Transcripts For CSPAN3 Work Of The Warren Commission Staff Part 2 20140920

I have been satisfied with the report ever since. , to is a personal note myself, i feel like i can rely on this personal opinion. I wanted to share that with you all. Thank you very much. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. After what i think was an extraordinary first session, and a truncated break, for which i apologize, we will begin the second session with five additional panelists. Our transitional panelist is jay vogelson. He has a foot in both caps. He was staff member on the Warren Commission and is a dallas lawyer. Begin, similar to the first panel, a description of his esperance with the commission. Then i am asking the second panel to do two things. One is that they have collated and organized the questions, but they also come at the questions for members of the Commission Staff, from their own individual areas of expertise. They have their own questions from preparation for this afternoons program. Then we will get to as many of your questions that you submitted during the first half and during the break as we possibly can. Let me give you brief introductions of each of the five of the second panel. Jay vogelson is a graduate of Lehigh University and nyu law school, and was in one of the early generations of the Honors Program at the United States department of justice, from where he went to the Warren Commission. He has done 20 years of private practice. He is an arbitrator in International Disputes and security cases. Was the chair of the International Law section of the american bar association, vice chair of the Texas Commission of the arts and the Texas Community committee of humanities. Lacklandbloom is a graduate of the university of michigan law school. After a courtship with george brown, he joined a private law firm that happen to be at the time the same law firm at which Howard Willens was a partner. Since 1978, he served as faculty at the Bethesda School of law. Professor Christopher Jenks is a graduate of west point, the arizona law school, and has earned two degrees so far from the u. S. Army judge advocate general school and georgetown inversity law school, served army line positions and a jagged posts. And jag he was awarded the bronze star. He is on the faculty of the Desmond School of law and the director of the criminal justice clinic. Professor dennis simon is a graduate of wittenberg university, went to Michigan State university. He is the distinguished teaching professor in local science and is a member of the tower centerboard. His Main Research focus right now is the popular and legislative leadership of the american presidency. He also was engaged in some research on southerners serving in the u. S. House of representatives and has served as a faculty leader at the smu civil rights pilgrimage. He teaches a course on jfk with professor stone. Professor tom stone is a senior lecturer in the english department, has won numerous teaching awards, including twice being named to the outstanding professor by the smu undergraduate yearbook, and for more than 20 years, has been teaching interdisciplinary classes using material related to the jfk assassination, which he uses to sharpen students abilities to think and read critically. These classes have been visited by organizations by reporters ,nd from the Associated Press cnn, the new york times, as well as local newspaper and television media. In ayear, he will appear new documentary on the assassination produced by the history channel. Vogelsonn first to jay for his contribution to this afternoon. Thank you, bill. It is much too far to go over there. We are going to talk right from here, if you dont mind. I never asked to go to the commission. I am not exactly certain how i got there in the first place. Let me tell you something about my background, which i am sure played some part in it. Lawyered working as a working for the United States attorney in the Southern District of new york. I was a kennedy confidant. I spent my time working with the most senior prosecutors in conspiracy cases. Conspiracy cases mostly involving labor rackets, which was a big deal at the time, and securities fraud cases. From there, i was selected by Robert Kennedys Honors Program at the Justice Department. I went there, where continue to work on criminal, but business criminal, conspiracy cases, some cases that are typically hard to prove, hard to get the evidence, hard to see what really happened. And i was involved in a wide variety of cases, domestic and international, some involving foreign political figures. You know, everyone in my generation knows exactly where they were when they heard of the assassination. The headthe office of of my area waiting for Robert Kennedy to come back from lunch for a meeting. He never came back. But then i went about my business doing the cases that i had that were all over the country. Hadr the Warren Commission been going for some time and it was at the point of starting to write the report and reach final conclusions, chief Justice Warren requested to have additional assistance, mostly people who could look with fresh eyes at the facts, who could ass ist in the writing of the report. For the first time in the history of the United States, the report was footnoted to evidence. Some of the footnoting was great. Some of it was not quite so hot. The fact is, none of us who were involved at that point had all that great experience footnoting. It is not like long reviews today where most footnotes are in text. But i got selected. I went to see Howard Willens. That is where i met howard. He was at the Justice Department. He was one of the senior officials in the criminal division. He interviewed me. Foggiestave the recollection of what he asked me or what i told him, but the next thing i knew, i was at the Warren Commission. , not many,a group but a group that were selected to do this work of factchecking, writing, footnoting. But i looked around when i got there. I looked around and saw the company i was with. I said, oh, my gosh. That was not the kind of company i was used to. I looked around, for instance, job all, one of the senior