Fourth Reich Archaeology - The Warren Commission Decided 7: Doing the Work

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

It’s Friday, and you know what that means—time for another installment of The Warren Commission Decided. We’re calling this week’s episode “Doing the Work” because in it, we take  a deep look at the nitty-gritty of legal investigations.  Donning our lawyer hats, in the first part of this episode we give a short primer on the grind behind the scenes that makes investigations come together. We break down the real "work" of the Warren Commission. At its core, the Commission was basically a law firm—the staff was almost entirely lawyers, and J. Lee Rankin, the Commission’s Chief Counsel, was the one steering the ship. For the second part of this episode, we explore the life and times of Rankin, including how and why he was picked for the position. A native Nebraskan,  Rankin served as the administrative head of the Commission, handling all the logistical and organizational work that the seven commissioners were too busy and too important to take on. Rankin was responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations, from coordinating evidence collection to working with the investigators who obtained witness testimony. Late in his life, Rankin came out swinging against the FBI and CIA for their manipulative tactics with respect to the Commission. We play a good deal of his testimony from the House Select Committee on Assassinations; it is sure to elucidate and enlighten! Seriously insane audio we had never fully appreciated before this episode. So, whether you’re powering through a work shift or wrapping up your classes for the week, hit play and give your brain a well-deserved snack—this episode is definitely worth it!

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. where you were 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 a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. 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.

He has a mouse. He knows so long as a die. Freedom could never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers.

Why you think our country's so innocent? This is a day. I'm going to be. This is coming. This is Fort Reich. Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick.

And I'm Don. Welcome back to a. Another installment of our series within a series, the Warren Commission decided. I'd like to again thank everyone for tuning in, for liking the pod, for subscribing to the pod. We are actively and very openly looking for your feedback. So remember that you can write us at forthrightepod at gmail.com. And we're also on social media, on Twitter and Instagram. at Fourth Reich Pod.

Please do spread the word if you enjoy our program. Tell your friends, your family, your loved ones, your co-workers, and people who you think might benefit from listening to our little project. I'd also like to wish you all a happy new year, and I'd like to wish you, Don, a happy new year. And a congratulations on the special episode you did over at Para Power Mapping. episode he did with Sean McCarthy on the recent, I don't know what you want to call them, terrorist attacks. And listener, you should also listen to it. But when I was listening to it,

it couldn't help but think about how these are just truck guys. You had the cybertruck guy and the Chevy truck guy, both doing some dirt in early January. Yeah, that's right. And Dick and I were just talking before we hit record here and dick reminded me that we had actually erected the cyber truck regular truck guy dichotomy in one of our earlier election specials so you know we stay winning over here on fourth rike archaeology and we take absolutely no pleasure in being right about the dire and depressing state of affairs in which we find ourselves, but so be it. Here we are trying to assemble for ourselves and to assist you, listener, in accumulating the tools necessary for both survival, analytical accuracy, and ultimately discursive victory here in the

fascist hellscape that confronts us and welcomes us into the year 2025 I believe that this will also be our last episode published in the Demon Rat Party Biden regime ahead of the upcoming peaceful transition of power between fascists. Just passing the ball, really? Yeah, that's right. So, you know, may Joe Biden and all of the senior members of this administration be locked up for their crimes, their crime of genocide, most notably, and may the incoming administration also meet with an utter absence of success in any of the many nefarious, goals that they seek to achieve in Trump's second term, except for the one goal that we do support, which I think we support it with a big hefty grain of salt given our disbelief

that it actually is a goal, namely JFK Disclosure. That's right. I'm on JFK Disclosure Watch, and I'll also say, here and now we got seven days left, I'm on Biden watch, because we could still have it happen. We could still have. Gerald Ford's prophecy. So I'm still holding out. I'll probably be a final holdout waiting just until inauguration morning. Okay, so let's do a recap. How about that? Let's situate the listener to where we are as of now. Yes. Now, to research, situate the listener in the timeline of events that immediately follow in the wake of JFK's assassination. As of November 22, 1963, the plan at the highest levels of the federal

government is to allow the Dallas police with assistance from the FBI to handle the investigation of the assassination to its conclusion, which at that time was thought to be, or at least was hoped to be a trial and ultimately a conviction of the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. And both President Lyndon Baines Johnson and FBI direct. J. Edgar Hoover were of a single mind with respect to the path forward. However, another plan was in the works, and that plan counted on there being no public trial of Lee Oswald. And the reason why is because that plan involved and required the elimination of Lee Oswald from the scene.

So on November 24th, just two days after JFK gets capped, Oswald is shot and killed while being transported through the basement of the Dallas police building by Jack Ruby, who was a mobbed-up Dallas strip club owner with a deep history of connections to the government, both running guns for the mob, running guns for the Cubans, both pro-Castro and after the revolution anti-Castro and a guy with just a very fascinating profile which we're going to cover in a future episode on this series but for now we continue the recap to what happened right after ruby capped oswald you want to pick that up dick Yeah, almost immediately after a cabal, what we've been calling a cabal of Georgetown set elites

with close ties to the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the CIA, the national security establishment. These are people with deep roots in American history, families that trace back to the 13th century. colonies. This set of elite individuals spring into action and push LBJ to launch a presidential commission, what LBJ calls a blue ribbon commission. I guess LBJ would call it a brew ribbon commission to investigate, and that by investigate, I mean rubber stamp. The FBI's reporting. and she ran to the police station when the papa found out he began to shout and he started the investigation

it's against the law despite LBJ and Hoover's initial reluctance the president does establish the commission on November 29 naming seven commissioners and at this point we've covered them all now if you haven't listened to our earlier episodes in this mini-series please go back and do so You won't find any podcast coverage that comes close.

