Courtesy of Mary Constantine
JFK LANCER: CONVERSATIONS WITH ALAN DALE
Welcome to JFK Lancer Conversations, an on-line interview program featuring discussions with prominent authors, historical researchers and notable personalities associated with the study of President Kennedy's assassination.
NAME: GERALD MCKNIGHT
DATE:
DURATION: 1:09:17
ALAN DALE: Welcome to Conversations. My name is Alan Dale. On November 29th 1963 President Johnson announced the creation of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, which would forever be known as the Warren Commission. Its final report, presented to the President on September 24th 1964, and made public three days later, declared that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the attack which resulted in the death of President Kennedy and the wounding of Texas Governor John Connally, and that Jack Ruby had acted alone in murdering Oswald. Our topic today is criticism. Winston Churchill said: "Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary: it fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things."
Warren Commission member and future president Gerald Ford described their report by claiming: "The Monumental Record of the President's Commission will stand like a Gibraltar of factual literature through the ages to come."
Thirty years later, after an ocean of dissent and criticism of the official findings, Norman Mailer compared the Commission's work to: "A dead whale decomposing on a beach." The late Harold Weisberg quoted Warren Commission member Senator Richard Russell as saying very simply: "We have not been told the truth about Oswald."
In 1998, in a chapter titled 'The Problem of Secrecy and the Solution of the JFK Act', the Assassination Records Review Board, which was created to collect and review the documents relating to the assassination, pointed out in its final report doubts about the Warren Commission's findings were not restricted to ordinary Americans. Well before 1978 President Johnson, Robert Kennedy and four of the seven members of the Warren Commission all articulated, if sometimes off the record, some level of skepticism about the Commission's basic findings.
And today, in the year 2014, a majority of Americans share that skepticism.
Our guest is one of the world's leading authorities on the Warren Commission, its methods and practises. His meticulous research, published in a new edition of his book 'Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why' is an essential resource for all who are invested in seeking to know the truth about how the Government of the United States responded to the assassination of President Kennedy. It's an honor for me to introduce Professor Gerald D McKnight. Thank you for being with us.
GERALD McKNIGHT: My pleasure, Alan. My pleasure.
ALAN DALE: Professor, would it be an apt re-statement of the name of the President's Commission if we referred to the "Prejudiced Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy"?
GERALD McKNIGHT: We certainly could. We certainly could get away with that without – I think without much fault-finding if you, you know, if people knew what went on there, yes. It was a - from the very beginning, I mean the Commission - if I could just make one point, I mean, right here. The Commission, presumably, is going to produce this report, based largely, and almost exclusively, on the FBI Commission Document 1, and they're going ahead in that fashion. One major, almost astonishing fact is that the Warren Commission never bothered to bring under its attention, or at least in any published way, the fact that it in terms of one of the things it looked at in terms of documentation was JFK's death certificate.
So here we have the Commission that is supposed to write the report based on largely – almost exclusively – on FBI investigation, and they cannot find the time or the interest or the reason – the rationale – for looking at JFK's death certificate, which understandably in the long run is going to be a problem because the death certificate, written by Dr Burkley, before the politics of this issue entered into this business. What the Burkley death certificate pointed out was particularly - which is key here - that the wound in Kennedy's back was at the third thoracic vertebra. Well, this is before politics entered into the discussion here, and what that meant – the Warren Commission is going to talk about three shots: two shots hit; one shot misses.
Now the basic point is – and I'm going to offer this right now – is that there is a key piece of evidence, and I don’t care where you would stand on this issue – a key piece of evidence that the Warren Commission – this is the Commission that was contracted to write the report – never bothered to collect; never bothered to look at. That in itself is – one would have to say it provokes a puzzling attitude about how things were going. I thought maybe I'd throw that in here now, just as an indication of how – of really how this whole investigation was constructed.
And I would add to that, I mean, if I'm talking about the Commission I also would talk about the FBI. The FBI turns out its report, Commission Document 1: that report is out and into the hands of the Commission in December, and the FBI, making its report, never bothered to collect from the Secret Service the Bethesda Naval Hospital report on the Kennedy autopsy.
ALAN DALE: Mmhmm.
