Gerald
Ford in 1970 was called by Newsweek the "CIA's best friend in
Congress." Ford also was an informer to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover
regarding the inner workings of the Warren Commission where he had been
appointed by JFK assassination perp Lyndon Johnson SPECIFICALLY because he had
close ties to the CIA.
Web
links -
1) https://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/JFK/ford.html
2) https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2016-02-29/gerald-ford-white-house-altered-rockefeller-commission-report
LBJ
appoints Gerald Ford to the Warren Commission and specifically says he (LBJ)
wanted someone on the House Appropriations Committee “who knows CIA over in
your shop” (referring to Ford).
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/secret-white-house-tapes/lbj-appoints-gerald-ford-to-the-warren-commission
(Ford): Yes, Mr. President. How are you, sir?
(President
Johnson): Happy Thanksgiving.
Where are you?
(Ford): I'm home, sir.
(President
Johnson): You mean Michigan?
(Ford): No, no, I'm here in Washington—
(President
Johnson): You're here in
Washington? Well, thank God there's somebody in town! [Ford chuckles.] I was
getting ready to tell [James] MacGregor Burns he's right about the Congress.
They couldn't function.
(Ford): I thought your speech was excellent the other day.
(President
Johnson): Why, thank you, Jerry.
Jerry, I got something I want you to do for me.
(Ford): Well, we'll do the best we can, sir.
(President
Johnson): I've got to have a
top, blue-ribbon presidential commission to investigate the assassination. And
I'm going to ask the Chief Justice to head it, and then I'm going to ask John
[J.] McCloy and Allen Dulles.
(Ford): Right.
(President
Johnson): And I want it
nonpartisan. Now, I'm not going to point out I got five Republicans, two
Democrats, but I'm going to do that, and I'm just . . . then you forget what
party you belong to and just serve as an American.
And
I want [Richard B.] Dick Russell [Jr.] and [John] Sherman Cooper, John Cooper,
of the Senate. [Ford acknowledges.] Dick's
on Armed Services over there, and I want somebody on Appropriations who knows
CIA over in your shop—
(Ford): Right.
(President Johnson): —from the Appropriations angle, 'cause I'm covering the
Armed Services angle with Russell.
(Ford): Right.
(President
Johnson): I want to ask [T.]
Hale Boggs [Sr.] and you to serve from the House—
(Ford): Well, Mr. President—
(President
Johnson): —it'll be McCloy, and
Dulles, and Ford, and Boggs, and Cooper, and Russell, and Chief Justice Warren
as chairman.
(Ford): Well, you know very well I would be honored to do it, and I'll
do the very best I can, sir.
(President
Johnson): You do that, and keep
me up to date, and I'll be seeing you.
(Ford): All right. Thank you very much—
(President
Johnson): Thank you.
(Ford): —and I'm delighted to help out.
(President
Johnson): Thank you, Jerry.
(Ford): Thank—
Gerald
Ford became a member of the House Appropriations Committee in 1951
https://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/events/centennials/ford/biography.html
Ford
became a member of the House Appropriations Committee in 1951, and rose to
prominence on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, becoming its ranking
minority member in 1961. In
1963 President Johnson appointed Ford to the Warren Commission investigating
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1965 Ford co-authored, with
John R. Stiles, a book about the findings of the Commission, Portrait of the
Assassin. He once described himself as "a moderate in domestic affairs, an
internationalist in foreign affairs, and a conservative in fiscal policy."
Robert
Morrow: In 1970 Newsweek called Cong. Gerald Ford “the CIA’s
best friend in Congress.” Web link: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Newsweek+calls+Gerald+Ford+the+CIA%27s+man+in+Congress&va=b&t=hc&ia=web&iai=r1-4&page=1&sexp=%7B%22cdrexp%22%3A%22b%22%2C%22recipeexp%22%3A%22b%22%2C%22biaexp%22%3A%22b%22%2C%22msvrtexp%22%3A%22b%22%7D
By MIKE FEINSILBER
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (July 2) - Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took
pen in
hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission's key
sentence
on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body when he
was
killed in Dallas.
The effect of Ford's change was to strengthen the commission's
conclusion
that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded
Texas
Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee
Harvey
Oswald was the sole gunman.
