Specter........

[Tom Kiehl]

Who appointed him to lead the questions for the WC....would he not make a great witness?......

[Bernice Moore]

Hi Tom:

Welcome to the forum......You may find the article by Gaeton Fonzi below interesting..

Am only posting a part, click the link to read all, if interested..about Darlin Arlen..

B..

The Warren Commission, The Truth, and Arlen Specter

By Gaeton Fonzi

Greater Philadelphia Magazine, 1 August 1966

On November 29th, President Johnson created the Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy “to evaluate all the facts and circumstances.” He asked Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren to be its chairman. According to The New York Times, Warren initially refused, but after an emotion-filled conference with Johnson, consented to serve.

Johnson then completed the Commission with two senior Senators, Democrat Richard Russell of Georgia and Republican John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky; two senior Representatives, Democrat Hale Boggs of Louisiana and Republican Gerald Ford of Michigan; former CIA director Allen Dulles; and former World Bank president John J. McCloy.

The Commission chose J. Lee Rankin, former U.S. Solicitor General, as its general counsel. Rankin, in turn, selected New York University professor and tax law expert Norman Redlich as his special assistant. Almost all communication between the working staff of lawyers and investigators and the Commission members was to pass through Redlich and Rankin.

As “senior counsel” to the Commission, a group of the most eminent and respected lawyers in the country were chosen, among them Philadelphia’s William T. Coleman Jr., partner in Dilworth, Paxson, Kalish, Kohn and Dilks. These men, however, generally turned out to be such outstanding attorneys that, during the course of the investigation, they could find little time to free themselves from their own busy law practices. As a result, the bulk of the work fell on what were called the “junior counsel,” the young lawyers with budding reputations for whom appointment to the Commission staff was a tremendous honor, Arlen Specter was one.

Specter, then a 33-year-old assistant district attorney, had recently been made chief of the litigation division after having achieved a notable success in sending local Teamster boss Roy Cohen to jail. A Yale Law grad, he had an excellent reputation as a hard, diligent worker and was known among his associates as a man of integrity and ambition—albeit, according to one civil lawyer friend, within the framework of what he termed a “prosecutor mentality.”

Nevertheless, when Howard Willens, Specter’s former co-editor of the Yale Law Journal who was acting as liaison between the Commission and the Justice Department, called him late in December and asked him to join the Commission staff, Specter initially refused. He says he didn’t like the idea of leaving Philadelphia or of being away from his wife and family for a long period. But as he began to talk to more and more friends about it, to his associates and then-district attorney James Crumlish and his law partner Marvin Katz, they convinced him it was a unique opportunity. “They told me I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t go,” he says.

Basically, the task of the Warren Commission staff was to evaluate reports submitted by various government agencies, chiefly the FBI and the Secret Service. (The FBI had quickly conducted its own investigation into the assassination and submitted more than 25,000 reports.) From the reports, the staff lawyers had to decide what witnesses would be questioned further, which should be brought to testify before the formal hearings of the Commission (only 94 of the 552 who provided testimony finally were), what questions needed further investigation and what details were relevant or irrelevant. There were no independent investigators. If something needed checking, the staff lawyers had to do it themselves or ask for an FBI or Secret Service report on the matter.

It had been initially decided that the Commission staff should be divided into senior counsel and junior counsel “teams” to look into various areas, resolve the minor problems and inconsistencies, and present before the Commission itself only the major questions. The team report for each area would serve as the basis for the principal chapters in the Commission’s final Report.

Arlen Specter was assigned as junior counsel to Area I, “the basic facts of the assassination.” Senior counsel in the area was to have been Francis W. H. Adams, a former New York City police commissioner. But because Adams was so wrapped up in a major case with his own law firm, he wound up spending only a few days working on the Commission investigation. Practically the entire workload for the most important area of the assassination fell on Arlen Specter alone.

The rest of the Commission staff worked on five other areas. Area II was concerned with the identity of the assassin. Chapter IV of the Report, which evolved from it, was entitled “The Assassin” and concerned itself with evidence which indicated that it was Oswald who fired from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. Area III of the investigation was devoted to Oswald’s background. Area IV looked into the question of whether Oswald was connected with any conspiracy and investigated his movements outside the country. Area V dealt with Oswald’s death, including the possibility of a prior connection with Jack Ruby. A sixth area, which was added later at the request of the Commission, studied Presidential protection in general.

Thus, before an objective evaluation of the facts concerning the assassination of President Kennedy ever got under way, it was decided that four of the six areas of investigation should concern themselves with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Arlen Specter knew it.

