Arlen Specter recalls informal interview with Dr. Humes before formal Warren Commission testimony

[Vince Palamara]

Arlen Specter recalls informal interview with Dr. Humes before formal Warren Commission testimony

(This was the informal interview Specter did at Bethesda the Friday BEFORE his FORMAL Warren Commission testimony)

Vince

[Vince Palamara]

I am posting this at the request of Joe Backes, Pat Spears, and anyone else interested. The interesting item I missed the first time around was the fact that Specter is refering to his informal interview with Humes at Bethesda which was done the Friday BEFORE his formal Warren Commission testimony. The first version of this video was meant to deliver maximum results: "don't bore us, get to the chorus", as musicians would say. There are several other interesting items he says before and after. Oh, and for any lunkheads out there- yes, the whole universe knows what Humes and Specter said and testified to in the final analysis (under oath)...the interesting items are Humes FIRST informal impressions to Specter before he spoke to Dr Perry, testified formally, etc. So, no need to write "see? See? Humes ultimately testified that the neck wound was one of exit." duhhhh!

[Pat Speer]

Thanks, Vince. Much appreciated.

It's clear to me he's trying to piece it all together and is coming up short. Far short.

Not only does he say Humes thought the throat wound was an entrance BEFORE talking to Perry, he says PERRY--who went to his grave claiming the throat wound LOOKED like an entrance--convinced Humes it was not, because it looked like an exit.

He also gets Humes' comments about the strap muscles wrong. Of course, he's never understood Humes' comments about the strap muscles, and has always pushed that these muscles were on Kennedy's back, when they were on the front of the neck.

Sad.

Too late.

Edited May 18, 2012 by Pat Speer

[Terry Adams]

I wonder; do we have another person on the Warren Commission that did not believe in it's official findings that has been overlooked? Senator Specter was left dumfounded when, after a lengthy description of the single bullet theory, Chief Justice Warren just turned and walked away without uttering a word. What do you think?

Edited May 20, 2012 by Terry Adams

[Richard Coleman]

Well. There's this: Excerpt from a post by John Simkin in the thread, "Thomas Hale Boggs", dated Oct. 27, 2006 (post #16):

Barnard Fensterwald provides an interesting commentary on Thomas Hale Boggs in Assassination of JFK: Coincidence or Conspiracy (1974) pages 96-105

"You have got to do everything on earth to establish the facts one way or the other. And without doing that, why everything concerned, including every one of us is doing a very grave disservice. Thus House Majority Leader Hale Boggs delivered an admonishment of sorts to his Warren Commission colleagues on January 27, 1964. Along with Senator Richard Russell, and to a lesser degree, Senator John Sherman Cooper, Congressman Boggs served as a beacon of skepticism and probity in trying to fend off the FBI and CIA's efforts to "shade" and indeed manipulate the findings of the Warren Commission.

Like Russell, Boggs was, very simply, a strong doubter. Several years after his death in 1972, a colleague of his wife Lindy (who was elected to fill her late husband's seat in the Congress) recalled Mrs. Boggs remarking, "Hale felt very, very torn during his work [on the Commission] ... he wished he had never been on it and wished he'd never signed it [the Warren Report]." A former aide to the late House Majority Leader has recently recalled, "Hale always returned to one thing: Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission - on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it... "

Almost from the beginning, Congressman Boggs had been suspicious over the FBI and CIA's reluctance to provide hard information when the Commission's probe turned to certain areas, such as allegations that Oswald may have been an undercover operative of some sort. When the Commission sought to disprove the growing suspicion that Oswald had once worked for the FBI, Boggs was outraged that the only proof of denial that the FBI offered was a brief statement of disclaimer by J. Edgar Hoover. It was Hale Boggs who drew an admission from Allen Dulles that the CIA's record of employing someone like Oswald might be so heavily coded that the verification of his service would be almost impossible for outside investigators to establish. Boggs and Dulles had the following exchange:

"Thomas Boggs: So I will ask you. Did you have agents about whom you had no record whatsoever?

Allen Dulles: The record might not be on paper. But on paper [we] would have hieroglyphics that only two people knew what they meant, and nobody outside of the Agency would know and you could say this meant the agent and someone else could say it meant another agent."

Congressman Boggs had been the Commission's leading proponent for devoting more investigative resources to probing the connections of Jack Ruby. With an early recognition that "the most difficult aspect of this is the Ruby aspect," Boggs had wanted an increased effort made to investigate the accused assassin's murderer.

