Fourth Reich Archaeology - The Warren Commission Decided 12: Lie-beler

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Finally, we land on the original Warren Commission Defender, junior staff member Wesley J. (“Jim”) Liebeler. Liebeler, 24 years younger than his senior partner, Albert Jenner, came to the Commission from U. Chicago law school, specifically recommended by his lawschool classmate, one Kenneth Dam. Both Dam and Liebeler were acolytes of the “law and economics” school - a legal theory fusing libertarian jurisprudence with the neoliberal, neoclassical economics of the “Chicago school” of shock-doctrine disaster capitalism.We discuss how Liebeler embodied the “gunner” lawyer prototype and how he brought that attitude to his work. He was a guy who knew how to play the middle to please everybody and advance his own star. For example, even though he went on record, writing a memo to Lee Rankin raising some serious questions about the Warren Report’s evidentiary weaknesses, he also took it upon himself to tie up some of the very loose ends he was concerned with in a way that tamped down evidence tending to show a conspiracy.In this regard, we take a deep dive into the “Odio incident,” wherein Dallas Cuban Silvia Odio was visited by a man she identified as Lee Harvey Oswald in September 1963, among a group of anti-Castro Cubans talking about wanting to assassinate the President. Liebeler’s conduct in that affair paints a disturbing picture of the man and his ethics, which casts further suspicion over his long and illustrious post-Commission career defending the Warren Report in the court of public opinion all over the country. This episode ties off our excavation into the Warren Commission staff attorneys for now, so we conclude it by zooming out to revisit the question we started with way back in Episode 7: How is it possible that all of these independent-minded professional men with no ulterior motives but to find the Truth about the President’s assassination could countenance a coverup of a conspiracy?

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America.

America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. Now, he has a mom. He knows so long that's a die, afraid of we'd never be secure.

It usually takes the national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is North Reich Archaeology. welcome back for another installment of the Warren Commission decided first before we get the

episode underway the usual thank you for tuning in for sharing the pod for liking and subscribing to the pod for telling everyone you know about the pod because Lord knows that the reality that we live in the Fourth Reich is dawning on more and more and more people each and every day here as we record in April of 2025. Now, we have come a long way in this series within a series on the Warren Commission. I don't think that Dick or I expected when we first set out on this excavation that it would take us this long or this deep into the Warren Commission lore. We have unearthed a wealth of artifacts on the Fourth Reich that can give us a

great deal of clues into how we got here, into how American democracy was subverted and was really buried just that much deeper on November 22nd, 1963, and with each passing day from November 29th, when Lyndon B. Johnson first signed that fateful executive order establishing the Presidential Commission on the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. To take a little stock of where we've been, we started out using the formation of the Warren Commission to illustrate the dynamic between the liberal cold warriors in the CIA camp, talking about your Georgetown set type personalities who were whispering or shouting, as it were, in LBJ's ear, urging him to create a presidential commission over the objections of both the president himself,

as well as his FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. And although Hoover put up a valiant fight against the idea, ultimately the weapon in the hands of the Georgetown set that caused LBJ to stand down his resistance was the threat of bad publicity in the Washington Post. We then went on to use our excavation into the backgrounds of the seven Warren commissioners as a way to explore the personality dynamics at the upper echelons of the American power structure. So we talked about how, on the one hand, you have your quasi-aristocratic members of the elite. guys like Alan Dulles who can trace their ancestry way back to the early days of the American

Republic and on the other hand you have your strivers like John J. McCloy who work their way in and once they're there go even the extra mile to solidify not only their own place within the power elite, but also the role of America as the rightful hegemon in global affairs. In between, you have your regional guys. You've got Earl Warren coming from California. You've got Dick Russell and Hale Boggs and John Sherman Cooper coming from the Deep South. And you've got your Midwesterner in the form of Jerry Ford. And what's really interesting is the way that the dynamic when you mix them all together really reifies the structure that's in place from the jump,

namely a structure that allows the Yankee boy, Alan Dulles, to... float to the top of the pile and to lead and direct the Warren Commission's investigation and its conclusions. So remember, Cooper, Boggs, and Russell would all go on after the Commission had concluded its work to express disagreement at minimum with the single bullet theory and possibly that implies a disagreement with the lone assassin theory as well as we discussed in our excavation of Arlenz Bechtar and the single bullet theory. But under the leadership of Dulles and his deputizing, Earl Warren, under the guise of preventing World War III, well, they were able, just like Warren did so many times on that Supreme Court, to marshal unanimity in support

of the official narrative when it counted. And finally, we've used our excavation into the staff attorneys of the Warren Commission to explore this question of how could a group of professionals, a group of disinterested lawyers, really participate in some kind of a cover-up? That being one of what we consider the hardest questions coming cold to the JFK assassination, picture to contend with. And we have not imputed to the staff attorneys some nefarious motives, but rather using the mere motivations of ordinary bog standard careerism or client service, in the case of Bert Jenner, to show how these staff attorneys were also able to come on board in a cover-up,

even if that's not what they intended to do. So at the staff level, we first zoomed in on Jay Lee Rankin, who faithfully served the commission in a sort of project management type role, but who later went on. to harshly criticize both the FBI and the CIA for manipulating the evidentiary record that was given to the commission. Then we dug in to Arlen Spector and how all it took for him was a healthy dose of political ambition combined with unaccountability and lack of supervision and toss into the mix as well, a up till now really underreported rapport with Commissioner Alan Dulles,

which led Spector to unscrupulously sell the American people the Bill of Goods known as the single bullet theory. And of course, for the last few episodes, we've been digging in to Albert Jenner, attorney and board member for General Dynamics, who used his role in investigating Oswald's biography to navigate that minefield of intelligence connections swirling around Oswald's social circle in Dallas and New Orleans, and Jenner took all those raw materials and spun a yarn about a lone nut... Marxist Marine gone mad. As attested by no less a figure than George de Morrinshild himself,

Jenner had a clear agenda to pin the blame solely on Oswald when he grilled Oswald's white Russian and anti-communist friends and acquaintances. And as we heard from Georgie Boy, Jenner was willing to use every trick in the book to advance that agenda. And I posit to you once more, listener, that the work that we've done on Albert Jenner's role in the Warren Commission is unmatched, certainly in the podcast space, but really you won't find a one-stop shop that digs out Jenner's decisive role and the motivations for

his rather unseemly participation in the cover-up perpetrated by the Warren Commission, you won't find that anywhere else. And after such a lengthy, lengthy exploration into Jenner, we can finally close the book on that old friend of the pod. We will now open the chapter on the guy who we've been promising to get to, the junior to Jenner Senior, the guy who's constantly in Jenner's shadow, what did you say, 24 years his junior, right? I wonder how many times you think during the course of the investigation Liebler was like,

uh, Mr. Jenner, is it? Do you think maybe our investigation is, is a little one-sided here. And how many times do you think Jenner turned and say, son, I've been doing this for longer than you've been alive. Yeah, I mean, probably Liebler was savvy enough not even to ask in the first damn place. Yeah, definitely. And in fact, yeah, well, we'll get to it. I think all the faults in the investigation only dawned on,

Liebler after it was too late. Exactly. Before that, I think he was just going along to get along, doing as he's told, keeping in his lane. Yeah, yeah. And then as soon as the pieces start to come together and he has that oh shit moment, it's too late. You want to give a little bio sketch on Buddy Jim? Sure will. So Wesley Liebler was born in a small town called Langdon, North Dakota.

He was a top student. He ended up at UChicago Law, which is a fantastic law school, where he excelled and graduated with honors in 1957. After law school, he got an associate position with the Wall Street law firm Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn. And now, I'm not going to say what kind of law firm it was. Because it was a CIA law firm. And in fact, it was the firm where our dear, near and dear friend of the pod, Frank Wisner,

had made his bones before joining the CIA, among other major early CIA personalities, like William Harding Jackson, who was deputy director under the Truman administration before becoming a Eisenhower's national security advisor. It was also where Franklin Roosevelt worked during his relatively brief stint in private practice. Indeed, Liebler testified before the House Select Committee in Assassinations that he had been interviewed by a CIA agent when he was younger and was impressed with them. whatever that means that's the that's that's that's that's that's that's the kind of statement that would lead jenner not to give a follow-up question for sure for sure and uh yeah indeed it's another one of these things where just like we talked about how the transcripts from the Warren commission

they misname J. Walton Moore as G. Walter Moore. So I spent a chunk of time looking for where Wesley Liebler worked on Wall Street before being named to the Warren Commission staff. And all of the obituaries, the Wikipedia page, et cetera, et cetera, they all just said he worked on Wall Street for all. a law firm. It wasn't until digging through his House Select Committee testimony and its transcript that I found he said he worked for a firm which was misnamed as Carter Ledger and Milburn, which is not the name of the firm. But, you know, again, one of these things that hard to tell if it's deliberate or if it's just a happy accident to throw the scent away from these fingerprints of intelligence. And that's not to say, you know, anything about