joe ball, one of the senior lauriers, was among one of the best criminal lawyers in the country. Hiser was at the top of form. He was there. Arlen specter, who was a senator from pennsylvania, he was a legendary District Attorney from philadelphia who was renowned for his ability to handle complex cases and murder cases. And norman read like redlick. He is the person who i was assigned to work with. I knew norman in law school. He talks tax law. He was one of those guys who knew the tax code by memory. He could fix one Little Corner here, another corner there, and he had it straight. When i got picked to work with , i passedd, finally tax law. But there i was. Then i started looking at the people who were selected like me to come over there and do this final project. If you look at the warren report, there is a section in the back that says, acknowledgments. The commission acknowledges with thanks the following people who gave a helping hand. Well, among those, if you look at the list, you will see names you recognize today. ,mong those was Stephen Breyer now a member of the u. S. Supreme court. There were a number of others of that kind. If you look on the midlevel Commission Staff, besides these great fellows, there were a wash of others, one of whom one of the great, great scholars of the law of our time. So what did we do . How did we do it . Reading virtually , all thece of evidence depositions, all the statements, all the physical evidence, that was in the area. Ofman functioned in the area the assassination itself. Harveyse who dont think where itd it, that is was. I dont have any doubt at all that oswald did it and was the lone gunman. The reason that i dont is i saw things in ways that the general public never saw, never would see. From the grassy knoll. So we took this evidence and we helped but as we did that, as we did that, we were always looking for is there something else. We were the reviewers. But in reviewing it, this is a 24 7 job that took three or four months to do. We could see, we could see what the evidence was. And we started footnoting it. And in in footnoting it, we were looking for not just the evidence that supported the fact statements, but we were looking for evidence that was to the contrary or that watered it down. And some of it was done great. Some of it was there was some inexperience in doing it. But in the main, the conclusions themselves are as clear as can be. There can be things that were not known then. I heard jim lehrer interviewed the other day. He has a new book out top down and its a fictional book but fictional about the secret Service Agents who made the decision to take the bubble off the car. And he was asked about a conspiracy and his conclusion, which really is my conclusion too, is, well, i dont know, maybe, maybe not, but ive been waiting 50 years for a death bed confession. Havent had one yet. Thank you. [applause] that was clever of us wasnt it to put one staffer on this panel so that you couldnt all leave before the academics got started . Its my understanding that no one on the commission or the staff inspected the autopsy xrays and photos. Is that correct . If it is correct, why didnt that happen . And if it didnt, in retro suspect, do you think that was a mistake . The autopsy, xrays, and photographs were seen by the chief justice. This was a subject of conversation with the attorney general and the Deputy Attorney general in which i participated. There had been an indication initially that the attorney general did not want the material seen because of their greusome nature. However, we did agree to have someone from the commission to look at them. The chief justice did this under g that the pictures were so gruesome that he did not think they should be seen by anyone else or made public. And one of the reasons that the that the inquiry ended there refers to what i reported earlier which is the chief justices remark that raised the question that raised the question about whether the materials would be made public. And the chief justice was of the view that if the commission, particularly the staff looked at these materials they would necessarily have to be made public. In fact, the staff wanted to have access to the materials so that one or two of the testifying autopsy doctors would have those materials with them when they testified before the commission. And it was that would have been very advantageous and in ret ret retrospe retrospect, that was a bad decision. After viewing these materials, doctor, is there any aspect of your previous testimony that you would like to change . And if the answer was no, then youd accomplisheded the purpose. If the doctor said, yes, in light of this, i would like to add the following comments with respect to the location of the head wound. Or the location of the back wound. So that did not happen. It was regarded by staff generally as being a serious mistake and shortcoming and i think it is unfortunate to not to we were unable to pursue that staff position aggressively because after the chief justice saw the material and communitied his view, i dont think we could communicated his view, i dont think we could have gotten the support to present the proposal to the attorney general. If we were able to get the support of the Deputy Attorney general and the head of the criminal division, would the attorney general have agreed . It would have been a long shot at that. But its too bad that it wasnt made. Isnt it a fact that some years later, those photos were released and exploited in some fashion and, two, at some subsequent investigation, some physicians did see the autopsy photos and confirmed the conclusions of the warren report in that regard. Am i correct . Its my understanding that the House Select Committee medical panel saw all of that stuff and they did, in fact, affirm the original. Because i think that there are reasons associated with the process of the investigation that has contributed to the publics lack of faith in those conclusions and im thinking in particular of the drawing that attempts to reconcile the entry wound at the base of the skull with the exit wound here by showing kennedy with his head on his chest