Writing an historical account of a violent and emotion-laden contemporary event presents a number of difficult problems, some of which cannot be solved. The November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy is such an event. Scholars of these crises must gather the widely scattered evidence, analyze it, and write a lucid account for both the scholarly community and the public. Their role in a social crisis is no different from their role at any other time. In fact, the emergency provides an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the practical use of scholarship.

Obtaining a solid base in the facts requires careful attention to the types of evidentiary materials immediately available and an awareness that many will be from federal, state, and local governmental agencies, which always leave an imprint upon them. When there is a possibility of foreign intrigue in the crisis, as in the John F. Kennedy assassination, the pressure for knowledge of its basic outline increases. The emotional urge to proceed hastily with the first available documents is often irresistible. The first picture of events is usually distorted because the evidence becomes public in such an erratic manner that minor facts are emphasized while important ones remain obscure. In the investigation of John F. Kennedy's death, background from the federal files on the alleged assassin, Lee H. Oswald, was known in great detail almost immediately after the event. Information on Oswald's murderer, Jack Ruby, remains scanty and murky to this day.[1]

In addition, much of the documentary evidence comes from faceless institutional sources which are not easily accessible to most scholars. Historians cannot push into archives such as the Central Intelligence Agency or the Federal Bureau of Investigation to poke around for material. Nor can historians question the agents who typed crucial documents. Both critics and supporters of the Warren Commission report have asked why federal security agents were not covering the buildings overlooking the assassination site. According to many informed persons this was a most unusual lapse in security arrangements. Historians will probably never know what happened precisely, because the answer must be sought within the operating procedures and methods of complex federal agencies. There may be a logical reason for this fatal error, but historians must be eternal skeptics of evidence whose origin cannot be probed.

The clamor for information frequently leads public and private sources to supply a number of facts that appeal to the emotions but which cannot be used to build a clear and distinct account of the event. The very existence of these facts requires perusal of them before they can be properly classified and the main investigation resumed. For example, the FBI supplied the Warren Commission staff with Jack Ruby's mother's dental chart, Lee Harvey Oswald's grade school attendance sheets, and other impressive irrelevancies, but not the spectrograhic analyses of the bullets and the data upon which they were based.

Further, as investigators assemble data they encounter possible contradictions of fact, but because evidence has been destroyed they have no way of check authenticity. The allegation by critics that a shot went through President Kennedy's limousine windshield from the front, thus proving a conspiracy, can never be checked since in the stress of the moment the car was flown immediately to Detroit, cleaned, and renovated.[2]

A third problem is the handling of documentary evidence that often is related to rank charges and sensational revelations. Scholars have the difficult job of approaching them with the detachment necessary to judge the facts properly. Historians have long been aware that federal inquiries into American crises have been subjected to emotional, truth-twisting pressures, and the documents surrounding the John F. Kennedy murder are no exception. Examples of similar instances include the probe into the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the recent Senate hearings on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

Several investigators of the Dallas tragedy have charged that high government figures were indirectly linked to the President's death. Spectacular charges are hard to evaluate, almost requiring inside knowledge. Scholars have been exposed to similar claims delivered in the white heat of emotion, and know the necessity of calm examination of the documents. These include the treason charges levied against Daniel Boone, the suspicion roused against Alexander Hamilton's connections with Great Britain, and the charges that Robert M. La Follette was pro-German during World War I. In Boone's case the accusation was apparently false, in Hamilton's case the charges were true, and in La Follette's case they were outrageously and deliberately false slurs.[3]

Students also confront the possibility that there are fraudulent documents among the evidence they have to use. Complex analysis must be performed before some of the critical evidence in an emotionally charged incident can be used. Forgeries are fairly common in history, and tend to appear at moments of social crisis. Recent examples from European history include the Czarist, French, and Nazi use of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion against the Jews and Freemasons, and the British right-wing manufacture of the Zionviev letter.[4] In America the Whalen forgeries and the possibility of a counterfeited typewriter in the Alger Hiss case stand out.[5] Critics of the Warren Commission findings allege the existence of several faked facts. These include the possibility that the entire evidence linking Lee Harvey Oswald to the actual shooting is false,[6] and that the third bullet, identified as Commission Exhibit 399, of the three the Warren Commission claims Oswald fired, was planted in the hospital.[7]

The handling of what appears to be minor pieces of evidence that stand contrary to the overwhelming mass of facts is critical. A fact must fit with the rest of the facts and cannot be ignored when it does not. One fact can be the key to understanding an entire tragedy as was the bordereau paper in the French Dreyfus Affair.[8]

