Tag: HSCA

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From the January-February 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 2) of Probe

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WILLIAMS: Before you ever got appointed to the Committee at all, before it was ever in anybody’s mind, is there something you can say about your own reaction to the assassination, and whether, and to what extent it got any interest on your part, or whether it hit you in any way?

SPRAGUE: Well, let me put it this way, probably the best way to respond to your question. I had been, at the time of the assassination, a District Attorney in Philadelphia, had been a prosecutor of murder cases. In fact the day that the assassination of President Kennedy was announced, I was going into a courtroom for the sentencing of somebody I had prosecuted for first-degree murder, who was to get the death penalty, and that’s the occasion for hearing about the assassination.

And obviously, I was as horror-struck, as I’m sure everyone else was. And I went through a period of time where I watched on TV the funeral, and I was watching TV and saw the assassination by Ruby of Oswald. I must say that when the assassination occurred, my immediate reaction was that the President of the United States is not assassinated by one person. There has to be a group of some sort involved in the assassination.

My initial reaction of thinking had been, “I wonder what foreign government was behind this?” I also recall reacting and felt that since Robert Kennedy was the Attorney General of the United States, that because of his own relationship as brother of the President, that Robert Kennedy would leave no stone unturned in trying to get to the bottom of who was behind the assassination. And at the time that Oswald was killed by Ruby, I remember the thought flickering through my mind, whether Oswald was killed in order to keep his mouth shut. That generally was my thinking back then.

The Warren Commission was appointed and came out with the conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman, and that there was no conspiracy. A person who worked with me in the DA’s office, Arlen Specter, had been a junior lawyer working with the Warren Commission. And I remember thinking when the report came out, you know, I’d be interested in reading it, and finding out what the factual determinations were, how solid they were. But I never got around to reading the report.

And I guess in the course of time, I kind of accepted that report. I think principally, on the grounds that as a prosecutor, I found it very hard to believe that if there was a cover-up, that there could be so many disparate individuals in high positions of our government that would be involved in a cover-up. And it would seem to me that it would come asunder in some manner, so I kind of just accepted it.

Arlen Specter, as you know, helped develop, if not was the author, of the single-bullet theory. And I was aware of the controversy that existed about that theory, and the people who suggested that it could not really be; or the people who said that if you really looked at the Zapruder film, a number of people who thought there was shooting from the front, and there were some people on the knoll off to the front. I was aware of all that. I was aware that President Johnson was convinced that there was a conspiracy.

So I had all that general knowledge. However, having said that, while I worked with Arlen Specter – I was the first assistant with Arlen the DA in Philadelphia for a full eight years, my having been in the DA’s office before and after, and being really Arlen’s right-hand man, I never spoke to him about the Warren Commission work, or what he did there, or his theory. I was involved in my own work, and I guess it is a long way around to respond. I was aware of everything. But I just accepted the Warren Commission report.

And when I would hear from time to time that there were books, Mark Lane’s book, other books saying it was not true, I noted it with passing interest, but nothing beyond. You know, as today, I have a general interest in why Clinton felt the need to bomb Iraq on the night before an impeachment vote, that these were acts of war, since there was not a need to bomb. And there are questions that pop up in my mind. But am I spending my time really studying it, analyzing it? The answer is no.

That is really the framework of where I was before I got involved with the House Assassinations Committee, not having really read – actually, I shouldn’t use the word “not having really read” – not having read anything pro or con on the matter, not having engaged really in discussions about it. At my family table, I believe very much in discussions of current events, but never seemed to get into a discussion about the facts of the Kennedy assassination, although I had friends sometimes pooh-pooh that it was done by a single person.

WILLIAMS: Now, where did that change in terms of your – I don’t suppose the reasoning so much, but then someone approached you or something happened to change that in terms of…

SPRAGUE: Well, here is what I recall. I did become aware that there seemed to be more questions being stated publicly concerning the findings of whether there were errors in the Warren Commission, and something being taken for granted. I think Mark Lane’s book was being given greater circulation, Rush to Judgment was given greater prominence at that time, and attacks on the Warren Commission. But I think a matter that came up, at least, I believe, in the public eye, and it’s certainly something that I became aware of, Schweiker’s Intelligence Committee came up with intelligence concerning Castro, which then started to raise more questions.

That seemed to start, at least as I recall, to give greater prominence to questions being raised about the validity of the Warren Commission Report. And then the next thing that sort of stands out in my mind, prior to the election of Carter as President of the United States, the House of Representatives authorized in a resolution, the creation of a Select Committee to investigate the assassination of Martin Luther King and President Kennedy. And that pretty much was the stage. And all of these things I noted with interest, not again, enough of an interest to do any digging, do any reading, but just aware of this because I do believe in staying up to date.

WILLIAMS: Kind of like in with the daily news.

SPRAGUE: That’s right. Where are they going with it? And then at some point in time, I recall getting a call from, I think it was Mark Lane, who I didn’t know, had never spoken to. And Mark Lane told me that my name was being considered, or was going to be submitted to the House Select Committee, if I was interested. And I am not sure if he said that Chairman Downing had asked him to call me or if he was to submit names to Chairman Downing, but I was asked if it would be something that I might consider.

And I have to back up one second here, just so maybe you understand me a little better. Even though I was in public service as a DA, a prosecutor for many, many years, when requests had come to me to take other public matters, if it was something that interested me, I would take it. For example, the assassination of Jock Yablonski and his wife and daughter, and then I was contacted and asked would I take an additional assignment, to handle that investigation for the people, I took it.

When I was asked by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to undertake an investigation against one of the justices in the Supreme Court, I took it. I was asked by a District Attorney of another county to undertake an investigation, I did it. So that I have – if it involved matters of interest to me, I was always willing to take additional matters. So when I was asked about this, I said “Yes, I would be interested if a number of conditions were met.”

When I say that was my response, I may have first said I want to think about it, I’ll get back to you. But I then spoke to Mark Lane, who I knew had spoke directly to Downing. (Rep. Tom Downing was the first chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Eds.) But I ended up speaking to Downing. And I thought it over, said that I would be willing to take it on certain conditions. The conditions were that I did not want this to be a political-oriented investigation. That as far as I could see in legislative investigations, the problems with them were that they were very politically oriented.

And I really wondered, is the legislature a proper vehicle for investigation of a murder? Or is that something that you leave for a grand jury, or the executive branch? And I had that concern, which I expressed. And I said that one of my conditions would be, I do not want any of this nonsense of a majority counsel representing the majority party, and a minority counsel representing the minority party. I wanted it clear that I was the General Counsel, there was no majority or minority. I was Counsel for the entire Committee. I did not want there to be a diffusion of responsibility between a Director administratively, and Counsel. I wanted to be, in effect, the whole show. I would take it if I was the Director, Executive Director over everyone in the title, and General Counsel.

WILLIAMS: Had there been any talk of the other arrangement?

SPRAGUE: There had been no discussion. I just laid it down what my requirements would be.

WILLIAMS: What your conditions were.

SPRAGUE: And my view was, if they didn’t want to accept it, fine. I had other things to do with my life. The second condition was that – and again, it was really an off-shoot from the first – I was aware of the problems in this majority/minority that arise from the selection of hiring of personnel. And I wanted it clear that all hiring, from the file clerks to the lawyers to everybody, would be by me. There was to be no Congressman, nobody else, that had one iota of a voice in the hiring.