A small change, said Ford on Wednesday when it came to light, one
intended
to clarify meaning, not alter history.
''My changes had nothing to do with a conspiracy theory,'' he said
in a
telephone interview from Beaver Creek, Colo. ''My changes were
only an
attempt to be more precise.''
But still, his editing was seized upon by members of the
conspiracy
community, which rejects the commission's conclusion that Oswald
acted
alone.
''This is the most significant lie in the whole Warren Commission
report,'' said Robert D. Morningstar, a computer systems
specialist in New
York City who said he has studied the assassination since it
occurred and
written an Internet book about it.
The effect of Ford's editing, Morningstar said, was to suggest
that a
bullet struck Kennedy in the neck, ''raising the wound two or
three
inches. Without that alteration, they could never have hoodwinked
the
public as to the true number of assassins.''
If the bullet had hit Kennedy in the back, it could not have
struck
Connolly in the way the commission said it did, he said.
The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that a single bullet -
fired by a
''discontented'' Oswald - passed through Kennedy's body and
wounded his
fellow motorcade passenger, Connally, and that a second, fatal
bullet,
fired from the same place, tore through Kennedy's head.
The assassination of the president occurred Nov. 22, 1963, in
Dallas;
Oswald was arrested that day but was shot and killed two days
later as he
was being transferred from the city jail to the county jail.
Conspiracy theorists reject the idea that a single bullet could
have hit
both Kennedy and Connally and done such damage. Thus they argue
that a
second gunman must have been involved.
Ford's changes tend to support the
single-bullet theory by making a
specific point that the bullet entered
Kennedy's body ''at the back of his
neck'' rather than in his uppermost back, as
the commission staff
originally wrote.
Ford's handwritten notes were contained in 40,000 pages of records
kept by
J. Lee Rankin, chief counsel of the Warren Commission.
They were made public Wednesday by the Assassination Record Review
Board,
an agency created by Congress to amass all relevant evidence in
the case.
The documents will be available to the public in the National
Archives.
The staff of the commission had written: ''A
bullet had entered his back
at a point slightly above the shoulder and to
the right of the spine.''
Ford suggested changing that to read: ''A
bullet had entered the back of
his neck at a point slightly to the right of
the spine.''
The final report said: ''A bullet had entered
the base of the back of his
neck slightly to the right of the spine.''
Ford, then House Republican leader and later elevated to the
presidency
with the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon, is the sole surviving
member
of the seven-member commission chaired by Chief Justice Earl
Warren.
Washington, DC, February 29, 2016 – The Gerald Ford White
House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975
Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the
objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and
Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The
George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The changes included
removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and
numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard
Cheney.
Today’s posting includes the entire suppressed section on
assassination attempts, Cheney’s handwritten marginal notes, staff memos
warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House
strategies for presenting the edited report to the public. The documents show
that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed commission deliberately
curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political
operatives.
This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for
decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the
John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents
were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College
Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow
John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not
willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than
we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into
standard accounts of the events of this period.
Among the highlights of today’s posting:
·
White House officials of the Ford administration attempted to
keep a presidential review panel—the Rockefeller Commission—from investigating
reports of CIA planning for assassinations abroad.
·
Ford administration officials suppressed the Rockefeller
Commission’s actual report on CIA assassination plots.
·
Richard Cheney, then the deputy assistant to the president,
edited the report of the Rockefeller Commission from inside the Ford White
House, stripping the report of its independent character.
·
The Rockefeller Commission remained silent on this manipulation.
·
Rockefeller Commission lawyers and public relations officials
warned of the damage that would be done to the credibility of the entire
investigation by avoiding the subject of assassinations.
·
President Ford passed investigative materials concerning
assassinations along to the Church Committee of the United States Senate and
then attempted—but failed—to suppress the Church Committee’s report as well.
·
The White House markup of the Rockefeller Commission report used
the secrecy of the CIA budget as an example of excesses and recommended
Congress consider making agency spending public to some degree.
The Rockefeller Commission, the White House
and CIA Assassination Plots
By John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi
The current controversy over drone attacks has an important
backstory. During the 1970s it became known that the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) had plotted the murder of foreign individuals. These persons for
the most part were prominent leaders or even heads of state. That the U.S.
government had in any way been engaged in murder became a dark charge against
the CIA, and helped inflame the political climate in a way that ensured
investigations of the U.S. intelligence agencies would occur.