Many documents first appear to be simple statements but later turn out to be complex. The historical record abounds with instances of this type, such as Abraham Lincoln's purported Wadsworth letter espousing equality of the races.[9] In the documentary base built during the inquiry into John F. Kennedy's murder, numerous pieces of evidence appeared to be obvious and simple detail but later proved to be extremely complicated, requiring elaborate analysis before being used. These include accounts of the transit of Oswald from the sixth to the first floor of the Texas School Book Depository.[10]

Another problem is the presentation of conclusions which run counter to the popular and official versions of what happened. Those studying the Kennedy murder are aware of the difficulties scholars faced in previous years with similar issues, and realize they must be able to maintain an objective calm both when hunting a publisher and later when reading reviews of their work. The revisionist historians, who explained that World War I developed partly out of tensions created by allied pressure upon the expanding German nation and not solely in unprovoked German militarism, came under heavy censure from their colleagues until the late 1920s.[11] The publication of German and Russian documents supported the revisionists' position and helped dispel criticism. Later, historians divided over the background of the American entry into World War II, some claiming there had been a conspiracy between American civilian and military officials to provoke the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The lack of complete documentary sources played a major role in the swirling controversy. The anticonspiracy school of historians silenced the conspiracy school in a seldom-recalled, bitter struggle, frequently using shoddy methods that displayed a lapse in academic objectivity.[12]

The question of a conspiracy lurking behind an event of key national importance is commonly encountered in a crisis. Its constant appearance in the writings critical of the Warren Commission findings is not an unusual historical phenomenon, but it is one that is as difficult to answer as it is serious in its implications. A conspiracy means that several persons planned, perpetrated, or attempted to perpetrate an unlawful act. Europeans, American, and Wisconsin history contain well-documented instances. European conspiracies are the Dreyfus Affair in France and the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico by Soviet agents.[13] In America conspiracies were part of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s, the American Protective League during World War I, and the plundering and destruction of the Indian tribes of Oklahoma.[14] In Wisconsin there was the bribing of almost all the members of the Wisconsin government by business interests in 1856 and the post-Civil War scheme of timber interests to take the Stockbridge Indian reservation. [15]

Throughout American history numerous claims of the existence of a conspiracy have been proven false, though historians have had a difficult time refuting some of them. There were the false claims that Abraham Lincoln conspired to cause the outbreak of the Civil War, that the railroad workers who struck in 1894 were in conspiracy against democratic government, that radicals were conspiring in 1919 to take over the country, and that the Cold War emerged out of an international communist conspiracy.[16] False conspiracy scares often appear to during crises in American life and sweep public opinion and federal officials into reactionary stances so severe at times that the national life is twisted with tension, bitterness, and fear.

The impact of false conspiracy charges is one of two principal reasons scholars are reluctant to tackle contemporary emotion-charged and violent events. This is especially true of President Kennedy's death since the murder has been proclaimed the work of a lone, psychologically disturbed, itinerant janitor. It is, however, precisely in the realm of controversial social problems that historical methods in the hands of scholars ought to perform better than any other method.

The second reason why scholars hesitate derives from American historians' strong acceptance of the theory of relativity, which holds that an event ought not to be examined until forty years or more after its occurrence, when its outline will have become distinct and clear. Only then will the manuscript sources be suitably stored and properly arranged for work. The event can then be seen through the critical eye of a broad perspective and the inhibiting emotions of the present will have faded sufficiently to permit objective research. Such considerations help account for the failure of professional historians, acting under scholarly conditions, to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The difficulty in using relativism is that the facts are never all obtained; events one thousand years old are still unclear and still being researched. The theory serves as a built-in, permanent functional disability. It is undergoing very effective criticism.[17] Like so many other theories, such as evolution, pragmatism, and psychic idealism, that have periodically emerged to dominate the doctrinaire approaches to historical inquiry and have then fallen into disuse, relativity also appears to be on the decline. Its present sway is regrettable, since the study of the assassination provides an opportunity to demonstrate the relevance to the public good of the scholarly abilities developed by the historical profession.

As a consequence of the dominance of these two factors over historians, the nonofficial investigation of the assassination has been left to citizen-scholars, opportunists, and eccentrics who have given us a rather unique literature, as voluminous as its quality is mixed. Some have produced outright fiction, others have suffused modest scholarly techniques with distorting emotions, and a few have reached conclusions through such careful evaluation of the evidence that their work should be recommended to scholars everywhere.