I didn’t mind if people wanted to suggest to me look at X, Y or Z. But the determination was to be mine. And secondly, that I had the absolute right to fire. That it was not dependent on a vote by anybody – and this included the chairman – had no authority of hiring or firing. It was mine.

WILLIAMS: You wanted the power to put together a staff that you could work together and not be torn apart by political complications.

SPRAGUE: Right, and that would have no loyalty to any members of Congress, but that would just be focused, really, in terms of what I wanted done, and recognizing that the power lay with me, that they didn’t have to play up to any Congressman, anybody. That was a second condition.

A third condition was that there had to be a provision for an ample budget to do the kind of investigation that I wanted done. And that I needed start-up money to at least be able to start recruiting, with the idea of then examining what I thought needed to be done to then be able to submit a budget. It seems to me there was a fourth condition, which right now – oh, yes, that was it. And I wanted it agreed that there would not be any time limitation.

I did not want to be told “You gotta wrap this up in 60 to 90 days.” It think time limitations are a terrible, terrible restriction in any ability to do a proper investigative job, as Senator Thompson and his recent effort in investigating campaign money, limitations that he had agreed to, which he shouldn’t have.

I also – those were basically my conditions. There may have been another one, and if so it’ll come back to me as we go along. I also, though, made it clear that in my recruiting of staff, I was not going to hire members of FBI or the CIA or federal agencies either, because to do a thorough investigation, those agencies’ actions would be part of the investigation. And I did not want anyone that would have any conflict of interest, any view of being protective of anyone.

WILLIAMS: Had you stated that – I’m curious to know – had you stated that right up front to Downing?

SPRAGUE: Yes. Yes. And I also made clear the way in which I saw, I wanted it understood from the beginning that I intended to proceed with the investigation, that I was going to treat this as though it was a murder case, and that I intended to work anew. I wasn’t bound by whatever there had been determined by anybody. I was going to treat this from the word “go” as a murder case, examine all the circumstances of the murder, the findings, retain our own experts on both murders. Remember, I was dealing with King as well as Kennedy.

WILLIAMS: That sounds like a fifth condition.

SPRAGUE: Well, it could be, maybe that was it. And that I was going to – at the same time that I was treating this as – each of these as a murder case and track them through, I was also, because I felt that it was very important to the American public that we examine with an open mind all that had been published of Mark Lane’s theory, Weisberg’s theory, whoever theories, the Warren Commission’s conclusions. And that we ultimately not only publish the results of our own investigation, but that we lay out to the American public the examination of what each and every supporter or critic has said and what was in support of it and what were the defects of it.

As best as I can recall, that was what I put forth. I was welcomed with both arms around me, told that my conditions had been agreed to – oh, one last condition. I was going to do this as a public service, I was not to get paid for it. I had my own private income, I was going to be able to continue with that, that I would give this full-time.

WILLIAMS: Wow.

SPRAGUE: For example, I was teaching as well at Temple Law School, and I enjoyed mixing with the youngsters in classes. Kicking back ideas keeps you fresh, keeps you on your toes, and I did that each Friday evening, and I wanted to be able to continue with that. That was it, and those conditions were agreed to.

WILLIAMS: Now when you say that, can you recall Downing’s response at all?

SPRAGUE: Downing’s response was he was enthusiastic about it. I had never met Downing. I came down to Washington, I met with Downing. I thought very highly of him. He seemed to be absolutely – and I do believe Downing was absolutely supportive of that approach. Downing took me around to meet other members of the Committee. And I would say that the initial response and reaction by the Committee members was enthusiastic. And as a matter of fact, while they ended up only criticizing me, the fact the New York Times wrote an editorial about what a great appointment this was, treated me as a white knight who would do this as a thorough, seasoned investigator, prosecutor, without politics being involved. So that’s I guess the answer to your question.

WILLIAMS: Yes. Okay, so then after seeing Downing – I am going to turn – look back for a moment. Was there any kind of process that went through your mind in terms of your own qualifications? Did you do any kind of thinking about that in terms of how you would fit for this position? Because that’s a big undertaking. Or had you figured by that time, this is something I am ready for without much real …?

SPRAGUE: Maybe it was a fault of mine. I never had much qualms about my ability to undertake, really, whatever I decide to undertake. And I never had any question about my ability to do this, provided the commitments to me were stuck to. Now I must tell, and maybe we’ll get into it in subsequent questions. Of course, one of my assumptions was that there was really a commitment by the Congress of the United States, when the resolution created this Committee, to really have an investigation of the two assassinations, and that the Congress of the United States would be whole-heartedly behind it and that they would give you the proper funding.

Now if you say to me today, “Well, Dick did you go and speak to anyone higher than Downing, to see where was the Congress of the United States, where was Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House?” Where was majority leader, who became speaker, Jim Wright in all of this? The answer is “No,” I didn’t have any contacts with them until after I was down there, which I can get into.

WILLIAMS: Yes.

SPRAGUE: But the assumption was what I just said, and as I went along I learned otherwise.

WILLIAMS: Yes. As far as you were concerned at that time, Downing knew what he was talking about. And as far as you felt here, the reception you got from the Committee members represented the commitment Congress was making to you. And that seemed solid at the time.

SPRAGUE: Absolutely.

WILLIAMS: Really no reason to question it.

SPRAGUE: That’s right. The only thing that first happened that took me back a little bit after I accepted it, I learned that Downing was not going to run for re-election. And that therefore, his term as Chairman was going to end upon his term of office being over. And then the question arose, who is going to be the next Chairman? I had had enough – by the time I really learned of that, I had had enough contacts with the Committee, and forgive me if I mistake names of the members of the Committee, you can probably help me. I think there was somebody named Preyer [Richardson Preyer was a representative from North Carolina. Ed. Note] Preyer, that was it, who impressed me very much. Preyer was a very impressive person, and I really hoped that he would become Chairman in place of Downing. I did learn, I think from Downing, that one of the people who had been somewhat of a problem for him was Gonzales. And lo and behold, Gonzales was going to then become the Chairman in place of Downing, which I can get to as we go along. [Henry Gonzalez was a representative from Texas. Ed. Note]

I guess the bottom line of all of this is, there were the high hopes, the understandings, agreement that I just told you. When I got to Washington, I learned that the leadership of the Democratic Party was not as much in support of this investigation as I had kind of assumed. For example, I learned that prior to the [1976] Carter election, the Black Caucus had been formed, in the House of Representatives, and that the Black Caucus had very much wanted an investigation into the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Until this time, the Congress had refused all the push to get a reopening of the Kennedy investigation. And I had always been curious, how come they all of a sudden agreed to King and Kennedy? What I learned when I got to Washington was that when the Black Caucus had been formed and with the Carter election coming up, the Democratic leadership wanted the Black Caucus to feel they had real input, real power with the Democratic organization. And since the Black Caucus wanted an investigation into King, they wanted to give the Black Caucus what they wanted.

But they felt from a country standpoint, they could not quite have an investigation of King without coupling it with Kennedy. And that was really the political motivation for at least forming the Committee prior to the Carter election, so that as a result there wasn’t quite the enamorment with the idea of an investigation. It was created for political purposes. Secondly, I was at a really early stage – I can’t remember quite when – was advised that Richard Helms, former Director of the CIA and later ambassador to Iran, had sent word back indirectly that the investigation as to the Kennedy assassination really ought not to proceed, and that the Kennedy family really could find it embarrassing.

WILLIAMS: Do you remember how you became aware of that, and through what channels?

