'Not All Questions Will Be Answered'

Friday is the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. El Espectador spoke with John Tunheim, the man who presided over the latest commission to gather information about the assassination.

“I know it’s very difficult to believe that the president of the United States was assassinated by a man who acted alone and without an agenda. It’s difficult accepting that the history of this country was broken in two without some great criminal plot behind it all. But the truth is that there is enough direct evidence to confirm that there was a single shooter that Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas, beyond any reasonable doubt. Plots are made between several conspirators and there is always one who ends up blowing the whistle on the plan. But it’s been 50 years and no one has said, ‘I saw something,’ ‘I knew something.’ We find it hard to accept, but that’s what the evidence tells us: President John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, no one else.”

This statement was made by John R. Tunheim, Chairman of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, or AARB. This was the sixth and last group specially created to address the most sensitive incident in the recent decades in the U.S. Today. Tunheim is the federal judge in the state of Minnesota; in his courtroom, he has even seen collaborators of the Somali terrorist organization al-Shabab, the very group that massacred 72 people in the capital of Kenya last September.

In an interview with El Espectador, Tunheim recalled the work he did along with 34 other people between 1994 and 1998, which led to the declassification of more than 4 million pages that are now part of the National Archives. Even the clothing worn by the assassinated politician, stained with blood, is part of that collection. “Our job was to ensure that federal agencies declassified its records on the assassination. Our work didn’t include solving the murder, at least,” said the judge, thankful for not having carried that burden on his shoulders. Perhaps because, having had access to so much classified material, he knows that their conclusion could not have been otherwise: The murderer was, as suspected from day one, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Tunheim’s story helps us to understand that nothing that happened Nov. 22, 1963 could possibly occur in the United States today. For starters, “the people were so close to Kennedy that it was dangerous.” But no one saw the risks involved in driving the president around in a slow-moving motorcade with an open limousine. Even harder to understand for Tunheim is that once Kennedy received the first shot, the driver of the car slowed down while trying to figure out what was happening. At that moment, the car was moving at less than 5 miles per hour, where Oswald then took advantage of the opportunity to shoot a second time — at the head.

At 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital — where, in less than 48 hours, his executioner would also be pronounced dead. More than 40 years later, when the ARRB began to dig into the documents of that medical center, it discovered that the pathologists not only performed an incomplete autopsy, but they were also wrong about the bullet’s point of entry, they didn’t agree on time that the president’s brain dissection was done and they had even burned notes. The commission would then discover that George Burkley, the White House physician, also destroyed a lot of evidence. Burkley had been giving Kennedy cocktails of drugs for his back pain.

The absurdity continued. Tunheim said, “In 1963, Dallas was a small town, its police force was a bit unprofessional and to kill the president was not even considered a federal crime. For this reason Kennedy’s body remained under the authority of the state of Texas. Secret Service agents were harassed by local sheriffs, who insisted that the body remain there. Many mistakes were made. Police officers, for example, took pieces of evidence home.” Tunheim further claims, “We know that many records were destroyed. It was the darkest time of the history of the Secret Service.”

Neither can Tunheim understand how Lee Harvey Oswald, after being arrested, was held in a cell surrounded by people who had come to the police station out of curiosity and were even able to talk to him. On Sunday, Nov. 24, the police decided to move Oswald to a safer place, but people remained at the station. One of the members of the crowd was Jack Ruby, a bar owner who had been there since he had heard the news of Oswald’s capture. Just as Oswald was being escorted by a couple of officers to a squad car, Ruby pulled out a gun and, in front of TV cameras, shot Oswald in the stomach. Hours after the president’s murder, he, too, died.

Equally incomprehensible for the federal judge is that the Warren Commission — the first committee established to solve the assassination — refused to agree to Ruby’s single request to talk. “He believed he had been a hero, a patriot. Some members of the Warren Commission went to see him in jail, but he said that if he talked in Texas, he would be killed and asked to be moved. They should have at least made the effort to listen to him and return him to Texas if his story did not make sense.” In March 1964, Ruby was sentenced with the death penalty, but an appeals court reversed the decision and ordered a new trial. They never saw him again in court. Lung cancer had killed him. He also died in the same hospital where Kennedy and Oswald had died.

Battles for Information

Judge Tunheim said that once the U.S. Congress approved the establishment of the ARRB in 1992 — the same law stated that agencies should declassify what the commission asked for, with few exceptions — the CIA hired retired agents for the daunting task. “They had a good attitude; they wanted people to stop thinking that they were guilty for the murder of Kennedy. They deceived us sometimes, leading us to erroneous documents. Other times they were right for wanting to protect the files.” On the acclaimed film “JFK” by Oliver Stone, who was in fact the trigger for the Congress’s creation of the ARRB, Tunheim stated, “It was good, but not very accurate.”

Along the way, as had been evidenced, the ARRB met with many people more willing to withhold information than to share it. That was the case with Walter Sheridan, a former aide of U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy during his brother’s presidency. Sheridan was exploring the hypothesis that organized crime was behind the murder, but after traveling to Chicago — home of the famous American mafia — the inquiries stopped. “We believe that perhaps it was due to Operation Mongoose, in which Robert Kennedy was deeply involved. The attorney general was mortified to think that he had been responsible for the death of his brother.”

Operation Mongoose was a plan that was hatched in the U.S. in the early ‘60s in order to overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro. Thinking in new lines of investigation over this controversial case, Tunheim argued, “It would be interesting to explore the connections between Lee Harvey Oswald and Cuba,” referring to the fact that Oswald had been in the Soviet Union seeking asylum, but had been expelled from there and, at the time of the assassination, he was again trying to get a visa to the Soviet Union through Cuba. “Apparently, the visa was denied and then later approved,” the judge added.

Then there is the reason why the whole world saw the precise images from the shots taken at Kennedy: Abraham Zapruder. “It’s the most important evidence of the crime,” said Tunheim. Zapruder, a businessman, filmed the presidential motorcade with a newly acquired Super 8 camera, which contained the material that the commission “took” after the Zapruder family repeatedly refused to hand it over. The ARRB also tried to access some of the Kennedys’ family records related to the never-confirmed romance between the actress Marilyn Monroe and the president. His daughter, Caroline Kennedy, said yes, but her brother, Ted, said no.

Tunheim also recalls that the commission received more than 600 pages of classified documents from the Kremlin, through the efforts of then Vice President Al Gore: “In Russia we were told that the Americans were asking too many questions. In the ‘60s, U.S. agencies wanted to know if the Kremlin had been involved [in the assassination], but did not want people to know, because they would have been forced to do something about it. Meanwhile, the Soviets feared that they would be blamed for the murder, which would have unleashed a nuclear war.” According to Tunheim, once Al Gore left the government, the bridge between the commission and the Kremlin broke.

It has been five decades since two bullets claimed the life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but Judge John Tunheim knows very well that few are satisfied with the explanations. Various conspiracy theories circle the minds of Americans and the general public, ranging from the CIA’s participation to the involvement of the Federal Reserve; however, the evidence only indicates that the one who pulled the trigger was a 24-year-old man named Lee Harvey Oswald. “This is a crime that changed the history of the country and seems too simple for Oswald to have acted alone. But there is no more evidence. It is clear that in this area not all questions will be answered,” Tunheim concludes.