and once this film became public, it was clear that, that was not the case. I dont think it changes conclusions. Its about Public Awareness and im curious about the process your question really has to do with Public Relations, not whether in fact the conclusions of the autopsy and the commission were correct. I accept their conclusions, especially of the House Select Committee medical panel because they did have access to that material. And i think as a man who has lived for 50 years with the impact on your lives of being disbelieved, i would challenge the rather dismissive phrase Public Relations. I think these things matter and i think they matter a lot. Let me stay with this with you if i can. If you do accept the fact that the conclusions about the head wounds and whatnot that the autopsy people rendered were correct, then why keep this issue for a knowledgeable person like you why keep this Public Relations issue alive . Its alive whether i say anything about it or not. And i learned from the response something about the process by which this decision was made and there seems to be general agreement that it was not the best possible decision. I dont think that, that does anyone any harm to acknowledge that there were aspects of this investigation beyond yalls control and they have influenced the Public Perception of your conclusio conclusions. With respect to the entry wound in the back and the exit wound in the front, is your notion that they dont line up . They dont line up unless the president is in the posture in that drawing. They do line up if the entrance wound is where the House Select Committee medical panel put it which is more in the crown. Actually, if you think about it, the president was leaning forward in some fashion. If you take an autopsy photo, the president is lying flat. If you think about it, if you have an entry wound here and an exit wound down here and then which is the way he was leaning forward and then you flatten him out suddenly that exit wound that entry wound is now lower. So that is the explanation for the that particular. I think that the film clearly shows that he was not in the posture in which he appears in that drawing and the House Committee reached a more valid conclusion by using the xrays and photos to move the entrance to its almost certainly correct location. Then we have no trajectory problem. Let me interject here where i believe youre confusing the two wounds. The wound that exited from the throat was positioned in the autopsy report as 14 centimeters from two bonny structures on bony structure can say. Although the language used to describe that wound was in some instances described as the base of the neck and in other ways described as the upper right shoulder. But it was only a single wound. You have referred to something that was a mistake made in the autopsy report and that is the location of the entry wound to the head. Youre right. I misspoke when i said right. So there was a mistake and the autopsy doctors that wrestled with why they made that mistake over the years but it has not really affected the fact of the entry wound being the right rear of the skull and exiting from the right front of the skull. Thats clear. The diagram you mentioned has been the source of controversy in the community of critics and properly so. They agreed years later that it was unfortunate that the doctors came to their attempt with a degree diagram that was made by one of the inhouse illustrators at the medical facility and he made two or three diagrams that are published in the report and the one thats most frequently used to suggest that the committee misrepresented the facts is the one that you alluded to that the shot came in higher on the body than in fact was reflected in the autopsy report. Is that correct . I misspoke. Thank you for clearing that up. It probably confused more than one person. Yes. Im talking about the the fray jacked tour of the fatal shot. Trajectory of the fatal shot. And the autopsy report, putting that to rest for a moment, all the doctors, and there were 17 professional pathologists who looked at the head wound and 15 potoologists who look pathologists who looked at the neck slash back wounds over decades and not one doctor has disagreed with the analysis that the back were the entry wounds and the front for the exit wounds and the shot came from behind on an angle to the horizontal. I agree with that. The drawing of the trajectory of the head shot creates the appearance that somethings going on there which really wasnt. That was reconciled. Do you think that your deliberations were would have been any different if you had known about the ciamafia plot to attempt to asasassinatassass. First, they should have told us. No question in my mind about that. Although, i had ive been thinking about that recently and i can now understand a little bit why maybe of course, i wasnt in on the secret, maybe they didnt and had good reasons to. Anyway, for bill and my investigation, we tried as hard as we could. The cuban government and the anticastro cubans both were our prime suspects, and the cuban government was probably the prime suspect. We worked as hard as we could. We tried every possible avenue, so would i have been any different . No. It would have given me one more powerful reason obviously for a motive but castro already had that. The bay of bigs invasion primarily. Then there was the cuban missile crisis. Both of which cuba was centrally involved in and good reason to dislike to put it mildly kennedy in particular and the United States. So we had all the motive we needed. So the question was is there evidence and we worked as hard as we could and we could not find any that implicated cuba and we found some that we could we did find some affirmative evidence that they were not involved and thats the stuff thats still secret. Are you satisfied with the cias explanations for the lingering mysteries about mexico city, particularly why there are no surveillance camera photos of oswald that we know. No. Im not impressed with their excuse. Let me pick up on your first question. Can i ask one quotation of yours that might speak to this . You are quoted in let me