what Liebler was doing at the firm before the commission, but it's interesting that that's where he came from and that it's not something that's readily available to anybody looking for information about Liebler and it's not like he was there for a couple of weeks i mean i think he graduated law school in 1957 so he was there for a solid chunk of years before joining the Warren Commission staff. Anyways, as he testified to the HSCA, Liebler was called to join the commission staff from an old law school buddy of his

by the name of Kenneth Dam, who had by then returned to the faculty of UChicago Law School. And Dam, after graduating alongside Liebler from U.Chicago in 57, went first to clerk on the Supreme Court, and then got a job with the law firm that had formerly been managed by friend of the pod, John J. McCloy, talking about the cravath law firm also on Wall Street. and I thought it was an interesting note about Dam, this lifelong bosom friend of Jim Liebler who got him the gig on the Warren Commission just to sort of show the listener where Dam was playing his cards,

he would eventually go on to become the longtime director of the University of Chicago law schools law and economics program, which we won't get real deep into here, but suffice it to say it's exactly what it sounds like, a program for further conforming the legal system to the ruling class ideology under capitalism. This was kind of where the seeds were planted for what would become this U-Chicago milieu that created the Chicago boys, right, this group of free market neoclassical economists that followed the U.S. Empire into places like Chile after the 1973 CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende and ran the disaster capitalism playbook

Of course, you could see Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine for more on that, but this is the ideological circle in which Wesley Jim Liebler had started out, and it's where he would also end up after the Warren Commission, dedicating his career to academia, and particularly to a sort of law and economics approach to antitrust law became his specialty. So wanted to get that out there for any antitrust heads out there, any critics of the Chicago Boys and the free market playbook, and to kind of tie all of this back together to the fact that even the, liberal and self-styled, progressive folks in the circle that formed the pool from which the Warren

Commission drew its legal talent. Well, these are people who wouldn't think twice before, you know, taking out the Javier Millet chainsaw to any welfare. estate that they could get their hands on. Back to Liebler. Dick, you want to get us back on track here? Yeah, and let's do a little bit of a side note. So when Leibler joined the Warren Commission, he really brought that junior lawyer gunner mentality. He was on that grind set. He told the House Select Committee on assassination, however, that he didn't work that closely with Jenner because Jenner was then seeking the presidency of the American Bar Association.

But this was 15 years after the fact when Liebler was a real grown-up lawyer. And, you know, I'm calling a little bit of bullshit on this story. Yeah, I think that's right. He, at the time, I think you laid it out well. What would have been in thrall to Jenner? He would have been eager to please Jenner. Right. Eager to preempt and do whatever steps he thought Jenner wanted him to take

and to act independently, but to act independently only in such a way as to please the shot caller. Right. Right. To be a mini Jenner, sort of speak, right? like to be a lawyer in the vision of Jenner. So to impress him. There's a, basically was trying to impress him, guy.

Yeah, there's a disgusting phrase that I remember hearing in law school about the dynamic for after graduation when you get into the legal profession, which is kiss up, shit down. you ever hear that one yes i've heard that one uh and i think that yeah lebler is the quintessential example of that uh yeah absolutely so remember we mentioned that libeler conducted several of the sort of the lower lesser depositions in dallas he also did so in new orleans even though he probably exaggerated his estrangement from Jenner, I do think it's fair to assume he was sort of on his own for a lot of that and

probably siloed off from the big picture that allowed him to gather the bare minimum from the witnesses he interviewed. Now one particular incident that bears illustration here that really calls Liebler's ethics and credibility into question. It's what we'll call the Sylvia Odeo incident. And it's probably the best window into Liebler's psyche, his conduct, and sort of who he was as an investigator.

You want to take this one? Yeah, sure. So once again, we have this information thanks to the great investigator, Gaiton Fonzie. Now, in our Arlen Spector episodes, we played a substantial selection of clips from a series of interviews that Fonzie had conducted with Spector way back in 1966. Fast forward to the 70s, and Fonzie gets himself work for the church committee as an investigator into this assassination. He later, of course, parlayes that into working for the HSCA as well, and he puts together a lengthy memo on his contacts with Sylvia Odeo. Sylvia Odio was a Cuban American whose father had been one of Fidel Castro's early backers and he was a very wealthy man who gave a lot of money to the revolution against the dictatorship of Batista. But later on, her father, and it's also his name is incredible, it's Amador Odio, which means literally

lover hate so eventually you know like many of Castro's early wealthier backers he splits ways from the July 26th movement and comes to back opposition groups