No one comes close to the excavation that we've dug up on the formation of the Warren Commission and the profiles that we've done on each of these individuals. As a brief reminder, the commissioners that were selected were Chief Justice or a warn as the chairman of the commission, and then you have two members of each chamber of the Congress. Now, there were also two members of the public. Now, these weren't just any members of the public, right? It's not like they went out and found two folks off the street to act as jurors, no. The members of the public were John J. McCloy, the chairman, of the establishment and another guy who was unemployed at the time by the name of

Alan Welsh Dulles and so in some as you've just explained Dick we have really focused the series so far on these seven commissioners however the commissioner themselves were really just the face of the commission. These were the guys that had to put their names on it, the guys who got their pictures taken with the president, right? The ones who were directing from a high level the contours of the Warren Commission investigation. Right on. But they were not the guys doing the grunt work, obviously.

Remember, the sitting chief justice of the Supreme Court is not a person with a ton of time on his hands. The same goes for the four sitting members of Congress. Likewise, John J. McCloy had a full-time job between roles as, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, Chairman of the Ford Foundation, not to mention, member of untold corporate boards of directors. And in fact, as you hinted Dick, the only commissioner with no day job at the time was conveniently the former CIA head, Alan Dulles. And as I think we'll get into, maybe not in this episode, but down the line, that permitted Dulles to spend an outsized amount of time on the commission and to exert an outsized influence on its direction and ultimate findings.

That's right. And I wanted to point out here that, you know, one of the major criticism in the commission is that for most of these guys, for virtually all of them. This was a scene as a part-time job, right? They were doing this in the evenings, on the weekends, right? They were doing this in addition to their responsibilities. So it's often viewed as a criticism of the commission's findings that the men that were in charge of the report, this wasn't their full-time job, which naturally leads to critiques that you know, they did a shoddy job, they did a slap-dash job, it was a rush to judgment, not the least because these men all have a full plate.

And I wanted to point out in this episode where we do investigate and do explain to the listener that there were others. I think that this criticism, it's not the best criticism. It's not the best critique of the commission, I think, as you'll see in this episode. That's absolutely right. We'll talk a little bit about using our expertise, whatever expertise we have as lawyers with some experience in factual investigations and fact-finding efforts at how this process really likely played out. And the amount of evidence gathered by the commission, you know,

hundreds of cubic feet of documentation belies any accusation that the problem with the Warren Commission was a lack of investigative effort. I don't think that that is the problem. Exactly. Because there was a great deal of additional manpower deployed in support of the commission's mission. So we spoke in our episodes on John J. McCloy, which, again, I would just say some of the most interesting work for us to have made, and certainly if you haven't yet, please check those out. But if you have already, you'll know that we discussed the ways in which McCloy as the wily pragmatist that he was, He saw the FBI report released in December of 1963, which initially the commission had hoped to rubber stamp, and he smelled a stink, right?

He did not believe in the authority of that document as something that the commission could get behind. It was full of errors. It was full of holes. It was open to all kinds of critiques like the ones that you were just saying, Dick, were not necessarily applicable to the commission report itself. And so what did McLeod do? He convinced his fellow commissioners to ramp up the investigative ambit of the commission. Now, recently I read the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Jay Edgar Hoover, G-Man, by the author Beverly Gage, auspiciously released, as it were, on November 22nd of 2022. And I was kind of tickled juxtaposing the Gage book with the Kai Bird biography of John J. McCloy,

because Gage attributes this expansion of the commission's investigative ambit to Chief Justice Earl Warren, who she kind of pits as Hoover's real nemesis on the commission. But as we reported it, and what I believe to be a more accurate reflection of the record, having looked at the primary documents, Warren was kind of following the lead of McCloy on this. So, yes, it's true that Warren was the authoritative figure, but I think for our listeners and for us, it's important to remember that the real Fourth Reichsmen here, John J. McCloy, the freer of Nazis, was the first guy to say, hey, guys, this commission can't rubber-stamp the FBI report. It will be the bane of our legacy as a collective if we do. And so Warren went ahead. He followed his lead,

and he exercised his authority to implement McCloy's recommendation and expand the scope of the Warren Commission's investigative operations. And the first thing that that entailed was hiring a staff of competent attorneys to handle the day-to-day work of investigating the case. At the end of the day, the staff attorneys would actually take the overwhelming lead and accounted for in excess of 93% of the total questions asked to, Warren Commission witnesses. That statistic comes from a quantitative analysis conducted by Walt Brown and reported in his book, The Warren Omission. Now, the staffers were the ones that did the bulk of the drafting of what ultimately became the Warren report. Edward J. Epstein, a journalist who might be fairly characterized as a right-wing critic of the Warren Commission

