The Warren Commision: A Rothbardian Analysis

0:00Good afternoon. Great crowd. I'm James Dunlap, Limestone College. I'm going to talk to you today about the Warren Commission. I'd like to be able to walk around. That was what I hoped to do. The member of the audience is a former graduate school friend of mine, Richard Gamble. The only thing I could say was, who knew? Richard and I were at USC together. Richard came to the university as a full-fledged libertarian, but I fell in among socialists there. I left the university ABD and taught at a private school in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the Spartanburg Day School.

0:53The man I shared an office with handed me a copy of Dan Smoot's Invisible Government. Dan here. I'm sorry, Dan Smoot's Invisible Government was the book he handed me, my office mate. And he handed me a big stack of the free market, and I became a convert at that point. So it's been an interesting experience. Now what interested me the most about the free market idea was the writings of Murray Rothbard, The historical angle that he took and I decided that what I needed to do was combine a couple of interests. One was an interest in the Kennedy assassination situation and the Rothbardian analysis idea as well.

1:38He basically said this, to assume as a hypothesis that people in government are at least as self-interested as those in other fields, to then examine relationships and connections that you find there and that if you did so you'd find revealing patterns within those relationships and I took that and applied it to some things that I've been working on on the side and I found that it worked basically. I also decided that I needed to try to either cut through or bypass entirely the enormous body of JFK assassination and conspiracy materials, especially official government document releases and that sort of thing, and try a fresh approach.

2:34What I found was that there was a lot of information about the Warren Report itself, but very little I also determined that since I was in a position where I was in a small town, in a small college, a small college library, that I would try to find this information if there was any through readily available sources, that I wouldn't need to do any freedom of information and Requests, or I wouldn't have to view a million pages of CIA documents and that sort of thing. I would say, okay, let's see if we can find it in a small college library or in the public library downtown, or books on interlibrary loan, reading such things as Who's Who in America, the entries in there, the entries in Current Biography, the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, the Dictionary of American Biography, Photography, Contemporary Authors, New York Times, microfilm, things that are readily available and if you use the book or an article of some kind to make sure that it was from an allegedly respectable author and a respected publishing firm and see if you could find the information.

3:54And I did indeed find some revealing patterns, a la Murray Rothbard, and I found that the Warren Commission was not a disinterested, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission. It was, in fact, Rothbardian, straight down the line. I mean, it just fit like a glove. It was beautiful. It was an interlocking group with long-standing ties to one another and long-standing ties to all of the elements that we've been talking about here today. Law, banking, finance, government, all within this milieu that we've heard already today about the welfare warfare state.

4:42And certainly some of these folks are even architects of the present setup. The Warren Commission, as you know, rubber-stamped or placed on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the lone nut thesis. And they actually have gone back in time to help explain other presidential assassinations from that same point of view. So it's a very interesting thing. But you have to remember this. The plain and simple fact is that on the 22nd of November, John F. Kennedy, whether you like him or not, it's not the question, was murdered in broad daylight, in full view of hundreds, actually recorded on film.

5:27And if anything, this fits the whole idea that Lew Rockwell this morning says that there are cracks in the edifice, and that was the problem. There were people who were concerned that the murder of the President may cause the welfare warfare state to come apart. And that seems to be, certainly was, where the Warren Commission fit in. Let's make sure this edifice stays together. They're doing this. The President is killed basically on a weekend. By the following weekend, the Warren Commission is in place. Place. And we'll see these folks in a desperate effort to control the damage. Now we're just going to try to go through each one and I did a version of this with Clyde Wilson's red shirt reading circle in Columbia and I went an hour and a half and it was getting late you know we just had a huge Greek dinner and Let's start with John J. McCloy. We'll see some pictures of him in a minute.

6:32It became clear that the leading character in the Warren Commission was not Earl Warren. In fact, Earl Warren is more like Slick Earl than the great justice he's made out to be. The central figure is John J. McCloy, a man who was sort of a lifelong wise man. He was a wise man in later years. Robert Carra maintains that Lyndon Johnson was known in his youth as a professional son and that he courted older men and women of power. John J. McCloy was sort of a professional protege, and we'll see where he works out. Born in Philadelphia in 1895, has the prep school experience, attends Amherst, incidentally, during the period when the takeover in academe by socialists was at its heyday.