of various stripes and the opposition groups that he is backing lean further to the left than a lot of, for example, the CIA's favorite opposition groups that were aligned with the revanchist Batista forces and, you know, far right-wing fascist or extremist Catholic groups or whatever. So that's kind of where Othiel is situated on the spectrum, and his daughters were living in the Dallas area in 1963. Now, sometime in September of 1963, Sylvia Odio and her sister were paid a visit at their

home by three men. Two of them were Latinos, and one was a gringo. And these men told the Odio sisters that they had just come into town from New Orleans, that they were raising money for this organization called Jure, and it was an anti-Castro organization, and that they wanted to enlist the support from the odios. And of note, and Sylvia remembered this with great detail, After the assassination of President Kennedy, the gringo in the group was introduced and introduced himself as Leon Oswald. One night I opened the door for three men that came to see one of my sisters. I opened the door. They were in a small hallway with bright lights overhead. The taller man introduced the other two men.

Leopoldo, he said that was his name. he introduced the American who was in the middle as Leon Oswald and he introduced the one that seemed Mexican and spoke with a Mexican accent as Anhello And are you quite clear about it that when those men visited your apartment The American was introduced as Oswald The American was introduced as Leon Oswald That would always be in my mind very clearly

Of course when she saw Lee Harvey Oswald on TV, she recognized him as the man she had been introduced to as Leon Oswald a couple of months earlier. So she even remembered that these Latino men who did most of the talking, and they were speaking to her in Spanish, but the white guy was kind of hanging back and didn't seem like he was following the conversation, didn't seem like he was a Spanish speaker, but regardless, the Spanish-speaking guys that were talking to her told her that Oswald was a former Marine and that he was a crack shot.

They were trying to sell me the American because they spoke that he was a marksman, that he had been an ex-marine, and that he was someone who could be used and who could be an asset to any organization. I think it was two days after. after that, Leopoldo, who had clearly a Cuban accent, called me on the phone.

And he tried to be very friendly on the phone with me and was trying to sell me the idea of the American. The first thing that he asked was, what did you think of the American? And actually, I had not formed any appearance of the American at the time. He said, well, you know, he is, we don't know what to make of him, he's kind of local.

He's been telling us that the Cubans should have murder, or should have assassinated President Kennedy right after the Bay of Pigs, and they didn't have any guts to do it. They should do it. And it was a very easy thing to do at the time. So this was pretty explosive, because if it were a true story, exactly the way that Sylvia Odio told it to investigators,

and I'm talking about in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, a decade before she has this conversation with Gait and Fonzie, If that was true, it would mean that Oswald was not a lone nut, but was in fact in some sort of relationship with anti-Castro-Cubans in the months preceding the assassination. And initially, the Warren Commission wanted to leave her alone and to leave her out of it. Enter Jim Liebler. He's the guy that he has no longer than to be present present and for he saw the audio anecdote in the investigative anecdote in the investigative record. that were turned over to the commission, and it did not sit right with him.

And in fact, this is to his credit, because in his view, it would have been a really bad, loose end to just leave out there untied, so he took it upon himself to go and pay her a visit. this is in late July of 1964 remember the Warren Commission report was already being drafted it would be handed over to President Johnson just two months later in September of 64 so it's really an 11th hour last minute investigative push to check out what can we do about about about this loose end. And Dick, if you would, I think for this part, it's best to just read verbatim from Gaten Fonzie's Memorandum.

Absolutely. So this is from Fonzie's Memo. She said that after Liebler questioned her for the second time that day, the first interrogation started at 9 a.m., the second. at 6.30 p.m. He asked her out to dinner. That surprised me, but I was afraid and I went. We didn't go out alone. We went out with someone who was supposed to be Marina's lawyer. I don't remember his name, but Mr. Phillips from CBS knew. There's CBS, the television network again,

playing a sort of bizarre and spooky role in all of this. Remember, we mentioned last time that CBS had planned a coup or had certainly gave the appearance of participating in a coup attempt in Haiti, at which we referred listeners to the program to chill episode on Mitch Warbell and that CBS coup. But just to point out, CBS had some weird, weird, let's say, boots on the ground, especially orbiting around Marina Oswald in the aftermath of the assassination. Sorry, Dick.

Go right ahead. We went to the Sheridan to eat dinner. I thought perhaps there was something behind it. and there was a kind of a double talk at the table between the lawyer and him. I wasn't sure they wanted me to hear the conversation, or they wanted to convince me of something, or wanted me to volunteer something. He, Liebler, kept threatening me with a lie detector test also,

even though he knew I was under tremendous stress at the time. But one thing he said, and this has always bothered me, he said to this other gentleman, And, well, you know, if we do find out that this is a conspiracy, you know, that we have orders from Chief Justice Warren to cover this thing up. I asked. Lieber said that? Yes, sir. I could swear on that.