It is customary in dealing with contemporary history for the scholar to make his viewpoint explicit. This reviewer believes that there was a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy, and that it can be shown by the evidence in the following public documents: the physical evidence --- especially bullet CE 399 and the autopsy reports --- seems incontrovertible that there was more than one assassin; on the other hand, no evidence --- the entire sequence of events, the curtain rod, the sixth floor position, the transit to the first floor --- links Oswald to the actual shooting. Other considerations which are not conclusive by themselves do bolster the conspiracy theory. These include the evidence brought out by Jim Garrison, as reported verbatim in the New Orleans press; eyewitnesses and photographs of the scene in Dallas; and the Zapruder movie film.

This reviewer found no evidence in the published material that would link the conspiracy to the institutional acts of the military, business, or intelligence bodies of America, France, or Russia. Nor is there evidence linking the conspiracy to a left-wing group.

This review examines the articles and books that reflect objective procedures and attempts to provide some rudimentary assessment of their conclusions. In passing, a few works that have achieved popular success or should be more widely available will be noted. Five authors stand out either for their public acceptance or thorough work; a brief sketch of their background follows.

Columnist Jim Bishop has long specialized in writing about popular subjects. His The Day Kennedy Was Shot is one of the best sellers on the assassination. It is also one of the most error-laden and misinformed volumes. Bishop approached his study of clipping and pasting all the evidence found in the Warren Commission's twenty-six volumes of testimony and exhibits into scrapbooks which were arranged chronologically. His book uses this material, supplemented by interviews of key witnesses such as several with President Lyndon Johnson. Having blindly taken as his working base the official findings of the Warren Commission, he uses history to defend them. His basic fallacy is the use of documents and testimony without even a suspicion that many are complex and full of contradictions.

Mark Lane is a New York attorney who early questioned the official version of the Kennedy assassination. With his legal background it is perhaps understandable why he would select as his approach a criticism of the Warren Commission, its evidence, and conclusion. From his analysis of the witness testimony and some of the physical evidence he concludes that the Commission rendered a hasty and improper judgment. Having basically restricted his study to the Warren Commission evidence and procedures and having reached the conclusion of its failure, Lane had two choices: either to find the vast institutional framework of the law a failure or to find a person in it who failed. He chose Chief Justice Earl Warren as a whipping boy but failed to support the accusation with evidence. His concentration on the legal framework and procedures overlooked a third area for criticism --- the investigative federal agencies upon which the Commission had to rely and whose slipshod methods and clumsy procedures merited discussion.

Harold Weisberg had experience as an investigative reporter in the 1930's probing the activities of American fascist groups, and also served as an intelligence officer during World War II. Although he is a tireless worker who has done massive research on the Kennedy assassination, he has been ignored by the academic and general media reviewers. Many balk at reading books that have been privately printed and whose conclusions are forthrightly used as titles. They have erred because his efforts are excellent examples of document analysis and testimony scrutiny. With careful procedure a document is studied; he uncovers flaws, errors, conflicts with other documents, and sometimes deliberate misstatements of facts. In no other source can one gain an understanding of the method by which the evidence emerged for the Warren Commission staff to write the Report's conclusions. Weisberg attributes motive to no one, for "the whitewashing was done on the working level, not the level of policy. Policy was wrong and was inhibited. It was safer to be for sin and against motherhood than to deny the successful Communist scare of the Dallas police."[18] The majority of public officials had declared Oswald to be the lone, mad sniper before the investigation got under way, and Weisberg provides scores of instances where investigators for the Commission tended to restrict their research to agree.

Weisberg's weaknesses as an author are, first, he does not consistently organize his material along conventional lines. He analyses a document to support an argument in one chapter and then elsewhere presents additional criticism that adds even more weight to the initial comment. This scatters the attention of readers. Second, he tends to employ expressive language such as "liar," "fraud," and "censor," particularly when he strikes at the arrogance of a witness.

Sylvia Meagher (pronounced Marr), a research librarian for the United Nations, wrote Accessories After the Fact, which is the best book on the assassination but which is seldom found in public libraries. Her numerous articles and constant research have established her as one of the top authorities on the subject, but the learned journals have declined to use her excellent abilities for reviewing books on the assassination.

Penn Jones, Jr., is the editor of a weekly newspaper in a small town near Dallas, Texas. A decorated combat veteran and officer of World War II, he has published his newspaper since 1948, often in the midst of extremist attempts to stifle the paper. His resistance to censorship has earned him top national awards. An indefatigable worker, he is well informed about the details of the murder and an excellent and willing guide of the Texas murder site. When analyzing the facts he places them in a framework of a military conspiracy operating in conjunction with right-wing elements. Many of his statements and assertions are not supported by reference to the evidentiary base; his conclusions are presented in the form of essays and editorials.

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