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EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN s THE WAR COMMISSION AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF TRUTH INTRODUCTION BY Richard H. Rovere Inquest The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth BY Edward Jay Epstein INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD H. ROVERE The Viking Press . New York Copyright © 1966 by Edward Jay Epstein All rights reserved First published in 1966 by The Viking Press, Inc. 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited Book Club Edition Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS Introduction by Richard H. Rovere 7 Preface 13 1. Overview: The Ten-Month Investigation 19 PART ONE Political Truth 2. The Dominant Purpose 45 3. The Vulnerability of Facts 55 PART TWO The Investigation 4. The Limits of the Investigation 71 5. The Limits of the Investigators 93 6. The Commission Hearings 107 7. The Hypothesis 113 6 Inquest PART THREE The Report 8. Writing the Report 129 9. The Selection Process 133 10. The Commission's Conclusions 147 Appendices Note 153 Appendix A: FBI Summary Report, December 9, 1963 (partial text) 155 Appendix B: FBI Supplemental Report, January 13, 1964 (partial text) 187 Notes 203 Index 217 Illustrations PAGE Elm Street map, with film frame numbers 56 Schematic drawing, Commission Exhibit 385 following 64 Autopsy face sheet, Commission Exhibit 397 64 President Kennedy's suit coat, FBI Exhibit 59 64 President Kennedy's shirt and tie, FBI Exhibit 60 64 INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD H. ROVERE "THE QUEST for truth in the Kennedy assassination has been long and arduous," Harrison E. Salisbury wrote in his introduction to an edition of the Warren Commission Report published under the stately imprimatur of The New York Times. "The Warren Com- mission spent the better part of a year in exhaustive investigation of every particle of evidence it could discover. No material ques- tion now remains unresolved so far as the death of President Ken- nedy is concerned. [The] evidence of [Lee Harvey] Oswald's single-handed guilt is overwhelming." Now, less than two years after the Warren Commission closed its books, we are confronted by a report on its report that chal- lenges almost every one of these satisfied and admiring words, and I find it my appalling duty to state that in my opinion the words do not withstand the challenge. Edward Jay Epstein maintains—and, I believe, amply demonstrates—that the "quest for truth" was also a quest for domestic tranquillity, that the second quest often got in 8 Inquest the way of the first, and that in any case the pursuit was by no means as "long and arduous" as it should have been. Mr. Salisbury said that the Commission spent "the better part of a year in ex- haustive investigation." Mr. Epstein shows that the investigation proper lasted less than ten weeks, that it fell far short of being ex- haustive, and that the Warren Commission as such—that is to say, the Chief Justice of the United States and the six other eminent Americans appointed to serve under him by the President on No- vember 29, 1963—played a minor and often inattentive part in the proceedings. "No material question remains unresolved," Mr. Salis- bury wrote. Mr. Epstein discloses that at least one large question of incontestable materiality—the number of rifle shots fired at the Presi- dential party—was never resolved, not even, astonishingly, to the satisfaction of the Commissioners themselves. He believes that the case for Oswald's guilt was solidly established. But he insists that evidence of Oswald's "single-handed" guilt was not, as Mr. Salisbury has it, "overwhelming," but incomplete and highly vulnerable. Mr. Epstein, a brilliant young academician, is not hawking any sensations or playing any hunches about a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy. He is not saying that there was a second assassin or that proof of the existence of one would necessarily alter the funda- mental nature of the case. (If one Oswald was possible, why not two? It would not have been the first crime committed by a pair of "loners"—vide In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.) He is dealing with the record and disentangling the evidence from the conclusions. "If there was no evidence of more than one assassin," he writes, "there was also no evidence that precluded the possibility." The case for Oswald's single-handed guilt rests, as of now, wholly on the Warren Commission's finding that only three bullets were fired at the Presidential party and that one of these described an eccentric course through the bodies of President Kennedy and Governor John Connally of Texas. According to Mr. Epstein, "There was, how- ever, no substantial evidence which supported this contention, and there was evidence that all but precluded the possibility that both men had been hit by the same bullet." I will not attempt here