Faced with startling new evidence of conspiracy in the waning days of its labors, the Warren Commission, in the person of General Counsel J. Lee Rankin, stated: "At this stage, we are supposed to be closing doors, not opening them."

The Assassination Records Review Board may find itself in a similar position, as it wraps up its work. The Board must ponder evidence that seems to prove a convicted murderer and alleged hit man, Malcolm Wallace, left previously unidentified fingerprints on a box on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

This evidence, given to the Board in a petition filed in May, flings a door open wide. The science of fingerprint identification assures us that prints left on cardboard boxes don't last very long. If Wallace did indeed leave fingerprints up there, it is a virtual certainty they were made on November 22, 1963. Around lunchtime.

The Review Board is not, of course, an investigative body. But that does not render it powerless to deal with new evidence. The question is one of integrity and courage --- of whether the Board, consisting of civilians who are nevertheless Establishment figures, will, as John Howard Griffin wrote, "lift the lid from a mystery and risk releasing a stench such as the world has never known...?"

The petition submitted to the Board last spring, which identifies a conspiracy involving no less a personage than Lyndon Johnson, calls for the identification and release of many documents pertaining to Malcolm Wallace. This is clearly within the Board's domain.

Asked about assassination-related records that surface after the Board goes out of existence, Deputy Director Thomas Samoluk said last year, "We intend to do what we can to have a system in place that will continue at least a shadow of what the Review Board was, and tried to do."

It is our fervent hope that neither time nor any other factor will force the ARRB to close this open door.

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