Why the Media Want the Inquiries to End
November 21, 1993, Sunday, NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition
SECTION: CURRENTS; PAGE: 54
TYPE: OPINION
BYLINE: John Klotz. John Klotz is editor of the City Sierran, the
quarterly journal of the New York City Group of the Sierra Club,
and former counsel to the Committee on Ethics and Guidance of the
State Assembly.
FOR THREE decades the major organs of the American media
have been as one voice in their support for the report of the
Warren commission and its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was
the lone, unassisted assassin of President John F. Kennedy. In
the face of ever deepening public skepticism toward the official
version, The New York Times, CBS News, the Washington Post and
other powerful and prestigious news organizations continued to
charge reporters who had originally affirmed the soundness of the
report with evaluating later challenges to it - the most
notorious being Oliver Stone's 1991 movie "JFK."
To the immense frustration of the media elite, the public
flocked to "JFK." A new generation of movie patrons was seduced
by a dark tale of assassination conspiracy.
The empire struck back earlier this fall. Gerald Posner's
study of the assassination, "Case Closed," was widely trumpeted
as finally proving that Oswald acted alone. In September, Tom
Brokaw and the NBC News staff hailed the book for finally
resolving the Kennedy mystery. U.S. News and World Report ran a
cover story claiming that Posner had made an "unshakable" case
against Oswald. Random House, the book's publisher, took the
highly unusual step of placing its own credibility behind the
book's findings. It also invested heavily in the book's
promotion, going so far as to place an advertisement in The Times
eerily echoing handbills that dogged Kennedy in Texas: Robert
Groden and other critics were "GUILTY" of misleading the American
public. And last week Posner's research figured prominently in
the PBS Frontline documentary, "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?"
Appearing in today's issue of The Times is a review of
recent assassination literature, including the Posner book, which
it singles out for praise. An unsigned editorial note on the
cover of the Book Review characterizes the fact that over 2,000
books have been published on the assassination as "a devastating
record of the lengths to which sensationalists have gone to sow
suspicion, and editors and publishers have gone to profit from
their wares."
The major organs of the media have tried desperately to
reconstitute the moral authority of the Warren commission under
the guise of "Case Closed." It has been a hopeless task. When
CBS News polled the public earlier this month, a record 90
percent said they believed that Kennedy had been the victim of a
conspiracy.
Given the maddening ambiguity of the forensic evidence,
not to mention the elusiveness of a distant milieu populated by
hoodlums, spies and zealots, the proliferation of possible
answers to the assassination and the lack of definitive ones
should not surprise. What does surprise, in light of all this
uncertainty, is the media's haste to foreclose further discussion
and the search for firmer proof.
By concentrating on the issue of Oswald's guilt, Warren
commission defenders beg profoundly important questions raised by
the commission's cover-up. Much more than Oswald's culpability
is at stake in the collapse of the Warren report. Swirling around
Kennedy and Oswald was a whirlpool of sinister personalities and
institutions intent on dominating the course of American policy
in the Cold War. It was these forces that the Warren report hid
from public view. The struggle between the official myth and the
countermyth inevitably leads to the question of governmental
legitimacy and media culpability for the horrors that have
befallen the nation in the decades since Kennedy's death. By
comparison, who killed Kennedy is almost an academic question at
this point.
Last week, however, the media's facade of unity began to
crumble. Newsweek and its sister publication the Washington Post
finally broke with the ranks of Warren commission defenders and
grudgingly conceded what critics had claimed for years: The
commission conducted not an honest search for the truth but
rather a carefully contrived effort to forge a soothing official
story of the assassination - covering up, by both inadvertence
and design, damning evidence of governmental misconduct.
The Warren report now resembles the legendary Vietnamese
village that was destroyed so that it could be saved. According
to the calculations of its long-standing defenders, the Warren
commission report must die so that the lone-gunman theory and the
phantoms it still masks can live.
When the Warren report was issued in September, 1964, the
media greeted it with universal praise. Its most popular edition
was published by The New York Times. The introduction, written by
Assistant Managing Editor Harrison Salisbury, pronounced, "No
material question now remains unresolved, as far as the death of
President Kennedy is concerned." To critics of the Warren
commission, Salisbury flashed a contemptuous warning: Those who
spread irresponsible rumors about the assassination were either
seeking to sow distrust and confusion among the public or intent
on conveying to foreign countries the "image of a violent
America, helpless in the face of dangerous forces."
It didn't work. The Warren report, the public decided,
was a coverup.
Oswald was the first critic of the lone-gunman theory. "I
am a patsy," he responded when asked if he had murdered the
president. After his death, other critics emerged. Mark Lane
sought to represent Oswald's interest at the Warren commission
hearings. After the report was issued, he published "Rush to
Judgment," a best-selling critique of the report and its
lone-gunman conclusion. Lane paid a price for his effrontery -
"ghoul" was among the kinder epithets.
In 1967, CBS News sought to answer the questions again
with a four-part study of the Warren report. The last program of
the series ended with the normally sober Eric Sevareid comparing
Warren commission critics to advocates of the "The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion," a vicious anti-Semitic plot.