SPRAGUE: No, I’ve tried to rack my brain since, but somehow I was made aware of that. For example, you asked me how I became aware of the motivation of the situation. There were so many people who were giving me information, I just can’t tell you.

WILLIAMS: Things were happening fast.

SPRAGUE: Although as I go along, I do know that Tip O’Neill ended up asking me to do something which I do think was counterproductive to the success, at least toward the investigation while I was there. And I do know, there is no secret about this, I remember – and I am sort of jumping ahead of myself here.

JOHN : Sure.

SPRAGUE: But it maybe fits in. But at a certain point in time, I mean we were in the press. I mean, if I sneezed, it became a headline in the press, which we can get get. Everything I did was a big story. And Tip and Jim Wright called one day saying, “We’d like to get an update of where we are in this investigation.” And I remember coming over with the two deputies there, headed to Wright’s offices, and I think we had a luncheon. My deputies were Bob Tanenbaum of the Kennedy part – and I can get into how I organized this – and Bob Lehner for the King investigation.

We went over and sat down with Wright. And he struck me as somebody with an attention span of all of ten seconds. And Wright said, you know, “Tell me where you are in the investigation,” and all of a sudden he interrupts me and says, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What are you telling that and that for?” He said, “You haven’t gotten to Sirhan, Sirhan.” And I looked at him, “Sirhan, Sirhan?” “Yes, he did the shooting.” And we said, “Sirhan, Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy.”

And he said, “Of course, that’s what you’re investigating.” We said, “No, we’re investigating the assassination of President Kennedy.” And Wright said, “Oh, yes, yes. That’s right.” I mean, I’m relating – now this is a majority leader of the House of Representatives. That’s the kind of situation we ran into.

When I got to Washington, and again, I cannot say enough complimentary words about Downing. Downing was absolutely superb in terms of backing and sticking to what he said, but because he was leaving, he really didn’t stay in his office. He turned over his office to me. Now, we were given – and this is my best recollection – but this is the first time I really saw what I thought was not sticking to commitments.

Before I went down there, [I asked] what kind of a budget do you have right now preliminarily? And I was told, I think I was told $150,000 for hiring staff. And I said, “Wait a minute, you are telling me I have a $150,000 budget to hire a whole staff, forget it.” And I was told, “Oh, no, no, no. You don’t understand the way that Congress works. There is $150,000 which is allocated which will run out.” I think this was September or something – “That’s what you can spend right now. So if you hire somebody – I’m just making up a salary – for $50,000, and their salary then for the remaining three months is, let’s say, $15,000, you still hire at the $50,000 salary, but you’ve the $15,000 to pay them here. And in the new budget, the full year’s salary will be there.”

And that was made, you know, absolutely clear to me. And so when I get down there, remember, I started out it was me alone. No secretary, no office. I’m working out of Downing’s office. And what I did do, having been a prosecutor for years, I put out word that I was interested in top notch prosecutors from around the country. People who had had superb investigative prosecutorial experience, state investigators, local, not federal people, and I was going to recruit from that.

And let me say, the response that I got really was a breath of fresh air, in terms of the type of people who responded. Really even to this day, you know, it just was such a wonderful feeling that there’s that kind of talent and that kind of capable people with ability around this country. I thought wonderful, wonderful people. And in that process, I started interviewing. And again, in view of my original condition, even though it was terrible in terms of time consumption, I did not delegate that to anybody.

I reviewed all the applications, and set up the interviews. And in that process, I started setting salaries, recruiting the staff. I met Bob Tanenbaum, who came from [Henry] Morgenthau’s office in New York. I met Bob Lehner, neither of whom I had ever met before in my life. What I wanted to do here, I didn’t want this to be a cozy place of people that I knew either.

WILLIAMS: Yes.

SPRAGUE: I really wanted top notch talent that all were imbued with a spirit of doing a job.

WILLIAMS: And I get the impression from what you’re saying, if I am reading that correctly, that in proportion to the response you had, if something had happened, for instance, where Lehner or Tanenbaum were not interested, you had several different choices you could have made from highly qualified people.

SPRAGUE: There’s no question about that. And I did an interviewing and culling-out process, and hired from secretaries to clerks to filing people, to the Tanenbaums and Lehners.

And my idea was looking at organizations, looking at myself at the top, having Tanenbaum with a team carrying out the investigation and the review, in terms of what people had said and done, critics pro and con, on the Kennedy side, having Lehner as the Chief Deputy under me on the King side with a staff. Available to both was what was needed, like a librarian. What we needed is access to all that had been filed, we needed as the investigation would be proceeding, somebody that would see that everything was filed and distributed within that area.

That was the basic concept here. I also, as I started getting more people hired, wanted to use a couple of people like Tanenbaum and Lehner – because certain names I can recall, some others – sort of as a think tank. I am a big believer in working as a team. I don’t think that all wisdom flows through me, and I wanted there to be a group whose thoughts or ideas and suggestions, analysis, and evaluation, and that was the concept.

WILLIAMS: Had you in mind, like you mentioned, these people who would be reviewing the information, had you in mind street detectives who would be out investigating?

SPRAGUE: Absolutely.

WILLIAMS: And how would you conclude the number of those needed, or were you just feeling your way along on that?

SPRAGUE: Feeling my way along. And I guess I sort of have to break it down here, as to prior to the end of the of year and after the end of the year. But the idea was to have an investigator, non-federal people in each area for purposes of interviewing, for purposes of giving them leads, as though we were starting the investigation from there. I did recognize that time makes much more difficult doing an investigation that anything really, particularly a homicide. And I did end up with a feeling that with the amount of time since the two assassinations, that if there was to be a thorough investigation and an analysis of the various pro and con views, that this was probably the last chance. I ended up feeling that if it was defeated at that time, it never will come to fruition and people will continue with their beliefs, pro and con thereafter. So I say that in terms part of what we said at the beginning.

WILLIAMS: You bet. I hear you loud and clear.

SPRAGUE: We started recruiting, which included detectives. And again, as I recruited, I was perfectly willing to hear recommendations from the attorneys we had hired. For example, Tanenbaum recommended some detective that had worked very closely with him, who I interviewed, who impressed me and we hired. So the whole idea was to use them with these lawyers.

Now, one of the criteria I was using in the hiring of lawyers, as far as I got, and that becomes an important limitation, “as far as I got,” was I did not want lawyers who sat at the desk. I wanted people who had been active investigators, who when they were assigned homicides back in the prosecutorial days of State offices, had gone to the scenes and worked with the police, and that was the whole idea here. As I was hiring, I was also having a study being made by each respective side as to what they really felt were the needs of that side to do the investigation, the examination, what experts were needed.

WILLIAMS: This would be Tanenbaum and Lehner.

SPRAGUE: Right. And to give me recommendations for manpower, to give me recommendations in terms of budgetary needs. I also did arrange, while I was going about this recruiting, because I wanted the staff, even though it was a skeleton staff, to have some things to do. I didn’t want them all sitting while I’m doing all of the recruiting and interviewing, I wanted to put them to some work. I did start to have them starting to review material that been published. I remember that we brought in a number of people who had been critics. I forget the person’s name in the Zapruder film, again, if you want, I’ll get his name, the guy that enhanced it.

WILLIAMS: Robert Groden.

SPRAGUE: Groden, that was it. We brought Groden in and we had him show and then analyze it, and explain it. We had some people come in and sort of lay out difficult things, and we were open to everybody. And I really didn’t distinguish, I wasn’t trying to make value judgments. The fact that somebody thought somebody was a crackpot didn’t mean anything to me. I felt that my job was to do analysis. So I was having that done.

