination
Debates: Lone Gunman Versus Conspiracy
(University Press of Kansas, 2006), reflect current
trends in books and articles about the assassina
tion written by academics specializing in histori
cal research and writing.
THE TRANSPARENT TRUTH
The author of Breach of Trust, Gerald
McKnight, an emeritus history professor at Hood
College, is codirector of the Weisberg Archive
which, with 300,000 documents, is the world's
largest private, accessible collection of govern
ment records pertaining to the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy. Prof. McKnight
believes that JFK's murder must have been the
result of a conspiracy, since "the government's
own documents establish the transparent truth
that Oswald did not kill President Kennedy."
Breach of Trust is the leading—and devastat
ing—study of the Warren Commission, supersed
ing, but not entirely supplanting, three brilliant
breakthrough books which also blasted
the Commission: Harold Weisberg's
Whitewash (1965), Edward Epstein's
Inquest (1966), and Sylvia Meagher's
Accersohes After the Fact (1967).
The astonishing follies of the Warren
Commission—the superficiality and ra
pidity of its investigation; the repeated
failures to follow up on evidence leading
away from the Oswald-was-the-sole-assas-
sin theory the Commission was obsessed
with foisting on the American public; the
Commission's misplaced confidence in
doubtful evidence and dubious witnesses
and its proclivity for embracing theoreti
cally possible but rather unlikely factual
scenarios—are fully documented in Breach
of Trust. Based on an exhaustive analysis
of gigantic quantities of the government's
own records, Breach of Trust shows that
the official investigation of the assassina
tion amounted to a shamefully inadequate
inquiry in which clear indications of con
spiracy were purposely disregarded. For
reasons fully explained in the book, the
Warren Commission and other government
agencies involved in the investigation
were not committed to uncovering all
the facts; instead, they were fixated on
proclaiming the absence of any conspiracy
and naming Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole
assassin. During the official investigation,
Breach of Trust convincingly demonstrates,
important witnesses were not questioned; tan
talizing leads were not pursued; srientificTests
which should have been performed were omitted,
while some relevant results of tests that were
performed were inexplicably ignored; credible
testimony was often dismissed, whereas doubt
ful testimony was frequently accepted as gospel;
persuasive evidence that several gunmen fired
was more outspoken than any of his colleagues
in his displeasure about the quality of the FBI
investigation and the information the FBI and
the CIA fed to the Commission," McKnight writes.
After the Warren Report was issued, Russell was
the only Commissioner to publicly criticize the
Report or express support for Commission critics.
He unyieldingly opposed the Report's preposter
ous single-bullet theory (which Breach of Trust
justly labels the "single-bullet fabrication").
Chapter 11 of Breach of Trust is titled 'Senator
Russell Dissents."
Breach of Trust therefore amply proves that
'the Warren Commission... conspired... to hide
the truth that Kennedy was the victim of a
conspiracy" and that the Warren Report 'was a
shoddily improvised political exercise in public
relations and not a good-faith investigation." In
short, the Warren Report, the fruits of a sham
inquest, is a fraud.
Although Breach of Trust rejects the single
assassin theory, it disclaims any intention to
identify the conspirators responsible for the
assassination: "no researcher can possibly truth
fully answer the 'who' and 'why' of the JFK assas
sination."
CRIME OF THE CENTURY
Michael Kurtz, author of The JFK Assassination
Debates, is a history professor at Southeastern
Louisiana University. This is his fourth book on
the Kennedy assassination. Prof. Kurtz is also au
thor of a seminal article, "Lee Harvey Oswald in
New Orleans: A Reappraisal," published in 1980
in the journal Louisiana History.
The'JFK Assassination Debates shares the
view that JFK was assassinated as a result of a
conspiracy and that at this point in time, there
is little likelihood that the conspirators will ever
be identified: "This case remains the greatest un
solved murder mystery in American history.... [A]
solution to the crime of the twentieth century in
American history [is] unlikely."
The JFK Assassination Debates also agrees that
the Warren Commission and various government
agencies assisting the Commission in its investi
gation performed extremely poorly: "The Warren
Commission, established... more to quell rumors
and speculation than to conduct a full, free, and
independent investigation, distorted the truth,
concocted absurd interpretations like the single
bullet theory, and deliberately suppressed much
of its evidentiary base.... J. Edgar Hoover wanted
to protect the image of the FBI, and he ordered
agents investigating the assassination not to dis
close anything that might tarnish its image. The
CIA wanted to conceal evidence of its nefarious
assassination plots against Fidel Castro, espe
cially because they entailed an unholy alliance
with organized crime. The Secret Service
wanted to withhold evidence of its own
failure to provide adequate protection for
the president...."
Unlike Breach of Trust, however. The
JFK Assassination Debates is not limited
to an evaluation of the work of the
Warren Commission or the contents of the
Warren Report, and contains chapters on
the ever-mysterious Lee Harvey Oswald
and his strange comings and goings, on
organized crime connections to the as
sassination, and on the connections of
American intelligence agencies to the as
sassination. The third chapter of The JFK
Assassination Debates gives an objective
account of the lone assassin, no conspir
acy theory, and the fourth chapter fairly
sets forth the case for conspiracy (which
Prof. Kurtz strongly believes is better sup
ported by the evidence). Other chapters
focus on the events of the assassination
itself and the conflicts in the evidence
relied on by the Warren Commission.
Breach of Trust and The JFK
Assassination Debates, both written by
PhD academics who adhere to profes
sional standards of meticulous research,
objective analysis, and precise wording,
allow us to comprehend that today it is
not ludicrous, but perfectly respectable,
to maintain that the Warren Commission
botched it, that key aspects of the Warren
Report are not credible, and that a foreign or do
mestic conspiracy was behind the shocking crime
which, Don DeLillo says in his novel Libra (1988),
"broke the back of the American century."
Donald E. Wilkes. Jr.
Donald E. Wilkes, Jr. teaches in the UGA School of Law.
at JFK was marginalized; highly improbable al
leged events were glibly treated as fact; and stark
inconsistencies or gaps in the evidentiary record
were left uncorrected.
Of the Warren Commission's seven members,
only Georgia's Senator Richard Russell, the*
Commission's great dissenter, enhanced his repu
tation by serving on the Commission. "Russell
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