based on his conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, but was nonetheless part of a KGB conspiracy to kill Kennedy. I would also just add that he counted himself a friend and confidant of no less a figure than James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, who in his own right would exert a great deal of influence on the commission's work, mainly by swirling away a trove of CIA documents on Oswald that the commission would never see. So Epstein reported on the functional operation of the commission's staff based on interviews with staff members. Epstein describes a system and the system will explain

in a little bit. It sounds awfully familiar to Don and I, but it's a system whereby the chief council, Jay Lee Rankin, was responsible for shaping sort of the overall contours of what the investigation was going to be about and determining who would do what and go where. And then below rank in you had 14 staff attorneys that were teamed up into seven groups of two and each was tasked with looking into one aspect of the assassination and drafting one chapter and this tracks in as much as there are actually seven substantive chapters in the Warren report and well there are a total of eight with one chapter being the first chapter being a summary and conclusions of the you know of the investigation and then seven substantive tractors um and to me and i'm sure to you don

this is sort of like when the junior partner walks in and sort of doles out the responsibilities and the overall goals and contours of an investigation and then you know staffs up the associate teams on who's doing what uh for for the job yep that about tracks And, yeah, it's something that parallels the work and the workflow that you might find in any law firm. So that's why in this episode, Dick and I are going to start out by putting on our lawyer hats. And we're going to share a few insights on how fact-finding and... and investigations actually work in practice. And without revealing anything about our own legal practice,

suffice it to say that we are more than familiar with both the work on the plaintiff's side and the defendant's side and the government side in conducting these types of investigations. after that we will begin to introduce the major most influential staffers we're not going to bore our listeners with a full dive into all 26 members of the commission staff but we'll pick out a few and i think today we'll probably have time to get to maybe just one or two of those and dive in to the work that they did.

So without any further ado, and realizing that we've dragged the introductory portion of this episode on a little bit long, let's get digging. I received a telephone call from the Chief Justice of the United States. What will your capacity be in serving with this commission? I will be acting as general counsel. for the President's Commission to examine into all of the information that is available concerning the assassination and everyone who might make a contribution toward the facts.

Something in me, dark and sticky, all the time it's getting strong. The way you're dealing with this feeling Can't go on that's too long. This time you begin work immediately? The Chief Justice asked that the staff the obtained as early as possible and progress as rapidly as possible in the interest of informing the people

and anyone throughout the world is what really happened. Mr. I'm digging in the dirt Stay with me I need support I'm digging in the dirt to find the places I've got love

open up places I've got love Mr. Rankin, here's the fact that the Warren Commission report according to all polls received such poor acceptance by the American people, giving you any pause to reflect on whether you want about it correctly or not?

Not really. All right, to start us off and to go back to something we were talking about towards the top of the hour is we're going to start our excavation at the top of this sort of sub-piramid. You have the chief counsel to the commission, it's going to be Rankin, and then the folks underneath him, sort of the staff attorneys, this is the machine, doing the grunt work of the investigation. Now, when you're thinking of the Warren Commission as a law firm, you have to think of the seven commissioners as the senior partners. these folks are the ones lending their names, lending their brand to the report, to the commission. Much like how when a client is looking for a lawyer or law firm, he's looking for names. He's looking for people who have developed a brand over time. That's right.

And there's some hierarchical distinction even among that rung. of the hierarchy where the senior seniors, right, your McCloys, your Dulles, these are guys who are older in years than the rest of the commissioners. Same goes for Earl Warren. And you're more junior members like, as we discussed in an earlier episode, Hale Boggs and Jerry Ford being the two youngest, and that tracks also the hierarchical distribution of power between the Senate and the House. So even there, there's a little bit of a hierarchical distribution. It's like pyramids within pyramids, within pyramids, and a shout out to friend of the pod

and resident pyramid watcher, Matt Farwell. Hell yeah. What's up, Matt? But the important thing here, when we're talking about senior partners, is they're not doing any grunt work. They're not in the documents. They're not getting dirty. In fact, they usually, conventionally, typically will have at least one buffer between them

and their associates. and that is the junior partner. And for our purposes, I think it's pretty apt, I think, to peg Rankin as the junior partner because he's the guy that is handling the sort of administrative stuff, handling the logistics, the organizational work. He's the one that's doling out the assignments. And under that, you have the associates, the boots on the ground, as it were, They're the ones that are reviewing documents, interviewing people, coming up with questions, coming up with angles.

They're not the ones that are coming up with the big picture, though. And then there were, of course, 12 staffers who largely didn't question witnesses but reviewed documents and synthesized the evidence and did a lot of the grunt work for the benefit of the assistant council and the commissioners. Right. It's always a two-way process. It's a two-way dynamic. So anybody at the lowest level of the pyramid simultaneously has a great deal of responsibility in as much as they are tasked with becoming the experts on their area. And here, thanks to the organizational work of Jay Lee Rankin, those areas for expertise were pretty much divvied up into these seven buckets and these seven two-man teams working to flesh out the issues within each of those buckets. maybe it makes sense here to just read the chapter titles of the Warren Commission report and give a little color on kind of the breakdown of the work there. Yeah, yeah.