At the time, she said she thought that maybe it was a bait for her because she had the feeling that they thought she was hiding something more, that she was involved with us. other Cuban groups, perhaps, or that she knew more than she was saying. That was the feeling that I got by the time that they took me to dinner, that maybe if I had a few drinks and the conversation became very casual, I would go ahead and volunteer information he thought I was hiding. I wasn't hiding anything, but what he said struck me. I remember I had a Bloody Mary in thinking to myself, My God, I'm not that drunk.

I had one Bloody Mary, and that's all I was having. If it was for my sake that he was saying that, if it was a little game they were playing with me, I don't know. That's when I said to myself, Sylvia, the time has come for you to keep quiet. They don't want to know the truth. But that made me angry.

Not only that, He invited me to his room upstairs to see some pictures. I did go, I went to his room. I wanted to see how far a government investigator would go and what they were trying to do to a witness. Of course nothing happened because it was right in my mind and senses. He showed me pictures, he made advances, yes, but I told him he was crazy. He even mentioned that they had seen my picture and that they had even

joked about it at the Warren Commission, saying, like, what a pretty girl you are going to see, Jim, and things like that. To me, that was also, I don't know, anti-professional. I wasn't used to this sort of thing, and I was expecting the highest respect, you know, I wasn't expecting any jokes in the investigation of the assassination of the president. So that's why I'm telling you, why my feelings changed, because I saw something I wasn't expecting to see. I wanted to see someone who was carrying on an investigation who was serious about it, but somehow I had the feeling it was a game to them and that I was being used in this game. The fellow who Liebler identified as Marina Oswald's attorney had not been at her questioning,

but they picked him up on the way to dinner. He left at dinner and did not go up to Liebler's room with them, meaning that Liebler was alone with Odio. it's so fucking creepy yeah tell me about it what a what an asshole what a nasty guy seriously like in case it wasn't clear what she's saying is that he took her out to dinner he was seeing if she would get drunk he said that earl warren was planning to cover up any conspiracy in the first place, kind of trying to loosen her up. I'm not sure if he meant that comment to get her to talk more openly or what, or if it was just an unguarded comment on his part. But then

he made sexual advances to her. It's like, God, could you imagine, like, those conversations in the Warren Commission? And this is not the first instance of really rank sexism that we've seen? Yeah, it's disgusting. I mean, these are just like, I don't, you know, they're like 20-something boys essentially, right? They're boys in their mid to late 20s. You know, probably frat guys, right?

And they're just salivating, like dogs over the fact that there's like a woman that one of them gets to question and that she's like, a total babe, you know? Yeah, yeah. And it's not lost on me that Jim Liebler in his personal life, he actually started dating one of his law students not long after this episode. Yeah, well, let's get to, yeah, I mean, we'll get to that in a minute. It is pretty disgusting.

Yeah. But I think all of it, it fits in this picture of Liebler as kind of ping-ponging back and forth between a curiosity of conspiracy and doubling down on the cover-up of a conspiracy. So some of his conduct at this time, like very much on the back end of the Warren Commission's investigation in July, August, September of 1964, it suggests that subjectively he might have suspected a conspiracy. And if that is the case, it only makes it that much worse that he goes up. John to spend his entire career after the commission defending the report and trashing the critics of the report. 100%.

But maybe we can just take off a couple of these anecdotes about Liebler's flirtation with conspiracy. Yeah. So at one point, Liebler was assigned to write a memo on. on Oswald's motive after all his and Jenner's investigative work. And a lot of it just straight up never made it into the final report. Any junior lawyer who has written a memo or brief or section of a brief or section of a memo that ultimately doesn't see the light of day knows exactly what this feeling is, right?

You're assigned to do like the shaky argument, the argument that doesn't really have any legs on it, the argument that doesn't carry any water, or maybe the argument that maybe there's not enough space for in the document. Let's see how it writes. Then it just, yeah, exactly. You're just doing make work for some, you know, more senior lawyer that just wants to, as you say, see how it writes. and spoiler alert it almost never writes well yeah this is it's not exactly like a a tertiary tangential argument it's the fucking motive of the assassin yeah yeah yeah yeah so it and this wasn't the only sort of libeler memo that was ignored right after first getting into some debates with Howard Willens and Norman Ratclick, who were Rankin's deputies in putting the report together.

