That Day in Dallas
by Robert Tanenbaum
Back in 1996, attorney Robert Tanenbaum did an interview for Probe magazine discussing his role overseeing the JFK case as Deputy Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Many readers were impressed by the revelations in that interview. (Click here for it https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/robert-tanenbaum-interviewed-by-probe) One who contacted Tanenbaum was first-generation researcher Ray Marcus. Ray encouraged Bob to write a book on his experience in Washington with the case. Tanenbaum said he would think about it.
Well, it appears that he thought about it for almost three decades. Because he has now released a rather slim volume entitled That Day in Dallas. In advance, I must say that I have known Tanenbaum for over thirty years and have visited him at his home in Beverly Hills on several occasions. He is a likeable man of many accomplishments, among them being the former mayor of Beverly Hills. He has maintained a strong interest in the John Kennedy assassination over the intervening years. So it is with reluctance that I have to say that his book, That Day in Dallas, is a disappointment. Made more so by his prominence as a leading attorney in the JFK field.
I
The author is from New York City. His father was a lawyer/businessman, and his mother was a teacher. (Tanenbaum, p. 36, all references to e-book version) He excelled at playing basketball in high school. At a summer camp, he met NBA all-star Bob Cousy, and Cousy recommended him to coach Pete Newell at Cal Berkeley. (p. 50) After a year at a prep school in Washington, DC, Tanenbaum decided to take up Newell on his offer. At Cal, he played basketball and attended their storied Boalt Hall School of Law. He then interviewed for a position under Frank Hogan, the DA of New York City. Hogan had a long and illustrious career of 32 years in the DA’s office. Tanenbaum felt fortunate to be selected for service in that office, and he devotes several pages to how that hiring process played out. (pp. 58-64)
Tanenbaum rose to supervise the homicide department, oversaw the court schedule, and ran legal training in Hogan’s office. He never lost a felony case that he tried to verdict, and he was one of the most — if not the most — active court lawyers in the office. He has stated that if Hogan had not passed on, he likely would have stayed there. But after Hogan died, Tanenbaum thought the office lost its stature. Therefore, when Philadelphia prosecutor Richard Sprague called him to come to Washington to work with him on the HSCA, Tanenbaum accepted.
The deceased Sprague was a first assistant in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office who had an excellent record. And most people believe that, given both his ability and work ethic, Sprague would have helmed the first full-court prosecution of the JFK case. The author clearly sees what happened with the HSCA as a legal proceeding sunk on the sandbar of politics. This is why he tries to fill in the background of his book with vignettes on how he was brought up and was instilled with a certain moral code. And it was not just by his family, but also certain professional mentors: like all-time great basketball coach Lou Carnesecca, and his colleague in the DA’s office Mel Glass. The former taught him the value of preparation. (pp. 42-43) The latter was a paragon of honesty about evidence. (p. 64) Tanenbaum notes this because he wants to get across the message that what he was faced with at the HSCA was something that was simply anathema to his upbringing.
II
The book has a circular structure to it. The author fills in the opening with the fact that the Warren Commission was a rigged game from the start since they largely relied on the FBI for their investigation. And J. Edgar Hoover had made up his mind on the case within about 48 hours of Kennedy’s death. (p. 8) So, in reality the Commission was a sham inquiry which ignored the importance of key witnesses. He identifies the Parkland doctors as an example of crucial testimony that was discounted. (p. 11). Tanenbaum also mentions the famous memo from Hoover to James Rowley of the Secret Service. That memo stated that FBI agents had listened to a tape supplied by the CIA of Oswald in Mexico City, and the voice on the tape did not match the Oswald the Bureau was questioning in Dallas. The memo also states that the picture produced by the Agency of Oswald in Mexico City does not look like Oswald. (Memo from Hoover to Rowley of 11/23/63)
Tanenbaum read the memo and was very interested, especially since the Warren Commission had done little or nothing about Mexico City. He decided to ask CIA officer David Phillips about this tape, since he was stationed in Mexico City at this time. Phillips said it was CIA policy to recycle tapes every 6 or 7 days, so the tape did not exist after the second week of October. Tanenbaum handed Phillips the Hoover memorandum, which undermined his sworn testimony. Phillips folded the memo, placed it in his jacket pocket and left the room. (p. 14). Sprague had already questioned Phillips about the matter, but he did not have the Hoover memo.
At this point in the HSCA inquiry, Tanenbaum told Sprague they needed to call Phillips back with his lawyer. The whole issue of perjury and contempt needed to be spelled out to him. But the committee balked at this.
At this point in the volume, Tanenbaum now flashes back to his acceptance of the position in the first place. (p. 23) He and Sprague were under the impression that there would be no compromise in their search for the facts. He was now realizing that they had been gulled. Congress was not the right place for a high-profile murder investigation. He now describes how he was hit with a cold towel by this fact in one of his meetings with the chair of the HSCA, Congressman Louis Stokes.
