Post by Rob Caprio on Jul 23, 2019 21:06:38 GMT -5
All portions ©️ Robert Caprio 2006-2024
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The Warren Commission (WC) claimed Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) shot and killed President John F. Kennedy (JFK) all by himself with NO help from anyone. They said their conclusion was based on the evidence and that they had full confidence in the investigative powers of the CIA, FBI and Secret Service (SS). As we will see in this post the man who was General Counsel for them, J. Lee Rankin, will admit he was snowed on quite a few things by the FBI and others.
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Let’s begin with a comment Mr. Rankin made at the outset of the WC’s process.
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We think it would be wise,” Mr. Rankin said, “to reassure this country and the world not only that we can protect our President but that accused criminals can be treated fairly.” (Lee J. Rankiin quoted in the N.Y. Times 1/12/1964 edition)
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First of all, we COULDN’T protect our president on November 22, 1963, so that comment is off base as that is the whole reason there was a WC in the first place. Secondly, we saw during the process of the WC’s life that they did NOT treat the accused criminal (LHO) fairly at all. So in this short statement we see Mr. Rankin was NOT speaking the truth about what he said. Why did the country and the world need “reassuring” if the authorities actually gave them the impression they were acting in the ways he spoke of properly?
In an interesting turn of events Mr. Rankin would be called to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978. He was asked this interesting question by the HSCA.
Mr. KLEIN. Would it be fair to say the the the Federal Bureau of Investigation did most of the investigation for the Warren Commission?
Mr. RANKIN. Well, that would be accurate as to the proportions, if you mean by most, percentage-wise, but we used all of the intelligence agencies of the Government before we got through and sometimes we used one intelligence agency on matters that we were not satisfied concerning and which were worked upon by another intelligence agency. Oftentimes we wanted a doublecheck or felt that there were some inaccuracies or we were not completely satisfied, and asked some other agency that had no apparent relationship to check on the matter for us.
They used INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES for all of their investigations? Aren’t the main purposes of intelligence agencies to mislead, to use subterfuge and to basically hide what they don’t want known? I would think so, but the WC had full faith in them when some of their own members said they could have been involved in the whole thing. Remember this quote I provided in post #195 about John J. McCloy regarding the culpability of some of these agencies.
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I have a feeling we have another obligation than the mere evaluation of the reports of agencies, many of which as you suggested, or some of them at least, maybe interested, MAY BE INVOLVED. There is a potential CULPIBILITY on the part of the Secret Service and even the F.B.I., and these reports, after all, human nature being what it is, may have some SELF-SERVING aspects in them. And I think if we DIDN’T have the right to SUBPEONA documents, the right to subpoena witnesses if we needed them, that this Commission’s general standing might be somewhat IMPAIRED….
historymatters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcexec/wcex1205/pages/WCEX1205_0040a.gif
This Commission is going to be criticized, and this article in the paper is the beginning, no matter what we do but I think we would be MORE CRITICIZED if we were simply posed before the world as something that is evaluating government agencies’ reports, who themselves MAY BE CULPABLE. (WC Executive Session, 12/5/63, pp. 40 & 43) (Emphasis added)
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Given this feeling why would they rely totally on these agencies for their information and evidence?
Mr. KLEIN. Whose decision was it to use Federal agencies as opposed to hiring investigators?
Mr. RANKIN. That was a decision of the Commission, although I recommended that kind of a procedure because I described various possibilities of getting outside investigators and that it might take a long period of time to accumulate them, find out what their expertise was, and whether they could qualify to handle sensitive information in the Government, and it might be a very long time before we could even get a staff going that could work on the matter, let alone have any progress on it.
Mr. KLEIN. In 1964, at the conclusion of the investigation, what was your opinion of the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
Mr. RANKIN. Well, as to their cooperation with us, I thought it was good. We were critical about some of the things that happened about alerting the Secret Service, about information that they knew about and we learned they had not informed the Secret Service about. That was all in the report.
