G. Robert Blakey 1936-2026
By James DiEugenio
George Robert Blakey passed away on May 1st in Chicago. Blakey spent the vast majority of his professional career as a professor at two esteemed universities, Notre Dame and Cornell. In fact, as one can see from the notice in the News section, he spent 37 years at the former institution. He spent a relatively brief period of time in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, and he served as a congressional and presidential advisor in fashioning laws tailored to confront organized crime. He also had a role in penning the legislation for the John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992.
Blakey was a 41-year-old professor at Cornell when his name was submitted for consideration to Congressman Christopher Dodd to assume the role of Chief Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The first chief counsel, Richard Sprague, had been forced to resign. And the committee did not want to disband, so after settling on a salary, Dodd decided to hire Professor Blakey to take the position.
Gaeton Fonzi had been working for the Schweiker/Hart sub-committee of the Church Committee since 1975. After Sprague’s Deputy Chief Counsel, Robert Tanenbaum, met with Schweiker, he hired Fonzi to work on the HSCA. Tanenbaum agreed to stay on in a caretaker role after Sprague left. Therefore, Fonzi had a ringside seat when Blakey was being escorted around by Tanenbaum and then ultimately took full command of the committee.
When Tanenbaum first introduced Fonzi to Blakey, the professor described his last meeting with Bobby Kennedy. Which he said was on November 22, 1963. He described it as such:
He was running late for a luncheon appointment and had to hurry off. He said we’d finish up when he returned. He never returned. At lunch he got word of his brother’s death in Dallas. (Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, p. 208)
Fonzi then describes how it was clear to him that Blakey was quite wise about the way a Washington bureaucracy operated. Blakey understood that in this internship phase, he should be doing little or nothing. Which is how one assumed a command. One should be walking around, inspecting, listening and asking a few questions. Once you had done that, you would be ready to assume control.
Blakey’s background was mob-oriented, and he chose someone with that same orientation to be his deputy for the JFK side, Gary Cornwell. Cornwell had been chief of the Federal Strike Force in Kansas City. He had attained some significant victories against some mob higher-ups while there. Blakey also named a retired New York detective, Ralph Salerno, to be a special consultant. Again, Salerno was not just mob-oriented. Some would say he was mob-obsessed since this is how he made his living, both on the force and in retirement.
As Fonzi wrote in his book, Blakey would later state that when he took the position, he had no inclination towards any conspiracy theory, including the organized crime one. (Fonzi, p. 7) But these two choices, plus the committee’s end result, do not seem to bear that out. Further, at the first full staff meeting, Blakey stated that he had promised the new Chairman, Louis Stokes, that a report would be produced by December 31, 1978. He also said the HSCA would not be continued after that time. Blakey also established what the boundaries of the inquiry would be. Since it was a legislative investigation, the HSCA would not produce indictments. They would gather evidence to be presented at public hearings, and after that, file a final report. (Fonzi, pp. 210-11)
As Fonzi notes, he did not really want to believe this:
I felt that once we started rolling, once we started accumulating evidence that demanded further investigation, well, then Blakey with the backing of the staff, would stand up to the committee and the committee would stand up to congress and congress would be forced to give us more time and money. The Kennedy assassination was just too important. (Fonzi, p. 210)
As we shall see, with one slight technical adjustment, that is not what happened. What Fonzi learned is that Blakey was a stickler for making a uniform record, one that would only adhere to facts and not analysis. He wanted the appearance of a voluminous inquiry from which he could write an impressive-looking report. As Fonzi then adds, this became bewilderingly paradoxical. Because he then moved to ensure that those records would be kept classified for fifty years. (Fonzi, pp. 212-13) But also, there were just 12 HSCA volumes to accompany their report, whereas the Warren Commission issued 26.
As many have pointed out, what the HSCA kept classified seems today to be more relevant than what they published. And the reason we know that was because of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). To give one infamous example: when the Board declassified the records of the HSCA medical inquiry, it exposed a deception in their published volumes. In medical books published on the JFK case in the eighties, e.g., Best Evidence, High Treason--witnesses were interviewed who said they saw an avulsive baseball-sized hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. But to counter this, backers of the official story would point to Volume 7, p. 37 of the HSCA volumes. There it says that, contrary to the witnesses at Parkland Hospital, the witnesses at Bethesda Medical Center did not see any such wound. The clear implication is that since the former only had the body for about 20 minutes or so, and the latter had it for hours, then the Parkland witnesses were likely wrong.
This ended up being exposed as a lie. When Gary Aguilar went to the National Archives, he assembled and compiled the testimony and exhibits of the HSCA witnesses from both locations. Both sets of witnesses agreed about seeing this wound in the rear of Kennedy’s skull, which would strongly suggest a shot from the front. Not only did they talk about it, they drew illustrations of it. Gary’s list included over 40 people. It is hard to believe that this many eyewitnesses could all be wrong. When Aguilar confronted Blakey and HSCA medical investigator Andy Purdy in public about this, they both denied writing it. Two people from the medical panel, Michael Baden and the late Cyril Wecht, later said they were not aware of these reports.