give you my position and then you can crossexamine me. Okay. David and i would have been in quite a battle within the commission on this issue. I would have enlisted if i could a much more aggressive advocate on this. Jim. I think we would have i would have pushed strenuously the relevance i see to this is not whether the cuban government or somebody recruited by the cuban government was likely to retaliate because i think on that one, if you think in a realistic way, its ridiculous to think about that. Where i would have pushed would be to elevate the significance of castros statement in Early September that he his awareness that the American Government was trying to kill him. What do we say . Do we go i dont think we could have in any way have reported that in that volume. But i think there were other ways perhaps we would have dealt with it. So i would have, yes, i would have pushed very hard for and i would have also pursued marina with the question of whether she had any recollection about her husband having been where. We dont know. We have no direct evidence that oswald knew about the report or what was on havana radio. Were drawing inferences from that. So the only person who would have known about whether he was aware of this would have been marina maria. Yeah but thats a question of motive, not conspiracy. Motive by oswald. And frankly i think it was very interesting, it would have been, but its superfluous. And theres no question in my mind at least that he thought he was killing someone that was badly treating cuba. He had become a castro worshipper almost. So, yeah, sure. But what i mean, from my point of view, it doesnt it doesnt make any difference on the conspiracy. You couldnt have pushed any harder to find a connection between ounce wallswald and cub yes. I agree. Also, if the president johnson that is by this time who i assume must have known what the cia had done, i cant imagine them doing this without the approval of the president , had made the whole thing happen, thats what should have happened. In fact, as soon as kennedy was anyway, at some point, they never should have done it i would say. And then theres no way finally to keep a secret i think. And if they had told us and said but dont tell anybody, that would raise the problems that were just said and thats among the other things why i thought it would have created. It was impossible to deal with them. They wanted to keep it secret on one hand. It was a shameful thing to have done. If they had succeeded, the whole world would have thought much less of the United States. This moral supposed company that are not at war with this guy yes they have lots of disagreements and they kill him. Yeah. About 13 years ago i had the privilege of participating at the Supreme Court of the United States in a conference between several of the justices of the United States and several justices of russia. And the night before the conference, we took them out to dinner, the russian Supreme Court justices at the Mayflower Hotel and basically said you can ask us anything you want about anything youre interesting in. And not surprisingly the very first question was who really killed kennedy [laughter] and i dont remember what i said. One of my colleagues who is a lot more quick whited than i am said what you should have said is we thought you knew. [laughter] i am satisfied after studying this that in fact i do know and it was Lee Harvey Oswald and he acted alone. And i want to give a plug to two particular books. The first one is this. The report on the Warren Commission. Id like to mention sam stern and i can vouch for the brillance and integrity of both of these men. And i agree with howard that he could have titled the book history has proven us right. Now the big question is what do we mean by history. And i think you can divide that in two different ways. If youre going to talk about historiens have studied this. But certainly the thing that brings a lot of people here and that creates a lot of interest is the fact that almost every Public Opinion study that you happen to see seems to suggest that the public at large is not convinced that frequently an overwhelming number of the public in days past or even now have their doubts. So one of the things that i would like to address is why is that. And in fact, ive got a stack of questions from the audience. I hope we can get to some of them. But that was one of the most asked questions that we had from the audience members, why is this so controversial. Why is this debate continuing to go on. Id like to suggest at least seven different reasons. The first one is that there is extreme distrust of the government and i think that when the Warren Commission announced its report, that distrust was nowhere near as great as it has become and one of the things that certainly has that distrust is that the cia and the fbi did in fact withhold and mislead the commission. That certainly hasnt helped the general feeling that the government often lies to us. Thats one factor. A second factor is that all the evidence is in ass as a practical matter. I cant say that for sure but theres not a lot were going to learn about that we dont already know. There are some documents that maybe wont tell us anything of significance. Now, that cuts two ways. Howard makes the case very well in his book that all the evidence is in and its not contradicted the commission. For those who have their doubts, the issue seems to be, well, you havent proven it to absolute satisfaction. Thank you cant disprove a negative. You cant disprove theres no possibility of a conspiracy and, yet, thats the standard that i think a lot of people have out there. A third reason why i think that there is a controversy here is a lot of people have not really looked into it in depth. A lot of people have not read this book, the Warren Commission report. Another reason is for people to make a buck. His reason is that people like mysteries. People like historical mysteries, that it remains open to some extent, that you can never really know and frankly i dont think that public curiosity would be ever satisfied if he didnt have a time machine. If we couldnt go back. And even