But as far as not being frank and open with us and revealing what information they had, we assumed that they did that. I did, at least, and I think the Commission did.
In the subsequent 14 years his opinion would change as he would hear things that showed the FBI (and the others too) did NOT divulge everything they knew to the WC.
Mr. KLEIN. You have partially anticipated my next question, which is, today, 1978, with what you learned over the course of the years, what is your opinion with respect to the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
Mr. RANKIN. Well, I have been very much disappointed with some of the things that have been revealed and I have, of course, no personal knowledge about those matters. I have just read them in the press from the reports of investigations by the Senate committee and others, but I had a close relationship with J. Edgar Hoover while I was in the Department of Justice and it was always friendly, but also professional, and I thought good. I never believed that he would withhold information or have it withheld from anybody like the Commission or that the FBI would do that.
It seemed to me from my experiences that they were more professional than to do anything of that character. When I learned that they were supposed to have known about plans for an assassination that were underway in the CIA, according to the investigation of the Senate committee , and did not report it to us and that we didn't receive any such information from the CIA, it was quite disheartening to me to know that that kind of conduct was a part of the action of our intelligence agencies at that high level.
Mr. KLEIN. I only asked the question as applying to the FBI, but your answer applies to the CIA and the FBI; is that correct?
Mr. RANKIN. I think it was our experience as it is revealed by investigation on the Senate committee. With the CIA it is worse than with the FBI because the FBI apparently did not originate the assassination plans and apparently the CIA did. So the FBI only happened on to them or were informed about such plans and then did not convey them to us.
But the CIA, they were apparently involved in them and did not alert us to the situation at all, give us any opportunity to take the action that we should have had the chance to, of investigating that type of information.
The CIA totally did NOT tell them of their assassination program and plans they had used against Castro.
Mr. KLEIN. As General Counsel of the Warren Commission, you had no knowledge whatsoever of the assassination plots against Fidel Castro?
Mr. RANKIN. That is true, I did not.
This subterfuge and withholding of information cannot lead anyone to have confidence in what was done on behalf of the WC by these agencies. This was key information and could have changed the focus of some of the WC’s work, but it was not shared with them and the ONLY reason one can come to is that it lead into areas NOT affiliated with LHO, and thus, a conspiracy would have been apparent. This again shows the WC’s main job (wittingly and sometimes unwittingly) was to pass a lie onto the American people that a lone killer was behind the murder of our president. This comment by Mr. Rankin is just pure fantasy to me.
Mr. KLEIN. What were some of the pressures, the political pressures, time pressures, that were exerted upon the Warren Commission staff?.
Mr. RANKIN. We had pressures from the beginning on the time element because the country was anxious to know what had happened and whether there was any conspiracy involved. I was assured by the Chief Justice that it would only take me 2 or 3 months at the outside in this job and that is all the time I would be away from my law practice, and, of course, I wished to get the job done correctly and properly, but also to get back to my other work. On the other hand, the first meeting we had with the staff, I told them that our only client was the truth and that was what we must search for and try to reveal. I think we adhered to that, that we never departed from that standard, any of the Commission or myself or the staff. We tried as conscientiously as possible to convey the information explicitly that we discovered.
When you publish a report full of claims and then publish evidence that does NOT support the vast majority of the claims you made in the report the last thing you are doing is “serving the truth” as he claims. You are misleading folks plain and simple.
He would say they most definitely did look for a conspiracy, but did NOT find one.
Mr. KLEIN. Were there any pressures exerted not to find a foreign conspiracy because of the dire consequences that such a conspiracy might have for war or peace?
Mr. RANKIN. None at all. There was a conscientious effort throughout to try to discover anything that would reveal that there was a conspiratorial action about the assassination of the President.