Boggs was perhaps the first person to recognize something which numerous Warren Commission critics would write about in future years: the strange variations and dissimilarities to be found in Lee Harvey Oswald's correspondence during 1960 to 1963. Some critics have advanced the theory that some of Oswald's letters - particularly correspondence to the American Embassy in Moscow, and later, to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee - may have been "planted" documents written by someone else. In 1975 and 1976, the investigations of the Senate Intelligence Committee and other Congressional groups disclosed that such uses of fabricated correspondence had been a recurring tool of the FBI's secret domestic COINTELPRO [Counter Intelligence] program as well as other intelligence operations. In any event, Warren Commission member Boggs and Commission General Counsel Lee Rankin had early on discussed such an idea:

"Rankin: They [the Fair Play For Cuba Committee] denied he was a member and also he wrote to them and tried to establish as one of the letters indicate, a new branch there in New Orleans, the Fair Play For Cuba.

Boggs: That letter has caused me a lot of trouble. It is a much more literate and polished communication than any of his other writing."

It is also known Boggs felt that because of the lack of adequate material from the FBI and CIA the Commission members were poorly prepared for the examination of witnesses. According to a former Boggs staffer, the Congressman felt that lack of adequate file preparation and the sometimes erratic scheduling of Commission sessions served to prevent those same sessions from being adequately substantive. Consequently, Boggs cut down his participation in these sessions as the investigation stretched on through 1964.

Author Sylvia Meagher has cited one of the more telling examples of the frequent inability of the Warren Commission to coordinate its members' involvement in these sessions, as illustrated by the following exchange in Warren Commission Volume 3:

"Chairman Warren: Senator Cooper, at this time I am obliged to leave for our all-day conference on Friday at the Supreme Court, and I may be back later in the day, but if I don't, you continue, of course.

Sen. Cooper: I will this morning. If I can't be here this afternoon whom do you want ' to preside?

Chairman Warren: Congressman Ford, would you be here this afternoon at all?

Rep. Ford: Unfortunately, Mr. McCloy and I have to go to a conference out of town.

Chairman Warren: You are both going out of town, aren't you?

Sen. Cooper: I can go and come back if it is necessary.

Chairman Warren: I will try to be here myself. Will Mr. Dulles be here?

Mr. McCloy: He is out of town."

On April 5, 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs took the floor of the House to deliver a speech that created a major stir in Washington for several weeks. Declaring that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was incompetent and senile, and charging that the FBI had, under Hoover's most recent years adopted "the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo"; Boggs demanded Hoover's immediate resignation. Boggs also charged that he had discovered that certain FBI agents had tapped his own telephone as well as the phones of certain other members of the House and Senate. In his emotional House speech, Boggs went on to say Attorney General Mitchell says he is a law and order man. If law and order means the suppression of the Bill of Rights . . . then I say "God help us." As the Washington Post noted, "The Louisiana Democrat's speech was the harshest criticism of Hoover ever heard in the House . . . It was the first attack on Hoover by any member of the House leadership."

At the time, Boggs' startling speech created a sensation in Washington. Observers were uncertain as to his exact motivations in demanding Hoover's resignation, and there was an immediate critical reaction from Hoover's various defenders. It has been reported that sources within the FBI and the Attorney General's office began spreading stories that Boggs was a hopeless alcoholic. However, it was not until almost four years later that the motivation behind Boggs' outburst came into clearer focus.

On January 20, 1975, the Washington Post and other news organizations reported that solid evidence had been uncovered about the existence of what Hoover and the FBI had long denied they possessed: secret damaging dossiers on various members of the House and Senate, compiled through various forms of surveillance. On the following day, January 21,1975, Washington Post reporter Ron Kessler made a further disclosure:

"The son of the late House Majority Leader Boggs has told The Post that the FBI leaked to his father damaging material on the personal lives of critics of its investigation into John F. Kennedy's assassination. Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr. said his father, who was a member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination and its handling by the FBI, was given the material in an apparent attempt to discredit the critics [of the Warren Commission].

The material, which Thomas Boggs made available, includes photographs of sexual activity and reports on alleged communist affiliations of some authors of articles and books on the assassination.

Boggs, a Washington lawyer, said the experience played a large role in his father's decision to publicly charge the FBI with Gestapo tactics in a 1971 speech alleging the Bureau had wiretapped his telephone and that of other Congressmen."