GERALD McKNIGHT: They just said: "We don't need it right now." That report was ready: the Secret Service had it; offered it to the FBI. The FBI – Alex Rosen, who was about the third man in the power chain within the FBI; third from Hoover I guess, he said: "We don't really need that now to write our report. And of course they wrote the report, and we can talk about it, but the thing is that before the report ever became public they had leaked the conclusions of the report to press people all over the country.
ALAN DALE: Right. Very deliberately.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Oh, absolutely, and the FBI was quite good at that, because they did have their own favorite reporters.
ALAN DALE: And are we referring to December of '63 for the FBI Commission Document 1, and that's a 39-page document – am I correct, thirty-nine pages?
GERALD McKNIGHT: Yes, mmhmm.
ALAN DALE: And among those thirty-nine pages how many words are devoted to an actual description of the assassination? You said it's sixty words?
GERALD McKNIGHT: Very little. We're talking about economy here; economy of language. And that was, yes, that was CD 1 and right, there's – CD 1, I think if you were honest with yourself, if you were to read CD 1, which is supposed to be, as Katzenbach said when he looked at it when he received it, he wrote back to the FBI and he called this report "sensational". Katzenbach plays a huge role here, a very huge role.
ALAN DALE: Right, Deputy Attorney General, probably stepping up with much more detailed responsibilities because of Robert Kennedy's grief.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Absolutely. Bobby Kennedy is trying to hold the family together. He's taken it over in that sense. He really is, he's the Attorney General – I mean de facto Attorney General in this particular situation, and took tremendous – I think he took – he was not hesitant about moving in and taking over responsibility. I think within three or four days after the assassination he was already putting together a tentative outline of what the Report should look like. So I mean there was no grass growing under Katzenbach's feet in this situation. And you know the thing that always – what shall I say – I guess, well, rubbed me the wrong way - is that Katzenbach was part of the Kennedy team, for Chrissake.
ALAN DALE: Yeah.
GERALD McKNIGHT: I mean he, you know, this guy was in his own way a rather remarkable guy: he was World War II, he was Air Force, he was shot down, he was a German POW, he escaped, he got back to the United States, he continued his service in the Air Force. I mean, you know, the guy had – the guy was remarkable. And then he became part of the Kennedy family: I mean he was up at Hyannis Port playing with his kids - Bobby's kids - football games.
ALAN DALE: And Bobby's kids referred to him as Uncle Nick.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Uncle Nick, yes.
ALAN DALE: And he was the administration's point man, confronting George Wallace. So he was an extraordinary person. But we focus on the letter; his letter – was it to Bill Moyers? Have I forgotten?
GERALD McKNIGHT: Yes, it was to Bill Moyers, two days later.
ALAN DALE: Well tell me about that letter.
GERALD McKNIGHT: The chronology quickly, in terms of this situation, is that on the 22nd of course we have the – we have Kennedy being shot: the 23rd of November, Oswald of course is in custody, and on the 23rd there – paraffin tests were run on Oswald on - probably late in the evening of the 22nd: 23rd the results came back from the paraffin test, and the paraffin test showed that he had paraffin-positive, which is, you know, the test of whether he fired a weapon or not.
His hands were positive; his cheeks were negative, which meant that, particularly in terms of the weapon we're talking about, the Mannlicher Carcano which the FBI asserted that he used in this situation, that that Mannlicher Carcano when it was turned over to FBI agents to test it, the condition of that weapon – you probably know about this – the condition of that weapon was so horrendous that these FBI guys said: "We refuse to use this weapon until we clean it up; we strengthen – we shim - the scope; we clean the weapon out, because if we use it now it's going to blow up in our faces." I mean, they spent a good deal of hardware and a good deal of time in getting that weapon into a condition where someone could look at it and say: "Yes, OK, it could…"
ALAN DALE: And am I correct there was also a succession of ballistics, or a succession of shooting tests, where all, without exception, all of the tests indicated an enormous cloud, or at least a significant and measurable cloud, of the materials that would be measurable in a paraffin test?
GERALD McKNIGHT: Absolutely. That's exactly right, and I'll say something about that later on. A year later something about that particular aspect of the situation. The point is on the 23rd – and I think most readers would know something about this; certainly know a little bit about the criminology; but for those who don't, on the 23rd Hoover was preparing to go with Tolson up to Baltimore to play the ponies; they did that on weekends…
ALAN DALE: That's right, yes.
