Good. Usually, when I talk to conspiracy theorists, they all claim they’ve read the Warren Report, even all 26 volumes of hearings and evidence, and it’s not long before they say something that makes it very clear that they have not. I guess I’m happier to hear that you’ve jumped to a conclusion about what’s in the report without reading it than I’d be to hear that you’d seen all the evidence and rejected it, though. You seem like a reasonable man.
Well, to begin with, the source of the allegation that Oswald met Ferrie at CAP is Jack S. Martin, who told authorities that it was just speculation on his part. Both the FBI and the Secret Service found Martin to be a very unreliable witness based on his alcoholism, mental health, and history of furnishing false information to law enforcement, and closed their investigation of the matter having failed to establish any link between Oswald and Ferrie. Neither did Ferrie have any association for the CIA, as noted in a September 28, 1967 memo from the CIA to the Department of Justice clearing up what suspects in the Clay Shaw case did and did not ever work for the CIA.
If Oswald’s communism was only a cover for his very important espionage work, he must have been recruited quite early on. In December 1963, the Socialist Party of America discovered in its archives an October 3, 1956 letter from the 16-year old Oswald identifying himself as a Marxist and expressing an interest in becoming active in party activities. Oswald’s high school friend William Wulf testified to his father once expelling Lee from his home when he started talking about how superior communism was, and Oswald’s Marine buddies, who often discussed politics and current events with him, all knew his preferred social system was communism. Of course, when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, the government there was highly suspicious of his loyalties and kept him under close surveillance. They found no evidence that he was a spy, and if they had, they would have released it in order to expose the conspiracy and embarrass the United States.
Allan Dulles—So he thought the president could have been doing a better job? A lot of people do. Where’s the evidence to tie him to the assassination?
George H. W. Bush—I don’t know why you write of Bush’s transition from the business world to DCI as if it were sudden or unusual. Was his long political and diplomatic career prior to that, in which he served as Ambassador to the United Nations and Chief of the US Liaison Office in China, all part of the cover? I find nothing suspicious about George Bush’s resume.
“The Mafia”—Which family? Which members?
LBJ & RMN—Johnson and Nixon were no angels, but even if the Nixon-CIA connection is established, I don’t think the CIA-JFK connection is established. I would be interested in proof that Jack Ruby ever worked for Congress or the Mafia, if it exists.
This is a very minor point, but I have to note that the chairman of the Warren Commission was not Allen Dulles, it was Earl Warren. That’s why it’s called the Warren Commission. But this leads into the larger point that there were more members on the commission than Allen Dulles, and what you’re suggesting is that the Chief Justice of the United States, Senators, Congressmen, distinguished public servants, men who had worked for years to get where they were, got together, probably with the better part of their staff, and all agreed that it would be best to make themselves complicit in the crime of the century. They would have known that when the deception was discovered, as it surely would be, they would go down in history as the men who disgraced themselves and their offices by covering up the murder of the president. Who could have even summoned the courage to even approach his fellow members with such a proposition? I mean, really think about this: you’re saying that Earl Warren, a man who would not countenance the conviction of one Ernesto Miranda because he had not been advised of his rights, participated in a fascist coup d’etat by running a fake investigation and issuing a bullshit report.
I think that if you read the much-maligned Warren Report, you’ll come away with respect for their careful, thorough investigation. Reality is that the Warren Commission’s eager young staffers searched high and low for evidence of a conspiracy, knowing that exposing the plot would make their names. Nobody was more disappointed when the evidence mounted that it was just Oswald. Then there were the Republicans; if the Johnson administration had been trying to cover it up, Gerald Ford and John Sherman Cooper would have never signed that report, and they would have made it an issue in the 1964 election.
Then there was the HSCA. Far from just another establishment investigatory body that was obliged to “admit” there was a conspiracy, these were young guys who were certain that with their “real investigation,” they were going to expose a conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of power, like Jean-Louis Trintignant in Z. After their careful forensic, ballistic, and photographic research established that the shots fired by Oswald in full view of eyewitnesses, they seized upon “acoustic evidence,” later completely discredited, to conclude that there was probably also a shooter on the grassy knoll, though if there was, he missed—he missed JFK, he missed everyone else in the limo, he missed the limo itself, he missed all of the spectators standing behind the limo, and he missed all of the structures in Dealey Plaza. No suspects were identifed for this blind-as-a-bat CIA/Mafia/Pentagon/oil assassin, but if he existed, they concluded, there was probably some kind of conspiracy. Probably a good idea for them. Would you want newspapers reporting how many thousands of taxpayer dollars you spent on the new investigation that revealed it really was just Oswald?
As for whether Oswald was the type to wake up one morning and decide to kill JFK, you should read the testimony of his wife, Marina. She told the Warren Commission how one morning, she saw Lee going out with his revolver and asked him what it was for; he said that he was going to see Richard Nixon, and if he had the opportunity, he was going to take a shot at him. She begged and pleaded with him not to do it, and he relented. She also testified that Lee confessed to her that he had attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker (a crime he is also implicated in by ballistic evidence), and that she had seen him burn his plans for the shooting in the bathtub.
Jack Ruby’s motive? He was telling people within minutes of shooting Oswald that he did it so the widow Kennedy wouldn’t have to come back to Dallas to testify in a trial that he didn’t think the son of a bitch deserved. See, for example, the testimony of Forest Sorrels and Barnard Clardy. If Jack Ruby was sent to silence Oswald, the conspirators certainly took their time: he had been in custody for two days, and police had interrogated him several times. If he was only a patsy, he could have spilled everything to the first TV station that stuck a camera in his face and asked, “did you kill the president?” Shooting Oswald in the abdomen was a real roll of the dice as well; an inch to the left, and he would have lived.
Re: Aldo Moro, I see no reason to doubt Mario Moretti’s confession.