Mr. KLEIN. On that question of a possible conspiracy, the Commission has been criticized over the years for not devoting enough time, effort, and resources to investigating the question of whether there was a conspiracy to assassinate the President. Would you tell us first, do you believe that the Commission did devote adequate time and resources to that question, and second, would you give us an idea of how the Commission went about investigating whether there was a conspiracy?
Mr. RANKIN. Well, I think that they did an adequate job in that regard. The problem of what could be discovered concerning whatever happened in the Soviet Union and whether there was any involvement there was necessarily a very difficult matter because of the closed nature of their society. Our opportunity, even with the best penetration that we were able to learn of by our own intelligence people, to reach within that society and discover material that could be relied on, was quite sparse to say the least.
We, within the domestic community, made great efforts, and we followed out as far as we thought there was any reason to believe that there was a possibility of any Cuban involvement. If we had had the information from the CIA, we certainly would have run out those leads and tried to find out whatever we could in that area, but we were not given the advantage of that.
All he had to do to find a conspiracy was to read the EVIDENCE they published in the twenty-six volumes as NONE of it points to LHO as being a shooter of JFK, Governor John Connally (JBC) or Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit (JDT). Why could he not see this? Also, I find it funny he remarks about the “closed society” of Russia when the WC met in ULTRA-SECRET sessions NOT open to the public or the media. What were the WC hiding? Also, given the lack of information the agencies gave them on quite a few issues, how could he have any confidence in this finding of no conspiracy by 1978?
The question of the evidence not supporting the claims in the report is asked of him and here is what he says.
Mr. KLEIN. The Commission has received a good deal of criticism to the effect that in some areas in the final report the evidence was not strong enough to support the conclusions reached in that report; and that some staff members immediately prior to the issuance of the report stated that in certain areas they felt the evidence was not strong enough to support the conclusions. What would be your position in reply to this criticism?
Mr. RANKIN. I do not think it is a valid criticism. I examined, I think, every word of the report before it was printed and I constantly tried to understate rather than overstate the findings, the position of the Commission on all of the various matters that it acted upon and reported upon.
These positions were carefully reviewed by the Commissioners, in fact by each one of them, and they argued them, and the staff presented such materials they had and the Commissioners examined it. They participated in hearings and it was their disposition, so expressed, that the report not overstate what the Commission found and the evidence that would support it.
That he would lie about the OBVIOUS in 1978 shows the power of the conspiracy still in play nearly 15 years later. Anyone who can read, and is honest, will see the evidence in the twenty-six volumes does NOT support the claims the WC made in their report. It is obvious Mr. Rankin was still lying for the conspiracy.
Mr. KLEIN. As you sit here today, do still believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission to be correct?
Mr. RANKIN. I do.
Enough said. He is willing in 1978 to say the conclusions of the WC are correct when it is obvious they are NOT based on the very evidence the WC gave us in their twenty-six volumes!
After saying he felt the conclusions of the WC were correct he then admits they could have followed many other leads if they had the information the agencies kept from them!
Mr. KLEIN. In retrospect, what, if anything, would have been done differently in the Warren Commission's investigation?
Mr. RANKIN. As I have said, if we had the information from the CIA and FBI, that they failed to give us, certainly those leads should have been followed out to discover whether or not there was anything of a conspiratorial nature involved. I assume that this committee has been doing that and that if you had anything of that kind we would know it by now, one way or the other…
How can you say you reached the correct conclusion when you did NOT follow all the leads or even know all the information necessary to reach a conclusion in this matter? Again, we have to go to WC member John J. McCloy’s comment I included in post #163 of my series.
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John J. McCloy told Kai Bird this in his book The Chairman—John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment:
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The commissioners themselves regarded their commitment to the investigation as a PART-TIME responsibility…There was neither the time nor the POLITICAL will to conduct a thorough investigation. (Kai Bird, The Chairman—John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment, pp. 549-50) (Emphasis added)
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How in the world can you reach the correct conclusion when the agencies “investigating” the case don’t tell you everything, when the members of the commission setup to find the truth are committed only on a “part-time” basis, and there is no “political will” to conduct a “through investigation” into who murdered JFK?
You got me.
Rankin sums up the WC’s whole conclusion in this short reply for me.
Mr. SAWYER. Did you make any effort either as a staff or, to your knowledge, as a Commission, to determine just where Oswald was going at the time he was intercepted by Officer Tippit?
Mr. RANKIN. We speculated on it but speculations aren't worth much.
They sure aren’t and that is why the vast majority of the world do NOT accept the findings of the WC at all 50 years later. They couldn’t even figure out where LHO could have been heading when he “intercepted” JDT and killed him!
Mr. SAWYER. Did you come to any reasonable hypothesis as to where he was going?
Mr. RANKIN. We all agreed that he was on his way to try to escape but where we didn't know, and everything from that point on was just one person's guess against another's.
This again seems to sum up the WHOLE ACTIVITY of the WC to me. It is obvious for them to reach the conclusion they did they did NOT bother reading the evidence they published. Here is an interesting comment by the Congressman from Michigan.
Mr. SAWYER. Well, did you find out that Jack Ruby's apartment was about two or three blocks up the street, also on the direct route he was going?
Mr. RANKIN. Yes.
Mr. SAWYER. Did you also find out that in the Dallas newspaper announcement of the President's visit, that on the same page was the identity of an informant who had substantially destroyed the Communist Party in Texas by informing to the FBI and he was identified as living just about two blocks up the street, also on the direct route he was going?
Mr. RANKIN. I don't recall that I was aware of that.
So Mr. Rankin admitted they knew Ruby’s apartment was within two blocks of the shooting of JDT, but what did they do with this information? NOTHING from what I can tell. Who was this informant who squashed the Communist party in Texas he is referring to? He also was just up a few blocks from the shooting site of JDT. What was done with this information? Again, it seems nothing.
The WC said LHO shot and killed JDT, but they couldn't even figure out where he was headed to make this happen!
Mr. SAWYER. But other than just the fact that on this some 14 1/2 or 15 minute walk he had taken through a neighborhood after leaving his roominghouse, other than just running or escaping, you had formed no hypothesis on where he may have been going or what his intent may have been?
Mr. RANKIN. That is true, we did not.
What? Let’s finish with this naïve statement, at the very least, or outright lie, at the very most, by Mr. Rankin before the HSCA.
Mr. PREYER. The threshold of this belief has gone up quite a bit. Let me ask you one other thing. The FBI reached a conclusion in their report that was made 17 days after the assassination that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Don't you think that would have had some chilling effect, would have dampened the incentive of FBI agents in following out the question of a conspiracy where his organization had already declared itself to the effect that there was no conspiracy?
Mr. RANKIN. I think that is true but we always assumed that. We started out knowing the FBI had already decided who the assassin was and that no one else was involved, and we knew that was the agency position. It was very evident. But we did not rely on anything like that. We sought detailed evidence and if we didn't get the evidence we asked for, we sent back time after time to get it.
We treated their report in which they promptly found Oswald as the assassin and that was no conspiracy as though that was just an interesting document, but we are not there to ratify that; we were to find out if it was true and I think we were probably quite offensive, especially some of the younger members of our staff who looked forward to the opportunity of finding that the FBI was wrong, at least on as much as they could find.
So that often times they were challenging the agents, I had difficulty with some of our relationships because of that. I do not think it affected our people at all, but, of course, I recognize that it would have been less majesty for anybody to tell Mr. Hoover, that the report was wrong.