GERALD McKNIGHT: …but before he left he had a telephone call with Lyndon Johnson. And in that telephone call what he said to Johnson was – and this is what he was saying, because by that time, by Saturday morning at ten o'clock - it was at 10~10.10 – something like that – 10.30 - the results – he was able to get the results of the paraffin tests. And of course the results of the paraffin tests simply demonstrated that Oswald didn't shoot anybody, and so he had to say – as he had to say to Johnson, that the case against Oswald is – I think his quote was "not very very strong".
ALAN DALE: Yeah!
GERALD McKNIGHT: And that was based on forensic evidence. I mean there we have this brick wall, a forensic evidence brick wall; I mean Oswald did not use that rifle to shoot anybody.
ALAN DALE: Yes, it's very interesting what a difference a day can make, because by the evening the next day…
GERALD McKNIGHT: Next day Oswald is gone and that's it: there will be no trial; there'll be no investigation; there'll be no back-and-forth over the evidence…
ALAN DALE: But there will be an "Official Truth"; there will be an "Official Truth" that early on. I want to go back to just one moment. You – your new version…
GERALD McKNIGHT: Sure.
ALAN DALE: …or new edition rather, of 'Breach of Trust', which is available right now, includes something that I find truly remarkable, referring to Admiral Burkley, who was – we have no reason to question his loyalty to President Kennedy; he was President Kennedy's physician; he participated in some capacity as a liaison between Robert Kennedy and the theater in which the – an – autopsy on President Kennedy was being performed.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Mmhmm, he was there!
ALAN DALE: He was there; he was there and he was aware of what was taking place. Something that drew my attention from your preface to the paperback edition, and if I can quote it, it says: "In 1967 Admiral Burkley agreed to take part in an oral history interview for the John F Kennedy Library. When asked whether he agreed with the Warren Report's description of the shooting, Burkley's terse response was: 'I would not care to be quoted on that.' " Now isn't that a powerful statement?
GERALD McKNIGHT: Yeah. Yeah, he was embattled, and I don't know whether Johnson, you know, called him and gave him the 'Johnson Treatment'; in other words: "We are in a…"
ALAN DALE: Yeah, well he promoted him for one thing. Johnson kept him in the fold, you know.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Oh yes, yes. He held – I forget what he was – he was boosted up from either Rear to Vice or Vice to Rear.
ALAN DALE: Vice Admiral I think.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Was it?
ALAN DALE: He became Vice Admiral.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Vice Admiral. And he is only the second presidential physician who was of that particular status.
ALAN DALE: Yeah, the other one was Teddy Roosevelt I think.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Also he was not only the president's physician, but he was promoted up to Vice Admiral. I don't think that – I don't know Burkley, clearly, and I don't know what kind of person he was, but I think he was a person of some substance. But before we forget it we might – I mean, here's Burkley; he saw the dead body, he saw the – what would we call it? I guess the medical "heroics" - at Parkland Memorial Hospital when they were working on the President and all they could do was relieve him somewhat in his breathing in terms of a tracheotomy over the bullet hole in his neck: a frontal bullet wound; a bullet from the front; and they were working on that.
Well he saw that; he had to know that, and he's also the one who wrote the death certificate, and the death certificate has the – has Kennedy's non-fatal back wound at third thoracic vertebra, which from a shot from the rear on a downward trajectory at third thoracic vertebra is not going to exit the neck.
ALAN DALE: And a shallow wound as far as we can tell, right? A shallow wound, that the attending autopsist – the physician – was able to feel the end of the wound with his pinkie?
GERALD McKNIGHT: Yes, that was it. When you get down, when you get right down to basic and irreducible facts, or a difference here, what we have, with the FBI we have the fact that there were three shots: two of them hit Kennedy.
ALAN DALE: And one hit Governor Connally.
GERALD McKNIGHT: And a separate one hit Governor Connally.
ALAN DALE: So three shots: three hits, that's the FBI's report as of December, right?