then thats not enough. You would have to follow oswald and ruby around for weeks before you could possibly satisfy yourself. Yet, another thing is that i believe that oswald was the lone gunman and there was no conspiracy. Nevertheless, this was a truly weird series of events. Oswald ending up in a place where we could act upon his truly weird disposition. With the magic bullet. I believe it. I think the commission has proven it but i have to say its weird. And the third fact is ruby simply ending up in the garage right at the right time hes down at the Western Union office a couple of minutes earlier somehow he just walks in right at the point when theyre transferring oswald and there he is and he shoots him. Very strange. I think it happened just like the Commission Says it happened but at the end of the day, you still have to say this is a very strange set of circumstances. Probably the other thing that keeps this discussion alive and has been the discussion so far to a certain degree is oswalds very strange resume. Here he is off in the soviet union. Hes going down to mexico. Wants to go to cuba. Hes in new orleans with these mobsters are. You want to build a conspiracy even though no real connection has been made, he was kind of like forest gump. He was on the spot. And consequently it doesnt take much to kind of, well, isnt it possible that, fill in the blanks. One of the questions that was asked more than once by the audience was already discussed. The autopsy report. And the second question i think we also got into but this was as far as i can tell the single most asked question from the audience. And that was how do you react to the finding by the House Committee that maybe there was a conspiracy. Well, i think there was considerable confusion among the public as to exactly what the House Select Committee concluded in its report of 1979. The House Committee had reached a decision to conclude that there was no conspiracy based on their two years of investigation of the eyewitness testimony, the ballistics, medical testimony, and all the other factors the Commission Also influenced the select committee to con clues as of early december 1979 that there had been no conspiracy. At the time of the testimony that developed over the summer and the fall, the acoupsstic experts said that it came from the grassy knoll. In the absence of all that real life, factual evidence, the commission relied on these experts and their findings said their Scientific Evidence to support the probability of a conspiracy and theres no Scientific Evidence to rebut it. In other words, you could rebut Scientific Evidence only with nonScientific Evidence and they ignored with that simple statement the responsibility of trying to accommodate the conclusion that they were going to reach based on the acoustics of it against all the real life evidence on which theyd reached their earlier decision. There was an aggressive staff. This committee had functioned for two years. They were embarrassed that they would have to agree with the Warren Commission. They quibbled about everything and most of us. But the fact is they made a serious error of professional judgment and political sensitivity that hurt the national community. They concluded that the sound waves on the tape happened 60 seconds after the assassination. In other words, there was no foundation whatsoever for the conspiracy conclusion of the House Select Committee and that somehow has gotten lost. Their finding was rebutted conclusively. So there is no conspiracy finding by the select committee and i think it was a blemish on what was otherwise a very commendable useful analysis of the facts. Also, a motorcycle policeman whose tape was used for this purpose wanted to testify and approached robert blake, the general counsel, he was the head lawyer for the select committee and said i wasnt in my motorcycle anywhere near the assassination when this tape was allegedly heard these Different Things and blakey said we dont need that and they found they went ahead and reached their conclusion. Id like to adjust as a general matter, at some point in the conspiracy, you got to say who are we going to indict. Who are the conspirators. What evidence is there that they in fact got together and made an agreement to do . After all these years, were not anywhere near any of that. If i could back up. I thought the list of reasons contributing to why has there been such distrust of the commissions findings which is indeed an intriguing question and your answers are all, i think, to the point. One more that i would add which strikes me as a mistake of the chief justice connection with the issue into the report. When i was a law clerk to the chief justice, i remember very clearly the first thing that he impressed on all of us was that the commission the opinions that the Supreme Court issued were to speak for themselves and that we who were working at the court were not to go out and go defending those opinions. The last thing you wanted was to have young law clerks interpreting what the court had done. The opinions spoke for themselves and whether we had said it rightly or wrongly, that was it and nobody was to add to that. I think that was his view with respect to the report of the commission as well. That the report stated the conclusions and was to speak for itself. Now, i dont remember perhaps others do i dont remember getting an explicit direction from anybody at the commission that we were not to go out ourselves and speak but i think that was the feeling of a lot of us, certainly the feeling of myself as a young member that i was not going to go out and be the spokes person. And i think what happened and how things got off to a wrong start in a sense is that there was this bevy of conspirators coming out and all these people trying to get publicity and the report came out and those of us most familiar with it were not out speaking and defending what the commission had done. Ive always thought that somehow got things off to a poor start. What christopher did was that after we issued our report, we queconven conveneed and lastly with respect to your russian story, some years ago, a book came out which he