The Kennedy Assassination Tapes by Max Holland

Author:Max Holland [Holland, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4378-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

December

News and commentary about the establishment of the Warren Commission (as it is immediately dubbed) dominate the media; nearly all the coverage is favorable. Only a few outlets express reservations in the days after November 29, either by harking back to the Roberts Commission’s unfortunate history or raising questions about the chief justice’s participation. The conservative Chicago Tribune, for instance, claims that a half-dozen senators and many more representatives are disgruntled over Earl Warren’s selection because of the remarks he made prior to Oswald’s arrest and/or during his Capitol eulogy. “The chief justice has already prejudged the case,” the Tribune reports, by blaming “right-wing extremists.” But none of the congressmen will go on record making such a charge “in this period of regard for a new president’s burden.”1 The closest thing to dissent with a name on it is uttered by unidentified “friends” of Senator James Eastland. The Mississippi senator earlier told AP that he was in “favor [of] what the president is doing.”2 But according to the Tribune, when Eastland told his friends about the president’s telephone call, he explained that he “could see no alternative to a reluctant assent.”3

For Lyndon Johnson, one of the desired consequences of the Commission’s establishment becomes manifest in December. Aside from occasional scattered references, neither the assassination nor the Commission will be a major topic of his telephone conversations, as they were during his first week in office. His schedule ceases to be cluttered with meetings and tasks directly related to investigation of the assassination. It begins to resemble a president’s regular schedule, that is, if a man of Johnson’s prodigious energies can be said to have a normal schedule. Even with the assassination successfully compartmentalized, of course, Johnson still has to grapple with the political legacy of a slain president who has suddenly taken on aspects of martyrdom. The situation is all the more complicated by the fact that there are two living Kennedys to whom Johnson must attend: the president’s widow and Robert. Johnson is intent on staying within the “Kennedy aura,” as he terms it, until at least the November 1964 election, when he can win the presidency in his own right.4 His efforts to do so will appear almost desperate at times.

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