THE fabric of history is rent with unanswered questions and unresolved doubts, and for many men those tears and slashes prove far more intriguing than the whole factual cloth. From the disappearance of the Holy Grail to the attack on Pearl Harbor, many of history's great events have been marked by suspicions of connivance, corruption and conspiracy. Today, 34 months after the tragic event, a new web of doubt is being publicly spun around the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
The skepticism is ironic, for never before has the investigation of a historic event been launched so promptly for the expressed purpose of dispelling uncertainty. One week after the murder, President Johnson appointed an august group of seven men, headed by U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren, to "satisfy itself that the truth is known as far as it can be discovered." The Warren Commission had an unlimited budget and access to all the investigative talents and tools of the Federal Government. With the help of a full-time staff of 26—mostly legal experts—it published a lucid, tightly written 888-page report that was a compendium of 26 volumes (17,815 pages) of testimony and evidential exhibits gathered over ten months.
The commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, the Marx-spouting ne'er-do-well, had fired a mail-order rifle from a sixth-floor window of Dallas' Texas School Book Depository, killing John Kennedy and wounding Texas Governor John Connally as they rode by in an open limousine. The report also said that the fleeing Oswald had murdered Dallas Patrolman J. D. Tippit within an hour after he shot Kennedy. And the commission concluded that those crimes, as well as the slaying of Lee Oswald himself by Nightclub Owner Jack Ruby before TV cameras in the Dallas Police and Courts Building, held no hint of conspiracy.
Provocative Attacks
In the U.S., the report met with widespread and surprisingly uncritical acceptance. But elsewhere, particularly in Europe, many people never doubted that Kennedy's murder was the product of a conspiracy involving either—there is a remarkably wide choice—the right wing, the left wing, the FBI, the CIA or the Dallas police force. When South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated last week in Capetown, officials hurriedly launched a series of anti-plot explanations to cut off the kind of who-killed-Kennedy rumors that have risen abroad.
This summer doubts about what happened in Dallas have been raised with a vengeance in the U.S. by an armful of books that place the commission's painstaking detective work under a savage crossfire of criticism. All of the authors manage to suggest that the commission members and their staff might have been guilty of anything from incompetence to a grotesque plot to conceal the truth.