Perhaps the most legendary piece of work done by the HSCA was the inaptly titled Lopez Report on Oswald and Mexico City. This was the 350-page report written by Dan Hardway and Eddie Lopez on Lee Oswald’s alleged activities while he was reported to be in Mexico City in late September and early October of 1963. The Warren Commission’s work on this subject is almost maddeningly vague. Hardway and Lopez dug much further and deeper. And the comparison can aptly be called the difference between night and day.
That report poses the most fundamental and telling questions about this subject. For example, if Oswald did go to both the Cuban and Russian embassies while in Mexico City, why is there no picture of him at either place? The Agency had multi-camera coverage of both buildings. Reportedly, Oswald visited the Cuban embassy three times and the Russian embassy twice. Yet, in 63 years, there has been no picture produced of Oswald either entering or exiting either domicile. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 354) Further, the audiotape that the CIA sent up to the FBI in Dallas from Mexico City did not match Oswald’s voice. Again, the Agency had both places wired for sound. But it’s even worse than that. Because Lopez and Hardway put together a chart of the phone calls attributed to Oswald while he was there. The chart says that Oswald spoke fluent Spanish but broken Russian. Which is the opposite of what witnesses said about him who knew him. (ibid, p. 353)
David Phillips was running covert action from Mexico City against Castro’s Cuba at this time. Hardway called him in to reply to some questions about the episode. One of the things he had discovered was that virtually every disinformation story about Oswald being in Mexico City and contacting either Cuban or Soviet intelligence came from an asset of Phillips. When confronted with this, Phillips began smoking more than one cigarette. As Hardway later stated:
I’m firmly convinced now that he ran the red-herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission, and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him. That’s what got him very upset. He knew the whole thing could unravel. (Fonzi, p. 293)
In fact, in reading the Lopez Report, the only person who told as many lies as Phillips to the HSCA about Mexico City was Anne Goodpasture. In an interview this author did with Lopez, he said that although she was titularly the assistant to chief of station Win Scott, Goodpasture handled Phillips’ operations when he was gone. There was very little that Anne Goodpasture did not lie about to the HSCA. She even lied about her access to the picture and audio coverage of the embassies. She tried to feign that she did not know who had first access. It turned out it was her. (DiEugenio, p. 354) She likely lied about this because she did not want to be asked when she discovered there was no coverage of Oswald. The second question would have been, why did she not ask Langley for a picture and audio recording of Oswald for a match?
As Dan Hardway once revealed at a JFK seminar in Pittsburgh, he and Lopez were so disgusted with all this that they actually wrote up a bill of indictment for both Phillips and Goodpasture. For whatever reason, the HSCA decided not to enact it. When I asked Lopez why the report was not in the published HSCA volumes, he related the following. “Jim, when we went in to get a clearance from the CIA, there were us three on one side: me, Danny and Blakey. There were three Agency guys on the other. They objected to every sentence in the report. It took us 8 hours to get through the first two pages. Blakey was not going to do that for over 300 pages. So that is why it was classified.”
Robert Blakey learned his lesson about the CIA much too late. It was not until years later after Jefferson Morley discovered that the Agency had taken George Joannides out of retirement to serve as a liaison to the HSCA. They assured Blakey that he had nothing to do with the Kennedy case in 1963. Which was a lie. Morley discovered that Joannides ran the relationship between the Agency and the Cuban exiles Oswald was interacting with in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, or DRE. (See the interview with Morley in the film JFK Revisited.) Both Hardway and Blakey later agreed that they had been victims of a deliberate Agency subterfuge. Because it was when Joannides came on board that Danny and Eddie began to experience delays in securing documents and also receiving expurgated papers. (See Hardway’s written statement to the Luna Committee, https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Hardway-Written-Testimony.pdf)
As alluded to earlier, Blakey wanted a Final Report by the end of 1978. But something happened that was unexpected, which delayed that deadline. This was the acoustics evidence that came in very late owing to an attempted reconstruction of the shooting in Dealey Plaza. Due to the findings of this reconstruction—that there were more than three shots fired, and therefore a second gunman—Blakey was not satisfied with the preliminary Final Report. So he and Chairman Louis Stokes asked for an extension, which they got. And their report said that, “Scientific acoustical evidence established a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy.” (Fonzi, p. 6)
After the HSCA expired, Blakey co-wrote a book originally called Fatal Hour. In it, he and Dick Billings, who helped write the report, explained the nature of the conspiracy. They formulated a mob did it thesis, with somehow, Oswald as the gunman. Later on, when I emailed Blakey about this theory, he said his position now was that the Cuban exiles were also in on it, and one of them fired from the front and missed. Although he still upheld the Single Bullet Theory.
For all public intents and purposes, that was the Last Testament of Robert Blakey on the JFK case.
