Subject: Gunn and Haron Interview Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:37:46 -0500 From: Steve Bochan Organization: Verio Mid-Atlantic Newsgroups: alt.assassination.jfk The following excerpt comes from an article in this month's edition of The Washington Lawyer, titled "JFK Declassified" wherein Jeremy Gunn and Ronald Haron (of the ARRB) were interviewed. It may be of some interest. TWL = The Washington Lawyer; JG = Jeremy Gunn; RH = Ronald Haron. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TWL: Prior to the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, there was a widespread public perception that the United States government was hiding secret information it had in its possession about the Kennedy assassination. What impact has this perception had? JG: Government secrecy has had a dramatic impact. When I spoke with different groups I would frequently start by asking the question, "How many of you think that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy?" Invariably, 80 to 90 percent of the people in attendance would raise their hands - and it didn't matter whether I was speaking to the American Legion or students at Stanford University. This view was consistent across the political spectrum - left, right, and center - and it is consistent with polling data that shows the great majority of the American people think that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy. I find that surprising because the government has consistently maintained that there was no conspiracy. TWL: Were the American people deceived by the government in 1963 and 1964? JG: People have different opinions. I will give you my personal opinion. I don't think that the Warren Commission did a thorough investigation. There are areas where the commission was seriously remiss. The commission did a lot of very high quality work, but there are things that they did not get into that should have been investigated. TWL: Can you give me an example? JG: Sure. One area concerns the medical evidence. There was evidence in the Warren Commission records that was inconsistent with the explanation contained in the final report. The commission did not disclose information that should have been disclosed. I spent a lot of time working with the original autopsy materials, and I'm still uncertain about the exact injuries that killed President Kennedy. The chief forensic pathologist was Dr. James Humes, who wrote the autopsy report. He was asked by the Warren Commission if he had destroyed anything from the autopsy and he admitted that he had destroyed his original notes, saying that he did so because they had the blood of the president on them. The implication was that it would be garish to keep them. In studying the autopsy materials and in looking at a number of statements Dr. Humes has made over the years, I had the sense that more was destroyed than notes. So I took Dr. Humes's deposition under oath at the National Archives with the original autopsy material in front of us, and I could tell that I was hitting a raw nerve. During the course of the deposition, Dr. Humes admitted that he not only destroyed the original autopsy notes, but that he had also destroyed the first draft of his autopsy report as well, which was something he did not tell the Warren Commission. I am sure that if Lee Harvey Oswald had lived and had been charged with the crime, his defense lawyer would have posed questions that would have been very awkward for Dr. Humes to answer on the stand. Why does a forensic pathologist destroy notes taken at the time of an autopsy? Why does he destroy the original draft? His answer that he did so because of the presence of the president's blood on the notes doesn't hold up. Other material from the autopsy that had the president's blood on it was preserved. So Dr. Humes' original answer was intended to throw people off. That is a pretty serious thing that should have been analyzed in the investigation into the assassination of the president of the United States. This was an issue the Warren Commission should have looked into. Questions regarding the medical evidence might have been resolved in 1963 or 1964. But they were not. TWL: Why did Dr. Humes destroy the notes and the original draft of the autopsy report? JG: I think he probably changed his mind after the autopsy was over about the trajectory of the bullets that hit President Kennedy and the circumstances of his death. I think that during the autopsy he thought that the wound that entered President Kennedy's back did not traverse the body. Subsequently, he decided that the bullet had come out the throat. That was one of the changes that he made. Whether there were others, I can't say. The evidence was destroyed. TWL: Despite the flaws in the investigation, did the Warren Commission get the final conclusion right? Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill President Kennedy acting alone? JG: I don't know. I mentioned earlier that 80 or 90 percent of the American people think that President Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy. That's a very curious thing because the elites across the political spectrum do not believe in a conspiracy. Scholars, journalists, and government officials tend to believe that President Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman. By and large, they accept the findings of the Warren Commission. I suspect that 50 or 60 years from now a good, solid, reputable historian who studies the evidence a century after the event will probably conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But I'm not sure that such a conclusion would be correct. Personally, I'm skeptical of every explanation that I've heard. If you were to ask me, "Was Lee Harvey Oswald guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?" my answer would be, "No." If you posed the question differently and asked, "Is it more likely than not that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?" my answer would be, "I don't know." I don't see how the assassination could have happened the way the Warren Commission said it happened. But I don't have a better theory. I suppose the lone gunman theory is more plausible than any other single theory, but it is not a theory that I find entirely satisfactory. TWL: So the mystery continues? JG: Yes, for some of us the mystery continues. TWL: In the review board's final report, it says, "The board knew that its greatest contribution would likely be to provide the public those records that would frame the tragic event." How so? Frame the assassination in what sense? RH: There are a number of theories that have circulated about the assassination. One was that President Kennedy was killed by the Mafia. Another was that Castro was involved in an act of retaliation for the CIA assassination plots that were directed against him. A third was put forth in the Oliver Stone film "JFK" was that President Kennedy was killed because he was planning to withdraw from Vietnam. We sought records that were relevant to all of these theories. I