So one of them was the assassination. So that's the immediate events surrounding. The shots fired. Very closely related to that, chapter three is the shots from the Texas school book depository. Chapter 4 is The Assassin. So the ambit of the team working on Chapter 4 was totally different because it was entirely a biographical project looking into Oswald's background that really had no bearing whatsoever on the event itself. Chapter 5, the detention and death of Oswald.

So there you have the kind of operational examination of the events between the afternoon of November 22nd and the shooting by Jack Ruby. Chapter 6 is the investigation of possible conspiracy, and what that's really about is the possible conspiracy between Ruby and Oswald, as well as whatever, quote-unquote, conspiracy theories, the commission itself sees fit to investigate based on the evidence that the commission elicits, right? Not possible, not any possible conspiracy, but the possible conspiracies that were identified at the discretion of the commission.

Chapter 7 is another biographical chapter. It's called Lee Harvey Oswald. background and possible motives. Then finally, chapter 8, the protection of the president, this is more of a prophylactic exercise, looking to what could have been done to prevent the assassination and what can be done looking forward to prevent future similar events. And Dick, I'm sure that... Yeah, don't cross.

don't cross the CIA yeah don't cross the department of defense exactly but I'm sure that you know in your practice as well that's what we typically would call in any investigation report the recommendations section right that always kind of brings up the rear of any investigation where you come up with some bullshit and the recommendation is usually bullshit totally totally it's it's whatever whatever you can do and yeah obviously in this case those very practical recommendations that you just made dick don't cross the CIA don't call into question the agenda of the military industrial complex these are not included in chapter eight so apologies for the spoiler but you won't find those there no but your exercise i think shows a really important point which is these lawyers

that were investigating that were doing the work they were siloed right they are focusing on very narrow sub-topics. They were not the one steering the ship. The ship was being steered by the, if you want to say, the seven commissioners, but really, as the ship often is steered, it's steered by the client. And in this case, the client, I don't know who you want to say, but the client to me is like the Georgetown set guys, right? The client to me is the powers that be.

they had a conclusion they wanted and none of these staff attorneys were going to change that by any sort of measure of investigation or reporting and in fact as we'll see in this episode many of them and especially the one we're going to cover today use this as an opportunity to make a name for themselves to sort of fit the facts into the conclusion that was desired. Yeah, and, you know, that point that you raise about serving the client, it's actually really interesting because there are multiple what you might call stakeholders here. The immediate stakeholder is the president.

LBJ is the one that authorized and created the commission through executive order 111.1.30, but is LBJ really the ultimate client? I would say no, because while LBJ has a very basic set of needs here, namely come up with a report that will put to bed any rumors of a global conspiracy of an international conspiracy with foreign adversaries and two to do so in time for the 1964 election which you know LBJ really wants to win but behind him is this cabal and to what extent any given commissioner or given staffer actually understands the client dynamic is again a function of this pyramid structure so

The commissioners, they could understand that, to varying degrees, Dulles obviously knows who's behind the whole thing because he's among them. He is. We'll call him, we'll call Dulles the relationship partner. That's right. Yeah, he's the guy, he's the guy. who knows everything and shares whatever he wants at his unfettered discretion. And I think a guy like Dick Russell, he seems to kind of misconstrue the true client relationship here.

He really treats LBJ as the client, and maybe that's explainable. by the fact that LBJ is his direct contact and his bully as we laid out. But there are other guys too, right? Like Jerry Ford certainly saw LBJ as his client, right? For no other reason that he's probably just the bootlicker at that point. And not only LBJ, right? I think Jerry Ford also saw Hoover as his client. Oh, for sure. Definitely.

As we'll get into in a future episode, Ford was Hoover's inside man on the commission in a lot of ways. Yeah. But to get back to this idea of the Warren Commission as a sort of a law firm and this rigid hierarchy, you can see how it serves this purpose, right? The guys at top, they're the ones, maybe one of them, maybe one of the five, one of the six. seven rather actually knows what's going on that's cabined off from not only the rest of the organization but even from the other guys at the top right and they all want to sort of obtain the same end goal which is a blue ribbon sort of rubber stamp um to varying degrees but on the day to day the staff attorneys the guys at the bottom they're not even thinking about, I don't even think they're considering that stuff.

What they're doing is they're just reading these documents, coming up with questions, coming up with angles that'll fit into their bosses theories, and kicking up, whether through memoranda, whether through interview notes, whether through summary analysis, whatever, kicking up their findings and either getting a pat on the head, like, good job, or, you know, take a different approach and that's really how it's going right that's at least how i view how it can be going yeah i think that they're constantly trying to evaluate and to discern any information they can about those dynamics above the next rung on the pyramid so that they could better position themselves to get the pat on the head from the right guy.