During those 1975 investigations, particularly those of the
Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, allegations of CIA involvement
in assassinations were among the most important lines of inquiry. President
Gerald R. Ford himself had a key role in triggering the investigations,
inadvertently but artlessly revealing the fact of CIA involvement in plotting
assassinations during a meeting with press editors.[i]
There had already been revelations of illegal domestic
activities by the CIA. These led to the creation of a presidential panel under
Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, and committees of inquiry in both houses
of the United States Congress. Ford’s January 1975 admission of CIA involvement
posed a dilemma for the administration. Vice President Rockefeller attempted to
head off inclusion of the subject, restricting consideration of assassinations
to the question of what role Cuba might have had in the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. That proved unacceptable to some members of
his own commission, among them then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan. When
the Rockefeller Commission took a vote on whether to include charges of CIA
assassination plots in its inquiry, the group overrode its own chairman.[ii]
Rockefeller’s key opponent in the fight over investigating
assassinations was the panel’s staff director, David W. Belin. A lawyer for the
Warren Commission, empanelled to look into the Kennedy assassination in
1963-1964, Belin had been handpicked by Ford for the Rockefeller group. Ford,
one of the Warren commissioners, was confident of Belin’s loyalty, but this
time the lawyer fought hard to investigate deeply.
The investigators sought CIA documents on assassination plots
conducted in its history and information on administrative routines. They also
questioned key witnesses. As CIA lawyer John S. Warner admitted under
questioning, the agency “certainly” had “no specific authorization” to conduct
assassinations (Document 7). Warner additionally admitted he was “not clear”
that a president had the constitutional authority to order an assassination,
though that “might” lie within his powers.
Documents in this electronic briefing book reveal the views on
the assassination reports of not only Belin but key members of his staff. At
the time, in the spring of 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church
Committee) was just being constituted but the Rockefeller Commission inquiry
was already in progress. Days after Church Committee members met with President
Ford, press adviser David Gergen advised the president to say nothing about
assassinations (Document 1).
The jurisdictional and procedural issues regarding whether to
include an investigation of assassination plotting, so far as the Rockefeller
inquiry was concerned, were fought out over this same period (Documents
2,3,4,5). White House officials, including panel chairman Rockefeller,
continued a rearguard action in opposition, first to covering CIA assassination
plots at all, and later to including that material in the Rockefeller
Commission report. Belin continued to press for the coverage, took a primary
role in interviews the commission conducted for this part of its inquiry, and
became the main author of the portion of the report dealing with CIA plotting
against Fidel Castro (including Operation ZR/RIFLE).
The Rockefeller Commission collected a wide array of evidence,
as illustrated by a staff member’s report on what could be learned from the
papers of former CIA Director John McCone, and a CIA compendium document on the
ZR/RIFLE project (Documents 8, 9, 10).
As of mid-April 1975, Belin expected to have the assassination
portion of the panel report complete by the end of the month. He so informed
White House officials. However, the CIA dragged its feet on providing
materials, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who initially promised
cooperation, provided little. Kissinger became a major actor in the struggle to
suppress the Rockefeller assassinations report.[iii] When Belin scheduled a press
conference to announce the panel’s assassination findings, deputy assistant to
the president Richard Cheney and White House Counsel Philip Buchen, citing
Kissinger’s concerns, intervened to induce Belin to cancel it.
As the Rockefeller Commission moved toward finalizing its
report, panel staff concluded that the assassinations issues were going to be
buried. Several recorded their objections to this course (Documents 11, 12).
The Rockefeller Commission’s public affairs director, for one, observed that
leaving out assassinations would make the report seem like a cover-up and cast
doubt on the Commission’s entire project (Document 13). Nevertheless Belin and
staff could not prevent determined superiors from holding back the entire
subsidiary report that dealt with assassinations.