And again, and this may become not important from your standpoint, but who knows, it may explain my tenure on the Commission. Wanting my people to go out – oh, and I hired [Gaeton] Fonzi, who was a person I thought very highly of. And while Fonzi had his own views, that made no difference to me because I wanted people who I knew would not be beholden to the Federal government, and who would carry out investigations that I gave them, and I felt would do a thorough job. That was my criteria. Fonzi, I think, is outstanding and a terrific person to have.

And I know he has his certain views of what he thinks happened, and that is fine with me. I don’t mind that, as long as it didn’t blind him to looking thoroughly and fairly, which I felt he would do. So we were doing that. Now you got to understand, as I said, initially I didn’t even have a secretary. I was making personal calls until I could get a secretary and do this and that. And working on getting space and getting furniture and all that.

But we were doing some preliminary interviewing. One of my thoughts had been, just like your having a tape recorder here, that it would be a helpful tool if in interviewing, because we didn’t have a secretary to take along, if we, with the interviewee’s permission, tape record the interview. And we had, I think, I had gotten one tape recorder, so that in terms of ultimately our budget requests, because – and we had done some interviews, as you are doing now, I felt it would be very helpful to our investigators to have along a tape recorder for interviewing.

I also had the thought that since part of this was a thorough investigation where I had some question on an the interview about somebody telling the truth, maybe we could pull that interview and put it under one of these stress analyzers, and not that I think they are so great, but any little bit is a helpful investigative tool.

WILLIAMS: Sure.

SPRAGUE: I say that because jumping ahead, at a certain point I was accused of wanting to wiretap and engage in unconstitutional efforts in this investigation. And let me tell you that in over seventeen years as a prosecutor, even back in the days where wiretapping was lawful, I never have wiretapped in my entire life, and I don’t like it. I think it is dirty and I have never done it and never had any intent to – and I want you to be aware of that, as that becomes germane to this story.

WILLIAMS: Yes, I can recall reading that, I think.

SPRAGUE: Well, I’ll get into that as we go along.

WILLIAMS: Yes.

SPRAGUE: But I …

WILLIAMS: This was premised on this – just this decision that you had made to tape record.

SPRAGUE: Right, right.

WILLIAMS: Somebody blew that up into wiretapping.

SPRAGUE: Absolutely. And it may take you in an area of interest in terms of the press, because I came away with this with that as the most fascinating area from my standpoint. But in any event – so I had the people engaging in some work, and I’ll get back to that in a moment. As we were getting to the end of the year, I all of a sudden was told from, I think it was Tip O’Neill’s office, or it may have been from Gonzales, who was becoming the new Chairman, because by now I have hired people with that $150,000 that I had to play with, whose – the budget for them for the following year, with a full year’s salary, would have been – I’m making up a figure, I don’t remember what it is, but let’s say $500,000.

And all of a sudden at the end of the year I am told, “You have overspent your budget.” To which I responded, “What do you mean I’ve overspent the budget? I was told I would have a budget, I had this for …”, “Oh, no, no. That represents your entire budget, and you’re not going to have more than $150,000 for the next year.”

WILLIAMS: Oh my gosh!

SPRAGUE: Yeah, well, and I’ve got people now hired whose salary far exceeds that. And my reaction was stronger than what you just said.

WILLIAMS: Oh, I can bet it was!

SPRAGUE: And I said, “Well, that’s preposterous! It’s ridiculous!” And I was dealing with Gonzales.

WILLIAMS: Now was this new, like had you been told previously of this other arrangement by Downing, and then now you’re getting a different story from someone else?

SPRAGUE: I had been told all along that the $150,000 was mine to spend and that would represent just the portion of their annual salary, which we would have the funding for the following year, plus more, when I came up with my entire budget. So, for example, if, let’s say two days before the end of the year, I still was saying – and again I am making this up – if for example, I had $20,000, I could hire like yet 10 people because for the remaining two days I had enough for their salary.

WILLIAMS: For that time.

SPRAGUE: But all of a sudden I’m finding out what I told you.

WILLIAMS: This was not true.

SPRAGUE: And I had discussions about this with the Committee members that they had to fight to get this budget. And in the new Congress they have an appropriation that they call a continuing funding until there’s a new budget. Well, all I had now was that same lousy $150,000, and the new budget doesn’t come up until, I forget what time. And the bottom line is that my staff went for I think they went for two to three weeks, just out of loyalty to me, without getting paid a penny, continuing their work.

WILLIAMS: This was into the new year.

SPRAGUE: That’s right, which again, is a credit to them. Somewhere along the line, and as I say, we can back up for more detailed questions.

WILLIAMS: Yes.

SPRAGUE: I decided, you know, I said we had this think tank, and one of the things I set in motion was, let’s interview James Earl Ray. We collected a fair amount of information, and I thought, well, let’s start with interviewing him. Also in the Kennedy thing, because the Committee was chomping at the bit for, “Let’s get some things underway.” And I can understand that.

And by the way, I think I came up with a budget, a proposed budget for the next year, and I think it was like $14 million. [This figure appears to be for two years. Eds. Note] And all of a sudden, it’s like that was the big red flag, how dare! And when you think what they are paying now. And I remember arguing that $14 million was less than the cost of one airplane.

Well, when the budget came out, all the people who really didn’t want the investigation used that – and that was an outrage. And I’ll get back to that in a moment, because a number of things came to a head, let me tell you. But I did decide, let us pick an area, that even though I am still recruiting, and I’m now fighting a battle to get a budget, and I’m trying to get funding for the people, that we’ll do some investigation.

As I say in King, let’s go interview James Earl Ray, and some other things. And Kennedy, this was after talks with Tanenbaum, let’s look at some areas, and one that stands out in my mind, there had been a representation, back in the days of the Warren Commission, that on a certain day, Oswald was in Dallas prior to the assassination of Kennedy, and seen talking to him was [Sylvia Odio].

And the Warren Commission discounted that, gave no credence to that, on the basis that Oswald was in Mexico City that same day and obviously could not have been in two places at one time. So we decided, well, let’s take a look at that.

And here you can get more details from Bob Tanenbaum, but I’ll give you my recollection of this thing. Because this brought other matters to a head. And by the way, at that time George Bush was the head of the CIA. And in my request for information, I was told there would be full cooperation, and that they would provide what we wanted. Keep that in mind, because that changes.

So anyway, looking into the Warren Commission Report, we wanted to find out on what basis did the Warren Commission accept that Oswald was in Mexico City. And the report from the Warren Commission was that Oswald had gone into, I believe – I may have my embassys’ wrong here, I think the Cuban Embassy, and he had called over at the Russian Embassy. And there had been a photographic surveillance by the CIA, as well as a wiretap catching some of those photographs catching Oswald going into the Cuban Embassy, and there was a wiretapped conversation of Oswald calling whoever it was at the Russian Embassy.

So we said, “Fine, let’s see the photographs.” Well, the short of it is, there were no photographs. And why did the Warren Commission accept it? They accepted it because they had been told that by the CIA. So then we wanted to know how come – we want to see the photographs for that day. What do we want to see? Is there still a photograph of Oswald going into the Cuban Embassy? I assume it is the Cuban, I am not sure, but I believe it was the Cuban Embassy.