The '70s more than vindicated the critics. Several Watergate
participants were linked to both the CIA and an amalgam of
organized-crime figures and anti-Castro Cubans that swirled
around the events of Dealey Plaza. Successive government
investigations stunningly confirmed some of the worst suspicions
of the independent investigators concerning the government's
potential for duplicity and violence.
Barely noted by the media establishment were equally
important revelations by reporter Carl Bernstein of Watergate
fame. Writing in the Oct. 20, 1977, edition of Rolling Stone,
Bernstein documented the CIA's use of major media organizations
to provide information and cover for wide-ranging espionage.
In 1991, months before the release of "JFK," a
disgruntled Warren commission critic who disagreed with Stone's
approach gave a copy of the script to George Lardner, a
Washington Post reporter who covered the Kennedy assassination.
Pouncing on Stone even as he was directing the filming of "JFK,"
Lardner launched a scathing critique challenging Stone's right to
produce a movie memorializing New Orleans' District Attorney Jim
Garrison's version of the countermyth. By the time of the movie's
release, it had become nearly as widely ridiculed by the media as
Garrison's 1968-69 prosecution itself.
On Friday night, CBS News, which shared investigative
resources with both Newsweek and the Post (a questionable
development in itself) emphasized the lone-gunman conclusion of
the Warren report and soft-pedaled the grave question of the
Warren report cover-up.
From the beginning, the Kennedy assassination has been
Dan Rather's story at CBS. Half past noon on the day of the
assassination, he was standing by the triple underpass south of
Dealey Plaza waiting for a film drop from a camera crew that was
following the presidential motorcade. They were late. Suddenly
he saw the blur of the presidential limousine flash by and
instinctively knew that something was wrong. Scrambling over an
embankment, he gazed down into Dealey Plaza and saw the crowd of
spectators running in panic. Instead of descending into the
chaos and trying to make sense of it, Rather ran back to the
local CBS affiliate to break the story - whatever it was -
to the nation.
Friday's "CBS Reports" was in one part a clips piece from
past reports. Once again, unsuspecting witnesses of shots from
the grassy knoll were led down the path and then bushwhacked.
What galled, though, was a series of obsequious Rather
interviews. Rather seemed blithely oblivious in the presence of
inanity and evil. The inanity was Lyndon Johnson's protege Jack
Valenti rhapsodizing about his mentor's "brilliant" decisions in
Dallas in the aftermath of the assassination. In the Post,
Johnson crouches in terror on the floor of his limousine,
speeding to the relative safety of the Dallas airport. The evil
is former CIA director Richard Helms offhandedly admitting that
he concealed from the Warren commission crucial information about
CIA involvement in assassination plots against Castro. They were
secret, after all. Both Newsweek and the Post posited CIA fear of
such disclosure as being at the heart of the Warren commission
cover-up.
Many of the same phantoms who lurked in the shadows of
Dealey Plaza reappeared in Vietnam, where the CIA ran the
Operation Phoenix assassination program. In the Golden Triangle
area of Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, the CIA expedited the drug
trafficking of its "assets" in the fight against communism. Those
expedited drugs were bound for American streets. In both Central
America and Afghanistan, the recruitment of CIA assets and the
expansion of the drug trade went hand in hand.
And now there's Haiti. The media feast on leaks from the
CIA questioning the mental stability of deposed Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. We learn that key members of the
controlling military junta are in the agency's employ - and
they, too, sell drugs. The true measure of the Warren
report's collapse is the time and space both CBS and Newsweek
devoted to advancing the theories of "Case Closed." This slight
tome can have no greater claim to historical legitimacy than any
other assassination book; future scholars will find "Case Closed"
just one more addition to the voluminous literature of the
assassination - and, one hopes, they will scrutinize the end
notes with a critical eye.
Solutions to the Kennedy assassination proffered by the
media must be taken with a grain of salt. To admit that such
evil could manipulate the course of government is to question the
very legitimacy of the government and the nation's established
news-gathering institutions.
The acceptance of the countermyth both baffles and enrages
the traditional guardians of the public record. The media return
to the Kennedy assassination again and again, but the story won't
stand still. No sooner does a new interpretation of the Offical
Myth close the case than new evidence and analysis blow it open
again. What Newsweek has realized and what CBS refuses to accept
is that blind faith in the discredited Warren report has
undermined the media's authority ever again to determine the
public's understanding of the assassination. The case will never
close.
The Warren report lies in ruins, the victim finally not
of its enemies but its friends. The road to free inquiry lies
open before us, no longer barred by sanctified official myth. We
may never know the whole truth of Dealey Plaza, but in the search
for that truth lies our freedom.
GRAPHIC:
Newsday Illustration by Gary Viskupic- the CBS television station
logo with JFK in its sighting. Photo- John Klotz
DESCRIPTORS:
OPINION, WARREN COMMISSION, LEE HARVEY OSWALD, JOHN F KENNEDY,
ASSASSINATION, MEDIA, INVESTIGATION
E-Mail: johnklotz@johnklotz.com