Please. He agreed that the edict from Hoover had an effect on the FBI investigators in the field and yet he had NO problem using them to run the "investigation" for them in which he claimed they were open to all possibilities. Sure, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale too. The bottom line is Hoover determined LHO acted alone and Hoover was the master of the FBI. Case closed.
i.pinimg.com/originals/94/5b/73/945b736f7ab47dcebe285134d8c3eb10.jpg
The Warren Commission (WC) claimed Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) shot and killed President John F. Kennedy (JFK) all by himself with NO help from anyone. They said their conclusion was based on the evidence and that they had full confidence in the investigative powers of the CIA, FBI and Secret Service (SS). As we will see in this post the man who was General Counsel for them, J. Lee Rankin, will admit he was snowed on quite a few things by the FBI and others.
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Let’s begin with a comment Mr. Rankin made at the outset of the WC’s process.
Quote on
We think it would be wise,” Mr. Rankin said, “to reassure this country and the world not only that we can protect our President but that accused criminals can be treated fairly.” (Lee J. Rankiin quoted in the N.Y. Times 1/12/1964 edition)
Quote off
First of all, we COULDN’T protect our president on November 22, 1963, so that comment is off base as that is the whole reason there was a WC in the first place. Secondly, we saw during the process of the WC’s life that they did NOT treat the accused criminal (LHO) fairly at all. So in this short statement we see Mr. Rankin was NOT speaking the truth about what he said. Why did the country and the world need “reassuring” if the authorities actually gave them the impression they were acting in the ways he spoke of properly?
In an interesting turn of events Mr. Rankin would be called to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978. He was asked this interesting question by the HSCA.
Mr. KLEIN. Would it be fair to say the the the Federal Bureau of Investigation did most of the investigation for the Warren Commission?
Mr. RANKIN. Well, that would be accurate as to the proportions, if you mean by most, percentage-wise, but we used all of the intelligence agencies of the Government before we got through and sometimes we used one intelligence agency on matters that we were not satisfied concerning and which were worked upon by another intelligence agency. Oftentimes we wanted a doublecheck or felt that there were some inaccuracies or we were not completely satisfied, and asked some other agency that had no apparent relationship to check on the matter for us.
They used INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES for all of their investigations? Aren’t the main purposes of intelligence agencies to mislead, to use subterfuge and to basically hide what they don’t want known? I would think so, but the WC had full faith in them when some of their own members said they could have been involved in the whole thing. Remember this quote I provided in post #195 about John J. McCloy regarding the culpability of some of these agencies.
Quote on
I have a feeling we have another obligation than the mere evaluation of the reports of agencies, many of which as you suggested, or some of them at least, maybe interested, MAY BE INVOLVED. There is a potential CULPIBILITY on the part of the Secret Service and even the F.B.I., and these reports, after all, human nature being what it is, may have some SELF-SERVING aspects in them. And I think if we DIDN’T have the right to SUBPEONA documents, the right to subpoena witnesses if we needed them, that this Commission’s general standing might be somewhat IMPAIRED….
historymatters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcexec/wcex1205/pages/WCEX1205_0040a.gif
This Commission is going to be criticized, and this article in the paper is the beginning, no matter what we do but I think we would be MORE CRITICIZED if we were simply posed before the world as something that is evaluating government agencies’ reports, who themselves MAY BE CULPABLE. (WC Executive Session, 12/5/63, pp. 40 & 43) (Emphasis added)
historymatters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcexec/wcex1205/pages/WCEX1205_0043a.gif
Quote off
Given this feeling why would they rely totally on these agencies for their information and evidence?
Mr. KLEIN. Whose decision was it to use Federal agencies as opposed to hiring investigators?
Mr. RANKIN. That was a decision of the Commission, although I recommended that kind of a procedure because I described various possibilities of getting outside investigators and that it might take a long period of time to accumulate them, find out what their expertise was, and whether they could qualify to handle sensitive information in the Government, and it might be a very long time before we could even get a staff going that could work on the matter, let alone have any progress on it.
Mr. KLEIN. In 1964, at the conclusion of the investigation, what was your opinion of the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
Mr. RANKIN. Well, as to their cooperation with us, I thought it was good. We were critical about some of the things that happened about alerting the Secret Service, about information that they knew about and we learned they had not informed the Secret Service about. That was all in the report.