Critic Dwight Macdonald wrote in Esquire: “The American legal mind is often subtle and complex, but its ‘adversary’ training pushes it toward an Either/Or solution which treats Facts not as ever-changing pointers toward an ever-changing hypothesis, but as uniformed troops to be strategically massed so as to overwhelm the enemy by sheer numbers…lawyers are always out for total victory—I attribute the Commission’s ‘adversary’ bias against Oswald simply to the fact that the prima-facie case against him was so strong.”

Arlen Specter began working for the Warren Commission early in January, 1964. A deadline of June 1st had been set for the first draft of reports from each of the area teams. Specter was the only staff lawyer to meet that deadline. In his report he concluded that all the shots fired on Dealey Plaza on November 22nd came from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.

Based on Specter’s investigation, these were the main points in the final version of the Report:

Witnesses, principal among them steamfitter Brennan, saw what they took to be a rifle in an upper-story window of the Depository.

Three employees on the fifth floor of the Depository heard shots and shells dropping on the floor above them.

Two large bullet fragments found in the front of the Presidential car as well as a nearly whole bullet said to be found on Governor Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital were definitely fired from the 6.5-mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle which Oswald ordered from a Chicago mail-order house and which was found on the sixth floor of the Depository.

Three shots were fired. One hit Kennedy near the top of his back, came out the front of his neck, went through Connally’s back, came out his chest, smashed his right wrist and caused a puncture wound in his left thigh. Another went in the back of Kennedy’s head and blew out the right front part of his head. A third missed. The Commission decided that the order of the hits was irrelevant and made no determination of the sequence.

Specter based these conclusions on a number of principal pieces of evidence: The autopsy report from Bethesda; motion pictures of the assassination taken by amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder; a re-construction of the event based on the films; and ballistic tests of bullet velocity and wound characteristics

The crux of Specter’s contention—and the Commission’s Report—is what has come to be called the “single bullet theory.” That is, the same bullet which went through Kennedy’s neck caused all of Governor Connally’s wounds. Specter claims that one of the principal factors that led him to the theory was that there was no other way to explain what happened to the bullet which emerged from the front of the President’s neck—unless it also hit Connally. There was no indication that it hit anywhere else in the car. There was a crack on the inside of the front windshield and a mark on the chrome above it, but much more damage would have been done if they had been caused by a whole bullet.

There was also the question of timing. Tests showed that the fastest the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle could be fired twice was 2.3 seconds (based on the time required just to open and close the bolt, not aiming). The Zapruder film, taken at 18.3 frames per second, indicated that all the shots were fired in less than six seconds. If three shots were fired, they would have had to be fired very rapidly and accurately.

It is far more complicated than that, however, given the details of the evidence. In fact, the key question is this: Was it possible for a lone gunman to have accomplished the assassination if President Kennedy and Governor Connally were not hit by the same bullet?

Specter maintains that the answer is not “central” to the Commission’s conclusion. He does so in the face of the very evidence which the Commission used to conclude that it was. In fact, Edward Epstein in Inquest quotes a Commission lawyer as stating bluntly: “To say that they were hit by separate bullets is synonymous with saying that there were two assassins.”

Continues.......

http://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Fon...th_Specter.html

[Dawn Meredith]

And no matter what Specter does with the rest of his life he will forever be considered a xxxx, a fool and an accessory after the fact for his role in the cover-up. I did not get to see him in Pittsburg at the JFK conference put on by Dr. Wecht and son Ben, but a friend who was there said he made a total fool of himself. None-the-less he stands by the lunacy of the magic bullet theory.

Dawn

[Tom Kiehl]

And no matter what Specter does with the rest of his life he will forever be considered a xxxx, a fool and an accessory after the fact for his role in the cover-up. I did not get to see him in Pittsburg at the JFK conference put on by Dr. Wecht and son Ben, but a friend who was there said he made a total fool of himself. None-the-less he stands by the lunacy of the magic bullet theory.

Dawn

[Tom Kiehl]

Thank you Bernice......tom

[Sid Walker]

And no matter what Specter does with the rest of his life he will forever be considered a xxxx, a fool and an accessory after the fact for his role in the cover-up. I did not get to see him in Pittsburg at the JFK conference put on by Dr. Wecht and son Ben, but a friend who was there said he made a total fool of himself. None-the-less he stands by the lunacy of the magic bullet theory.

Dawn

Specter a xxxx?

Certainly

Accessory after the fact?

Obviously.

Fool?

That depends on one's point of view.

He probably thinks not. He's close to the top of the US political tree, posturing as a defenders of civil liberties and so far from arrest and indictment that the prospect is not seriously mentioned, even in forums such as this.

I guess Specter would regard us as the fools.

He got away with it. Those of us who regard him as a criminal accomplice to the cover-up of the President's murder haven't laid a glove on him, except by occasional protests in narrowcasts targeted only at minority interest groups.