And then we were told, there were no photographs from that day because the camera wasn’t working. So then when this was reported back to me, I demanded – I wanted to see what photographs there were the day before and the day after. I was all of a sudden very curious, how come a camera – how long a time was this camera not working? Was it just that day?

And secondly, I wanted to see the repair bills if these cameras were not working. I wanted to see what was done for the repair. Hold that to the side for now. So, but then we decided, well, let’s ask for the copy of the wiretap, of the actual recording. And the CIA responded, “We don’t have that. It is not in existence. Because once we transcribe something, we reuse the tape. And we had transcribed this conversation before the assassination of Kennedy without knowing at that time any importance to Oswald. There was no need, therefore, to have kept the tape, and we had reused the tape.”

The problem with that arose because we had gotten access to an FBI document which stated that after the arrest of Oswald, a FBI agent who had at least taken part in the interrogation of Oswald, had listened to the CIA tape, and in his report said the voice on the CIA tape was not the voice of Oswald. So, if that was true, it showed that that tape was in existence after the assassination of Kennedy. So keep that in mind.

So then, we thought, let’s look at the transcript. Which transcript had been produced to the Warren Commission? And of course what we noted, which I think strikes anybody who looks at that transcript, it was an innocuous conversation, and some – the interpreter says that the speaker spoke in broken Russian, I believe it was. But that the voice on there introduces himself as “Lee Henry Oswald,” which, if Oswald was trying to disguise who he is, I mean, whoever heard of giving your first and last name, and only changing your middle name?

But the Warren Commission had accepted that transcript as proof that he was in Mexico City at the time. So then, we decided, well, let’s see if we can find the person who was the interpreter and the stenographer, the typist, for the transcript. And we located them. It was a husband and wife team in Mexico City. Tanenbaum can give you more details.

And our people spoke to them. They looked at the transcript. She said this is not the transcript that I typed. The interpreter disputed things that were on there, and we asked, “Do you still have the typewriter that you used,” and they still had it, and we brought it back to Washington. And I will make a bet with you right now that that typewriter is still sitting in Washington. Nobody knows what the hell it is doing there. Nobody followed through and had the typewriter compared with the type on the transcript, which is something …

WILLIAMS: Oh, wow!

SPRAGUE: This is the kind of thing we were doing. And we also had done, let’s say federal, record checks along the following lines. I was interested in, of those Americans that had defected to Russia, what was the time sequence when they decided they wanted to come back to this country, before they were allowed to come back?

And there was a startling difference between Oswald and others. His time for coming back was much, much quicker. We also checked into those that, when they came back were debriefed by the FBI with one exception. Oswald was not debriefed by the FBI. Now, I’m not saying that this, therefore that we jumped to the conclusion, “Ah, ha! The CIA is involved in the assassination.” I am just giving you an idea of the areas of inquiry, in what I believe was the thoroughness with which we were trying to undertake.

WILLIAMS: Right. You were still letting the evidence go walking, and right now…

SPRAGUE: Absolutely.

WILLIAMS: You were going to hold your options open until you accumulated enough evidence. . .

SPRAGUE: We were just going to do that type of thorough thing. I demanded the records from the CIA, and now there was an abrupt refusal, and I subpoenaed them. At that point, Gonzales, who was Chairman of the Committee, ordered the CIA, or told the CIA that they need not respond to my subpoena, and fired me, and ordered the U.S. Marshals come in and remove me from my office.

WILLIAMS: Oh, so that firing was directly after you had subpoenaed the records from the Central Intelligence Agency.

SPRAGUE: Right. But there’s more involved in it than the timing…

WILLIAMS: Right.

SPRAGUE: … if you checked the record. That came up after that. He ordered my firing. He ordered marshals to remove me from my office in what I’m sure was the first and only time in the history of the United States Congress. The rest of the Committee, backed me to a man and overrode the Chairman, and ordered that I remain, and the marshals were directed to get off.

Of course, that led to Gonzales taking it up in the House of Representatives, and the House backed the rest of the Committee. And he resigned and Stokes came on. [Louis Stokes was the Representative from Ohio. Eds. Note] I’m sure that’s the only time in the history in the United States Congress that in the fight between the Chairman and the Director, that the Chairman got bounced.

But there’s a terrible price paid for that. Every Congressman dreams of being Chairman of a Committee and being all powerful. It ultimately did not sit well with the Congress that a Chairman got ousted, and…

JOHN : The chief counsel.

SPRAGUE: … the chief counsel stayed in. And that rubbed a lot more. But I’ve got to back up a second. When I proposed the budget, and those that did not want this investigation jumped on this thing, this terrible: “Who does Sprague think he is, that much money.” It was a realistic budget to do the kind of job that had to be done. You know, and I met with Schweiker [Sen. Richard Schweiker was a Republican from Pennsylvania. Eds. Note] and I sat down with Schweiker before he went out of office. I got good ideas, I think, from him as to things that we wanted to do.

WILLIAMS: So you had done some thinking through of this whole thing in terms of your initial budget…

SPRAGUE: Oh, yes. And also – and I had a committee here – I mean, Gonzales, really in terms of being a leader and head of the Committee, it was night and day different from Downing. Members of his own Committee despised him. The Committee was concerned about how they were going to get more funding.

I know I wanted to do the kind of job I said. They wanted to do something dramatic to help get new funding. And I remember they wanted to call some mobsters, like Trafficante, in to have him take the Fifth Amendment, which I protested. They said they wanted him – like ask questions, when did you stop murdering Kennedy, and take the Fifth Amendment, and you get a headline. All that was nonsense to try to help get funding, which was no – again, no way to run it. But in this fight to get funding, and I think because he knew exactly what he was doing, at least in retrospect, Tip O’Neill asked me to address the Congress.

WILLIAMS: The entire House?

SPRAGUE: Now you say the entire House, I think it may have been the Democratic Caucus.

WILLIAMS: The Democratic Caucus.

SPRAGUE: I think that was it. They don’t let a non-member of Congress really speak to them from the pit of the Congress. Tip O’Neill arranged for me to do it. And so here I am speaking right in the pit, whatever you call it, the pit of the House of Representatives, with the Congress around me, to tell them why I need this budget, which I did. And they listened in a half-way fashion, some did and some did not.

The effect of that was, well, I think I am a very quiet, honest person. I don’t go around trying to stir things up. I just try to do my job. I’m not somebody who you would think, well, people would notice or pay attention to. For some reason, in my public life, it’s the opposite.

And the Committee had become known from the early start of it as “The Sprague Committee,” which rubbed a lot of – I mean, whoever heard of a Committee being named, again, for the chief counsel? It’s like the Chairman, you know, but not the chief counsel. That rubbed people wrong.

But Tip O’Neill’s maneuver in having me talk – he didn’t have the Chairman – he didn’t have a member of the Committee, he didn’t have Gonzales do it, he had me. It had a lot of the members of Congress thinking, “Who the hell is this guy who thinks he is bigger than any of the Congressmen? It’s not the Chairman, it’s not Committee, this guy is talking to us, like he’s riding over everybody.” And if Tip O’Neill was trying to create, in a very subtle way, a political reaction, he was very successful. Because that, coupled with “The Sprague Committee,” the fact that I unseated a Chairman, led to a very bad reaction. Now, at or about this time, all of a sudden, and this came up, and if you check your records, the timing here, because you asked when did Gonzales fire me, it’s after he countermanded the subpoena to the CIA.

