For the last few years I have always been reading a series of books on a set theme in the background while I read other books. I read about a dozen books about the sinking of HMS Titanic and the destruction of Pompeii in the past. Now I have begun a series about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I read Profiles in Courage which is by Kennedy, but I didn’t have much to say about it. I have just finished the report of the official investigation into the assassination: The Warren Commission Report. A text-only copy (with frequent OCR processing errors) is readily available.
How can one really even review this report? It is the text of the official explanation so I have heard most of the story before. If you happen never to have heard the official story before, it goes like this: President Kennedy died of a single gunshot wound to the back of his head. This shot and (only) two others were made by a single shooter from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. That shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald. The bullet fragments in the presidential limousine were fired by the gun found on the sixth floor. That gun was bought by, shipped to and photographed with Oswald months before the assassination. No evidence of material, logistical or planning assistance of any kind from any source was uncovered. Jack Rudy killed Oswald two days later for his own reasons and had no previous connection to Oswald or any other conspiracy. I didn’t find any unreasonable leaps in logic or gaping holes in the Commission’s theories given the information presented. Re-examinations of the case usually start here. All alternate theories must be mounted in opposition to this body of collected information.
What a massive body of information the Report is, too! It is 888 pages including footnotes and is based on what must be thousand of pages of sworn testimony and depositions by eye-witnesses, experts, government officials, and family members and acquaintances of Oswald and Rudy. Since I watch a lot of non-fiction crime shows I am familiar with fingerprint evidence, microscopic comparisons of firing pins and bullets, and question document examination. All of these were used to match the evidence to Oswald. All of these lines of evidence are explained in detail for people who in 1964 had seen fewer episodes of Forensic Files than I have. A bullet matched to a gun, matched to a suspect, who was seen in the area before, during and after the assassination is strong evidence. Plenty of people have been convicted of murder on less. Though, to be fair, and the Report itself points this out, since Oswald was dead by that time the Commission was not bringing evidence to criminal trial so not all of the evidence gathered quite rises to that high level of proof. Case closed!
Unless all the evidence is manufactured, of course... In many ways, reading this report in the 2017, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, after the Watergate scandal, after the Iran-Contra affair, after actual impeachment hearings against a sitting president and that whole “we were wrong about WMD” misadventure it becomes impossible not to think of the possibility the Commission was lied to. The Report makes constant mention of whom the information reported comes from. About half of the information is “according to the FBI” or “according to the Secret Service” or “according to the Dallas Police” or (even!) “according to the Soviet Union’s embassy in Mexico City.” Are these really trustworthy sources of information?! Maybe in 1964 they were. The Commission certainly had faith in the reports and records turned over to them by other government agencies. As the biographies of the commission members make clear, some of them were literally born in the Nineteenth Century! There was criticism of the trusting nature of the Commission even at the time. Overall, it seems that was a simpler age and there is something beautifully old-fashioned about the Report and its tone of assurance.
Speaking of beauty, the part of the Report I find most striking is the domestic portrait it paints of Lee Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina. (Since her family was from Minsk, she’s probably Belarusian, but these intra-USSR distinctions were not the concern of the Cold War-era Commission.) After concluding Oswald was the assassin, a large part of the report and a very long appendix (Appendix 13) deals with all the minutia of his life. Perhaps the Commission was intending to encourage disdainful pity, but to me, he comes across as very nearly sympathetic. He never really succeeded at anything in his life and he ended up bitter about it. Born into humble circumstances and never able to rise above them, he was a loner and a constant reader who had big ideas he was never able to put legs under. I see something of myself in that biography. He became disillusioned of the American system, but after living in the USSR, he learned that wasn’t really any better. The only positive he took from Minsk was his marriage to Marina. They seem to have come to care for each other, but initially they both married to spite previous partners. I want to know much more about Marina. She is a major source of the Commission’s information on Lee, but she is not the focus of their investigation. After the Oswalds came to the US, Lee seems to have been searching for some way to make a big splash and become important in the political scene in the way young people often do. He was 24 at the time. He bought a gun. Missed a shot at a right-wing ex-general. He tried to start a pro-Cuba group and found no support. He tried to go to Cuba and they didn’t want him. Then he read on a certain Monday the President would be passing below his office window that Friday. He never got the advice Holden Caulfield did about living for a cause rather looking for a way to die for it. To me, that’s just another tragic part of what is an American tragedy on almost every level.
