The New York Times Never Quits
Many years ago, in October of 1972 to be exact, the late Jerry Policoff wrote a long article for The Realist. Early on in that article, Policoff noted that in the murder cases of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the New York Times regarded the official line as the only line. He then added that the newspaper of record has, in the process, “subjected its readers to distortion, misrepresentation and outright deception.”
This included the following headline of November 25, 1963: “President’s Assassin Shot to Death in Jail Corridor by a Dallas Citizen.” Recall, this was before the Warren Commission was even appointed. But yet Oswald—who never had a lawyer-- was proclaimed as the assassin. And he had consistently proclaimed his innocence. In another story, they headlined about Ruby, “Kennedy Admirer Fired One Bullet.”
In other words, The Times had the Warren Report story several months before the Commission issued its report. As Policoff also wrote in that article, the Times dutifully served as more or less a PR organ for the Commission once it was up and running. On March 30, 1964, they carried a story saying that the Commission had “found no evidence that the crime was anything but the irrational act of an individual according to knowledgeable sources.” On June 1st, the Times ran a page-one exclusive titled, “Panel to Reject Theories of Plot in Kennedy’s Death.” In other words, Oswald alone killed Kennedy, Ruby alone killed Oswald, and there was no conspiracy in either case.
This was four months before the Warren Report was issued to the public. But the Times was running interference for them to grease the skids. When the report was issued, the Times had fulsome praise and no reservations about the verdict. In an editorial, the Times declared:
The facts, exhaustively gathered, independently checked and cogently set forth, destroy the bases for conspiracy theories that have grown weedlike in this country and abroad. (September 28, 1964)
The obvious question about that statement is this: The report had just been issued a day earlier. How could anyone read, analyze, and certify 888 pages that fast? As for independent checking, the 26 volumes of exhibits and testimony were not to be issued until over a year later. So how was it possible to cross-check the report against its own evidence? The Times was going out on a limb in its efforts to knock down any kind of conspiracy theory. Whether or not there really was one, that did not seem to matter.
But in spite of all these journalistic shortcomings, the Times published the entire 888 report as a supplement to its September 28, 1964, edition. The Times then helped publish both hardcover and softcover versions of the report. After the 26 volumes were issued, they put out a volume of highlights from the testimony called The Witnesses. This was a censored edition. For instance, it left out pathologist James Humes’ testimony about burning the first draft of his autopsy report. In addition to that omission, The Witnesses left out the testimony of Seth Kantor and Wilma Tice about seeing Jack Ruby at Parkland Hospital. Policoff went on to sum up The Witnesses as:
…a careful selection of only that testimony which tended to support the official findings contained in the Warren Report. It was a patently biased and dishonest work, shamelessly slanted toward the lone assassin hypothesis, and capitalizing on the legendary objectivity of the New York Times.
In 1966-67, books and articles that did cross-check the report against the evidence emerged, e.g., Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment and Leo Sauvage’s The Oswald Affair. These works did exercise journalistic responsibility, which the Times did not. But the Times did not want to admit that fact. So they could not bring themselves to confront these books honestly. They insisted the case against Oswald was still intact and that there was a lack of evidence against any other possible assassin. The Times insisted, rather incredibly, that Oswald would have been easily convicted at trial. (August 28, 1966).
But there were enough doubts in the public arena by then that the Times quietly began a new inquiry under editor Harrison Salisbury. That inquiry did not get very far. It was abandoned after about a month. Afterward, the Times printed negative reviews of both Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas and Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact. (February 28, 1968) It was quite an acrobatic achievement to somehow find Lane, Sauvage, Thompson and Meagher all lacking in quality, while praising the Warren Report.
By 1968, it was quite possible to see that what the Times was doing as not really reporting. It was damage control. They had made a serious mistake by declaring Oswald the assassin on November 25th. Attorney Alexander Bickel called for a new inquiry in Commentary; the Saturday Evening Post put Thompson’s book on its cover. But for whatever reason, The Times was not going to backtrack from their error. In fact, they were going to double down on it.
As the late Roger Feinman, who lived in New York, told me, the decades of new information that surfaced from 1968 to 1991 had little if any impact on the Times editorial position regarding the Kennedy case. In the run-up to the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, Feinman said that the Times printed well over a dozen stories in order to soften the blow of a movie they knew would make their deductions undergo serious questioning. Afterward, Times stalwarts Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis wrote negative articles about Stone’s film.
Shockingly, Wicker credibly referenced the 1-hour NBC special that Walter Sheridan produced for NBC, which was broadcast on June 19, 1967. (December 15, 1991) That program has been proven to be, without qualifications, a hatchet job--the likes of which has rarely been approached, let alone surpassed, in broadcast history. It has been fully exposed by writers like Bill Davy in his book Let Justice Be Done (pp. 135-37), the late Joan Mellen in her work A Farewell to Justice (pp. 188-200), and the present author in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed (pp. 237-43). It was so bad that the FCC granted New Orleans DA Jim Garrison time to respond on NBC. But this is how desperate the Times and Wicker were to rabbit punch Stone’s film.
