Opinions are like a**holes: everybody has one, and they all stink.
Thus it's not surprising that conspiracy books are always quoting Washington insiders who believed that there was a JFK assassination conspiracy. They can quote some pretty important figures, too.
On Friday, September 18, 1964, less than a week before the Commission presented its report to LBJ, Russell talked to LBJ and discussed the Commission's work. Russell is explaining why he left town so quickly:
Johnson: Why did you get in such a rush?Russell doesn't seem to have any "inside" or "secret" information. Indeed, he has less information than most students of the case. Russell was hardly a model Commission member. Of all the commissioners, he attended the fewest hearings. While Earl Warren (the chairman) was present for part or all of the testimony of all 94 witnesses who appeared before the Commission, Gerald Ford was present for 70 of them, and Allen Dulles for 60. Russell was present for only 6 (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, New York: Vintage Books, 1992, p. xxx).Russell: Well, I was just worn out, fightin' over that damn report.
Johnson: Well, you oughta [have] taken another hour and gone to get your clothes.
Russell: No . . . No. Well, they were trying to prove that [the] same bullet that hit Kennedy first was the one that hit Connally . . . went through him and through his hand, his bone, into his leg and everything else. Just lot of stuff there . . . I hadn't . . . couldn't . . . didn't hear all the evidence, and cross-examine all of them but I did read the record and so I just, ah . . . I don't know. I was the only fella there that even . . . practically, that suggested any change whatever in what the staff had got up. This staff business always scares me. I like to put my own views down. But we got you a pretty good report.
Johnson: Well, what difference does it make which bullet got Connally?
Russell: Well, it don't make much difference. But they said that . . . that the Commission believe[s] that the same bullet that hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well, I don't believe it.
Johnson: I don't either.
Russell: And so I couldn't sign it. And I said that Governor Connally testified directly to the contrary, and I'm not gonna approve of that. So I finally made 'em say there was a difference in the Commission, in that part of 'em believed that that wasn't so. 'Course, if a fella was accurate enough to hit Kennedy right in the neck on one shot, and knock his head off in the next one when he's leanin' up against his wife's head and not even wound her . . . why, he didn't miss completely with that third shot. But according to that theory, he not only missed the whole automobile but he missed the street. Well, a man a good enough [sic] shot to put two bullets right into Kennedy, he didn't miss that whole automobile . . . .
Johnson: Hmmm.
Russell: --nor the street. But anyhow, that's just a little thing, but we --
Johnson: What's the net of the whole thing? What it say? [sic] That Oswald did it, and he did it for any reason?
Russell: Well, just what he was a general misanthropic fella . . . that he'd . . . had never been satisfied anywhere he was on earth, in Russia or here, and that he had a desire to get his name in history and all. I don't think you'll be displeased with the report. It's too long, but it's a . . . whole volume.
Johnson: Unanimous?
Russell: Yes, sir.
Johnson: Hmm.
Russell: I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they'd come 'round and trade me out of it by givin' me a little old thread of it. (Max Holland, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, pp. 250-251).
Russell disbelieves the Single Bullet Theory because of the testimony of John Connally. And he doesn't believe that Oswald, whom the Commission said fired all the shots, could have missed one of his shots. Regardless of the merits of these arguments, they don't reflect any inside knowledge.
But the clearest indication of his ignorance is his saying of the Single Bullet Theory "Well, it doesn't make much difference." As any conspiracist will emphatically insist, it makes a world of difference.
Johnson says that he doesn't believe the Single Bullet Theory either. It's difficult to know whether he actually has an opinion, or whether he's just humoring the Senator from Georgia. The latter is more probable, given that Johnson can hardly have studied the Single Bullet Theory days before he's even been given the Commission's Report. Later, as we shall see, he clearly came to suspect a conspiracy.
Interestingly, Russell tells Johnson that "we got you a pretty good report." Russell's discontent was, at this point, not very deep. Over the years, he became more critical of the Commission and its work.
In 1970, told WSB-TV (Atlanta) that:
I think someone else worked with him (on the planning). . . .Interestingly, even in the 1970 interview, Russell appeared to agree with the Warren Commission that Oswald was the lone shooter. "I think that any other commission you might appoint today would arrive at that conclusion," he told WSB-TV. (ibid.)There were too many things . . . the fact that he was at Minsk and that was the principal center for educating Cuban students . . . some of the trips he made to Mexico City and a number of discrepancies in the evidence, or as to his means of transportation; the luggage he had and whether or not anyone was with him . . . caused me to doubt that he planned it all by himself. (The Washington Post, Monday, June 19, 1970, p. A3)
Russell, by this time, has become a buff. The issues he cited were the standard conspiracy book lore, and not things about which Russell would have had any particular knowledge.
In fact, Russell was being "tutored" on the assassination by conspiratist Harold Weisberg. Weisberg lobbied Russell, fed him documents, and pandered to Russell's unhappiness that his doubts about the Single Bullet Theory not only did not make it into the Warren Commission Report, but also were not included in the minutes of the September 18th Commission meeting (Harold Weisberg, Never Again, Chap. 18).
People expected suave. They expected sophistication. They expected blonde. They expected cool efficiency. What they got was the cool efficiency. She was not an intellectual, a beauty or a charmer. She was efficient, loyal and competent.Perhaps intuition often holds truth, but equally often it's merely an expression of prejudice, or of wishful thinking. One might assume that the President's own private secretary would be the consumate insider, privy to all the secrets that government "insiders" have but which are concealed from ordinary citizens. If so, those "secrets" didn't include any actual evidence that a conspiracy killed Kennedy.. . .
Evelyn greatly disliked Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, being harshly critical of both. She once told me that President Johnson had seen her on TV severely criticizing his decisions on the Vietnam War and said: "I ought to throw that black-haired bitch into the Potomac."
It is not surprising, therefore, that Evelyn Lincoln viewed the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a political coup d'etat, carried out by Lyndon Johnson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency. She insisted it was the first successful coup in American history.
Evidence? There was none, even when I asked why she believed it. It came down to the fact that Evelyn was convinced, and that was that. This is not to dismiss the validity of intuition, however, for intuition often holds truth. (Francis McGuire in the introduction to My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy by Evelyn Lincoln)
Did any of them actually witness anything that would indicate a conspiracy? In virtually all cases, no.
Witnesses, quite simply, can become buffs. And government officials who might seem to have "inside information" can be quite ignorant on issues that go the least bit beyond their official duties. But they, like everybody else, read books and talk to people. And if misinformation is rife in the culture, they will pick some up.