American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [29]
Three months before the Warren Report appeared in September 1964, the New York Times ran a Page One exclusive: “Panel To Reject Theories of Plot in Kennedy Death.” They then printed the whole report as a 48-page supplement, and collaborated with Bantam Books and the Book-of-the-Month Club to publish both hardcover and paperback editions. “The commission analyzed every issue in exhaustive, almost archaeological detail,” according to reporter Anthony Lewis.
The Times also put together another book, The Witnesses, which contained “highlights” from testimony before the Warren Commission. All these were aimed at shoring up the lone-gunman notion. In one instance, a witness who reported having seen a man with a rifle on the sixth floor had other portions of his testimony eliminated—namely, that he’d actually seen two men but been told to “forget it” by an FBI agent. Witnesses like Zapruder, who believed some of the shots came from in front, were left out entirely.
Life magazine devoted most of its October 2, 1964, issue to the Warren Report, assigning commission member (and future president) Gerald Ford the job of evaluating it. In 1997, the Assassination Records Review Board would release handwritten notes by Ford, revealing that he had misrepresented the placement of the president’s back wound—raising it several inches to suggest he’d instead been struck in the neck—in order to make it fit the theory that a single bullet had hit both Kennedy and Connally. Otherwise, the entire lone-assassin notion would have collapsed.
That same issue of Life underwent two major revisions after it went on sale. One of the articles was illustrated with eight frames from the Zapruder film. But Frame 323 turned out to contradict the Warren Report’s conclusion about the shots all coming from the rear. So the issue was recalled, the plates broken and re-set (this was all pre-computer), and Frame 313 showing the president’s head exploding became the replacement. A second “error” forced still another such change. When a Warren Commission critic, Vincent Salandria, asked Life editor Ed Kearns about this two years later, Kearns wrote back: “I am at a loss to explain the discrepancies between the three versions of LIFE which you cite. I’ve heard of breaking a plate to correct an error. I’ve never heard of doing it twice for a single issue, much less a single story. Nobody here seems to remember who worked on the early Kennedy story... ”
And so it went. Skeptics of the Warren Report were often labeled “leftists” or “Communists.” After Mark Lane’s book Rush to Judgment and Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas came out in 1966 questioning the official version, and became best-sellers, the New York Times decided to conduct its own investigation. One of its unit, Houston bureau chief Martin Waldron, later said they’d found “a lot of unanswered questions” that the paper then wouldn’t pursue. “I’d be off on a good lead and then somebody’d call me off and send me out to California on another story or something. We never really detached anyone for this. We weren’t really serious.”
Life magazine also took a fresh look at the case. “Did Oswald Act Alone? A Matter of Reasonable Doubt,” an article in the November 26, 1966 issue was headlined. A reexamination of the Zapruder film, the magazine said, had reached the conclusion that the single-bullet theory didn’t hold up and a new investigation was called for. This was to be the first of a series of articles but, in January 1967, editor Richard Billings says he was informed that “It is not Life’s function to investigate the Kennedy assassination.” That was the last time they’d challenge the Warren Commission’s findings. Billings resigned from the magazine and took a job with a newspaper in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1967, led by Dan Rather, CBS News did a four-part study that again upheld the Warren Report. Warren Commission member John McCloy was the network’s behind-the-scenes advisor.
Another decade went by before the Bernstein piece in Rolling Stone showed