Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2014There should never have been a Warren Commission. Had you been Vice President when President Kennedy was assassinated, you would have allowed the law enforcement agencies with jurisdiction over the crime of murder in the State of Texas to do what they were required by law to do, investigate. You would have had no honest motive to cut lawful investigations off by creating a Presidential commission.
When you read much assassination literature, you soon see that whenever a piece of evidence goes to the FBI, it disappears. The Warren Commission had as its purpose from the beginning to reassure the public that Oswald acted alone, and J. Edgar Hoover's language to this effect is well-known. If you have read at least the one-volume edition of the Warren Report which was released to the public, you have seen for yourself the pattern that Sylvia Meagher describes as "constant and premeditated," to incriminate Oswald and no one else, despite what its own evidence and exhibits actually revealed.
Meagher's study is brilliant, and absolutely crucial for any open-minded person seeking to understand the cover-up of the facts surrounding this murder. Piece by piece, Meagher examines each aspect of the Warren Commission's product, and demonstrates with admirable patience how shoddy and finally how dishonest a piece of work that product is. My own reaction to the Report, as a lawyer, was that I realized I was reading a legal brief -- a factual and legal argument made from a position of advocacy, not from an objective standpoint. Whenever the Report was faced with two possible conclusions, A or B, each of which had at least equal support in the record, it always chose the conclusion which supported the Oswald as Lone Nut theory, and always discounted the other conclusion.
Meagher's study was not limited to the one-volume Report issued to the public. She went through the entire body of work, and found this same pattern, even when the evidence clearly led in the other direction, which it did, time and again. It is impossible to believe that the lawyers writing this document were that incompetent; and that leaves only one conclusion: a form of dishonesty known as single conclusion advocacy. When the outcome is preordained, you are not seeking the truth. You are advocating a position.
That is what the Warren Commission did, and there is no honest motive for it to have done so. There is no need for a cover-up when there is nothing to cover up. When people deliberately avoid the truth, it is because the truth is unpleasant, or because there is some compelling reason to avoid it, such as "National Security" or stability. The title "Accessories After the Fact" is appropriate, not because its authors deliberately sought to frustrate justice, but because they were in an untenable position for someone supposedly engaged in a dispassionate search for facts. They were employed by LBJ, and their investigative agency was the FBI. There is no way they could have turned around and accused these same actors of complicity in the crime. They ended up endorsing an illegal and falsified autopsy, and a false story. Much more is known today than at the time Meagher did her study, but if you are seriously interested in this topic, don't fail to read this important early book.