At this meeting, Tanenbaum told Stokes that he had strong suspicions about the Agency. This was not just based on his encounter with Phillips. It was also based on his meeting with Senator Richard Schweiker of the Church Committee. The senator told him the following:
Beware, the CIA will stonewall your investigation, refuse to hand over key documents, and intentionally mislead to further advance its cover-up—all of which it has done monumentally already. You see, during my participation in the Senate investigation regarding possible intel Agency abuse, I came to realize that the godawful truth was that the CIA participated actively in the assassination of our president. (p. 24)
Schweiker then handed him his Church Committee investigative file. Tanenbaum was trying to use that file, plus his own work, to convince Stokes to sign subpoenas. In what is probably the best scene in the book, Stokes declined. The reason he gave was that the HSCA would not go along with it because of the fear of Agency retaliation. This meant that neither Tanenbaum nor Sprague had the support of the committee any longer. When Stokes asked what the Deputy Counsel would now do, Tanenbaum said he would resign. When Sprague was informed of this impediment, he said he had no choice but to also resign.
The problem with this being the best episode in the book is simple: we are only on page 26.
III
When I first heard that Tanenbaum would be writing a book on his experience with the JFK case, I thought he would be writing a memoir. That is, something like Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins. But that is not what That Day in Dallas is. There is much that is left out of the book that the author has related to me or at conferences. For instance, after Senator Schweiker gave him the file, he and his investigator, Cliff Fenton, went back to his apartment. They stayed up all night reading it. When they were done, Fenton turned to his boss and said, “Bob, this is not a New York City felony case. We are in over our heads."
This would have been a telling follow-up scene. Well, Fenton is not even in the book. And Tanenbaum himself curtailed what happened in his meeting with Schweiker. Because before the senator took the file out of his desk, he asked that Fenton leave the room. This is the gravity with which Schweiker regarded what he was about to say to the HSCA attorney: He wanted no witnesses there. And, in fact, when I visited Schweiker in his Washington office many years later, he denied he ever said that about CIA complicity in the JFK case. I told Tanenbaum about this interview, and he called it out as BS. He said Fenton would back him up on this since he told him about it. But my point is this would have all made for a gripping material in a memoir about his experience on the JFK case. For whatever reason, that is not what the author decided to pen.
From that scene with Scheiker, the book goes into his upbringing in New York, his basketball and academic career, and his hiring by Hogan-- which I have already outlined. In other words, it breaks the actual JFK narrative. And this goes on for about thirty pages. As I said, this does have a thematic purpose. But does it merit almost one quarter of the book? What makes this even more puzzling is that Tanenbaum knows how to write this kind of finely hewn, intricately referenced book. Because he has done it before. Three times to be exact: in Echoes of My Soul, Badge of the Assassin, and Coal Country Killing. These were all about celebrated homicide cases, so it’s not like he does not know how to do such a book.
It is not until he arrives at his meeting with Richard Sprague that he completes the circle and gets back to the JFK case. And he now presents some of the evidence for why he believes the Kennedy murder was a conspiracy. He gives us things like the exposure of the junk science around the Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis test that falsely linked the bullets to each other in the case. (p. 78) He then goes on to the dispute about the fingerprint evidence between Lt. Day of the Dallas Police and Sebastian La Tona of the FBI. (p. 80)
He describes how the eyewitness testimony in Dealey Plaza links to that at Parkland Hospital. (pp. 88-98) He also tries to show that, through x ray analysis, one can demonstrate the direction of the fatal head shot at Z frame 313, although this needed some finer elucidation. (p. 104)
Towards the end, the author does make a new revelation. He writes that he had evidence that intelligence agents literally rewrote testimony of key witnesses to make the single shooter scenario stick. Again, this is something I wish he would have expanded on. (p. 120)
But there is something wrong with his presentation. And that is his backing of the McCone/Rowley document. (p. 124) This is a memo that CIA Director John McCone allegedly wrote in 1964 to Secret Service chief James Rowley, In it, McCone writes that Oswald was a CIA operative and some of their agents were involved in what he termed the Dallas Action. There are so many problems with this exhibit that I really do not know why the author included it, except he was not aware of the controversy surrounding it. In addition to there being no paper trail for it at NARA, there are also internal problems with it. I discussed them in a previous review. (Click here for that https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/groden-robert-absolute-proof)
What makes the book even more disappointing is that I know the author did have new things to reveal. Because, for instance, he told me that Fenton had a back channel to the CIA giving him information about David Phillips using the name of Maurice Bishop. I also know that he saw documents showing that the CIA had surveillance on Garrison’s witnesses for harassment purposes, and the paper came out of Deputy Director Richard Helms’ office. I also know that his apartment in Washington was burglarized for certain documents he had there.
All this and more could have made for a compelling, revelatory volume about one man’s journey into the abyss of the JFK case. In my opinion, Bob Tanenbaum missed a great opportunity.
