The Witnesses
The odd thing about the Warren Commission's report is that it is so full of life. There are so many characters in it. I think this arises from the way so many of the witnesses disagree with each other. The report makes no attempt to con- ceal these disagreements. Over the number of shots, over which bullet missed, over how Oswald carried the gun into the building, there is no definitive conclusion. This seems to me the report's strength rather than its weakness. What emerges is a picture not so much of what hap- pened as of how it seemed to happen and of the effect of the assassination on people. Catastrophic and unprecedented event that it was, witnesses reacted much as they would have done to a simple street accident, with blurred memories. It was right, of course, that such a comprehensive report should have been demanded, and right, too, that people should have drawn attention to the contradictory evidence that first came out of Dallas. Much of this appears now to have been the direct result of a number of the Dallas police taking it upon themselves to feed news to the press and the chaotic nature of the Oswald press conferences. In a naïve bit of editorialising. the report blames the newsmen for this as much as the police. But surely the journalists' responsi- bility was to gather every scrap of information they could from wherever they could get it. It was entirely the fault of the police that journalists, and anyone else, should have been allowed to swarm continually over the police headquarters.
Previous page
