WHO KILLED J.F.K.? The jolting question glares from bumper stickers, intrudes from posters, lures capacity crowds on the national campus lecture circuit. At least 87 U.S. Congressmen have backed a resolution urging a new investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963—twelve years ago this Saturday. Three congressional subcommittees are trying to find out precisely what information the FBI and CIA withheld from the Warren Commission's investigation of the crime—and why.
A flurry of articles in magazines —from the solemn New Republic to the impetuous New Times, from the Saturday Evening Post to Penthouse—criticize the commission and question its conclusion that the murder was committed by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting "alone." A paperback published this week, "They 've Killed the President!" by Robert Sam Anson, suggests that Kennedy was the victim of a CIA-Mafia conspiracy. The first printing: 250,000 copies. Television and radio talk shows focus on the Warren Report—and question it. Shown three times on ABC-TV, the shocking color movie of the shooting taken by Amateur Photographer Abraham Zapruder has jarred millions of viewers into a renewed awareness of the brutal event.
The revival of doubt about that day in Dallas stems mainly from what Americans have since learned about their Government. The Viet Nam War and Watergate have inspired a new skepticism about the veracity and motives of high Government officials. The disclosure that some CIA agents schemed with Mafia racketeers to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro has fanned theories about a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. So, too, has the recent admission by the FBI that it secretly destroyed a threatening note from Lee Harvey Oswald, although that reckless act was apparently done only to save the agency from embarrassment. Those facts were withheld from the Warren Commission by both agencies. A Harris Poll, taken in October, shows that 65% of the public believe that the Kennedy assassination was "not the act of one individual, but rather of a larger conspiracy."
The resurgence of conspiracy theories is all the more remarkable because not a single fact linking Oswald with anyone else in a plot has become known in the eleven years since the Warren Commission issued its 888-page summary and 25 accompanying volumes of exhibits and testimony. Headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the commission included Congressmen Gerald R. Ford and Hale Boggs, Senators Richard B. Russell and John Sherman Cooper, former CIA Director Allen W. Dulles and former Diplomat John J. McCloy. The mass of evidence was gathered over nine months and based on some 25,000 interviews conducted by the FBI, another 1,550 by the Secret Service. In addition, the commission's staff of 14 lawyers examined 395 witnesses and took sworn statements from another 63. The commission itself quizzed 94 people. That is surely not a record of investigators refusing to listen to witnesses who might disturb their eventual conclusions.