was a kgb agent who defected and he kept copious notes of all of his activities and smuggled them out in his shoe and ended up in london and somebody put it together and they did a book. And i got the book and i went to the index and kennedy assassination, i went there and what the kgb decided to do was to send money, funds, to an entity in new york which supported some of the writers who were implicating the cia. So the kgb was actually, you know, trying to stir the pot up a little bit and fund some of the conspiracy theoryists. They weorist s. As someone whos had to enlist investigating officers, im i know at least a little about the difficulties you assumed in performing your duties. Im interested in your thoughts on what i call the government investigatio investigations paradox. That no matter how far up the hill you roll the investigative boulder, its never enough. When is the investigation enough . I covered this issue of government investigations from my own experiences in army judge advocate who served in iraq who conducted investigations on actions in combat and then highprofile investigation or another isnt ongoing. I remain struck by the militarys investigation into the death of nfl player and army ranger pat tillman. A sixth investigation not of the death but of the five investigations. The army faced similar challenges in other battles in afghanistan. Theres always more you can investigate, more people to be interviewed or reinterviewed, tests, reenactments can be done. Indeed, i submit that the longer and more thorough an investigation the more sysyphean the investigation backs. If you tell me a witness was interviewed five times over the course of a couple of years, what would be suspicious to me is if their memory and perception didnt change. Five identical statements would be suspicious. Yet, superficially when statements are inconsistent, it seems damaged and can marshal a call for another investigation. And investigations tend to confront a number of what i think wed call cognitive biases. Were fortunate in the u. S. Most americans will never know what its like to be shot at or to be around someone who has been shot or what gun fire in an urban area sounds like. Having been shot at in an urban environment specifically mosul, iraq, i would offer the audience that when you are being shot at, you do not have a clue from where youre being shot at. Its only in the last two or three years that weve twoed the technology to help Service Members identify from where theyre being shot at in an urban environment. I teach evidence among other things at. Law school and the first day of class this fall i did an eyewitness perception exercise. First day of class, i was explaining how the course will go, this is what the test will cover, and literally about the middle of the first class i had one of our support staff come in, get in an argument with me, a verbal altercation, and then storm out. And then i immediately asked 98 eyewitnesses who were no further away from this exchange than you are to me to write down and describe what happened and the person involved. And i compiled those results and displayed them for the class the next day and the only point of agreement was that the person that had come in the room was a she. Everything else, there was amazingly wide variance. People sitting next to each other turning how could you say she was wearing a black dress. It was blue. So we are not the eyewitnesses that we think we are. And what oddly, we know were not the eyewitnesses that we continue to think we are. So recognizing the cognitive biases, there are some people that youre not going to be able to convince, how did you identify the end point of your investigation into president kennedys assassination . How do you determine or know when is enough enough . In my case, i determined simply that i couldnt think of anything else. I had had it and knew i had done all i can. I was fortunate that i was able to reach that result before we ended but anyway, that was that. And let me elaborate a little bit not on me but on my opinions. Thats why when people say if you had known about the cias attempt to asasassinatassassinat you have worked harder . And the thing is when people you go back again and youre not going to get anything better out of them. Not unless theyre intentionally hiding something. But if they had tried at the beginning to give you an honest account, thats probably all they can tell you. Let me say first thank you for your comments and for your service. I think the examples that you raise about the internal dod investigations of the tillman matter and how theres really fodder for those who say that Government Agencies cant investigate themselves and therefore you look outside and thats to some extent the use of president ial commissions in this country, royal commissions elsewhere. But the final question you asked is exactly right. Anybody whos been in private practice knows that when youre engaged in writing a brief or doing a discovery or working on a complicated constitutional issue, there comes a point at which you satisfy yourself that you may not have exhausted everything but because of time restrictions or your own sense of what more needs to be done, youve reached the point where enough is enough. This is a consideration in which i was actively engaged in the last six weeks i would say of the commission investigation. And it was an issue that came up on frequent occasions because of the selfdesignation of one of our fellow staffers to be the Commission Staff in the last weeks of his work and that was ape wonderful colleague who did write a series of memoranda late in the day not only when there was gally proof but when there was page proof and he was looking at the page proof sections of the book in which he had no previous exposure and he wanted to convin us to know e thought there were deficiencies that should be addressed now and that he thought we were falling short and not meeting his standards of excellence. And he had very high standards. And we tried to respond as best we could in those last several weeks. Many changes for made. I discussed it to some extent in my book. Sort of curious in