But as far as not being frank and open with us and revealing what information they had, we assumed that they did that. I did, at least, and I think the Commission did.
In the subsequent 14 years his opinion would change as he would hear things that showed the FBI (and the others too) did NOT divulge everything they knew to the WC.
Mr. KLEIN. You have partially anticipated my next question, which is, today, 1978, with what you learned over the course of the years, what is your opinion with respect to the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
Mr. RANKIN. Well, I have been very much disappointed with some of the things that have been revealed and I have, of course, no personal knowledge about those matters. I have just read them in the press from the reports of investigations by the Senate committee and others, but I had a close relationship with J. Edgar Hoover while I was in the Department of Justice and it was always friendly, but also professional, and I thought good. I never believed that he would withhold information or have it withheld from anybody like the Commission or that the FBI would do that.
It seemed to me from my experiences that they were more professional than to do anything of that character. When I learned that they were supposed to have known about plans for an assassination that were underway in the CIA, according to the investigation of the Senate committee , and did not report it to us and that we didn't receive any such information from the CIA, it was quite disheartening to me to know that that kind of conduct was a part of the action of our intelligence agencies at that high level.
Mr. KLEIN. I only asked the question as applying to the FBI, but your answer applies to the CIA and the FBI; is that correct?
Mr. RANKIN. I think it was our experience as it is revealed by investigation on the Senate committee. With the CIA it is worse than with the FBI because the FBI apparently did not originate the assassination plans and apparently the CIA did. So the FBI only happened on to them or were informed about such plans and then did not convey them to us.
But the CIA, they were apparently involved in them and did not alert us to the situation at all, give us any opportunity to take the action that we should have had the chance to, of investigating that type of information.
The CIA totally did NOT tell them of their assassination program and plans they had used against Castro.
Mr. KLEIN. As General Counsel of the Warren Commission, you had no knowledge whatsoever of the assassination plots against Fidel Castro?
Mr. RANKIN. That is true, I did not.
This subterfuge and withholding of information cannot lead anyone to have confidence in what was done on behalf of the WC by these agencies. This was key information and could have changed the focus of some of the WC’s work, but it was not shared with them and the ONLY reason one can come to is that it lead into areas NOT affiliated with LHO, and thus, a conspiracy would have been apparent. This again shows the WC’s main job (wittingly and sometimes unwittingly) was to pass a lie onto the American people that a lone killer was behind the murder of our president. This comment by Mr. Rankin is just pure fantasy to me.
Mr. KLEIN. What were some of the pressures, the political pressures, time pressures, that were exerted upon the Warren Commission staff?.
Mr. RANKIN. We had pressures from the beginning on the time element because the country was anxious to know what had happened and whether there was any conspiracy involved. I was assured by the Chief Justice that it would only take me 2 or 3 months at the outside in this job and that is all the time I would be away from my law practice, and, of course, I wished to get the job done correctly and properly, but also to get back to my other work. On the other hand, the first meeting we had with the staff, I told them that our only client was the truth and that was what we must search for and try to reveal. I think we adhered to that, that we never departed from that standard, any of the Commission or myself or the staff. We tried as conscientiously as possible to convey the information explicitly that we discovered.
When you publish a report full of claims and then publish evidence that does NOT support the vast majority of the claims you made in the report the last thing you are doing is “serving the truth” as he claims. You are misleading folks plain and simple.
He would say they most definitely did look for a conspiracy, but did NOT find one.
Mr. KLEIN. Were there any pressures exerted not to find a foreign conspiracy because of the dire consequences that such a conspiracy might have for war or peace?
Mr. RANKIN. None at all. There was a conscientious effort throughout to try to discover anything that would reveal that there was a conspiratorial action about the assassination of the President.
