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The release of the Assassination Records Review Board's Final Report at the end of September was accompanied by a great deal of media attention, both print and electronic. Almost none of it was front page, lead story material, judging from what I saw. It may well be that for many media outlets, it was one of the few times, if not the only time, that its reader-, listener-, or viewer-ship was informed of the Board's existence.
The Board's Report was turned over to Congress on September 29, and to President Clinton the following day. While I did not personally monitor all media, I did keep track of those mentions that I was aware of.
An Associated Press dispatch appeared fairly widely; its lead sentence quoted the Board's statement that the U.S. Government "needlessly and wastefully" withheld records on the JFK assassination, "causing Americans to mistrust their government."
This may turn out to be the new fallback position for officialdom: the government needlessly and wastefully withheld records, because the Warren Commission was right all along. But that remains to be seen.
In any case, this AP story appeared in my local paper (the Boulder Daily Camera) and the nearby Denver Post, as well as in USA Today. It featured a fairly low-key quote from Gerald Posner, who said only that the Board provided "documents that help fill in the details of this horrible event in Dallas 35 years ago." The article also had a comment by James Lesar: "There is physical, medical, ballistics evidence that leads you to conclude that one person could not have fired all the shots." David Lifton added that "no one working on the Kennedy assassination today can ignore what the review board did. The true debate now begins."
One of the strangest articles appeared in The New York Times. The lead sentence to this story, published September 30th, opined that "There is no second gunman, no assassin skulking on the grassy knoll, no vast conspiracy." This is a blatant distortion, as the Review Board never said that.
The Times article also said the Board was "created by Congress six years ago to dispel an abiding sense among some Americans that the truth about the Kennedy assassination had been hidden." This is also a blatant misrepresentation, since the Board was created to release records and nothing more. Its unstated goal may indeed have been to dispel the sense we've been lied to, but this statement by the Times was completely off the mark.
Gerald Posner was an omnipresent media darling for the several days before and after the release of the Report. The same Times article mentioned above called him the author of "respected" books on the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations. He was quoted in several other articles, and heard in a sound bite on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He also appeared on NBC News with Tom Brokaw, and opposite author Harrison Livingstone on NBC's Today show.
Posner told host Katie Couric that the Board's Report "doesn't show any Mob involvement, it doesn't show Oswald having any link to the CIA..." The Report also said "exactly what I said five years ago in my book, that the FBI and the CIA had a massive coverup --- not of an assassination, but trying to cover up their own bureaucratic reputations. And in so doing, they didn't serve the Warren Commission correctly, nor serve history, and they laid the groundwork for a lot of conspiracy speculation."
Harrison Livingstone --- his name consistently mis-pronounced by Couric --- was then asked if the Board's conclusions "blow a whole in" his conspiracy theory.
"Katie, I regret that Gerald Posner completely misstated the facts," Livingstone replied. "The Board did not draw any conclusions --- that was not in their mandate." He then reiterated some of what he told Fair Play in August: "What the Board did that was stunning was to re-interview the doctors, and to go down the chain of evidence and give us this raw material ... these new interviews and depositions show conclusively that the autopsy was faked, and that the photography was false ... Gerald Posner has never done his homework in this case; he doesn't understand the evidence."
Posner rather pompously replied that this was a predictable response by Livingstone and anyone else who rejects the Warren Commission findings: that, confronted with solid lone-gunman evidence, cries of "faked evidence!" are heard. Posner then suggested Couric ask Livingstone if the Zapruder film was faked. "You can ask him that; that's what he thinks."
Livingstone countered this with data gleaned from his readings of the medical evidence released by the Board last July 30. "Those interviews and depositions quoted by both the Associated Press [sic] ... the photographer who took the photographs of the brain says those are not his pictures, the photographs of the body are stated by the person who developed them not to be the pictures that she developed; all of the doctors, all of the medical witnesses have insisted that the wounds are not in the correct place."
Then Couric took Posner's suggestion, and asked about the Zapruder film. "Katie, that film is the biggest hoax of our lifetime," Livingstone replied. He also reminded viewers, who may not have heard at the time, that former President and Warren Commissioner Gerald Ford admitted to altering the wording of a key passage in the Warren Report about where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body.
Couric gave Posner the final word, with which he reiterated the lone nut thesis.
The Board's Final Report was delivered to President Clinton on September 30. The following day, the Associated Press reported that "the White House excluded reporters to prevent questons about possible impeachment and the Monica Lewinsky affair."
Soon after this, however, Ohio State University's daily paper, The Lantern, ran a feature on Kermit Hall, the OSU professor who served on the ARRB. Hall told The Lantern that the Board was scheduled to meet with the President for ten minutes, but that Mr. Clinton was so interested it lasted for forty-five.
"The President was very gracious, humorous, and congenial," Hall said. "He was also very praiseworthy of our work."
Hall also told The Lantern, in reference to the Board's Final Report, that "I feel confident with our answers ... but there is probably some more information that we didn't get to."
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