And just at that time – and I am not a big conspiracy buff – when I say “at that time,” I mean what I say, the subpoenas of the CIA, lo and behold, the Los Angeles Times comes out with an article, and it was prefaced upon a letter that a Congressman from out west, a former FBI agent [Rep. Don Edwards of California. Eds.].

I think he had it put in the Congressional Record, because you see, that protects him from a suit. And, anyway, the substance of it was, I guess maybe the Los Angeles Times came out first, and then he wrote his letter. … But anyway, the whole idea between the Times and Edwards was that I was going to go about this investigation in a reckless manner.

I was going to be doing it by using unconstitutional means, violating due process. I wanted to wiretap, and I was trying to get wiretap equipment. I mean, a horrendous attack. I immediately – and again, the timing of this is with the subpoena of the CIA, my being upheld by the Committee, but I immediately saw the threat politically of this, and we had a PR man on our staff, because I wasn’t going to take – with all the work I was doing, I was going to deal with the press. And we had hired a fellow who did that.

This was a friend of mine named Burt Chardak, who’s still alive, you could interview him, because he’s a newspaper man. And this is the first time he sees it from the other side. And he’s in Florida, and I can get his address for you.

WILLIAMS: That would be great.

SPRAGUE: But Burt Chardak, a very good, savvy newspaper man, was our PR man. I immediately told him to contact the press around the nation, editorial boards, let them have the facts in the sense as I just gave them to you, take the time, which he did. Not one newspaper in this entire country or one editorial board contacted us to at least get more information. Not one newspaper or editorial board around this country printed our side of it.

But with the attack by the Los Angeles Times, it was then picked up immediately by the Washington Post, and the New York Times, all of whom carried similar editorials, which then led to editorials all around the country about what a terrible ogre and what a terrible person I was. That’s the scenario at that point.

WILLIAMS: The failure to check that, in other words, made you wonder what was going on out there.

SPRAGUE: Oh, absolutely. And to this day, while I’m certainly not a conspiracy buff, and I don’t believe for a moment the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times were all in bed with each other, to this day I find that the most fascinating part of my stint there.

But, let me just finish this aspect of it. Then the New York Times decided to really get in. And remember, I was the fair-haired boy at the beginning, now I was a horrible monster. They assigned a reporter named Burnham. I can’t think of Burnham’s first name – David Burnham? And he subsequently – I don’t think it was Fonzi – but he admitted it to somebody, that they assigned him to try to do a hatchet job on me.

WILLIAMS: He came here to dig up stuff.

SPRAGUE: Yes. And what he did is he then dug up an attack by the Philadelphia Inquirer on me from years back, which ultimately the Inquirer got hit with a $34 million judgment, and which was upheld to the tune of $24 million, the highest award against a newspaper for defamation of a public official in the United States. But Burnham, this was before that trial, Burnham dug up their attack on me and had The Times publish it as though it was true.

And that was the main attack on me. At this point, and by the way, I must tell you, in my fights with Gonzales, he had tried to unseat me even earlier and appoint somebody that was a friend of his as chief counsel, you know, none of which I would accept, because it violated my conditions. And ultimately, when Stokes got appointed – and by the way, I had to testify before the whole Committee in response to the Burnham article and relate what the true facts were, which as I say, the best way in terms of history to show the true facts is that they had a $34 million judgment, which was ultimately upheld at $24 million against them.

But Stokes finally said to me that the only way the Committee would get their new

budget – and it would have to be reduced to a terrible amount, I think like 14 million would be made down to 4 million at some time – was that I had to give them back the power to hire and fire, which I refused. I said “No way.” And they ultimately said that “You’re going to have to agree to a lower budget and not hiring and firing in order for us to get the budget through.” And I had a meeting with my staff, who still wanted me to stay. I had good loyalty, but I mean the staff felt that they had a real non-political professional who was fighting and was doing the right thing. And I told them “No,” let the work of the Committee go on. I had had enough of this, and I was out.

WILLIAMS: So it was your resignation. You weren’t actually fired, or would you say that you were pressured, in a way, to resign?

SPRAGUE: No, no, it was my decision. I was told that I had to accept the change in the conditions in order for the budget to be approved. And I wouldn’t accept that, and by midnight or something, I drafted a letter of resignation, and gave it. And there were a number of members of the Committee that did not want me to. And even after the fact, I think one of them said, one or two even voted to not accept it.

WILLIAMS: So Congressional members were supporting you in saying “Don’t resign.”

SPRAGUE: That’s right. Stokes was adamant, Preyer. There was a great number of them in my corner. But there was no way that I would – let me say this, it gets back to maybe what I said at the beginning. A legislative committee dealing with political figures, they each have their own political future, their constituencies, their own interests at heart, is not the proper vehicle for an investigation of this nature.

One of my good friends in Washington, Joe Rauh, who I’m sure you’ve heard of. Joe Rauh was a great crusader, liberal lawyer. He helped found the Americans for Democratic Action. He really was the author of the civil rights legislation that Johnson signed. He had been Jock Yablonski’s personal lawyer, and that’s how we met.

WILLIAMS: I see.

SPRAGUE: He was very, very – I mean, he was everywhere in the Democratic liberal establishment in Washington. A very good friend of mine. And he came to the view that I might be a great investigator, prosecutor, but that combination does not mix with a political animal like the Congress of the United States.

WILLIAMS: I was wondering before as you were talking, because you said this has happened at other times in your life, that you suddenly found that you had become larger than life as you get into some kind of conflict like this. I wonder if it’s because, in a way, you are a quiet, fairly gentle, straightforward person, but highly determined. You have a strong will about what will be.

SPRAGUE: Well, I think that’s part of it. There’s no doubt that, you know, I believe I listen. I believe if you talk to people in this office, it is a hard-working office. But I think everybody will tell you that after I listen, I make up my mind that’s the way.

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From the September-October 1998 issue (Vol. 5 No. 6) of Probe

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Thankfully, the Assassination Records Review Board has declassified many of the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. This process is ongoing as it winds down to its termination date of October 1, 1998. But there is quite enough now available to begin to get an accurate gauge on the performance of that committee, more specifically the record of its controversial second Chief Counsel, G. Robert Blakey. It seems odd that, as of today, no one has written a book-length critique on the history and findings of the HSCA. Within four years of the issuance of the Warren Report, there were several incisive, full length analyses of that report and organization. Yet, nearly two decades after the HSCA’s Final Report, there is no matching volume of the last investigation into the murder of President Kennedy – or the corresponding HSCA inquest into the assassination of Martin Luther King.

This essay will not pretend to be the comprehensive history and analysis that now cries out – screams – to be done on the HSCA. It is written as a stepping stone, an indication of what could and should be written on that topic. In the immediate aftermath of the release of the HSCA Final Report in 1979, two books were being written that proposed to perform this critical analysis. One, to be written by Ted Gandolfo, to my knowledge, never got past the unpublished manuscript stage. Another book, Beyond Conspiracy, an anthology by Peter Scott, Russell Stetler, Paul Hoch, and Josiah Thompson, progressed further toward publication than Gandolfo’s. This too was never published. And from the version of the volume I have, it does not take on the function of critical analysis that Mark Lane or Sylvia Meagher did in the previous decade. In fact, the tone is not really critical at all. This can be seen by reading Thompson’s discussion of the HSCA’s version of the single bullet theory. This celebrated critic actually seems to accept what he was so skeptical about in his 1967 Warren Commission critique, Six Seconds in Dallas. As we shall see in part two of this essay, Blakey’s version of the magic bullet theory is, in some ways, even more strained than the Warren Commission’s.

