Earl Warren clearly did not want his commission to stray into the subject of Communism. But his reasons for this are not so clear.
In an
earlier post, I pointed out that author Philip Shenon wrote in his book that
Silvia Duran agreed to come to the United
States to testify to the commission under
oath, but Chief Justice Earl Warren vetoed the idea because "she was a
communist and we [the Commission] don't talk to communists." In my book, I quote the lawyer John Abt, who
represented Vincent Lee when he testified before the commission: “It quickly became obvious that neither the
FBI nor the Warren Commission were really interested in digging into the case,
to really discover if there was a conspiracy.
They certainly weren’t interested in trying to show the Communists were
a party to the matter.” And then there is CIA historian David Robage’s
characterization of his agency’s investigation of the assassination as “passive.”
Why was
this? Warren and other members of the
commission had the unpleasant experience of “Red-baiting” during the
McCarthy era with claims that Communists had infiltrated
government. Naturally, those commission members would not want to be accused
of doing the same thing in investigating Kennedy’s assassination, at least not
without good reason.
On the other hand, the introduction
of the Warren Report does seem to parrot Nicholas Katzenbach’s memorandum to
the White House on November 26, 1963 – which he later called
badly worded – saying speculation about Oswald’s “motivation ought to be cut
off, and we should have some basis for rebutting the thought that this was a
Communist conspiracy.”
I’ve not seen any books or articles address this
question in depth.
