The solemn occasion of the 25th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has returned the minds of millions of Americans to that awful moment on a bright sunny November day in Dallas when the unthinkable happened. Memories of sudden gunfire, a burst of spattered blood and the torrent of confusion that followed have come rushing back after years of often deliberate forgetfulness.
That moment never has left the mind of Washington attorney Bernard Fensterwald, a Harvard classmate of Kennedy`s and one of his 1960 campaign speech writers. A former Senate staff aide and investigator, he was among hundreds of independent probers who conducted their own inquiries into the shooting-provoked rather than satisfied by government investigations and reports that Fensterwald now simply characterizes as ”funky.”
The question of who really killed the 35th president of the United States and why became an obsession born as much out of frustration as curiosity. Even now, Fensterwald has a number of theories about Kennedy`s murder and related assassinations: that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK and another, probably unrelated one to cover it up; that Lee Harvey Oswald never shot Kennedy and there may have been two or three Oswalds; that Bobby Kennedy more likely was killed accidentally by one of his own guards than by Sirhan Sirhan, who witnesses said fired from the front, though the bullet that killed RFK came from the rear. But he has fewer conclusions and even fewer official facts.
In 1969, after so many years had passed, witnesses had died, files had been closed and events forgotten, Fensterwald and some like-minded doubters organized the Committee to Investigate Assassinations. The aim was to gather and preserve data, shift the emphasis of their various inquiries from quasi-criminal investigations to scholarly study and to expand the scope of their probings to include the 1968 killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1984, this evolved into the privately (and rather meagerly) funded, nonprofit Assassination Archives and Research Center. A permanent repository of material on the Kennedy slayings, the center was intended to keep interest in the Kennedy mystery alive and to further knowledge and study of all assassinations, throughout history and throughout the world.
It`s the sort of enterprise that could be housed in one of the neoclassic columned buildings that abound in Washington, but, perhaps more fittingly, it`s in a run-down building on a seedy capital street just around the corner from the Ford`s Theater, where Abraham Lincoln was shot and the Petersen House, where he died in 1865.
The FBI Reading Room is a convenient block away and the National Archives just two blocks distant.
It`s the sort of place that ought to be the repository of conspiracy theories. The office directory could easily include a ”Sam Spade, Private Detective” listing, and the musty corridors and general ambiance would make the Phantom of the Opera feel cozy and wanted. There`s even a creaky old metal-cage elevator to lurch and groan visitors up to the archives` 5th-floor suite.
The center occupies five rooms crowded with storage shelves and file cabinets and piled with books, documents, tapes and investigatory flotsam. The fastidious Sherlock Holmes would not be happy here, but Lt. Columbo would.
This is not a museum. There are no bullets, blood-soaked shirts, skulls or other artifacts. As the computer terminals rising from the clutter signify, this is a tombful of information.
The center contains more than 1,500 books, including practically every work ever written on the Kennedy killing, among them Fensterwald`s own 1977 book, ”Coincidence or Conspiracy?” There are 80,000 pages of FBI documents, most acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (Fensterwald says he has become one of the nation`s leading experts on that law through his assassination studies).
There also is a computer data bank containing 50,000 names and assassination references (among them 32,000 names and events related to the JFK shooting) and a file of 2,000 audiotapes, of which 22 were recorded by a Dallas Morning News reporter who worked on the Kennedy case for years.
With a paying membership of about 200, the archives is run by an 11-member board that includes attorneys and university professors. The director is Fensterwald, who once represented King`s convicted assassin, James Earl Ray, in a years-long effort to win a new trial (and, as he candidly admits, to help himself learn more about the King killing).
The organization puts out a newsletter, which this month informs members of the multitude of television programs to be broadcast on the Kennedy assassination, including specifics on program subject matter such as ”medical evidence & single bullet.”
There are files on virtually every country in the world (few have been immune from assassinations) and entries going back to the Roman Empire. Curiously, though it has some material on Lincoln`s murder, it is not pursuing any historical probe into the circumstances of the Emancipator`s death-though there is some indication that Lincoln`s war secretary, Edwin Stanton, may have been involved in the conspiracy. Fensterwald prefers to leave that to two other groups, the Lincoln Society and the Surrat Society.