In other words, it's not immediately apparent maybe to the staff members, but the more that they learn, the greater visibility or instinctual awareness they gain into the bigger picture and the better understanding any given commissioner has of the bigger picture the more effectively he can comport his own conduct as a staffer to serving that goal and then the better that he can serve that goal the more accolades and the more career advantage he will ultimately reap from the experience of serving on the commission. That's right. And I think a good segue into the next little part of this episode. But first I want to say, I think we'll say it again, but just a flag for the listener right now. Of these, I don't know how many 20 odd lawyers, they all have.

some suss background and they all go on to do amazing things with their careers miraculously. I don't, you know, not to say correlation, causation, whatever, but it's just odd. If you look at the list of these guys, how many of them end up as a judge? They end up as a politician of some sort. They end up in a high level in corporate media. academia oh academia is a great one right the Warren commission serves as the inflection point in their careers yep the same that it did for Jerry Ford that's right and I don't have a one-to-one comparison but just to put it on the listeners

radar interestingly and perhaps we'll get into this once Jerry World gets a decade or so further on into the future, but a number of these people show up again when it comes time to investigate Watergate. So, you know, back to your point, Dick, about getting into the good graces of the ultimate client. For the most part, the Warren Commission is, really a springboard into more opportunities to protect the deepest elements of the deep state. So let's just start with the lawyers and begin with the chief council and work our way down. All right. Should we go ahead and pop that cork? Should we get into our boy Jay Lee Rankin? I'll kick it off to you, but before you get started, I just wanted to point out the thing we were talking about before we went on air.

listener Lee Rankin to me is often I view him as like the eighth commissioner because if you just look up a photograph of the Warren Commission I'll bet you dollars to donuts there are going to be eight people in that photograph and one of those people will be Lee Rankin's goofy ass he's even in the film footage the original film footage of the delivery of the Warren report the commissioners walking into the Oval Office and delivering the Warren report to LVJ, Lee Rankin is in that room. So, you know, whenever you have the seven commissioners, odds are Lee Rankin is not far away. Now, Lee Rankin was not the first choice for Chief Counsel of the Warren Commission. As a matter of fact, the first choice, as selected by Earl Warren, was a fella by the name of Warren Olney the third. Olney had been a Warren pick and a Warren confidant, really in every sense, dating way, way back.

So he first got onto Earl Warren's radar, having been a native of Northern California, in the year 1930. At that time, Earl Warren was the district attorney of Alameda County, and he hand-selected and hired Warren only as an assistant district attorney. and every rung of the ladder that Earl Warren climbed, Warren Olney was right in his wake. So when Earl Warren became Attorney General of California, Warren Olney took on major responsibilities within the Justice Department of the state of California. Olney also worked during his California legal career to implement the orders of another member of the Warren Commission, John J. McCloy, in carrying out the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II. And now, at that time, kind of similar to McCloy, only took.

a sort of liberal defense stance of the internment, insisting that, in fact, it was for the good of the Japanese Americans to be placed in concentration camps. Because if not, they would have been subjected to the violent rage of their California neighbors. Jesus Christ. As Southern California burns, as we record this episode, I think it's worth noting that the real crib of American fascism that lies in California and the political dynamic that subsists beneath that fascist nucleus is still very much

with us today. Yeah, and so now it's in 1953, around the same time that Earl Warren was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States only was appointed to a senior role in the Eisenhower Justice Department as chief of the criminal division. So he's the head guy in the DOJ's criminal division. here his liberalism gave way to a much messier anti-communist role some folks would say it's the sign of the times I would say fuck that guy

he worked closely with j edgar to prosecute cases like the Rosenberg's the prosecutions of communists under the smith Act and other high-profile Cold War cases. Maybe we should say it's Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. This is the couple that was sent to the chair, right, at the hands of Roy Cohn. So this is what we're talking about here, folks. Like, this is not, this is nasty business.

But all that. to say, you know, he didn't totally abandon his liberal bet, advocating for the creation of a several civil rights division within the DOJ and directly opposing southern legislators by supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which of course is a precursor to the more expansive Civil Rights Act of 1964. Now, at this point, I also want to point out, and this is just like we were thinking about the episode and this is what Warren only means to me as a lawyer as a lawyer

he went on so while Earl Warren was on the Supreme Court of the United States Warren only goes on to serve concurrently as both the director of the administrative office of the U.S.

courts which is known among government lawyers as the A.O. and the executive office, and he was the executive officer of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Now, the A.O., you could think of that as the agency that handles, you know, the payroll, handles all of the logistical and operational stuff of the U.S. courts. They're the guys that decide whether a judge is being bad or dilatory.

in rendering decisions or whether they're being good. Now, what did they get other than a slap on the wrist in public shaming? Not much, but the AO is the one that decides whether you're on track or not. And the judicial conference of the United States, that's like the policy arm of the U.S. courts. They're the ones that sort of set forth the policy for the judiciary. And this guy, Warren Only, was basically at the head of both of those agencies. So, you know, if ever you're thinking of if ever there was a good administrator, a good, you know, a guy who is sort of made for the job, it's this guy, Warren only. Yeah, it's interesting that you note all of that.