Meanwhile at the White House, Cheney led the way in “editing”
the Rockefeller report—including suppressing the assassinations section. The
final draft of the full report contained a brief passage noting that President
Ford had asked the panel to investigate the assassination plots after its
inquiry began, that the staff had not been able to complete the investigation,
and that Ford had then asked that assassinations material be turned over to
him. The Cheney edit inserted doubts by adding that it was unclear whether
assassinations fell within the scope of the Commission’s mandate, thus resurrecting
jurisdictional issues which had previously been resolved. The revised language
also reduced President Ford to a bit player—asserting only that he had
“concurred” inthe panel’s decision to investigate rather than that
he had revealed the existence of CIA plotting and then been obliged to modify
the Commission’s terms of reference to include an investigation of the matter.
White House editors also changed the original text, from indicating that
records were still in the process of being turned over to the president, to the
statement that it already “has been” done.
Document 19 reviews the substance of the Commission’s evidence
and findings relating to assassinations. In Document 20, White House lawyer
Buchen discusses the substance of the findings.
The White House “edit” (Document 15) provides clear indications
of the direction of the White House’s concerns vis-à-vis the conclusions of the
wider Rockefeller Commission investigation. The report had determined that
various intelligence agency actions were illegal and explicitly called them
“unlawful.” The edit resisted that formulation and talked instead about actions
that merely exceeded agencies’ statutory authority. The Cheney-supervised edit
made a single exception—the White House changed Commission language which found
the CIA had exceeded its authority in the course of drug experiments to say
that these had been “illegal” (p. 37).
Rockefeller investigators had probed White House-CIA
relationships that landed the agency in trouble during Watergate as a result of
White House instructions to provide psychological profiles of prominent
individuals, disguises for White House operatives, and documents on past CIA
activities. The full Commission had then approved a recommendation (number 23
on its list) which specified that a single, authoritative channel be
established for all White House requests to the CIA and that this be routed
through the NSC staff. Following CIA internal directives (ones that had, among
other things, resulted in the compilation of the “Family Jewels”), the Rockefeller
Commission made clear that any CIA employee who questioned the “propriety” of
any White House order should take that concern either to the CIA director or
the agency’s inspector general. The White House editors changed this directive
(in renumbered Recommendation 26 of the published report). Now, employees were
to be instructed only to question requests that came outside the authorized
channel, and to state their concerns only to the CIA director. Improper
requests came off the table, and the inspector general was not to have
automatic jurisdiction.
Among the abuses that led directly to President Ford creating
the Rockefeller Commission were charges the CIA had compiled dossiers on
American citizens and infiltrated political groups that opposed the U.S. war in
Vietnam. In this instance the Rockefeller panelists entered a blanket finding
that the files and lists of citizen dissenters were “improper.” The White House
edit changed this conclusion, indicating that the “standards applied” had
resulted in materials “not needed for legitimate intelligence or security
purposes,” and that this merely applied to “many” records gathered about the
antiwar movement (see unnumbered page revising p. 41 in the report).
White House editors eliminated a Commission
recommendation (number 17 in the original text) that applicants for agency
positions and foreign nationals acting on behalf of the CIA be informed more
clearly that they could be subjects of U.S. security investigations. The
Cheney-inspired edit also added recommendations the
Rockefeller panel had not voted. One (Recommendation 29 in the published
report) advocated for a new civilian agency committee to be formed to resolve
concerns about the use of CIA-developed intelligence collection mechanisms
(overhead photography) for domestic purposes.
Another White House-originated point (Recommendation 20 in the
published report) sought to increase public confidence in the integrity of the
intelligence agencies by instructing them to review their holdings of secret
documents periodically with the aim of declassifying the maximum amount of
material. This recommendation was more honored in the breach.
In a related case, White House editors eliminated a lengthy
commentary from one of the commissioners, the former solicitor general of the
United States, Erwin N. Griswold. A detailed footnote quoted Griswold as saying
that an underlying cause of the problems confronting the CIA was its pervasive
atmosphere of secrecy, and recommending Congress consider making public the CIA
budget (page 132-3, renumbered p. 15 in Document 15, footnote 2). The
commission quoted Griswold in the context of a recommendation about the
President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. White House editors converted
Griswold’s statement into part of the main text which the entire Rockefeller
panel had supposedly agreed upon, and used it to buttress a recommendation to
create a joint committee of the Congress to oversee the CIA and other
intelligence agencies and went on to Recommendation 4 — that Congress consider
making the CIA budget, to some degree, public.