7:26He was at Amherst under the presidency of a man named Alexander Meiklejohn, who dismissed members of the faculty and replaced them with younger men who were socialists, who had come from Germany studying the socialist tradition. McCloy goes to Harvard Law School. He was studying under Felix Frankfurter and you hear about Felix Frankfurter and there are people who have written that Frankfurter was basically the leader of a Marxist cell at Harvard and did everything he could to forward the sort of Fabian Socialist idea. World War I, John J. McCloy was captain of field artillery. His bio makes great play of his meeting Wild Bill Donovan as a young military officer.

8:20Comes back from World War I, joins the Cadwallader, Wickersham and Taft law firm. We heard a piece on William Howard Taft. This was Henry Taft, the brother of William Howard. Howard. So it's a well-connected Wall Street firm. George Wickersham, the leading partner, was one of the founders of the Council on Foreign Relations that many of us have heard of. Incidentally, every reference I have to the CFR in the work that I've been doing is from a mainstream source, not a so-called conspiracy-style source. He joins the Cravath firm a little bit later on, and the Cravath firm was led by Paul Cravath, another founder of the Council on Foreign Relations and the man who helped The Journal of Foreign Affairs when it was first started in the early 1920s.

9:06McCoy sort of gravitates toward them and they show him the ropes. With the Kravath firm, he becomes a serious talent scout for talented young attorneys and talented people in other areas. During World War II, as Assistant Secretary of War, we'll see a picture of him a little bit as Assistant Secretary. And his specialty basically was espionage and security and that sort of thing. Just a tremendous figure. Rothbard describes Secretary of War Henry Stimson as a frail read and maintains that McCloy was the man who handled the day-to-day business of the War Department. After World War II, he becomes a partner in the Milbank Tweed law firm in New York.

9:55It's another Wall Street firm. The leading partner was a man named E. Parmely-Prentis, who was the son-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, a very interesting group of people. With the Kravath firm, McCloy is the big lawyer for the Kuhn-Loeb interests, and he comes back after World War II, works for the Rockefellers. He leaves Wall Street and becomes the military governor of Germany. of Germany. He's a military governor and high commissioner of Germany from 1949 to 1952, and he took with him his vice commissioner, a man named Benjamin Buttonwiser, who was a Kuhn-Lohab partner. Again, after coming back from Germany, he takes a job with the Chase Manhattan Bank, and is very closely associated with the Rockefeller interest for the rest of his career.

10:56McCloy actually served in the Kennedy administration. He was the arms control chief, the arms control and negotiation chief. And it's not well known, but there was a dispute in the fall of 1961 over the Russians cheating on the treaty. And Jack Kennedy basically said that I feel under no obligation to stick to the treaty. So we're going to test ourselves, and McCloy quit in disgust. So he had basically a falling out with Kennedy that's not very well known. Again, a lifelong internationalist and well-known pragmatist. Earl Warren, again, not what you think.

11:41Several of the members of the Warren Commission have public images that are very carefully crafted. His image is that of the solemn learned judge and his career was anything but that. Born in 1891, went to law school at the University of California. His first job right before World War I was as a lawyer in the legal department of an outfit known as Associated Oil in San Francisco. Associated Oil was owned by Southern Pacific Railroad. The Southern Pacific Railroad was owned by John D. Rockefeller, basically. Warren was a career politician, Alameda County DA, California Attorney General, Governor of California, vice presidential candidate on the 1948 Dewey ticket.

12:30When he ran for Attorney General, he filed as a Democrat and a Republican. I've never seen anything like it. This is slick Earl. I mean, you know, one of the things McCloy did as Assistant Secretary of War was set up the interment of Japanese citizens, and that was Warren's thing, too. Warren was said to be one of the first to suggest rounding up Japanese citizens or Japanese civilians, excuse me, American citizens, some of them, and putting them in camps. So 20 years before the Warren Commission, he and McCloy have a very silent connection. He's described as this, as a politician. Years ago, Warren was singled out for future political favor by the most powerful industrial and political cliques in California.