And I think the reason why you did, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that. that's because it makes the subsequent conduct of Edgar Hoover in the wake of Olney's appointment as Chief Counsel, all the more curious. Exactly. I know nothing to say someone has taken my place when times go bad, when time, go bad, Yeah, then time's go bad, won't you lay me down in the torrent, and let me do my stuff? I know, after only is announced by Warren as the pick for chief counsel,

J. Edgar Hoover launches a smear campaign against him to get him taken off of the commission. And this is not only surprising given Olney's apparent capacity and aptitude for administration, but also given Olney's very as far as we can tell, very storied history of collaborating closely and effectively

with Hoover and with the FBI in all of those prosecutions that he ran as head of the criminal division. And so you would think that to a guy like Hoover, this proven anti-communist would be ideal, but we've scratched our heads a little bit to figure out why Hoover would try to get him fired. Now, one reason that is posited by Beverly Gage in the G-Man book, which I think is convincing, is that only was too close to the inside. that he had worked very closely with Hoover, that he maybe knew too much about the inner workings of the FBI. And at this point, I am extrapolating, not any longer citing gauge,

but I think that this is really where Hoover's hackles rise, because Hoover does not want somebody who knows the code of FBI language and operations. The FBI notoriously, it speaks almost its own language. And so somebody who's a former chief of the criminal division would understand that language and not being under Hoover's thumb would be apt to expose or somehow exploit his knowledge of the FBI's inner workings to undermine or subvert the cleanliness of the narrative from the FBI's perspective. And what's really interesting is that Hoover's nemesis, or one of Hoover's many nemesis,

Alan Dulles was the first commissioner on the record to say nay to Olney. He violently spoke out against Olney's appointment in an open session of the commission and he was followed by Gerald Ford and they were operating on inside knowledge from Hoover and from top FBI men that only had a, quote, a horrible personality. And, you know, kind of putting it on the level of this guy would be a nightmare to work with. And I have no idea if that's true or not. Yeah, it boils down to just, we're not going to work with this guy. Yeah, you're going to miss you when you go

It's down so long I've been tossed to ground enough Oh, wouldn't you just let me go down It certainly tracks All the other reasons that Hoover would have to oust him And It's funny to me that Dulles would follow suit

And it's almost Tragomically ironic that the commissioner who some accounts actually credit with ousting Olney is really the third man on the train

which is Hail Boggs Yeah that to me is the head scratcher Yeah after Dulles and Jerry Ford throw their wads of monkey shit at Olney Boggs takes it a step further

and says, well, if he's on the commission, you can count me out. And that's what ultimately tips Earl Warren to say, okay, fine, I relent. Yeah, and that's how he taps Lee Rankin. Like our man Jerry, Lee Rankin, was a native nebraskan spent a little more time than jerry did in nebraska and he was a few years older than jerry he went on to the university of nebraska both for undergrad and law school and he started his career his legal career working yeah you know the expression there but for the grace of god go i oh man

For Jerry Ford, it was there, but for the psychopathy of Leslie Lynch King, senior, go I. Lee Rankin was born in 197, so that puts him six years older than our boy Jerry as well. Just to flag the age dynamics that, you know, and this is another. thing in the legal profession, too, that seniority doesn't always correspond to age. And so here, Jerry Ford outranks Lee Rankin and Hale Boggs, for that matter, who is, you know, like Jerry Ford was a younger member of the commission, but Lee Rankin was older and more experienced. So that's another interesting factor to consider. definitely it's a good one it's a good one to consider but ironically by the time ranken made a name for himself

in washington dc he too had a fairly liberal profile his main credential for service as chief counsel was his role as solicitor general during the eisenhower administration and that role put him in front of Chief Justice Warren on numerous occasions, right? Because the Solicitor General, for those of you who are not familiar, he's the guy who is responsible for arguing before the Supreme Court. So not the top lawyer in the organization, but sort of the advocate that goes up to the Supreme Court to argue. and in this role, Rankin argued for desegregation, albeit it was gradual desegregation, on behalf of the administration in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and then after he left the government, he went on to work for the ACLU, where he argued in favor of free legal

representation for indigent criminal defendants in the case styled as Gideon v. Rainwright. That's right. And we mentioned both of those cases and the Warren court more generally in, I believe it was episode three of the Warren Commission decided series. And so there's a real interesting crossover between the career trajectories of J. Lee Rankin and Earl Warren, such that even though Rankin is not as only was a lifelong subordinate to Warren, he was a guy with whom Warren had frequently crossed paths, and a guy for whom Warren, Warren, as well as the remainder of the commission, had developed a healthy respect. So to sum it all up, Rankin was just another centrist or even liberal Republican

who understood the federal government from experience. as the chief counsel to the commission he was in charge of organizing the investigation remember we've styled him as the junior partner he is the one that is handling logistics he's doling out assignments apparently at the strong urging of hoover dulles and others he chose to use federal investigators with the FBI, CIA, and other agencies of the federal government. Ostensibly, he trusted them and thought that hiring sort of outside investigators, folks that weren't already cleared by the government, that would impose unwieldy delays on the commission.