Thus the White House edit both put words into Rockefeller
Commissioners’ mouths and dispensed with concerns they had expressed. Apart
from the substantive issues raised thereby these actions amounted to direct
political interference with a presidential advisory panel. Ford may have been
comfortable with his subordinates’ maneuvers, but they helped drain credibility
from the Commission’s investigation, as the panel’s own staff had warned in
discussions of whether to include its assassinations report (Documents 11, 12,
13, 14).
The White House strategy for releasing the Rockefeller report is
detailed in talking points and strategy memoranda (Documents 16,17,18). In the
end, in a complete reversal of the actual inquiry, the only assassination
material to make it into the report concerned whether the CIA had conspired to
assassinate President John F. Kennedy.[iv]
Richard Cheney and Gerald Ford failed in their effort to
suppress the assassinations portion of the Commission’s work. Rather, the media,
alerted to the issue by the president himself, kept pressing until Ford
declared he would turn over the assassinations material to the Church
Committee. The president essentially kicked the controversy down the road. The
Commission’s files and interview records related to assassinations gave Church
investigators a blueprint and a boost in their own inquiry. Senator Church’s
committee moved quickly and completed its investigative report in October 1975.
Along the way investigators compiled more than 8,000 pages of depositions or
testimony, covering 75 witnesses over 60 days of hearings, most held in
executive session. Committee staff analyst Loch Johnson, who later authored a
classic account of the “Year of Intelligence,” found many revelations almost unbelievable,
in some cases “requiring a suspension of disbelief few serious novelists would
ask of their readers.”[v]
With the committee at the point of asking that the full Senate
release its report, on October 31 President Ford wrote Senator Church to ask
that the report be kept secret on national security grounds (Document 21).
Several days later the committee voted to reject Ford’s demand, and Church
answered his letter on November 4, writing, “in my view the national interest
is better served by letting the American people know the true and complete
story . . . . We believe that foreign peoples will, upon sober reflection,
admire our nation more for keeping faith with our democratic ideals than they
will condemn us for the misconduct itself” (Document 22). In a display of
legislative strategy, on November 20 the Senate convened in a secret session to
debate releasing the Church assassinations report but failed to delay or
prevent its being made public, because the committee had approved the report
while the full Senate took no vote on whether to enforce a rule that would have
held up release.
The sordid story of CIA assassination plots came into the open
most authoritatively in the Church report. Its revelations did not destroy the
republic, contrary to White House and intelligence community warnings. The
committee recommended that a prohibition on assassinations be written into law,
even supplying language that could be used in such a statute. Their prohibition
would have covered not only foreign officials but members of an “insurgent
force, an unrecognized government, or a political party.”[vi]
The White House took a different tack. A steering group of
officials working on the political crisis of the “Year of Intelligence,”
proposed that President Ford issue an executive order (E.O.) to govern
intelligence agencies and operations, and that the order include a prohibition
on assassinations. Senator Church objected that anything a president set by
fiat could be changed by fiat as well, by means of a future executive action.
Besides, the Ford executive order, issued in February 1976, lacked the definition
that would have been supplied by the Church Committee-recommended statute.
President Jimmy Carter issued his own executive orders on intelligence, in a
preliminary form in May 1977 and in a reworked version in January 1978. The
assassination prohibition would be widened somewhat, by removing the word
“political,” which the Ford E.O. had used as a qualifier (as in “political
assassination”), and by extending the ban beyond government employees to anyone
working for or on behalf of the United States. The Carter ban would be repeated
verbatim in President Ronald Reagan’s E. O. 12333, issued on December 4, 1981.
Every subsequent president has continued the ban, and the Reagan E.O. itself
remains in force.
[i] See John Prados, The
Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy and Presidential Power. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2013, pp. 160-161.
[ii] Nicolas Djumovic, “Ronald
Reagan, Intelligence, William Casey, and the CIA: A Reappraisal,” Central
Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, April 2011, pp. 7-8.
[iii] Prados Family
Jewels, pp. 163-165.
[iv](Report to the President by the
Commission on CIA Activities within the United States(Rockefeller Report),
June 1975, pp. 251-269.
[v] Loch K. Johnson, A Season
of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1985, p. 50. A new edition of this book will
appear very shortly from the University of Kansas.
[vi] United States Senate (94th Congress, 1st Session). Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence
Activities. Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving
Foreign Leaders, pp. 289-290.