Anthony Lewis was clearly upset by Stone’s repeated showing of the Zapruder film, accenting the back and to the left movement of Kennedy’s body. Lewis tried to explain this as a ‘neuromuscular’ reaction. (January 9, 1992) That concept has been shown to be a myth by physicians like Gary Aguilar, Randy Robertson and the late Cyril Wecht. (See “Nicholas Nalli and the JFK Case, Pt. 2”, Kennedys and King.com, 12/17/23)
In spite of their efforts to sandbag Stone’s film, the firestorm of controversy surrounding JFK helped create the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Their function was to declassify the last remaining documents on the JFK case. They were in office from 1994-98. They declassified about 2 million pages of papers. Some of the materials were quite important to the case. Unfortunately, they did not have enough time to fulfill their mandate. But the legislation that enacted the ARRB, the JFK Act of 1992, provided that all documents on the case were to be released by October 2017. That did not happen. The only person who could have stopped it from occurring was the president, and Donald Trump did just that. Joe Biden then came in and, if anything, might have been even worse. ( See, “The Biden/CIA Attempt to Usurp Congress’ Authority Over JFK Records”, Kennedysandking.com, 7/21/23). Therefore, as of today, in defiance of the JFK Act, we still do not have the last of the JFK documents declassified. When it should have happened almost ten years ago.
The Times has never been devoted to covering the work of the ARRB. As John Tunheim, the Board chair, told Oliver Stone for his film JFK Revisited, their coverage was intermittent. One of the most crucial achievements of the Board was their work on the autopsy evidence, done by Jeremy Gunn and Doug Horne. In their November 10, 1998, story on this bombshell report, the Times soft pedaled its implications. They headlined their story, “Papers Highlight Discrepancies in Autopsy of Kennedy’s Brain”. As Oliver Stone showed in his film, JFK Revisited, with three qualified doctors, one a neurologist, all the evidence indicates that the brain in question is not Kennedy’s. Which leads to the question: Why not? And what happened to Kennedy’s real brain? Obviously, the Times did not want to deal with that evidentiary hot potato.
In fact, the Times has even been downplaying new documents when they actually are declassified. Last year, they did a series of articles saying that there were no juicy revelations about the Kennedy assassination in them.
I do not think that is the case. And neither does Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna. She is the chair of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. At her first subcommittee hearing in April of last year, Oliver Stone, Jefferson Morley and this writer all testified. That proceeding caused a spate of newspaper coverage all over the country. Largely because Stone called for a new investigation. Amid all the newspaper stories, I could not find one from the Times about that hearing. It was an interesting proceeding because key pieces of evidence were discussed, e.g., the Magic Bullet and the hole that disappeared from the rear of Kennedy’s skull.
In fact, the ARRB did a very good job in reviewing the latter phenomenon. Before Luna’s committee, I stated that the Board discovered that the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had lied about this key piece of evidence. In Volume 7, p. 37, they wrote that, unlike what the Parkland Hospital witnesses said about this wound, the witnesses at Bethesda Medical Center did not see that cavity. When the Board declassified the files of the HSCA, that statement was exposed as a deception. Dr. Gary Aguilar compiled a table showing that just as many witnesses saw the rear skull wound at Bethesda who saw it at Parkland. Which made for a total of 42 witnesses. That rear skull wound would suggest a shot from the front. This is the kind of information that was revealed at this hearing. I guess this was not noteworthy for the Times. Or perhaps it was too noteworthy?
I bring this up because the Luna Committee has been at work trying to let loose even more documents that should have been declassified years ago. Let us consider two of them. We are all familiar with the notoriety of former CIA officer George Joannides. He was called back into service by the Agency to serve as a liaison between the HSCA and CIA. According to HSCA investigators Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez, it was when he came in that their investigation of Oswald in Mexico City began to be obstructed. That is, they would now have to wait days for documents, and the documents they did get would be partially redacted. This had not happened to them before.
It turns out that Luna discovered that Joannides was, in part, awarded a medal for this obstruction. Why? A second important discovery her committee made was that William Harvey:
…secretly obtained false credentials from the Federal Aviation Administration in August 1963 that enabled the Kennedy hating officer to travel undercover in the U.S., at a time when he supposedly served as station chief in Rome.
Both of these revelations were written about by Luna herself in the online journal The Hill in October of last year. The latter discovery is made even more bracing by the fact that, in David Talbot’s book The Devil’s Chessboard, Harvey’s deputy in Rome, Mark Wyatt, revealed something rather crucial to a French journalist. He said that he bumped into Harvey on a flight to Dallas a bit before the assassination. (Talbot, p. 477) Wyatt asked him what he was doing there. Harvey replied in a rather vague manner: “I’m here to see what’s happening.” One would think that Wyatt’s disclosure, added to Luna’s discovery, would make perhaps a slight blip for the Times to notify its readers about. Apparently, it was not. With the Times continuing to rely on alleged experts like historian Fredrik Logevall, how could it?
Why is this so pernicious for the “paper of record” and its readers? Let me quote Luna from her above-noted article:
The Kennedy assassination was not just another crime. It was a political murder that changed our country’s trajectory. If intelligence agencies concealed their own role, directly or indirectly, then that cover-up distorted American democracy for six decades. The question is no longer simply, “Who killed President Kennedy?” It is, “Why has our government fought so hard to keep the full story from the American people?”
I have a curative suggestion for the Times. Why not let Ms. Luna write an editorial about her committee’s work for your newspaper? I ask, but will not hold my breath on that one.