to restate or condense Mr. Epstein's line of reasoning. He makes his Introduction by Richard H. Rovere 9 own case adroitly and with an economy of language I might find my- self unable to match. That the case is as impressive as it is disturb- ing is borne out, in my view, by the fact—brought to light here for SBA.v the first time—that the Warren Commission was itself divided on c AweI" this crucial matter and that it settled the question by what some members called "the battle of the adjectives." In characterizing the evidence on which its single most important conclusion rests, the strongest word the Commissioners could agree upon was "per- suasive." A word they could not agree upon was "compelling." _t Mr. Epstein does not challenge or even question the fundamental integrity of the Commission or its staff. He discards as shabby "demonology" the view that the Commissioners collusively sup- pressed evidence. He pays the Commission Report the high com- pliment of close scrutiny. His concern when he undertook this study was not with the conclusions the Commission reached; it was with the processes of fact-finding employed by an agency having a com- plex and in some ways ambiguous relationship to the bureaucracy that brought it into being. "The primary subject of this book is the Warren Commission, not the assassination," he says. And although, along the way, he raises some sharp questions about the assassina- tion, he adheres rigorously to his fundamental purpose: an examina- tion of the way in which a group of Americans prominent in public and professional life carried out an assignment given them by their President, that assignment being, in the language of Executive Order 11130, "to ascertain, evaluate, and report upon the facts relating to the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy." Executive Order 11130 was promulgated by a President seven days in office and at a moment in history when the merest show of presence of mind seemed a triumph over the environment. If some of us may now find ourselves critical, it is thanks to hindsight and to the kind of insight this book provides. As Mr. Epstein says, the President could find little guidance in American history. Mr. Epstein believes that the closest thing to a precedent for the Warren Com- mission was the Roberts Commission that prepared a report on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This is probably so, although it occurs to me that some procedures might have been borrowed from 10 Inquest government regulatory agencies—for example, the Federal Aviation Agency in its disinterested and meticulous investigations of airplane accidents. But even to suggest such comparisons is to show how incomparable a situation President Johnson faced in his first days in office. In any event, if Mr. Epstein's analysis is as generally sound as I believe it to be, one of the major failings of the Warren Commis- sion arose from the concept of expertise which was in the President's mind when he chose the members and in the members' minds when they chose their staff. The seven Commissioners were chosen more for their known probity than for their mastery of probative tech- niques. And the Commissioners, lawyers without exception, hired a staff of lawyers. These were chosen as much for their professional standing as for the skills and experience relevant to the problem at hand. The Commissioners evidently gave some thought to hiring men with other skills and backgrounds but did not do so because they felt that they could call on all sorts of experts already in federal employment. "Because of the diligence, cooperation, and facilities of Federal investigative agencies," they said in their own foreword to the Report, "it was unnecessary for the Commissioners to employ investigators other than members of the Commission's legal staff." The Commission, then, was a committee of lawyers, all of whom were also public servants and men with present or very recent con- nections with the federal government. It was assisted almost ex- clusively by lawyers. Lawyers serve clients as doctors serve patients and teachers serve students. Technically, the Commission's client was Lyndon B. Johnson; its official title was the President's Com- mission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. All that the President asked of the Commission was the truth, and truth was what the Commissioners sought. But at crucial points the Com- mission's structure, its procedures, and, finally, the peculiar atmos- phere in which it worked hampered and deflected its search. Its professional investigative arm was the Federal Bureau of Investiga- tion, in many ways an estimable organization but one with interests of its own to protect. Thus, when the question arose as to whether Lee Harvey Oswald had ever been an informant for the FBI, the Commission sought an answer from the FBI and was assured that Introduction by Richard II.

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