don't necessarily subscribe to any of them, but the review board was not tasked with the job of reaching conclusions regarding those theories. Our job was to gather the evidence and make it available to the public. We have done that. Millions of pages of previously classified documents from the CIA, the FBI, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and a host of other sources are now available. If someone is interested in the question of whether the Mafia was involved, he or she can go to the FBI records on various crime figures and reach their own conclusion. Or they can go to the CIA and National Security Council records on Cuba to see whether or not there's any evidence that would suggest that Castro was somehow involved in an act of retaliation. The records thus provide a wealth of information about the historical context in which the assassination took place. That's the sense in which they frame the event. Personally, I think that the Warren Commission's basic conclusions were correct and that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman, and I have seen no evidence to convince me otherwise. Whether Oswald acted with the knowledge or assistance of others, and understanding why he committed the murder, are more difficult issues in my opinion. Again, I tend to believe there is no compelling evidence of conspiracy, although I should make clear that I have not reviewed all of the voluminous newly released files. Many of these files, however, have been previously reviewed in connection with prior government investigations of the assassination. Anyone who disagrees with the Warren Commission, or is interested in reaching his or her own conclusion, can now go to all of the underlying records and look at the files. There is a lot of new information now available to the pubic that addresses questions that have long been asked. JG: One of the first things the review board did was look at the question of what constituted an "assassination record." We held public hearings on this issue and received many comments. The problem was that it was difficult to define something when you don't necessarily know what you're looking for. If you don't know whether or not the Mafia was involved, you can't say whether the organized crime records are relevant. So rather than try to define what constituted an assassination record, the review board took a very broad approach and sought to include records that would enhance the historical understanding of the assassination. I think it's important to note that the records are very valuable for scholars and historians who have no interest in the assassination, but who are interested in a wide range of foreign policy and intelligence issues. The records are very valuable for understanding how the CIA operated and how the FBI operated in the 1960s. They illuminate what was going on inside the Kennedy administration, and what our government was doing. TWL: Is there significant new information about CIA covert operations that targeted Fidel Castro? JG: Yes. One of the things we looked into extensively was U.S. policy toward Cuba in 1963. Many records on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis had already been declassified. But the question of what President Kennedy and the CIA were doing from November 1962 to November 1963 was a bit of a black hole. The new documents make it clear that the United States was still actively engaged in anti-Cuba activities after the missile crisis. There were still covert operations going on, and the board was able to obtain declassification of many internal Kennedy administration records and CIA records. TWL: A lot of the speculation about Mafia involvement in the assassination has centered on Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Is new information available on him? JG: Most of the Giancana file has now been released by the FBI. There have been long-standing questions about the role Sam Giancana played in the Castro assassination plots, his purported use of Kennedy's mistress Judith Campbell Exner as a courier to JFK, as well as questions about Mafia support for then Senator Kennedy in the 1960 presidential primaries. So there are a lot of issues involving Giancana, and in the records one does see that the FBI was closely tracking the activities of Sam Giancana. TWL: Was there a Kennedy-Giancana relationship in 1960? JG: There probably was a relationship of some sort. Giancana probably provided some assistance to Kennedy in the 1960 election. The most highly publicized allegation is that Judith Campbell Exner was used as a courier between Sam Giancana and John Kennedy and there is no evidence in the FBI records that directly supports that. But there is other information that would suggest that there were connections between John Kennedy and Sam Giancana. TWL: Three weeks before the Kennedy assassination, President Diem of South Vietnam was killed in a CIA-backed coup. Did you look into that? JG: Yes. One of the questions we looked into was whether or not President Kennedy was directly involved with a plan to assassinate President Diem. We released all of the material on Diem from the Church Committee and we looked for additional new material. TWL: Did you come across anything that surprised you? JG: One of the allegations that was made in the Oliver Stone film "JFK" was that President Kennedy was killed because the military wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam and he was preventing them from doing so. That's not a theory I subscribe to, but in the process of reading through the Vietnam records it became clear to me that there was a significant change in U.S. policy toward Vietnam after the assassination. The documents show that President Kennedy was ambivalent about Vietnam. My own personal conclusion is that he had not decided what he was going to do about Vietnam. He wanted the problem to go away. President Johnson, however, was committed to doing whatever was necessary to win. He was going to make the problem go away by sheer force of will. So there was a sharp change in emphasis between the two administrations regarding Vietnam that has not been sufficiently appreciated. TWL: How do citizens and scholars gain access to the records that the review board had brought together? JG: It's very easy. All anyone has to do is go to the National Archives in College Park and make a request. The entire collection is available there. RH: My hope is that people do use these records. I hope they are carefully examined by historians and journalists because they are fascinating. They deal with issues like Cuba, Vietnam, organized crime, and CIA covert operations that have been the subjects of intense interest for the past thirty years. JG: It's really an unprecedented thing that our government has done. No other government in the world would expose its secrets and let all sorts of unflattering information come to light. The willingness of the United States government to do so is something that the American people should take justifiable pride in. [END]