So after getting into debates with these fellas about the inadequacy of the record on some open threads regarding conspiracy on September 6, 1964, Liebler wrote a 26-page memo to Rankin pointing out complaints about the report. Rankin shut it down, saying this is what the commission wants, and the report was given to LVJ just weeks later on September 24th. Amazing. It's like kind of a C-Y-A, a cover-your-ass move to register your dissent in a way,

but it was a dissent that Liebler would never pick up on and obviously was not made public at the time or until very much later to the point where it was no longer relevant. And his sort of towing this line, it continued after the report's publication as well like Liebler entertained some criticisms that were being leveled at the report. Remember, after the report, instead of going back to private practice,

Liebler gets a plum gig teaching law at UCLA, and over there, a young engineering grad student named David Lifton, who would go on to become a promiscan, Warren Commission critic approached Jim Liebler in his office hours. And Liebler, according to Lifton, was very open to it. He heard Lifton out in 1965 when Lifton came with kind of a well-organized critique. And indeed, after their interactions, Liebler wrote a letter to Lee Rankin asking about some of these irregularities that Lifton brought to his attention, including irregularities in the Zapruder frames that were published in Life magazine.

And not only did Liebler take that action, he encouraged rather than discouraged Lifton to keep on investigating, speaking up, and publishing his critiques. He even told Lifton that the other lawyers on the commission, in Rankin's words, they wanted to close doors, not open them. So Liebler is kind of playing the role here of a good faith interlocutor. right and this is all recounted in lifton's book best evidence their whole relationship and how he kind of encouraged lifton but told him you know don't get your hope go ahead do your thing speak up

but don't get your hopes up because nobody involved wants to revisit this but nevertheless Lee Blur invited Lifton to his Vermont farmhouse and gave him access to documents that he had stored there. Raises a lot of questions about the documentary record in this case and whether all those documents are part of the National Archives collection that is now the subject of so much attention, who really knows. But, you know, it suggests at least that Liebler was an open-minded guy about the Warren Commission and its findings. If he was privately open-minded about it and entertained doubts about the report's findings, he definitely did not show that publicly. Yeah. Instead, he really became. the sort of reasonable face of Warren Commission defense, the guy who would concede that, yeah, it wasn't perfect, but we all did our best, and nobody wanted to cover anything up.

There was maybe some mistakes around the edges, but we generally got it right. And Liebler really took the show on the road debating the likes of Warren Commission critic Mark Lane, author of one of the earliest books of criticism of the Warren report entitled Rush to Judgment. And Liebler was really the face of the commission in the media circuit for quite some time, much more so than any of the commissioners themselves. And similarly to how we dissected and deconstructed Albert Jenner's methodology of interrogation in the last episode, I think Jim Liebler's public appearances and his mastery of the art of Warren Commission defense is worth exploring here because a lot of the same.

tactics and argumentative lines that we see deployed in service of the official loan nut narrative today well a lot of those were really workshoped and tested out by Jim Liebler himself for example positioning himself on the side of the skeptic and calling for further disclosure we see this even even today with Gerald Posner, for example. Here's how Liebler did that trick. There is no doubt that in some ways the commission deserves criticism. Most serious is its failure, primarily out of respect for the wishes of the Kennedy family,

to make the autopsy photographs and x-rays a part of its record. And in deal of the public doubts that have since been raised, I think they should be made available to an independent panel of pathologists as soon as possible. And as we exposed in our Arlen Spector episodes, the medical evidence, even as cited in the volumes of the Warren report, already makes impossible the single bullet theory that was critical to the Warren Commission's conclusions. And Liebler blithely ignores that fact by misdirecting attention. And in a talk that Liebler gave on September 30th, 1966, which was reported, but I couldn't find a recording of it, Liebler said, quote, The fact that the report says that all the evidence supports the one-bole theory is simply not correct. The report is wrong in that respect, and there is no doubt about it.

Well, if that's indeed true, and there's evidence against, the one-bullet theory, as he calls it, that means that there's evidence of a conspiracy, Jim. Another technique that Liebler uses is to cloak himself in the mantle of reasonableness. But the commission's admitted mistakes have been blown up all out of proportion to their real significance. It is generally known that I have criticized the commission when I thought that it was wrong. I will continue to do so. Most of my criticism has involved matters of judgment or procedure, and none of them has called into question the basic conclusions of the report.