Mr. KLEIN. On that question of a possible conspiracy, the Commission has been criticized over the years for not devoting enough time, effort, and resources to investigating the question of whether there was a conspiracy to assassinate the President. Would you tell us first, do you believe that the Commission did devote adequate time and resources to that question, and second, would you give us an idea of how the Commission went about investigating whether there was a conspiracy?
Mr. RANKIN. Well, I think that they did an adequate job in that regard. The problem of what could be discovered concerning whatever happened in the Soviet Union and whether there was any involvement there was necessarily a very difficult matter because of the closed nature of their society. Our opportunity, even with the best penetration that we were able to learn of by our own intelligence people, to reach within that society and discover material that could be relied on, was quite sparse to say the least.
We, within the domestic community, made great efforts, and we followed out as far as we thought there was any reason to believe that there was a possibility of any Cuban involvement. If we had had the information from the CIA, we certainly would have run out those leads and tried to find out whatever we could in that area, but we were not given the advantage of that.
All he had to do to find a conspiracy was to read the EVIDENCE they published in the twenty-six volumes as NONE of it points to LHO as being a shooter of JFK, Governor John Connally (JBC) or Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit (JDT). Why could he not see this? Also, I find it funny he remarks about the “closed society” of Russia when the WC met in ULTRA-SECRET sessions NOT open to the public or the media. What were the WC hiding? Also, given the lack of information the agencies gave them on quite a few issues, how could he have any confidence in this finding of no conspiracy by 1978?
The question of the evidence not supporting the claims in the report is asked of him and here is what he says.
Mr. KLEIN. The Commission has received a good deal of criticism to the effect that in some areas in the final report the evidence was not strong enough to support the conclusions reached in that report; and that some staff members immediately prior to the issuance of the report stated that in certain areas they felt the evidence was not strong enough to support the conclusions. What would be your position in reply to this criticism?
Mr. RANKIN. I do not think it is a valid criticism. I examined, I think, every word of the report before it was printed and I constantly tried to understate rather than overstate the findings, the position of the Commission on all of the various matters that it acted upon and reported upon.
These positions were carefully reviewed by the Commissioners, in fact by each one of them, and they argued them, and the staff presented such materials they had and the Commissioners examined it. They participated in hearings and it was their disposition, so expressed, that the report not overstate what the Commission found and the evidence that would support it.
That he would lie about the OBVIOUS in 1978 shows the power of the conspiracy still in play nearly 15 years later. Anyone who can read, and is honest, will see the evidence in the twenty-six volumes does NOT support the claims the WC made in their report. It is obvious Mr. Rankin was still lying for the conspiracy.
Mr. KLEIN. As you sit here today, do still believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission to be correct?
Mr. RANKIN. I do.
Enough said. He is willing in 1978 to say the conclusions of the WC are correct when it is obvious they are NOT based on the very evidence the WC gave us in their twenty-six volumes!
After saying he felt the conclusions of the WC were correct he then admits they could have followed many other leads if they had the information the agencies kept from them!
Mr. KLEIN. In retrospect, what, if anything, would have been done differently in the Warren Commission's investigation?
Mr. RANKIN. As I have said, if we had the information from the CIA and FBI, that they failed to give us, certainly those leads should have been followed out to discover whether or not there was anything of a conspiratorial nature involved. I assume that this committee has been doing that and that if you had anything of that kind we would know it by now, one way or the other…
How can you say you reached the correct conclusion when you did NOT follow all the leads or even know all the information necessary to reach a conclusion in this matter? Again, we have to go to WC member John J. McCloy’s comment I included in post #163 of my series.
Quote on
John J. McCloy told Kai Bird this in his book The Chairman—John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment:
Quote on
The commissioners themselves regarded their commitment to the investigation as a PART-TIME responsibility…There was neither the time nor the POLITICAL will to conduct a thorough investigation. (Kai Bird, The Chairman—John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment, pp. 549-50) (Emphasis added)
Quote off
How in the world can you reach the correct conclusion when the agencies “investigating” the case don’t tell you everything, when the members of the commission setup to find the truth are committed only on a “part-time” basis, and there is no “political will” to conduct a “through investigation” into who murdered JFK?