the course of writing the book, to what extent did we really respond affirmatively to jims comments. And jim ending up being a very close friend of mine over the decades and he was one of these people who was basically argumentive. Some have said any conversation with jim turned into a dispute. So the point is we had to reach a decision when enough was enough and we knew that there would be loose ends but our sense was that we had conducted what turned out to be the most extensive investigation in the history of the country. We felt confidence in our major conclusions and so we finalized the report. We did ask for extra time in the months of august and september and we got extra time. But id be the first to admit that we could have continued to work for another month or three months but im not sure that there would be any change in our conclusions. Let me kind of respond in this way. I think our initial primary purpose was to deal with immediate questions that we knew we had to deal with such as was there a foreign conspiracy, et cetera. Whats happened is the question of what about the critics who are going to come on virtually everything the critics have, theres no new evidence. Virtually everything they have comes out of the 26 volumes of evidence that weve given them. So should we have done what stewart said we did and hes right, we never got an order that we should not do it but it felt that the chief justice and other people set the standard for us. But what we now have are a group of people who write about things that are very, very remote from the evidence. And should there have been somebody maybe in the Justice Department to which people who had questions about the very kinds of things that mr. Stone has raised here could have come hopefully to someone who was trusted and go and talk with him and go through this. But the further that dialogue was forclosed to everybody and so they went initially let me say ive talked to a lot of the people who they call themselves researchers. These are very honest in my opinion honest serious hardworking, intelligent people who have really grasped one or the other. And i think they want to get at what they believe is the missing truth. And i think there should have been a way for them to go to some knowledgeable people. Not any of the rest of us. We had to get on with our lives. We really did. I dont know what that institutional position was but i think it might have thanks. I want to come up to 2013. Im going to ask these of each of you. In our department in the tower center, our clientele is largely undergraduate and tom and i are teaching a course this semester about j. F. K. , his life and his legend. But lets get real. These students that means they were born in 1993. That means their parents were more than likely born in 1963. Okay. So our rationale is to say consider historical reference, consider lets say your work, why do people look at this different kinds of authors, well intentioned or not and draw different kinds of conclusions, supportive or otherwise. Now, against that backdrop, my question of each of you, what do these students need to know about the time the kennedy era, the pressures you folks faced because there was politics going on and your report. You know, any aspect of that. I would say that first they should have access to the best statements of the facts that they can. And that does not mean just the warren report. It means some of the criticism. But primarily and ive mentioned this before, i think that very long book and obviously they cant be told to read the whole thing. That would take the whole semester. But you could take specific series disputes doubts whatever you want to call them and say read these, read the Warren Commission report on it and then read this and give them the pages and so on. There is a new book out. Dallas, 1963. They should be reading that so they know the context of things. I think there are a couple of things in this context, one of which has to do with those of us who are working on it. Aware that we be were all products of the second world war, which was a. Period of intense patriotism and there was not one of us who is not determined to if this hadecause been a conspiracy or if we had the wrong person, our countrys safety was in great jeopardy. Despite what people think about politics as going on today, youve got to understand that none of that was at work with any of us. These are people who are absolutely determined even though they are getting paid by the government, to find the. Ruth if you start with the idea that there were some people in the country at that time that cared about that, maybe you can see from some of us here that davis and i disagreed on something. We will be very candid with each other and pointed out. It is hard to think that any such body like this existed. Despite the fact that there were signs in dallas to impeach kennedy, for many of us and for most of us who wound up on the commission the kennedy years was a time of camelot. That the entire country felt was hard to imagine. That was something, i think, that affected everyone who is involved in this task. The last thing in the world that we wanted to do was cover anything up or not get to the bottom of it. This was an exceptionally personal experience that we all went through, this shooting of the president. It framed our mentality. It was not to go in and find excuses or cover up. It was to get to the bottom of it. I think those feelings pervaded the task. Think, somewhat at a disadvantage doing with sophomores in college, because they have not been exposed to the legal or judicial process. This is a criminal investigation , a factfinding mission. Any of us who have been involved in factfinding, we are all lawyers and we have had two trial judges and two appellate justices here. That in the simplest intersection case, somebody will save the light is red and somebody will say the light was green, someone will say i was in the middle of the road, some will say you were at the crosswalk. You put all the evidence together and you get an accident reconstruction person and all of the evidence points in one direction. The fact thatg some other person says no, the light was red or the car was in the intersection. So what i am longwinded lee someones the fact that says they saw someone on the grassy knoll or i heard orbiting shots, those are facts that is evidence, but they are totally inconsistent with all scientific andg other evidence. You have to come to a conclusion , notwithstanding the fact that there may be some inconsistencies. I dont think people understand that notion. Idea thator see the somebody says i heard four shots or i saw somebody on the grassy know. They think, that is it. There is something wrong here. Real quick to conclude. , and anyoneection can comment, i dont recall any stories that said according to sources close to the one commission how did you guys keep it under wraps . Was it just a different journalistic crime it climate , or were there extraordinary, where you approached by reporters and the like . Not while i was working. Howard was different. There were numerous leaks from the commission. The stories were always cited by a source close to the word commission or someone close to it. I describe some of these in the book because it came as a surprise in march to learn from a wellin warmed source wellinformed source that our investigation will be completed in march and the report would be out by april. In some cases it was possible to identify the source of the story. Isone story, senator cooper ,escribed in laudatory terms and general pattons tank assault on the nazis, and he is quoted in the report as saying report members are anxious to get the report out. It was written in a way that happen to be that laudatory story. Routinely, the commission would vote to ask the fbi to investigate the leak. In one case, when the dallas news featured a story about making public oswalds historic historicroperty propertya piece of that Marina Oswald wanted to keep personal. They announced with great pride that the fbi would investigate this week because they had gone to the highest level of journalism and he thought it was their obligation to report any fact that came to their attention. I do not begrudge that. Leaksthe opportunity for and communication and social media are beyond anyones comprehension if youre over 30 years old. There were leaks. A handful were of concern to the commission. Investigations were ordered. Nothing resulted, as you would expect. We went on. Another reason to get the report out. One of the reasons we had hearings which were considered private hearings, although a witness could ask for a public hearing and one did. The point was that a commission whether they should have had public hearings. The idea was going public with witnesses individually over several months produces a lot of coherenton without any shaping or emphasis on where it is going. The commission decided to remind president on all the important issues until they received a published report. You just answered the second most asked question for the audience. Let me oral a phrase. We have to come to a conclusion. May i ask you to join me in thanking these panelists for all they have given us this afternoon . [applause] thank you for your attendance and attention. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] youre watching American History tv on cspan 3. To join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. Each week, American History tvs reel america brings us archival film to tell the story of the 20th century. In 1964, the president ial Campaign Officially launches as hundreds of thousands of people assemble in detroit to hear president johnsons first bid for election. His speech is mainly concerned with nuclear weapon. While not naming Barry Goldwater, he reaffirmed the need for strict president ial control of nuclear weapons. Make no mistake. There is no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon. Years, noilfilled nation has used the adam against the other. To do so now is a political decision of the highest order. It would lead us down and uncertain path of blood and counter blood, whose outcome none may know. No president of the United States of america can divest himself of the responsibility for such a decision. As the cheers ring out in detroit, there are more in los angeles. 50,000 people packed to Dodger Stadium to greet the republican candidate. Senator Barry Goldwater a lives arise with mrs. Goldwater. This is the opening of his first swing that will take him into washington, oregon, and for other states. Four other states. Mr. Goldwater took the geisha and to call the administrations tax cut as cynical. A 25 reduction over five years if he is elected. The Campaign Manager called the curtainraiser and auspicious one. Next up is sacramento before going to the pacific northwest. The republican candidate admitted he is the underdog, but said he did not know what to do if he was not. Mr. Goldwater mixed freely with the crowd. Now it is official. The campaign is underway and nothing can stop it but election day. They call her dora, but she is no lady. The fourth major hurricane of season hits the floridageorgia coastline. Winds of up to 100 Miles Per Hour cover the beaches. Storm coveredthe more area than the new england state. 30,000 people took refuge in schools and hospitals along the coast area coast. In saint augustine, much of the beach was lost to erosion. 160foot section disappeared. If you had to put it to a vote, dora was the most unpopular girl in town. Tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, Oregon State University professor Mercer Chapelle chapelle marissa discusses the civil rights and the war on poverty. That is on lectures in history, our program that takes you inside classes across the country for lectures ranging from the American Revolution from 9 11. You are watching American History tv on cspan 3. 200 years ago this summer during the war of 1812, british soldiers invaded washington, d. C. On august 24, 1814 and set fire to the white house and u. S. Capitol building. President James Madison and first Lady Dolley Madison fled the city. Historiansouse discuss tonight. Discusses the portrait of george washington, saved by dolley madison. House Historical Historical Society hosted the event