I believe that those conclusions are correct, and they must be judged by the evidence developed by the most extensive murder investigation ever conducted, and against the almost two and a half years of work by the critics. Of course, to a certain respect, Liebler is just relying on the volume of the reports, evidence for its own sake here. As we've discussed a great deal throughout, the evidence doesn't always back up the conclusions, and in many, many, many cases, including the chapter penned by Liebler and Jenner, which you can bet that Liebler would have written the first draft of, well, it just outright falsifies the evidentiary statements contained in the

record. So this statement as well is a cop-out, an evasion. And another evasion that Liebler uses is to fall back on credentialism. Another classic technique. He falls back on the objectivity of all the commission staffers based on what? On their institutional affiliations within the American elite, namely top law schools. The work that we did, being humans, was not perfect. But to suggest, as Mr. Lane has suggested, that it is false and fraudulent, is an entirely different matter. You take lawyers, and I don't ask you to believe that I always act honestly in good faith.

That's not a matter that I'm going to put an issue here. that speaks for itself and it's not doesn't call for any comment from me but there's one thing i think that ought to be considered the people who worked for this on the staff of that commission were brought in from all over the country i was recommended by the university of chicago law school several of the men were recommended by the harvard law school the ale law school there were young guys five six seven years out of law school who had never worked for the government before we came in there and we were very conscious of the historical nature of the event that we were associated with and we took our responsibilities seriously and then as a last resort you've always

got to have that option to smear your critics and call them anti-American the Warren report is a convenient object against which we can direct the frustrations that we all rightly feel as a result of the so-called credibility gap and I want to add a personal look on that if we really believe that sort of thing. Things in this country have come to a sorry state of affairs. Now, maybe I'm prejudiced about this. But I'm a professional man, and I'm a lawyer, and I don't make a habit of lying anyway.

And I try not to lie at all. You're usually pretty successful, I think. In other words, trust the authorities. And if you don't, well, you're just too darned. cynical. Well, listener, do you want to know what makes me a bit cynical? It's the way that after the Warren report had been published, Liebler did a heel turn and trashed the reputation of Sylvia Odio. That's right. The witness whom he had sexually propositioned in his hotel room while deposing her earlier that day for the Warren Commission in Dallas, Texas.

Here's how old Jim Liebler talked about Ms. Odeo after the fact. Mr. Lieber, I'd like to direct my questions primarily to you. On September 25 or 26th of 1963, two Cubans and an American visited Mrs. Odio in Dallas. One of these Cubans was known as Leopoldo, the other one possibly as Angelo, and the American was introduced as Leon Oswald. The following day, Leopoldo called and phoned Mrs. Odio and said that the American, namely Leon Oswald, had suggested a fascinating president.

I said, I'm not convinced that anybody came there. but I'm inclined to believe Mrs. Odeo's testimony in certain respect. Let me be more precise. I'm not convinced that there was anybody there who was introduced as Leon Oswald, period. I'm not convinced as anybody that was introduced as Leon Oswald, because Annie Leodio did not testify to that, did she? You mean Mrs. Odeo's sister? Yes, Annie Lee.

I don't recall if she did or not. No, she didn't. She said that there were three people who came there, and Sylvia said that one of them was introduced as Leon Oswald. They both identified him as Lee Harvey. Oh, yes. They both said they thought that every devil's pictures as Lee Harvey Oswald. I took, as you probably well know, I took Mr. Sodio's testimony

and spent considerable time discussing this with her in Dallas. I don't think that Lee Oswald was there for many reasons. There's nobody else. impersonating him because I think that whole notion ceasily falls in his face. This was at the end of September, which is over two months before the assassination. And anybody that would be going around

impersonating Oswald and sold the odious department at that point, I can't imagine any conceivable would be served by that. There was no notion that the president was even coming to Dallas at that. It had been in the paper on September 13, I believe. Well, I think that's right. But the fact matter is that the notion was at that point

that Oswald was going to be in Cuba, isn't that right? That's right. That's what he was proposing to do. He was going to go to Cuba and stay there. So how are they trying to inculpate or frame somebody in Dallas on November 22nd when there was no notion. In fact, the whole notion was contrary

because Oswald was not going to be in Dallas on November 22nd. He was on his way to Cuba. I'll go a step further with you. Even if Oswald had been there, and I don't think he was, the next question is, what's that got to do with the assassination

of the president two months later? later. And I'm not a loss to make that leap, even if I'm willing to admit, which I'm not, and I'm honestly not. I really don't think Oswald was there, and I went into great detail with Mississippi on this question. I think she has her own problems and her own motivation for this story. Well, you think she has something to gain by telling this story? Yes, I do. Well, allegedly, this Oswald suggested assassinating the president, so there was something there, and also that he did have activities getting arms to go to Cuba. No, no, this had nothing you do with arms to Cuba.