And now we'll discuss this later on, but Rankin would later come to regret this decision, as it allowed him to be duped by the very agencies he entrusted with the investigation. Yeah, and I think since we are going to end this episode with Rankin before digging into the rest of the staff of the commission, I think we might as well fast forward a decade or so. So you had mentioned, you know, Rankin, he's the organization guy. I'll say in the typical process, the organizational person, they typically have a passing familiarity

at a high level with the facts of the case, but they're not the ones that are digging into the actual documents and testimony. And I know that Rankin did sit in on a number of interrogations, of depositions of depositions of various commission witnesses, but, for example, he was adamant that at the time of the commission, he had absolutely no awareness whatsoever, no knowledge and no inkling of a suspicion that the CIA was involved in assassination efforts, including against Castro. Now, in a solid number of our commissioner profile episodes, we've recounted how Gerald Ford, John McCloy, Alan Dulles, John Sherman Cooper, and likely Dick Russell as well, all did have insight into the CIA's assassination efforts. And so that informational asymmetry was never corrected with respect to Rankin.

And as a result, 10 years later or 11 years later, when Jay Lee Rankin is interviewed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 70s, right? This is the congressional inquiry launched in the wake of exposures like the Pentagon papers, like the Watergate scandal, into past affairs of the government. Rankin tells a very different story compared to the one that he signed off on when the commission issued its final report. The next witness to be called this afternoon is Jay Lee Rankin. We all of us didn't believe the FBI was capable of that kind of conduct. At least I didn't, and none of the commissioners did.

And I think that the, uh, all of our ideas about what people in government are capable of and do has changed. But back then, we didn't think they would do such things. I assume you feel the same way about the CIA's non-disclosure of the alleged assassination plots that they may have participated. an in vis-a-vis Castro? I do. Allegations came to your attention that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been an FBI. That's correct.

So we top ranking, uptown top ranking. How were you able to investigate the truth or falsity of that charge? So the commission finally determined that they would accept Jay Edgar Hoover's personal assurance by affidavit that Oswald had never been an informer or agent of the FBI, and that was given.

Today in 1970, with what you've learned over the course of the years, of the years. What is your opinion with respect to the performance of the Federal Bureau's investigation? Well, I've been very much disappointed on some of the things that have been revealed. And I had a close relationship with Jay Edgar Hoover while I was from the Department of Justice. And it was always friendly, but also professional. And I thought good. And I had, I never believed that he would withhold information or habit with help from anybody like the commission.

And when I learned that they were supposed to have known about plans for assassination that were underway in the CIA, according to the investigation of the Senate committee, and a little base with my wine, up down top ranking. And did not report it to us. and that we didn't receive any such information to CIA. It was quite disheartening to me to believe and to know that that kind of conduct was a part of

the action of our intelligence agencies at that high level. Well, I think our experience, as it's revealed by investigation of the Senate committee, where the CIA is worse than the FBI, because the FBI apparently did not originate the assassination plans, and apparently the CIA did. So the FBI only happened on or were informed about such plans and then did not convey them to us. But with the CIA, they were apparently involved in them.

and did not alert us to the situation at all, give us any opportunity to take the action that we should have had the chance to of investigating that type of information. The report was wrong. Yes, I think your answer to an earlier question has demonstrated a certain fall from innocence that we've all had since that time.

Things are now believable, which we would not have thought believable at that time. That's correct. The threshold of just belief has gone up quite a bit. A certain fall of the premise. So I'll start... you know sharing a couple of these and then dick maybe you can share some more but it's very interesting i guess in some you know rankin expresses a great deal of skepticism and makes it look

as though he had been duped really during his service on the commission so So in 1978, a little after a decade, in fact, 14 years after the Warren Commission report had been published, Rankin gave an interview to Michael Ewing, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And we're going to now read some excerpts from Ewing's description of that interview. Of course, the full transcripts of these interviews are all available, and the listener can find them in the records of the House Select Committee on assassinations. But these excerpts are selected by Michael Ewing in sort of making the case about how Rankin from his very privileged position, right?

Dick, you called him the eighth commissioner, and I don't think that that is inaccurate. And these are some of his reflections. Quote, hindsight makes it clear that both Hoover and the CIA were covering up a variety of items, end quote. from the commission, and Rankin personally. He said, that is Rankin, and these are the words of Ewing, that he had been continually saddened over the years

by, quote, all the disclosures about Hoover's performance in our area and a number of others, end quote. I, Ewing, commented that he, Rankin, was apparent, not one of Hoover's favorite people. And he laughed and said, quote, that is now abundantly clear, though I've never read my dossier, end quote. He said that he finds the FBI performance, quote, quite disturbing in hindsight. We would have found their conduct nearly unbelievable if we had known about it at the time, end quote. He further stated that, quote, Hoover did everything he could, end quote, to get the commission to adopt the earliest FBI report on the shooting,

which Rankin said, quote, we of course finally rejected, end quote. And remember, we talked about that in our McCloy episode, part one, that the FBI report was not only weak, it was utter garbage. You want to pick up with Ewing's narration, Dick? Yeah, but before we do, I mean, the line about I've never read my dossier, that made me chuckle, right? This guy is so self-aware of it. Totally. He's so aware of the apparatus, and he's like, well, I've never read my file, so I couldn't tell you what Jay Edgar Hoover thinks of me.