You got me.
Rankin sums up the WC’s whole conclusion in this short reply for me.
Mr. SAWYER. Did you make any effort either as a staff or, to your knowledge, as a Commission, to determine just where Oswald was going at the time he was intercepted by Officer Tippit?
Mr. RANKIN. We speculated on it but speculations aren't worth much.
They sure aren’t and that is why the vast majority of the world do NOT accept the findings of the WC at all 50 years later. They couldn’t even figure out where LHO could have been heading when he “intercepted” JDT and killed him!
Mr. SAWYER. Did you come to any reasonable hypothesis as to where he was going?
Mr. RANKIN. We all agreed that he was on his way to try to escape but where we didn't know, and everything from that point on was just one person's guess against another's.
This again seems to sum up the WHOLE ACTIVITY of the WC to me. It is obvious for them to reach the conclusion they did they did NOT bother reading the evidence they published. Here is an interesting comment by the Congressman from Michigan.
Mr. SAWYER. Well, did you find out that Jack Ruby's apartment was about two or three blocks up the street, also on the direct route he was going?
Mr. RANKIN. Yes.
Mr. SAWYER. Did you also find out that in the Dallas newspaper announcement of the President's visit, that on the same page was the identity of an informant who had substantially destroyed the Communist Party in Texas by informing to the FBI and he was identified as living just about two blocks up the street, also on the direct route he was going?
Mr. RANKIN. I don't recall that I was aware of that.
So Mr. Rankin admitted they knew Ruby’s apartment was within two blocks of the shooting of JDT, but what did they do with this information? NOTHING from what I can tell. Who was this informant who squashed the Communist party in Texas he is referring to? He also was just up a few blocks from the shooting site of JDT. What was done with this information? Again, it seems nothing.
The WC said LHO shot and killed JDT, but they couldn't even figure out where he was headed to make this happen!
Mr. SAWYER. But other than just the fact that on this some 14 1/2 or 15 minute walk he had taken through a neighborhood after leaving his roominghouse, other than just running or escaping, you had formed no hypothesis on where he may have been going or what his intent may have been?
Mr. RANKIN. That is true, we did not.
What? Let’s finish with this naïve statement, at the very least, or outright lie, at the very most, by Mr. Rankin before the HSCA.
Mr. PREYER. The threshold of this belief has gone up quite a bit. Let me ask you one other thing. The FBI reached a conclusion in their report that was made 17 days after the assassination that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Don't you think that would have had some chilling effect, would have dampened the incentive of FBI agents in following out the question of a conspiracy where his organization had already declared itself to the effect that there was no conspiracy?
Mr. RANKIN. I think that is true but we always assumed that. We started out knowing the FBI had already decided who the assassin was and that no one else was involved, and we knew that was the agency position. It was very evident. But we did not rely on anything like that. We sought detailed evidence and if we didn't get the evidence we asked for, we sent back time after time to get it.
We treated their report in which they promptly found Oswald as the assassin and that was no conspiracy as though that was just an interesting document, but we are not there to ratify that; we were to find out if it was true and I think we were probably quite offensive, especially some of the younger members of our staff who looked forward to the opportunity of finding that the FBI was wrong, at least on as much as they could find.
So that often times they were challenging the agents, I had difficulty with some of our relationships because of that. I do not think it affected our people at all, but, of course, I recognize that it would have been less majesty for anybody to tell Mr. Hoover, that the report was wrong.
Please. He agreed that the edict from Hoover had an effect on the FBI investigators in the field and yet he had NO problem using them to run the "investigation" for them in which he claimed they were open to all possibilities. Sure, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale too. The bottom line is Hoover determined LHO acted alone and Hoover was the master of the FBI. Case closed.