GERALD McKNIGHT: That's the FBI. And then for your listeners and all, we could just simply say when you look at the – that's the FBI report – when you look at the Warren Commission we have three shots: two hits: one miss.
ALAN DALE: And that's because of the entrance of James Tague, the bystander?
GERALD McKNIGHT: That's right; the FBI refused to even acknowledge the fact that this man walked…
ALAN DALE: Oh, yeah! Well, you've written - you've included some marginalia that - apparently Hoover was famous for writing in margins of things, and he didn't buy that at all. So we have no resolution; we've no resolution in terms of the irreconcilable distinction or conflict between the FBI and the Warren Commission's conclusion. How many people who believe it was Lee Harvey Oswald in an unaffiliated act – how many people acknowledge that fact: that the FBI and the Warren Commission are at irreconcilable differences?
GERALD McKNIGHT: Well, in '67 there was an effort – I'm trying to think of him – a lawyer who had close contact with Hoover who interceded here and wanted to – it was 1967; I'm trying to think of the lawyer's name. He was a wheeler-dealer, an insider, and he knew everybody, and he knew Hoover, and he came to Hoover and he said: "Is there anything you can do any way to elucidate on the positions here, and maybe try to square the circle in terms of what they said and what you said?"
ALAN DALE: And how did Hoover respond?
GERALD McKNIGHT: Hoover said: "I don't think so." [Both laugh.] "I don't think so"; he did not go for the bait. I think – I wonder if the bait really wasn't this lawyer who was being an intermediary for President Johnson…
ALAN DALE: Yeah, I think that's correct, right.
GERALD McKNIGHT: …who probably in '67 was a little bit – maybe himself – I mean, considering the fact that he plays a major role; he's a part of the grand architect of this thing in Dallas, you know, I mean I… That, I think, will come out one day: that Lyndon Johnson was a leading figure in the Kennedy assassination. I regard him, anyway - I may sound crazy, but I regard him as an American Caligula. The most dangerous man who ever occupied the presidency of the United States, and a man who was not well wrapped, mentally.
ALAN DALE: Well, there's a wonderful book written by a physician who was a close friend of Hubert Humphrey's, called 'Hubert'. I haven't seen the book in a number of decades, but I remember reading it when it came out, and it was one of the most, I thought, revealing depictions of Hubert Humphrey's perspective about the irrationalities, the unbelievable powerful mood swings, the incredible "handle with care" that was required in the dealings in the inner circle round Lyndon Johnson.
I just found this from your book 'Breach of Trust': "In October of 1966 President Johnson called on an old friend, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, to approach the FBI Director about undertaking a series of lengthy articles or a book…
GERALD McKNIGHT: That was it! That's what I was referring to.
ALAN DALE: …concerning the captioned matter, and the request was…
GERALD McKNIGHT: Yes, that's what - it was '66, OK? I thought it was '67. Abe Fortas, OK!
ALAN DALE: Late '66. And so they approach Clyde Tolson, and Tolson parades out reasons why the Director could never oblige any such request. This is amazing to me, because really the request clearly is indeed coming from Johnson, who wants some kind of bow put on this, something to make it tidier. And Fortas then advanced a more modest request: would the Director consider writing one brief article, restricted – this is a quote - "restricted solely to the controversy raised by critics with respect to the differences as shown in the autopsy between FBI reports and the final conclusion of the Warren Commission. Hoover declined Fortas' request."
GERALD McKNIGHT: Right. It's like somebody leaving a turd on the dining room table. I mean, you know, really, in terms of - if you're paying any attention at all, even if you bring in naïveté to this whole issue, when somebody explains that to you, you say: "Well, if it were a dog held in the street, or if it were some regular normal person, you know, what would it matter really, in this age?" But we're talking about the President of the United States, which, one has to say, really does elevate the discussion to some degree, anyway.
ALAN DALE: Well, one of the things that I get out of your magnificent book is, you know, we're all familiar with intrigues and complexities and the politics with regard to the internals of the Warren Commission itself, but something that you've really helped to clarify for me are the conflicts, the political distortions, the maneuvering, the contortions between the FBI, the President of the United States, the Justice Department, and the Warren Commission. So there's a much bigger controversy really in terms of the relationships between those four elements in particular. Justice Department, President, FBI and the Warren Commission: everybody is at odds with each other.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Let me ask you this, Alan. Now you clearly have spent some time on 'Breach of Trust'; with the book. One – and I ask this – this is sort of just a general question, but I'm aiming it at you as a person who's pretty well-grounded in this historic situation. When you were looking at 'Breach of Trust', and I ask this to you, but I'm thinking of a larger audience.