Yes, I believe it dead, believe it dead, believe it death, believe it death, believe it death, believe it death, believe it death, believe it death, believe it death, believe it. Leibler was ultimately rewarded for his loyalty to the commission's conclusions. He remained gainfully employed at UCLA law, where he focused on antitrust law. It gets even better. He married a star UCLA law student who had started as a first year, in 1963 and graduated in 66 named Susan Liebler. Susan worked as a corporate lawyer and eventually became a favorite of the Reagan Circle, getting nominated to the International Trade Commission in 1984 and nominated to the Federal

Circuit Court of Appeals, albeit unsuccessfully nominated, in 1988. Now, Don, this is a classic Fourth Reich fairy tale, where loyal service to the Warren Commission cover-up ends up with patronage from Reagan's Republican Reichisman. But this fairy tale didn't have a happy ending. Liebler died, as many affluent white men of his time died. In 2002, alongside his flight instructor in a small Piper plane, in late Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire.

So now the whole point, to bring it all back and wrap it all up and leave you, dear listener, the whole point of this phase of our excavation into the staff lawyers who did the legwork in the Warren Commission investigation is to put the lie to this idea that a group of the country's best lawyers couldn't possibly all been in on it to contribute to a conspiracy.

As we pointed out, the workflows were somewhat siloed off from one another, so people like Arlen Spector could take ownership of individual pieces, and in Arlen Spector's case, he took ownership over the medical and ballistics evidence, largely unimpeded and he sought to please Alan Dulles by delivering on the single bullet theory that clinched the lone

assassin hypothesis remember when he was pitching the single bullet theory he basically told the commission if you don't want to go with the single bullet theory then you gotta start looking for other assassins And in similar fashion,

Jenner was able to manipulate the investigation into Oswald's biography to steer away from the intelligence connections, away from general dynamics, away from this extremely hot political climate wherein the titans of industry had their sights set against the prospects of a second JFK term that could bring peace with the reds, and undoubtedly would bring disaster to big business. Right, yeah, it only takes a couple of well-positioned, well-selected attorneys

to look out for their own interests to achieve the larger objectives of the let's say the bigger picture forces that are interested in engineering a cover-up. And we've talked about multiple different reasons, even legitimate reasons, that people could authentically hold for covering up the assassination of the president and for delimiting the investigation into the assassination in such a way as to avoid any conspiratorial angles. You know, it's not necessarily nefarious to conduct the commission's business in such a way as to avoid World War III, right? If you believe in your heart of hearts that, well, if we dig too deep, probably will find a Cuban connection or probably will find a Russian connection. And if that gets out, it's kaboom for planet Earth, right?

It's nuclear war. And it's not evil. It's not even bad to do. whatever you can, even breaking your ethical obligations, even bending the truth to avoid that disastrous outcome. So the same kind of goes for an ambitious prosecutorial lawyer like Spector or for a rainmaker board member of general dynamics like Jenner to you know, tweak things around the edges to make sure that they're not stepping on these very many landmines that litter the landscape of the milieu in which the alleged assassin Lee Oswald was

moving in 1962 to 63. And as for the underlings, like Liebler, even when they did have the temerity to step out of line on the official narrative, as Leibler kind of did, as demonstrated by his memo to Rankin, well, either because of the carrot of careerism that was dangled in front of them after the commission, or, or the stick of the type of harassment to the point of murderous harassment, right, that befell George de Moorinshilt and so many other witnesses, well, those junior guys also had skin in the game. They had to protect both the investigation and its integrity on the one hand, but also to keep that integrity cabined within the predetermined conclusion that J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Alan Dulles,

Nick Katzenbach, all of these higher-ups had determined was the order of the day from square one. And so that, you see with a lot of these junior staff, they go on to spend their whole post-commission career writing books about it, getting academic gigs, going on speaking tours, going into politics, all kinds of different fruitful career opportunities become available to pursue thanks to their going along with the momentum. Could you imagine a squeaky wheel, one junior staffer going out on a limb

and telling seven eminent personalities of America that they're wrong? Not even Dick Russell, who was beholden to no one, much less to Earl Warren, was willing to put his name on a public dissent. and so it flows down hill what do you say we call this one game i think that that is the ball game as far as the gener Leibler team is concerned until next time i'm dick and i'm done saying farewell and keep digging. One day I'm going to I'm going to frescoing a salmona

She said to start Mata, that God's Pernona, Mata, that God Pernona, Mata, that God Pernona. Thank you.