In logic, to be sure, he will have to be tried. His thoughts, although not his conduct, are disloyal by the standards of the army. Last week, he was granted another leave and went to Chicago to speak against the war. He wore his uniform. "I figured," he says, "that if General Westmoreland can wear his uniform and speak for the war, I can wear mine and speak against it."
And, in Washington, the Defense Department wonders about court-martialing him. It is understandably slow to decide. To try Howard Petrick will be to confess that the war has turned us into a country where a man can be a criminal not for what he does, but for what he thinks and says when asked.
Book Review
"WHITEWASH II"
By Arthur Maglin
WHITEWASH II: The FBI-Secret Service Cover-Up, by Harold Weisberg. Published by Harold Weisberg, Hyattstown, Maryland 20734. With photos and documents. 250 pp. $4.95.
Harold Weisberg is one of the Warren Commission's best-known critics. Besides his first book, Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report, Weisberg has now written a companion volume. This constitutes the most recent full-length critical analysis of the work of the Warren Commission.
Whitewash II is unique in being the first book to be based on that section of the Warren Commission files which were secret until recently.
Formerly those seeking to analyze the Warren Commission's version of the assassination of Kennedy had available only the 26 volumes of evidence and testimony which the Warren Commission selected for publication. Last year a vast amount of other material was declassified and made available at the National Archives. A great deal of material still remains secret.
It seems that Weisberg's work on the assassination mystery has caught the attention of the New Orleans grand jury which is now investigating the circunstances leading up to Kennedy's death. Weisberg testified before this body on April 28. There has been no public disclosure as yet of what he said.
It will be interesting, then, to take a look at Weisberg's conclusions at the end of his extensively documented book. Weisberg writes:
"Further investigation made possible by evidence not available when Whitewash was written proves that the minimum standards for dime-store murdermystery fiction were not met by the various police. This extends to the simplest investigatory functions, as with the bullets and their number and the fingerrints and their presence and absence twith Oswald's missing where they must have been for him to have been an assas-— sin and present only where his employment placed them). The competitive FBI foreclosed the work of the Secret Service. There is further evidence of illegal searches, the suggestion of the planting of the evidence and the proof that it was possible. There were strangers crawling undeterred all over the evidence at the alleged scene of the crime....
"The indispensable man in the attempt to place Oswald at the scene of the crime, Officer Marrion L. Baker, actually proved Oswald's innocence, if he proved anything. Baker accommodated with a string of statements consistent only in their disagreement with each other and the story he recounted under oath. That story is supported by none of his many statements, each equally official, and is disputed by all of them. Not once did he ever tell anyone what he swore to before the Commission. That untested and uncontested account proves the opposite of the interpretation placed upon it in the Report, but it was tortured, twisted and corrupted by the staff into a semblance of possibility. The staff was without public qualms about false statements under these and many other circumstances. Why?
"How can the suppression from the Report of the fact that 'Oswald was all right' to the FBI before the assassination be anything less than sinister, especially because of his defection and redefection and the indications of his clandestine government connections?...
"Or how can honorable interpretation be placed on the suppression of the knowledge that Ruby, who was known to carry a gun, managed to be near Oswald and was seen there by police officials who knew him, prior to his murder of Oswald and again at the moment of it?
"Did the exalted, the indispensable, the infallible, the all-wise J. Edgar Hoover booby-trap the Commission with his creation of a false identity for 'The False Oswald'? (The 'false Oswald' theory held by many critics of the official. version of the assassination holds that an effort was made to incriminate Oswald before the assassination by the use of an impostor who kept drawing attention to himself in a variety of suspicious circumstances, at times when the Warren Report concedes that Oswald was elsewhere. ] Can his failure to correct his own ‘error' when there was time be explained?
"Or can he explain the inference of CIA involvement with those men of whom 'The False Oswald' was one?...
"Instead of solving the case of 'The False Oswald,' the FBI leaves for history the inference of complicity of a federal agency in the President's murder and a monument to its own classic incompetence or its deviousness in the investigation of the assassination."
SARTRE'S OPENING ADDRESS AT WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL