Portland Observer
Thursday, May 27, 1976
Page 3
The Kennedy assassination: A case thaï will not die
by Peter hale Scott
iMltor'x Note: Thia is the first in a
eerie, of two article, by Peter Dale Scott,
a proleaaor ol English at the University
ol (alllornia, Berkeley, and one ol the
country's leading scholarly exports on the
John F. Kennedy assassination. He has
authored or edited numerous articles and
books on covert politics, foreign and
domestic, including most recently “The
Assassinations, Dallas and Beyond" Ran
dom House, 1970.)
B E R K E L E Y . PNS
The beginning of
the end of twelve years of national
schizophrenia about the Kennedy assas
»¡nation may be at hand.
For the first time, a national political
leader, Senate intelligence committee
chairman Frank Church II)., Idaho), has
publicly confirmed what polls have indi
cated a majority of Americans have long
believed: There was an official cover up.
Both the C IA and FBI withheld relevant
information from the Warren Commis
sion.
Never before has there existed such a
com plete divergence betw een official
U.8. government dogma ■ "Oswald acted
alone"
and public belief.
But the key question remains: Will
some form of cover up merely replace
past ones? W ill the new intelligence
oversight committee proposed by the
Church committee choose a broad re
opening of the assassination and cover
up, or a narrow investigation not chai
lenging the W arren Commission finding
that Oswald acted alone, but merely
looking into his motives?
The Senate intelligence committee has
already voted to recommend the latter.
Whether the momentum of an unraveling
cover up will carry it further
now that
the unmentionable has been mentioned
remains uncertain.
It is certain that the past twelve years
have seen one obstruction after another.
For a decade, except for a brief interlude
in 1966 67, the national media stuck
doggedly with the lone assassin dogma.
When Lyndon Johnson speculated in a
1969 CBS interview that Oswald might
have been part of an international con
spiracy, that portion of the interview was
deleted, and not broadcast until six years
later. CBS said that Johnson's assassins
lion remarks had been suppressed in the
"interests of national security."
Yet public opinion resolutely refused to
accept the official findings of the Warren
Report. Some of the reasons are obvious:
The improbability of the events them
selves, climaxed when Oswald was mur
dered on T V by an equally improbable
"lone assassin," Jack Ruby; the incessant
work of the W arren Commission critics,
whose lists of anomalies and misrepre
sentations produced a whole new.genre of
literature in the counterculture of the
late 1960s; that counterculture itself,
largely the product of the national divi
sion over the Vietnam war. which gua
ranteed that critics like Mark Ijin e would
find a ready following on the college
campuses of all 50 states.
All of the work by critics might h»ve
become a private curiosity, as remote
from political realities as the ongoing
doubts about the murder of President
Lincoln, had it not been for two intriguing
developments.
The first was the fact of the cover up
itself, which served to glamorize the
question of an assassination conspiracy.
I t soon became w id ely known, for
example, that Time Life, having bought
for a large fee the film of the assassina
tion by a bystander, Abraham Zapruder,
was making the Zapruder film totally
inaccessible. Bootleg prints of the Zap
ruder film began to circulate and draw
large crowds.
The choking off of Jim Garrison's
investigation in Ixiuisiana, a development
still shrouded in b itte r co n tro versy,
heightened the impression that truth was
being deliberately obscured.
The second development, and perhaps
the decisive one, was W atergate. W ater
gate established as a fart that cover ups.
“in the interest ol national security,"
could be ordered by the W hite House and
carried out by the C IA and FBI.
Worse, the W atergate investigations
failed to uncover precisely what it was
that Nixon, and the C IA and the FB I all
had been working to cover up.
The
transcript that led to the President's
resignation spoke only in guarded terms
of the "Cuba thing," the "whole Bay of
Pigs thing," which would “make the C IA
look bad" and be "very unfortunate for
the country."
What all this was about has never been
disclosed. Hut nearly the only thing that
Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby had in
common was a shared interest in Cuba, at
a time when the C IA and the Mafia were
collaborating to assassinate Fidel Castro.
And Frank Sturgis, one of the six
W atergate burglars, had been named in
Warren Commission documents as the
author of false stories about I>ee Harvey
Oswald.
The national investigation into W ater
gate was followed swiftly by a lifting of
an informal media embargo against talk
of 8n assassination conspiracy. In July
1973, shortly after the first Senate
W atergate hearings, the Atlantic Month
ly quoted President Johnson as saying, “I
never believed that Oswald acted alone."
For the first time, conferences and
meetings about assassination conspira
cies began to receive oblique mention in
the national press. A bootleg Zapruder
film print was screened for the press at
one conference, then shown on late night
television.
SPREADS TO CIA
By 1975 the cancer of W atergate had
spread to the C IA itself and the presi
dential commission chaired by Nelson
Rockefeller to investigate the C IA had
been established.
The Rockefeller Commission acquired
as its executive director an Iowa lawyer
named David Belin, whose last public
service had been as staff counsel for the
Warren Commission after which he had
become the Commission's most persistent
and controversial defender.
Belin was chosen for the Rockefeller
Commission post by President Gerald
Ford, who besides Belin was the only
member of the Warren Commission to
w rite a book defending the report.
Daniel Schorr, then the CBS reporter
on C IA activities, has since disclosed that
about this time Ford told a W hite House
luncheon with editors of the Now York
Times that he had had to choose the
Rockefeller Commission members very
carefully, because “there was the danger
that the commission would trip over
matters a lot more sensitive than domes
tic surveillance.”
When asked which matters, Ford re
plied, "Off the record, like assassina
tions."
Schorr surmissed later that "the whole
panoply of the Rockefeller investigation
was to keep attention focused on the
C IA ’s domestic surveillance, which had
apparently leaked from a 1973 internal
report of the C IA . hoping to keep under
wraps other more dangerous parts of the
same report."
Schorr broke part of this story in
February 1975. In response, the Rocke
feller Commission announced that it
might investigate C IA involvement in
foreign assassination plots, and President
Ford added later that, although the
Warren Commission might "take a look at
it - the problems.”
Hut when unanswered questions about
a C IA aspect to the Kennedy assassina
tion were raised before the Rockefeller
panel, Belin - rather than investigating
them
referred them to the C IA itself
for a possible reply.
That reply was
never made.
Instead, the Rockefeller Commission
chose to ignore nearly all the work of the
long time Warren Commission critics -
including the charge, since proven cor
reel, that the C IA withheld relevant
material from the W arren Commission -
responded only to charges that Howard
Hunt and Frank Sturgis had both been
present in Dallas on November 22, 1963,
aired recently in the media.
This was in keeping with the last
minute decision, with all of the press now
w atching closely, to drop from the
Rockefeller report its intended chapter
on foreign assassination plots. Someone,
either President Ford or Vice President
Rockefeller, decided instead to turn all
this assassination material over to Sena
tor Church's committee.
I t is not yet clear whether all of this
material has been released or if some of it
will now be transmitted either secretly or
in public form to the proposed Senate
intelligence oversight committee.
An attempt to narrow the investigation
to Oswald's motives - particularly his ties
to Cuban premier Fidel Castro - may
have been behind an informal C IA memo
of May 1975 by C IA counsel Ray Rocca.
Rocca eleven years earlier had been the
C IA liaison to the W arren Commission.
The memo, in response to discussions
with Rockefeller Commission Director
David Belin, speculated that Oswald
might have acted in response to a public
speech by Fidel Car.ro. in which Castro
allegedly threatened President Kennedy.
In the words of the 27 page Rocca C IA
memo, “the purpose of this review
undertaken by Mr. Belin's request, is to
reconsider Lee Harvey Oswald's activity
in the assumption that as an avid
newspaper reader he read the Castro
warning and threat.”
This language in turn followed the
guidelines of President Ford's remarks of
April 1975, which reemphasized Oswald's
role as the assassin and then recom
mended that the Rockefeller Commission
might look at the probability of "the
VU »VH »< JVM HY
k V A lH K l
involvement of anybody or anybody as a
group in the assassination" - implying
the involvement of Castro.
Then in November 1975, Belin made a
highly publicized call to reopen the
assassination inquiry to see whether
"there is any credible evidence of a
foreign conspiracy ." He stressed that, in
his opinion, this would not upset the
Warren Commission conclusion that Os
wald acted alone.
A few days later. Ford made a similar
statement.
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The Association honored I)r. Jackson,
often referred to as “Ma Jackson" or
“that N A A C P lady," in the fourth of a
series of 100 markers dedicated to Black
American pioneers.
An A S A LH research committee head
ed by Dr. Roland C. McConnel, Chairman
of the Morgan State College Department
of History, reports that Lillie Mae Car
roll, born in Baltimore on May 25. 1869,
was a descendant of Charles Carroll,
signer of both the Declaration of Inde
pendence and the United States Consti
tution. and John Bowen, a free African
chief.
President of the Baltimore Branch of
the National Association for the Ad
vancement of Colored People for 35
years, she increased the N A A C P mem
bership from 2,000 in 1935 to nearly
18,000 by 1946, making the N A A C P the
largest civil rights organization in Mary
land.
Through the NA A C P, Lillie Jackson
used seven successive law suits in the
Maryland Court of Appeals to open the
University of Maryland Schools of Law.
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the Graduate School of Sociology and the
Undergraduate School of Engineering
0935-1950) in her fight against segrega
tion.
Her work with the N A A C P resulted in
successful campaigns to employ Blacks as
cab drivers, bus drivers, firemen, police
men, and other municipal and state
employees, as well as employees in the
private sector.
Municipal swimming
pools, tennis courts. State Parks, and
beaches were desegregated through a
series of suits won in the Supreme Court
0954). setting a precedent for the entire
nation.
D r. Jackson and the N A A C P led
successful fights against police brutality,
and supplied bail and legal defense for
some 300 student sit-in leaders and
freedom riders.
A fter 35 years of leadership in the civil
rights struggle, Lillie Jackson had re
ceived commendations on local and na
tional levels, which included an honorary
Doctor of Humanities from Morgan State
College 0956).
When she retired from the N A ACP
0970), D r. Jackson founded Freedom
House, Incorporated. Begun as a federa
tion of inner city neighborhood leaders to
combat crime and juvenile delinquency, it
has grown to assist the community with
problems of housing, health and youth
employment. Credited with a reduction
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program and a day camp.
The dedication of the plaque was
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hundreds expected to attend.
The two-year historical project was
made possible by a grant from the Amoco
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this joint A SA LH Amoco Foundation
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marker was placed at the birthsite of Dr.
Carter G. Woodson, founder of A S A LH
and "Father of Black History," in New
Canton, Buckingham County, Virginia.
Yhe second plaque was dedicated to
American educator Dr. H. Councill Tren
holm at Alabama State University in
Montgomery, Alabama, and the third was
dedicated to Louis “ Satchm o” A rm
strong, known internationally as the
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The Associa
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The key question is now whether the
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involvement of Fidel Castro.
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