By Gary L. Aguilar, MD and Cyril Wecht, MD, JD

Last fall former Warren Commission assistant counsel Burt Griffin put out a brief in defense of the government’s original 1964 findings regarding John F. Kennedy’s assassination. He was the third Commission counsel to do so. Former Warren Commission assistant counsel David Belin wrote one in 1988.[i] In 2013 assistant counsel Howard Willens did the same with his book History Will Prove Us Right.[ii]

Now Griffin has picked up the baton with a book of his own, JFK, Oswald and Ruby.[iii] What’s striking, though not surprising, is how little the last two authors seem to know (or are willing to admit they know) of what we’ve learned in the millions of once-secret files that have been unsealed during the past 60 years, particularly during the past 25. Were it not for these declassifications, we might not know that much of what Griffin and Willens asks us to accept as true simply is either not true, or not the whole truth.

For example, it isn’t true, as Griffin writes, that “The Warren Commission had not sealed its documents. Our intent was complete openness for the public.” (p. 306) This is an old untruth. It was first disseminated by the New York Times on the day the Warren Report was released. In the simultaneously released, October, 1964, New York Times’ edition of the Warren Report, Timesman Anthony Lewis reported, undoubtedly from a Commission source, that “The Commission made public all the information had bearing on the events in Dallas, whether agreeing with its findings or not. It withheld only a few names of sources, notably sources evidently within Communist embassies in Mexico, and each of these omissions was indicated.”[iv]

This was debunked decades ago. Despite the government’s having slowly released Commission documents in the years following the 1964 release of the Report, the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) discovered that, “at the time that Congress passed the JFK Act (1992), only 3,000 pages of Warren Commission material remained for the agencies and the Review Board to release.[v] “Only?” Moreover, in 2014 historian Philip Shenon reported that Willens was releasing never-seen Commission documents on the former commissioner’s personal website.[vi]

Nor is it true, as Griffin claims (p. 294) that Bobby Kennedy accepted the Commission’s conclusions. This untruth, first put forward in the Warren Report,[vii] was similarly debunked decades ago, a fact established beyond any doubt years ago by best-selling author David Talbot,[viii] whom neither counsel mentions. Also by historian Philip Shenon who long ago wrote that RFK “had never stopped suspecting that there had been a conspiracy to kill his brother,”[ix] and that Bobby “insisted in public that he believed the commission’s report and accepted that Oswald acted alone—but said precisely the opposite to the people closest to him.”[x] This information is readily confirmable with a simple google search of independent sources.[xi]

However, it is true, as Griffin and Willens report, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a marine radar operator at Atsugi Naval Air Base in Japan.[xii] But it’s far from the whole truth, or even the most important part of the truth. Which is that Atsugi was a CIA-run base from which U-2 spy planes flew high-altitude missions over the Soviet Union.[xiii] “Defector” Oswald would have tracked those flights. Given long-held suspicions the “lone nut” had undisclosed intelligence ties, this is scarcely an inconsequential detail. (See below.)

It’s also true, as they report, that Oswald visited Mexico City six weeks before the assassination. The whole truth, which they withhold, includes the fact that someone impersonated this “unknown,” “unaffiliated” “lone nut” in CIA-taped calls that Oswald made to the Soviet Embassy while he was there. This part of the story was published by AP 13 years ago,[xiv] and has been frequently discussed by critics ever since. (See below.)

Both books establish one thing that is as true today as it was in 1964: one should not look to the Warren Report, or its attorneys who defend it, for the truth about November 22nd, 1963. It’s not that one encounters falsehoods, although there’s no shortage of those. It’s more that inconvenient evidence is omitted, or tendentiously spun to lead away from the truth. It’s a feature that defines the lawyers’ briefs Griffin and Willens have produced, as it did Earl Warren’s 1964 lawyer’s brief. Fortunately, not all former Commissioners sing along in the chorus with Griffin and Willens and Warren. In recent years some of them have sung a different tune.

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