In the wake of the HSCA Final Report, finally issued in the summer of 1979, there were three books published on the JFK case in 1980 and 1981. David Lifton released Best Evidence, Anthony Summers authored Conspiracy, and Blakey (with co-author Dick Billings) wrote The Plot to Kill the President. Both Summers and Lifton seemed to take their cues from Blakey’s post press conference press conference. After the Final Report was issued, Blakey called his own press conference to say that although the HSCA had come up with a finding of “probable conspiracy” without pointing the finger directly at any one, he knew that the real culprit was the Mob. His book, published by a subsidiary of the New York Times, reiterated that verdict in (unconvincing) detail. In the book’s preface, Blakey again stated that “the evidence . . . established that organized crime was behind the plot to kill John F. Kennedy.” Although the Lifton and Summers books discuss the HSCA, they are in no way rigorous anlayses of that body. In fact, both books rely on some of the information published by the HSCA and both writers were privy to leaks since they had contacts inside the committee. With the benefit of hindsight, this has proven to be at least a partly questionable practice. As HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi once told me, the HSCA was so compartmentalized that only those people at the top really knew what the entire body was doing. These would include Blakey, his deputy on the JFK side, Gary Cornwell, and the Final Report’s co-author, Billings. Relying on informants inside the committee only gave these writers a glimpse of the gestalt. With the release of the raw files of the HSCA, it seems that both Summers and Lifton were too deferential to certain important aspects of the HSCA, a point to which we will return. (An interesting sidelight should be noted at this point. Nearly all the authors mentioned thus far – Summers, Scott, Hoch, Lifton – have all been muted in their criticism of Blakey. Yet, when the subject of Jim Garrison is brought up, they have no problem venting their spleens at length on the late DA.)

It is important to trace the origins of the House Select Committee to understand the temper of the times in which the last investigation began, and also to briefly map out the change that occurred when Robert Blakey, Cornwell, and Billings took over for the original Chief Counsel, Richard Sprague and his Deputy Counsel Robert Tanenbaum.

After Clay Shaw’s acquittal in 1969, Jim Garrison had attempted to bring Shaw up on (well-justified) perjury charges. In May of 1971, Judge Herbert Christenberry (whose wife had telegraphed Shaw their congratulations upon his earlier acquittal) threw out the charges. As Mort Sahl related to me, he and Garrison then went to the 1972 Democratic National Convention to try and make a political issue of the case with people like George McGovern who had been a friend of both John and Robert Kennedy. They were frowned upon by people in the Louisiana delegation, headed by former Warren Commissioner Hale Boggs. At this juncture the case seemed dead. But the ensuing Watergate scandal inadvertently revived it. The Senate’s Republican minority report, issued by then minority counsel and now Senator Fred Thompson, saw much CIA involvement in that scandal. Thompson’s boss, Senator Howard Baker, later became one of the participants in Frank Church’s subsequent investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975. That committee publicly exposed a myriad of crimes conducted by both the CIA and the FBI. But there were two aspects of Church’s work that impacted with force on the JFK case and helped revive it in the media. First, Church held hearings on the secret CIA plots to kill foreign leaders, most notably Fidel Castro. Second, committee members Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart conducted their own investigation of the performance of the FBI and CIA in investigating the Kennedy assassination. That report remains mandatory reading today. It was a scathing indictment of both agencies which categorically exposed the breathtaking rush to judgment to nail Lee Harvey Oswald.

This was a qualitative leap up from Garrison. The New Orleans DA could only howl in the wind about what he knew to be the malfeasance, or worse, of those two agencies in the Kennedy case. Now, with access to the actual documentary record, Frank Church and the U. S. Senate were certifying that much of what Garrison said was true and warranted. Further, Church was also saying that the CIA secretly plotted the deaths of political leaders and was tracing those plots in detail. At this time, New Orleans magazine ran a cover story on Garrison basically saying that he had said all this before and no one had listened to him. Researcher Mary Ferrell wrote him a letter apologizing for not standing by him more staunchly. She didn’t suspect in 1967 that the CIA could do such awful things.

In the midst of the tumult about Church’s sensational disclosures, Robert Groden and Dick Gregory went to Geraldo Rivera who then had a network talk show at ABC. At the time, Groden had the best copy yet made of Abraham Zapruder’s 26 second film of the JFK assassination. On March 6, 1975, for the first time, millions of Americans were convinced that, at the very least, Oswald had not acted alone. The effect of this public showing of the Zapruder film was, in a word, electrifying. The day after, the Kennedy assassination was topic number one in bars and barber shops across America. The case was back on the front burner. Along with the exposure of the crimes of the CIA, and the negligence of the FBI, what Warren Commission critic could have asked for more?

One of the people who got hold of a copy of the Zapruder film at this time was the son of Congressman Thomas Downing of Virginia, who had represented the Newport News area of that state for over fifteen years. An accomplished lawyer by trade, Downing was a well-respected member of the House of Representatives. When I interviewed Downing in 1993 at his luxurious office in beautiful Newport News, he told me that his son and a friend of his named Andy Purdy had viewed the film at the University of Virginia and were shocked at what it depicted. His son made Downing watch the film and the Congressman decided that this evidence itself merited an investigation by the House. He decided to draw up a bill focusing on the formation of a committee to reinvestigate the murder of John F. Kennedy.

At the time of Downing’s action, the spring of 1975, there already was a bill on the House floor (HR 204), authorizing a reinvestigation of all three assassinations of the sixties – JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and the attempted killing of George Wallace. Its author was Texas representative Henry Gonzalez. Gonzalez was part of the reception party when Kennedy had visited Dallas and he was at Parkland Hospital when Kennedy had died. His name is mentioned at times in the Warren Commission volumes. Gonzalez had liked Kennedy and his policies and wished to go farther than just examining only JFK’s death – he wished to relate it to the other two. But his bill was stalled and had little hope of succeeding. Gonzalez decided to give way to Downing’s bill and then both men made a tactical move. They decided to attach only the King case to Downing’s bill in order to enlist the aid of the Black Caucus in the House.

It was an uphill battle, but the momentum kept accumulating. On September 8, 1975 Senator Schweiker introduced a Senate resolution calling for a reopening of the Kennedy case. In the House, Don Edwards’ subcommittee on Constitutional Rights held hearings into allegations that Oswald had delivered a threatening letter to the Dallas headquarters of the FBI just weeks before the assassination. This was the famous note that was subsequently destroyed after the assassination. With this kind of controversy playing in the papers, the Downing-Gonzalez bill was getting some help. And Downing was a determined man who made some impassioned speeches on the floor of the House. (The one he made on March 18, 1976 was a dandy. See page 16.) Finally, in September of 1976 the bill cleared the Rules Committee where it had been bottled up for months. On September 17, 1976 HR 1540 creating the House Select Committee on Assassinations was passed by a vote of 280-65.

The committee was first led by Downing with Gonzalez as second in command. Once formed, it faced two immediate problems. First, Downing had decided that this would be his last term in the House of Representatives. He would step down at the end of 1976. Second, a chief counsel would have to be chosen. Both of these events were absolutely crucial to the history of this committee. Neither of them has gotten the attention or weight they deserve. Although the battle to get the HSCA authorized had been a difficult one, the newly formed committee still had plenty of ballast from the momentous events described above, all taking place from 1974-1976. Also, former Warren Commissioner Gerald Ford, who we now know was up to his neck in the spurious editing of the Warren Report, was about to leave office. Ford had done everything he could to thwart the investigations of Frank Church and his congressional counterpart Otis Pike in the House. He had even formed his own commission to preempt them. It had been headed by, of all people, Nelson Rockefeller who chose as his chief counsel former Warren Commissioner David Belin. Jimmy Carter was to be the new president and he had campaigned against the corruption symbolized by Watergate with the slogan, “I will never lie to you.”