The overriding conclusion Fensterwald has reached is that assassination as a means of changing government has been the rule rather than the exception. ”Going over the Roman emperors one by one, we found that more than one-half of them were assassinated,” he said. ”Something like two-thirds of the Russian czars were. A lot of the popes were. . . . The present pope (John Paul II) had an attack on his life” in 1981
Fensterwald, who for 12 years was an aide and investigator for the late Sen. Estes Kefauver (D., Tenn.), among others, believes Napoleon may well have been murdered and that contrary to popular legend there was no chance that Czar Nicholas II`s daughter Anastasia escaped Bolshevik assassins in the murder of her family in Ekaterinburg
President Warren Harding, he thinks, was murdered in 1923 by his jealous wife.
”Throughout the world, assassination is a favorite way of changing power,” he said. ”The U.S. is unique in that the country doesn`t believe in it. If a president is killed, it always has to be by some nut.”
Fensterwald noted that the open nature of the U.S. government and democratic system makes any American president vulnerable to attack.
”In the Soviet Union, it`s very rare that a leader like (Mikhail)
Gorbachev will go out and make public appearances the way presidents do. Until Gorbachev, it was almost unheard of. Here, if someone really wants to kill a president, it can be done. Attempts are made all the time,” Fensterwald said. Presidents Lincoln, Kennedy, James Garfield and William McKinley were killed by assassins. Attacks were made on George Washington (while still a general), Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Teddy Roosevelt (while a presidential candidate), Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.
”There are others we may not know about,” Fensterwald said.
He complained that though major assassinations are the most important crimes that have confronted this country, they seldom get the police work they deserve.
”A murder up on 14th Street (a reference to one of Washington`s higher crime areas) will get a more professional investigation than you get with these assassinations. Some of the best evidence is walked over or ignored. Witnesses are ignored. There isn`t the effort to find out what happened,” he contended.
He doesn`t blame the FBI, noting that in both Kennedy assassinations, for example, local police had primary jurisdiction.
Unlike a lot of supermarket tabloids and best-selling books, neither Fensterwald nor his center has concluded who killed John Kennedy, except to identify four possible suspects: the Central Intelligence Agency, the Mafia, Fidel Castro and anti-Castro Cuban groups who felt betrayed by Kennedy`s lack of military support in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Rather than seek evidence to support a particular theory, he wishes the government would reopen the case and examine and exhaust all evidence-including a lot it ignored-until it has a clear idea of what happened and why. This, he said, the Warren Commission and its report failed to do.
”It`s 26 volumes of baloney,” he said. ”Most of the evidence points to . . . (the assassin) being other than Lee Harvey Oswald. The only thing I`ve concluded beyond a doubt (about the JFK killing) is that Oswald wasn`t alone and that he wasn`t the killer. I`m 90 percent sure he may not even have shot.”
Fensterwald believes the murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit, which led to Oswald`s arrest, was due to an unrelated love triangle. He said the government has information now in the public domain that at least two people were using the Oswald identity, including a known gun-runner seen in Cuba before the assassination. The gun-runner subsequently died in an electrical accident.
Fensterwald said the CIA had 12 photographs of a possible third Lee Harvey Oswald, much taller and heavier than the man arrested, whom agents observed in Mexico. He also found it curious that the Dallas police had a full description of Oswald within 15 minutes of the Dealey Plaza shooting.
Soon after his arrest, Oswald, of course, was himself killed in the basement of a police station by Jack Ruby, a strip-joint proprietor with known Mafia connections.
”Ruby said he would tell (Earl) Warren everything if they`d get him out of the Dallas jail,” Fensterwald said. ”The chief justice of the United States Supreme Court said he didn`t have the power to do that.”
Ruby died in prison in 1967.
He said there were an extraordinary number of oddities to the case. Though it`s not commonly known and doubtlessly unrelated to the shooting, Richard Nixon was in Dallas addressing a bottlers convention at the time of the assassination.
Partly in response to pressure from Fensterwald`s and other groups, Congress in 1975 created the House Select Committee on Assassinations to reopen the Kennedy and King cases.
Noting that four of the committee`s witnesses were killed, including Chicago gangster Sam Giancana, Fensterwald called the committee`s work less than a success. It concluded that there had been conspiracies in the JFK and King assassinations, he said, but it shut down in 1979 without determining what the plots were about and locked up its files for the next 50 years.
”There`s hardly anything about this case that isn`t funky,” he said. –