Yeah, I mean, a little bit of a preview of a future episode when we'll talk about Gerald Ford's sort of mole work on behalf of the FBI, but there's a great deal of suspicion, which I find to be very well-founded, that in fact the FBI bugged the very rooms in which the Warren Commission held its proceedings. Totally par for the course for Jay Edgar Hoover. Just on the same tip, you know, there's this incredible article. It's actually also, I believe, from 1978 as well. In The Washington Post, this is also the same time that this Ewing interview is coming out, the same time that the HSCA disclosures are emerging.

And the Washington Post reported on a memo that was declassified from May 13th, 1964. And it was a memo from FBI. assistant director William Sullivan, whom our listeners might recognize as the chief of the co-intel pro operation for the FBI. And he reported to the director about a little conversation that he had with our friend Jim Engleton. And he said, quote, Engleton said it occurred to him that it would be well for both, this is parenthetical from Don, CIA director John McCone, now back in the memo, and director Hoover, to be aware that the commission might ask the same questions, wondering whether they would get different replies from the heads of the two

agencies. Angleton wanted us to know some of the things which he believes McCone will be asked and the replies which will be given. One question, says Sullivan, will be, was Lee Harvey Oswald ever an agent of the CIA? The answer will be no. According to Angleton, as reported to Sullivan, So they know the questions ahead of time, they know the answers ahead of time, they are coordinating ahead of time. And all of this is presumably informing the interview that Jay Lee Rankin gave to the Committee on Assassinations, in addition to the plethora of information about the commission and all of its very many blind spots. and errors that had come out in the intervening period. I just wanted to get that into the record, Dick,

before passing the mic back to you to continue with... Yeah, and bringing it back to our lawyer law firm analogy, I just, when you have a witness and you know the question and you know the answer for that witness, that becomes your witness, right? The only situation where you have a witness where you truly know what questions and what answers, that witness is no longer an independent witness.

That is your witness. And you will refer to him as your witness because you've essentially prep them, right? And not only that, but you will select which questions that you ask the witness depending on what you anticipate their answers will be. So just like if you're doing, let's say you're doing a what we call a government-facing investigation where the eventual results need to be reported to some agency of the government.

Whether it's the DOJ, the SEC, the FTC, or any of the other very many alphabet agencies out there, you are going to do all you can to understand the witness through their documents, through their emails, through their communications, and shape the questions that you ask that person towards the result that you ultimately want to present to the audience. And I think the Warren Commission was no different in that respect. That's right. okay back to ewing back to the text ewing goes on to say he rankin then made a point of inquiring about our work relating to the CIA mafia plots against Castro he said quote one thing which i think is

very important and i don't know if you are getting into this and i don't know if it is proven or not is whether the CIA used the mafia against Castro, end quote. Rankin said that there were reports in recent years that this was true and that it involved an assassination conspiracy against Castro. He said, quote, do you know if this has been proven? End quote. I, Ewing, said yes, it had, and briefly explained. the history of the plots and their concealment from anyone higher than Helms at the time.

Rankin then responded, Ah, yes. I've been very afraid that it was all true, but I haven't followed all the books and reports in recent years. Rankin went on to say, quote, I would find the plots with the mafia, the mafia being mixed up with the CIA and these Cubans, frightening. You've got to go after that, end quote. Rankin went on to say, quote, that again is something that would have been beyond belief at the time, end quote.

He said Helms' role in the plots and his concealment of them from the commission, quote, would have been just unconscionable, end quote. Rankin expressed great anguish over hearing that the plots were in fact confirmed. It seems strange that he has not followed public developments on the plots more carefully. But he indicated that he simply does not follow these areas and has not read, quote, any of the church committee reports, end quote. Can I just say that sounds like a bunch of bullshit? Yeah. Yeah. And I will tease the listener that on our next installment, we're going to get into Commissioner Arlen Specter and his late in life commentary on his absolutely nefarious role on the Warren Commission.

but it's always funny to see how these guys try really in a Sisyphian effort to roll the heavy weight of their soul bearing the moral culpability of their role in covering up the president's assassination at the hands of elements of their own government, up the hill, which, like Sisyphus, is an impossible effort. In closing, Ewing reports that Rankin repeatedly expressed the view that both the FBI and CIA had concealed important information from the commission, and that the CIA mafia plots would have had a, quote, very direct bearing on the areas of conspiracy which we tried to pursue, end quote. And so we have commissioners. We've talked a little bit about some of the doubts.

that John Sherman Cooper expressed later in his life that Dick Russell expressed later in his life that Hail Boggs expressed later in his life in his very short life by the way

and so Rankin belongs to that same pattern of insiders calling into question the Commission's ultimate conclusions. And as we've previewed, we're going to continue to trace a little bit more, just a little bit more, not to bore the listener, but to elucidate the important nuts and bolts of the Commission's investigation. that so often go overlooked in treatments of the Kennedy assassination,

especially given our ability to comment on the investigative process, given our JD's. For now, I'm Don and I'm Dick, saying farewell. And keep digging. Start tearing the old man down run past the heathering down to the old road Start turning the grain into the ground Roll a new leaf over In the middle of the night

There's an old man shredding around in the gathering In the street if you're gonna walk on water Oh could you drop a line my way Oh ha Somewhere America Give her right to the heart of matters So heart didn't matter

I think you better turn your ticket in Get your money back at the door