13:19His record on most major social and economic issues is an almost perfect blank. It's 1944. Alan Dulles, gentleman spy. Never see him without his pipe. Fairly well connected as well. Well, his grandfather was John Foster, Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. His uncle was Robert Lansing, Secretary of State under Wilson, who took the assignment after William Jennings Bryan quit on a point of principle. Born in 1893, educated in Paris, Princeton BA, Princeton MA in International Affairs in 1916, heads out to Vienna as a Foreign Service Officer. Ed Lee, no evidence that he came into contact with the Austrian School. As you could well imagine, in 1919 he was actually on the staff of Everett M. House of the House Inquiry fame, close advisor to Woodrow Wilson, goes to Berlin as an embassy employee in 1920.

14:24His Wall Street experience was with the Sullivan and Cromwell firm, and his major client was the J. Henry Schroeder Banking Firm, which is a German bank with Rockefeller connections. Alan Dulles and McCoy met while working in Paris. Their law firms handled the transactions that were basically the Young Plan and the Dawes Plan, the financing of German debt during the interwar period, and they spent a lot of time in Europe together, knew each other very well for many, many years. Alan Dulles helped organize the OSS, he drafted the legislation himself for the CIA, became the director when his brother John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State.

15:10And he has a well-known following out with Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs situation, and Ironically ends up judging Kennedy's assassin just two or three years later. Some Southerners on this Warren Commission were Richard Russell, John Sherman Cooper and Hale Boggs. Look at them as well. Richard Russell was a lifelong politician, never married, basically spent his entire adult life He lived his life just about from 1933 until his death in 1971 in the Senate. Quote, considered one of the most powerful men in the U.S. Senate, a master of parliamentary maneuvers, a formidable debater, a leading congressional advocate of a strong military stance.

15:59So a very solid warfare state. They say he had some differences of opinion on the welfare portion of it, but not too much. wore two hats, took a decidedly segregationist position for the benefits of the voters back home, but was a decidedly internationalist bipartisan power broker in Washington DC, described as Lyndon Johnson's man on the Warren Commission. John Sherman Cooper, probably one of the more enigmatic figures in American history, at least in my opinion, who was a very refined, very cultured man, a Republican at a time when it was almost unheard of, and he sort of portrayed a cracker, hayseed image to his benefit, would go back home and make a rant about integration and desegregation, and would come back and work with the internationalist community, described as an able and vigorous supporter of a bipartisan foreign policy.

17:15He has a McCoy connection, I think, in that he was a lawyer, Harvard Law School, Yale, graduated from Yale in 1923, most likely to succeed at Yale and incredible stuff. Goes to Harvard Law School, serves in the government, the American military occupation of Germany as a lawyer, and his specialty was helping to rewrite the Constitution of Bavaria and helping people being repatriated or who had been displaced. So very solid connection, I think. One of the first Republicans to oppose Joe McCarthy and such things is that. So an interesting situation, again, played up his hayseed image, even as New York Times obituary did this.

18:04I talked about his funny accent and all this. I found that he was one of the attendants, partygoers, at Truman Capote's 1966 Black and White Ball. This was the high society event of the decade, and there's John Sherman Cooper. He's probably not a hayseed, I can tell you that. Gerald Ford, let's look at Hale Boggs very quickly. Hale Boggs' entire career was as a power broker in the House. He was involved in an outfit called the Inter-Parliamentary Union. He was big on the Marshall Plan. He helped draft legislation for NATO. His pet project was the New Orleans Trademark.

18:51Yeah, anybody tell me who the director of the New Orleans Trademark was? Clay Shaw, friends with Clay Shaw, friends with Jim Garrison, Gerald Ford, we're going to look at some pictures here in a minute. Gerald Ford had an image as well. I grew up basically watching Saturday Night Live, watch Chevy Chase do Gerald Ford. What does he do? He falls down, he acts like a moron. This guy, graduated from the University of Michigan, was a star on national championship football teams. He was one of the four blocks of granite. I mean, this guy is incredible. He goes to Yale Law School. I mean, morons don't graduate from Yale Law School. I mean, it's just plain and simple.