When I asked Downing if he had ever thought of staying on just to see the committee through, he replied no he had not. He was eager to return home, spend time with his family, and get back to his law practice. In retrospect, Downing’s departure was a blow the committee could not sustain. Gonzalez was now slated to be eventual chairman, and as Bob Tanenbaum later told me, he hadn’t the experience or the stature to carry out what would be an insurmountable task. But before leaving, Downing was determined to choose a worthy chief counsel, one who would be above reproach from both a political and professional standpoint.

Downing told me that he was mystified by reports in the media (see page 19) that he was pushing Mark Lane for that position. He never suggested him for the job since he was perceived as being too close to the subject to lead an impartial investigation. He said he opened up the subject to the committee members themselves. They nominated several people for different positions. He then pulled out the record of the original nominations made on September 29, 1976. It shows that the nomination of Richard A. Sprague was made by Gonzalez himself. Five days later, Sprague was appointed Chief Counsel and Staff Director.

Henry James could not have dreamed a more ironic stroke. As we shall see, the upcoming battle between Gonzalez and Sprague was to ensure both their ousters. But Sprague was actually a salutary choice at the time. He had just come off a brilliant legal performance in a sensational murder case, namely the conspiracy to kill reform labor leader Jock Yablonski, a conspiracy headed by corrupt union boss Tony Boyle. Sprague had been appointed special prosecutor for Washington County, Pennsylvania between 1970 and 1975. He had unraveled the complex conspiracy behind the Yablonski murders. He went through a series of five trials pyramiding upward through each level of the conspiracy. It culminated with the conviction of Boyle, not once but twice since the original verdict had been overturned upon appeal. Previously, Sprague had made a reputation as first assistant DA in Philadelphia under, of all people, Arlen Specter. Tanenbaum told me that although Sprague liked Specter personally, he thought he was a completely political animal. And politics was something that never entered Sprague’s legal ethos.

When Downing approached Sprague for the position, the former special prosecutor told him that he had no fixed opinion on what had happened in either the King or Kennedy cases. He was aware that there had been a controversy as to what and how much had been revealed to the public. So he insisted that there should be no more cover-ups. If he took the job it would have to be with the insistence that as much as possible be done in public. He also insisted on four other conditions:

1. He wanted to hire his own investigators.
2. There would be no time constraints that would allow government agencies to just stonewall and outlast the committee.
3. There had to be enough money to employ a large, efficient staff so there would be no reliance on other aspects of the government for services rendered.
4. To emphasize the non-political nature of the inquest, there would be no majority and minority counsel positions, just a chief counsel and executive director.

As Sprague related later on Ted Gandolfo’s cable program in New York, if Downing would not have agreed to all four conditions, he was prepared to go back to private practice. Downing said yes, and Sprague took command. For a brief moment, the critical community thought they finally had their man in a position that could finally do something to officially change the status of the Kennedy case. As Cyril Wecht commented:

Dick Sprague was the ideal man for that job with the HSCA. Richard Sprague had probably prosecuted more murder cases than any DA in the United States. . . . He knew how the police worked. He wasn’t just the kind of guy who tried the case. He worked with the police. He knew thoroughly how homicide cases were conducted. He’s tough, he’s tenacious, he’s aggressive. He has a strong streak of independence. He was the man for the job.

Or, as Gaeton Fonzi recalled it in The Third Decade of November of 1984,

After talking with Sprague I was now certain he planned to conduct a strong investigation and I was never more optimistic in my life. I remember excitingly envisioning the scope and character of the investigation. It would include a major effort in Miami, with teams of investigators digging into all those unexplored corners the Warren Commission had ignored or shied away from. They would be working with squads of attorneys to put legal pressure on, to squeeze the truth from recalcitrant witnesses. There would be reams of sworn depositions, the ample use of warrants and no fear of bringing prosecutions for perjury. We would have all sorts of sophisticated investigative resources and, more important, the authority to use them. The Kennedy assassination would finally get the investigation it deserved and an honest democracy needed. There would be no more bullshit.

And for a short time, there wasn’t. Sprague hired two top deputies, one for the Kennedy side of the HSCA, and one for the King side. They both came out of New York City. Tanenbaum took the JFK side, and his friend Bob Lehner took over the MLK investigation. Sprague granted both men the freedom to pick their own staffs. Tanenbaum brought in some first class detectives from New York, like Al Gonzalez and Cliff Fenton. From an interstate homicide task force he helmed, Tanenbaum hired L. J. Delsa to work New Orleans. He hired Michael Baden and Cyril Wecht to serve as his chief medical consultants. After talking to Richard Schweiker, he decided to hire his chief field investigator, Fonzi to investigate the Florida scene. There were literally thousands of applicants for the researchers’ positions on the HSCA. When I interviewed Al Lewis in Lancaster, he told me that they must have gotten at least 12,000 applications to work on the committee from young people around the country, most of them college students who wanted to serve. Lewis was an attorney who had worked with Sprague in Philadelphia, helped on the Yablonski case, and later joined him in private practice.

The feeling on the committee, and inside the research community was that the JFK case was now going to get a really professional hearing. Jim Garrison never had the resources or the professional manpower to really helm a widespread, multi-pronged criminal task force. It looked like celebrated prosecutor Sprague now would. As Lewis related to me, one of the areas that Sprague expressed a special interest in was the medical and ballistics evidence. Sprague and his fellow staff attorneys requested entrance into the National Archives in order to survey the existing medical evidence firsthand. They were appalled at what they saw. Coming out of big city homicide bureaus, they had studied many autopsies. Remembering back to the experience of encountering the autopsy materials in this case, a look of disbelief and disgust crossed Lewis’ face. Sitting in his office on a Sunday afternoon in Lancaster, Pennsylvania I took note of that look and I commented that Harold Weisberg has written that skid row bums had received better autopsies than President Kennedy’s. Lewis replied, “Its worse than that.” When I asked him to elaborate, he waved me off. As Bob Tanenbaum plodded through the Warren Commission volumes, he was shocked at their incompleteness and the lack of thorough investigation. As he relates in his fictionalized treatment of the matter, Corruption of Blood, it struck him as being unsatisfactory for a first year assistant DA and something in which a law student could have found giant evidentiary holes.

Sprague was eager to delve into some of the better, more concrete materials that the critics had come up with. One area that he felt was important was the photographic evidence. Soon after he accepted the position, counsel Richard A. Sprague was introduced to photoanalyst-computer technician Richard E. Sprague. Sprague quickly arranged a presentation of the voluminous photos that Richard E. Sprague had collected over the years, undoubtedly the largest collection of pictures on the JFK case in any private collection. Sprague directed every hired detective and researcher to attend a photographic slide show put together by the Kennedy researcher. According to people who were there, it was a long and impressive presentation. But before the lights went down, Sprague turned to everyone in attendance and said, “I don’t want anyone to leave unless I leave. And I don’t plan on leaving.” By the end of Sprague’s four hour slide show, Al Lewis told me that, of the 13 staff lawyers in attendance, only one still held out for the single bullet theory.

….

The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.