WARREN IN CHARGE
The ugly implications of the execution of Lee H,. Oswald in Dallas police headquarters, in full view of all of Americats TV screens, compel led: President Johnson on the following day to order the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take over investigation of the assassination of Kennedy. The order was a tacit admission that the Dallas police were utterly incom= petent, if not themselves involved in some of the darker aspects of the murder of the President.
_ However, this concession to public opinion did not prove sufficient, Abroad, especially, the general political level is such that it seems incredible that a crime, committed in the well-known pattern of racist lynch murder and in the miasmic racist atmosphere of Dallas, should have been instigated by "reds," "Castroites," "Communists," or "Trotskyists," Competent reporters and criminal and political analysts submitted the "yroofs" offered by the Dallas cops to logical examination. The proofs vanished like wax images under a blow torch, -Fresh "proofs" were supplied and they went the same way, casting still more doubt on the whole case,
-.In addition to this, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was itself not entirely free of suspicion. It has a long record of the use of provocateurs and stool pigeons, particularly in witch-hunting activities against the radical and labor movement. Its admission that its agents had visited Oswald, the prime suspect, only shortly before the assassination of Kennedy was an ominous fact with sinister implications, The FBI needed a superior body of some kind to clear its skirts.
The Central Intelligence Agency was hardly the proper body to call in, Besides lacking jurisdiction, it has perhaps the foulest record of all with its partisans boasting of its dirty cloakeand-dagger work abroad,
Johnsonts solution to this nagging problem came November 30 when he signed an order creating a special commission of seven prominent public figures, who are presumably above all suspicion, to undertake a complete investigation of the assassination and to draw the necéssary conclusions.
Johnson appointed Earl Warren, the head of the Supreme Court, to preside over the seven, Such an appointment is without precedent in the United States, It testifies to Johnson's political adroitness,
Earl Warren has a strong reputation for liberalism. In fact, he is as much, if not more hated in the South than Kennedy. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that Warren catapulted into his political © career in the thirties as a prosecuting attorney in Oakland,. California, where he won convictions of union organizers on a murder charge in a case involving efforts to bring unionism to some of California's oil companies.
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