PRESUMED GUILTY How and why the Warren Commission framed Lee Harvey Oswald factual account based on the Commission's public and private documents - by Howard Roffman 1976

A Decade of Deceit: From the Warren Commission to Watergate
Whoever killed President John F. Kennedy got away with it because the Warren
Commission, the executive commission responsible for investigating the murder, engaged in
a cover-up of the truth and issued a report that misrepresented or distorted almost every
relevant fact about the crime. The Warren Commission, in turn, got away with
disseminating falsehood and covering up because virtually every institution in our society
that is supposed to make sure that the government works properly and honestly failed to
function in the face of a profound challenge; the Congress, the law, and the press all failed
to do a single meaningful thing to correct the massive abuse committed by the Warren
Commission. To anyone who understood these basic facts, and there were few who did, the
frightening abuses of the Nixon Administration that have come to be known as "Watergate"
were not unexpected and were surprising only in their nature and degree.
This is not a presumptuous statement. I do not mean to imply that anyone who knew
what the Warren Commission did could predict the events that have taken place in the last
few years. My point is that the reaction to the Warren Report, if properly understood,
demonstrated that our society had nothing that could be depended upon to protect it from the
abuses of power that have long been inherent in the Presidency. The dynamics of our system
of government are such that every check on the abuse of power is vital; if the executive
branch were to be trusted as the sole guardian of the best interests of the people, we would
not have a constitution that divides power among three branches of government to act as
checks on each other, and we would need no Bill of Rights. Power invites abuses and
excesses, and at least since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, an enormous amount of
power has been assumed and acquired by the president.
Political deception is an abuse that democracy invites; in a system where the leaders are
ultimately accountable to the people, where their political future is decided by the people,
there is inevitably the temptation to deceive, to speak with the primary interest of pleasing
the people and preserving political power. There probably has not been a president who has
not lied for political reasons. I need only cite some more recent examples:
Franklin Roosevelt assured the parents of America in October 1940 that "your boys are
not going to be sent into foreign wars"; at the time he knew that American involvement in
World War II was inevitable, even imminent, but he chose not to be frank with the people
for fear of losing the 1940 election.
Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 denied that the American aircraft shot down by the Russians
over their territory was a spy-plane, when he and the Russians knew very well that the
plane, a U-2, had been on a CIA reconnaissance flight;
John F. Kennedy had the American ambassador at the United Nations deny that the
unsuccessful invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs was an American responsibility when
exactly the opposite was true.
So, deception and cover-up per se did not originate with the Warren Commission in
1964 or the Nixon administration in 1972. They had always been an unfortunate part of our
political system. With the Warren Commission they entered a new and more dangerous
phase. Never before, to my knowledge, had there been such a systematic plan for a
cover-up, or had such an extensive and pervasive amount of deception been attempted. And
certainly never before had our government collaborated to deny the public the true story of
how its leader was assassinated.
In the face of this new and monumental abuse of authority by the executive, all the
institutions that are supposed to protect society from such abuses failed and, in effect,
helped perpetrate the abuse itself. As with Watergate, numerous lawyers were involved with
the Warren Commission; in neither case did these lawyers act as lawyers. Rather, they
participated in a cover-up and acted as accessories in serious crimes. The Congress accepted
the Warren Report as the final solution to the assassination and thus acquiesced in the
cover-up of a President's murder. And, perhaps most fundamentally, the press failed in its
responsibility to the people and became, in effect, an unofficial mouthpiece of the
government. For a short time the press publicized some of the inconsistencies between the
Warren Report's conclusions and the evidence; yet never did the press seriously question the
legitimacy of the official findings on the assassination or attempt to ascertain why the
Johnson administration lied about the murder that brought it into power and what was
hidden by those lies.
It was only a small body of powerless and unheralded citizens who undertook to
critically examine the official investigation of President Kennedy's murder, and among them
it was still fewer who clearly understood the ominous meaning of a whitewashed inquiry
that was accepted virtually without question. It was only these few who asked what would
happen to our country if an executive disposed to abuse its authority could do so with
impunity.
It was in 1966, long before the press and the public saw through the thicket of deception
with which we had been led into a war in Vietnam, long before this country was to suffer the
horrors of Watergate, that a leading assassination researcher, Harold Weisberg, wrote and
published the following words:
If the government can manufacture, suppress and lie when a President is cut down -- and
get away with it -- what cannot follow? Of what is it not capable, regardless of motive . . .?
This government did manufacture, suppress and lie when it pretended to investigate the
assassination of John F. Kennedy.
If it can do that, it can do anything.
And will, if we let it.
Weisberg, in effect, warned that the executive would inevitably commit wrongdoing beyond
imagination so long as there was no institution of government or society that was willing to
stop it. That one man of modest means could make this simple deduction in 1966 is less a
credit to him than it is an indictment of a whole system of institutions that failed in their
fundamental responsibility to society.