Book Review

"Just when scholars deemed the John F. Kennedy assassination 'case closed,' along comes Gerald McKnight to shatter certain fundamental assumptions," writes historian Douglas Brinkley about McKnight's work in Breach of Trust. One of those fundamental assumptions made over forty years ago is that the Warren Commission conducted an impartial search for the assassin of President Kennedy. Not so. With its 17,000 pages of testimony, the Warren Commission Report, McKnight argues, "was a shoddily improvised political exercise in public relations."

McKnight, Professor of History at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, argues that the Commission's documents, along with items it "never saw, refused to see, or actively suppressed," actually reveal evidence of two conspiracies: the assassination itself and the official cover-up. The cover-up began within days, asserts McKnight, when President Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach decided on the official conclusion. President Johnson then assigned a sham body to prop up a patsy who'd already died for the cause: one Lee Harvey Oswald.

Based on more than a quarter-million pages of government documents, along with 50,000 file cards in the Dallas FBI's "Special Index," McKnight asserts that the Commission's own evidence proves Oswald could not have acted alone. Therefore, he concludes, the Warren Commission knew they were participating in a cover-up. Further, he asserts, only about 11% of the hefty Report deals with the facts of the assassination. A large percentage of the report is spent on a detailed biography of Lee Harvey Oswald.

With regard to the single-bullet theory, McKnight writes that it never met the stringent standards of an actual theory, which we all know must be supported by a hypothesis. Instead, he writes, the single-bullet theory was invented to meet the requirements for a lone assassin. He refers to it, therefore, as the "single bullet construction." He writes, "When the commissioners first met they all knew what was expected of them. They were to go through the motions of an inquiry and release their report in quick order." McKnight explains, a timely FBI leak to the press made clear the conclusion in advance for the Commission: Oswald had acted alone.

Breach of Trust's chapter on the lone dissenter, Senator Richard Russell, is most compelling. To Russell, it was more than just "happenstance" that Oswald had just returned from a bizarre trip to Mexico, had lived in Russia and had denounced his American citizenship, and had essentially behaved in a peculiar manner that only a deep undercover operative could get away with. Indeed, Russell wondered how Oswald had managed to get a job at the Texas School Book Depository in mid-October, which just happened to overlook the president's motorcade route. "There had to be someone to advise him about that," he wrote.

The Senator questioned "a number of suspicious circumstances that precluded the conclusion that Oswald had acted entirely alone, without knowledge or assistance from anyone else." Indeed, due to Russell's membership on the Senate Oversight Committee on the CIA, he suspected Castro was behind the assassination. In the end, his dissenting language was whittled down in a "battle of the adjectives," wherein compelling evidence became credible evidence and, finally, persuasive evidence - that Oswald had acted alone. Apparently, it was the best this lone dissenter could achieve in a deck that was already stacked.

From the moment J. Lee Rankin stated, on January 27, 1964, "We have a dirty rumor… and it must be wiped out," the machinery was set in motion. McKnight concludes, "It was consistent with the Commission's modus operandi to dodge and weave… to squelch any in-house dissent that might encourage 'ugly rumors' of conspiracy." Indeed, the ugly rumor was that Oswald was either an undercover FBI subversive or a CIA informant. These "rumors" were widely held by members of the press in Dallas, and even Oswald's mother stated he had worked for the FBI or some other agency.

Breach of Trust is a highly recommended intensive examination of the Warren Report's convoluted findings. The truth that was buried under the "official mythology" is that JFK was a victim of "deep divisions" within the CIA over Cuba, and his assassination was a coup d'etat carried out by "powerful and irrational forces within his own government." Although the Warren Report satisfied the immediate political needs of the Cold War era, McKnight feels it failed us in the long run. I sincerely hope Breach of Trust can replace political expediency with the truth, as ugly as that truth might be. An ugly truth is still better than an elegantly propped up fiction.