Gerald D. McKnight
Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2005, 478pps, $29.95.
The commonly accepted view is that the Warren Commission was a prisoner of its sources (i.e. the FBI) and that, coupled with a notable lack of general curiosity (‘We’re supposed to closing doors around here, not opening them,’ quoth Wesley J. Liebler), resulted in the Report that declared Oswald a lone, mad assassin. Yes, so the argument goes, they could have asked more questions, but there were restraints of time and money and they had to go down the one and only avenue that was open to them – an avenue carefully contoured by Hoover and his agency.
What McKnight documents fully and exhaustively is that Chief Justice Earl Warren and his fellow commissioners were complicit from the get-go in the lone assassin theory. Their job was to substantiate what had already been decided over the weekend of 23 and 24 November by Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover. But their ‘crime’ was even worse than this, they knew that they were bolstering a lie. Their job was certainly not to go where the evidence might lead them.
On the evening of 22 November President Johnson had put Hoover in charge of the investigation. Subsequently Johnson told Hoover that he wanted a full report on the assassination on his desk by Tuesday. What would the report conclude? McKnight cites an FBI document that the president ‘approved the idea that [the FBI] make a report showing the evidence conclusively tying Oswald in as the assailant of President Kennedy.’ This was the ‘official solution’ and Earl Warren and company simply fell in behind it.
Now, we may have guessed that this is what happened but here we have McKnight proving it and we only had to wait 42 years. A long time in politics, yes, and a short time in history.
McKnight has chapters on how the ‘official truth’ emerged, the formation of the Commission, and examinations of various issues that confronted these ‘honourable’ men such as Oswald in Mexico and the ‘Single Bullet’ fabrication and virtually no page goes by without new insights and fresh documentation. His is a remarkable achievement and one that nobody in the critical community should fail to read.