19:36I think his connection with McCloy came in 1940. In his biography, he talks about going to Washington, D.C. It's going to be down in New York from New Haven to help with the Wendell Willkie campaign. And McCloy's biographer maintains that the central office of the Wilkie campaign was John J. McCloy's office at the Kravath firm. And here's a guy that's looking for new talent. He's looking for young men that he can bring along. And they urge Jerry Ford to run for Congress against a known isolationist in 1948. So, very interesting connection. Hale Boggs, incidentally, died mysteriously, died in 1962, October 16th, 1972, excuse me, while campaigning with Congressman Paul Begich.

20:28Let's see, what does the Kennedy assassination tell us about the presidency? Fierce competition for control of the executive branch, plain and simple. Violence is an integral part of the American political mosaic, certainly. The Necessity for Maintaining the Facade of Legitimacy If you've watched the recent releases of the Assassination Records Review Board, that's exactly what they're trying to do. They have put their report out and they say, there are no smoking guns. Let's look at some slides here. John J. McCoy and Robert Lovett. These were, they were both assistant secretaries of war, Henry Stemson called them the imps of Satan, and I don't think he was joking.

21:15Lovett helped put the Kennedy cabinet together. Lovett selected Dean Rusk and Maxwell Taylor to be the military advisor. Both Dean Rusk and Maxwell Taylor had been socked away in Rockefeller-paid sign issuers or sinecures. John J. McCloy as Chairman of the Chase, John J. McCloy, Harry Truman, and Dean Acheson John Sherman Cooper joined the Dean Atchison law firm of Covington and Burling later on.

22:06You don't hire hayseed goofballs to be members of those kinds of firms, trust me. Would you buy a used car from these men? I don't think so. David Rockefeller, a tad bit older, Richard Nixon during his period as being groomed as elder statesman, and John J. McCloy probably in his late 80s. John J. McCloy and G. McCotter. Well, what's your name again? There he is, Jack, God bless him.

22:53John J. McCloy, advisor, wise man. Looks like they've got some kind of Oval Office taping device there, I don't know. Here it is, folks, the New York Times, the day after Kennedy's murder. And all this has contrived, again, to keep the edifice from completely coming down, I think. Lew really, I think, hit it on the head early this morning. John J. McCoy, John Sherman Cooper, a young man named David Bellin, who has created a cottage industry in writing The Final Revelation from the Warren Commission several times.

23:42Mostly hogwash, mostly designed to steer you in the direction away from viewing the Warren Commission itself. Almost no assassination conspiracy material deals with these people. They deal with the report, which is 80% of the American public thinks it's balderdash anyway. And that's Dealey Plaza, that's the Texas Schoolbook Depository, and there's John Sherman Cooper. It's interesting, whenever they photograph these guys outside, they have on these wonderful hats. It's like my dad There they are handing over the report. Sunlight streaming in. Our learned judge handing the thing to Lyndon. There's John Jay on the far left, Richard Russell, Gerald Ford, Alan Dulles in the bow tied, John Sherman Cooper in the glasses and Hale Boggs on the far right there.

24:40Incidentally, it should be on the other side, but they all knew each other. Cokie Roberts is the daughter of Hale Boggs, and she's written a book, and she says basically that Gerald Ford was a house guest. They were over the house the whole time, you know. Hale Boggs had a garden. People would come over and have squash, you know, and some watermelon and all, whatever, you know, beans, and corn from his garden. And there's the report. See, that's supposed to be enough. That's supposed to be, man, look how thick that is. That's got to be true. That's J. Lee Rankin in the background, Solicitor General under Earl Warren. Lots and lots of connections we just can't go into here, but maybe we'll see something in print soon.

25:28There it is. That's supposed to do it, folks. That's supposed to keep your edifice from crumbling. An Official Portrait, Solomon. We find him guilty. Look what it says. War Commission finds Oswald guilty. Well, who are they? Is this a jury? Is this a court of law? This is an extrajudicial thing, an extragovernmental thing. And that did it. That was supposed to be enough right there. and I think 35 years later they have just this year put out the report of the assassination records review board and they have rubber stamped this just saying that they were a little bit too zealous in their secrecy, that's all they said, so we still got it.

26:16What's the presidency? Again, a hotly fought over prize, a hotly sought after key to the executive branch. And there's some suggestion here that even the president himself is not the true leader. Five minutes, thank you. I'm done, really. We're going to finish early, just out of light. Thank you very much. Bring the lights up. Thank you very much.