ALAN DALE: Absolutely.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Because one of the things that I – are in the book 'Breach of Trust' - I rarely ever see – of course I really don't see too many book reports of – reviews of 'Breach of Trust'. I guess I've seen a couple that were sent down by Briggs at the University of Kansas Press, but in the book, in the hardback copy – I don't know what it is in the paperback copy there is – at the end of it – there is an Appendix A.
ALAN DALE: Yeah, the tickler; that's the tickler document, right?
GERALD McKNIGHT: Yes, the tickler file.
ALAN DALE: Absolutely.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Well – and the thing about that, what I call here – I mean I'll just point this out; maybe your listeners will benefit from this – is that I call this – it's accidental, totally, because tickler files are interior; these are FBI interior files. These are never to be – and in this particular case somebody screwed up, or somebody had a mad on that day; anyway, this…
ALAN DALE: We got lucky. That's what happened: I think we got lucky.
GERALD McKNIGHT: We got lucky. And Mark Allen, who – and what is sort of funny about this in a way, is that Mark Allen, when he got this tickler file he really didn't ever try to make anything out of it. I mean I think he just… I don't know what it was with him, but if you look at this tickler file, what I call – in large part I just call this thing as a – I call it the DNA of the FBI.
ALAN DALE: Yeah. Well, it's an internal document; it's four pages, and in those four pages is basically everything that we would have wanted to know about the FBI's attitude about this.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Exactly! An explanation of why we never got to know in terms of what the devil – I mean, just check Alex Rosen, who was number four man, I guess; I said three or whatever – number four man in the hierarchy.
ALAN DALE: Under Belmont, right, or under William Sullivan? I don't know; it's Tolson and then Belmont and then Sullivan?
GERALD McKNIGHT: Well, it's – it's on the second page I think, and really what it is is the FBI's attitude in terms of handling the case, and what Alex Rosen says, he says the FBI's handling of the case, he explains it this way: "Standing with pockets open waiting for evidence to drop in." I mean, you know, that's classy; that's classy stuff.
ALAN DALE: You know, and it – but one of the things that it kind of reminds me to examine, and I so appreciate you raising this, because it's something that would not be something we might think of to discuss, especially if our objective – my objective with regard to this program is to make it accessible to people who are not necessarily experience in terms of delving into the deepest aspects of the related subject, so we want this information to be accessible to people who are not walking encyclopedias about all this stuff, and that tickler document, you're right; we never hear anybody refer to it.
One of the things that it sort of complements is the understanding that the FBI was receiving quite a lot of the information that they were going on, that they were working with, from the CIA, and that even though it's not explicit in that document it does – it sort of corroborates the idea that, as opposed to this the greatest – what was it Gerald Ford said about this? "Gibraltar of factual literature". Where? Where? Where would that be? But in the meantime you are aware that John Whitten…
GERALD McKNIGHT: Ford was Hoover's man on the Commission, I mean more than anybody else, and he was just feeding him information every opportunity he got, and then the FBI let him have certain FBI toys when he went golfing or stuff – I don't know, but anyway.
ALAN DALE: I don't know either.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Yeah, Ford's a miserable – anyway, we have an aircraft carrier now that's going to cost us, what? 4 billion dollars? – I don't know - or 12 billion dollars? I don't know; it's going to be named the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, and right now it's full of problems; they can't get it out on the water.
ALAN DALE: Gerald Ford's…something.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Well, anyway, I didn't know we were going there.
ALAN DALE: That's OK.
GERALD McKNIGHT: Do you want to do anything about Oswald's 45 – last 45 hours or anything?
ALAN DALE: Well, this is exactly what I'd like to do. Allow me to take a brief intermission, Professor. We're speaking with Professor Gerald D McKnight about his extraordinary and valuable book 'Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why'. Please stay with us: we'll be back in just a moment.