"Supposition"

House report on assassinations is short on hard evidence

After two years of investigation and the expenditure of $5.4 million, the House Select Committee on Assassinations last week released a final, 686-page report on the murders of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The study finds, with an unseemly amount of fanfare and self-justification, that both assassinations were the result of "probable" conspiracies. But the committee's conclusion appears to have outstripped its evidence.

The committee was fascinated by a tape of a broadcast taken from a police motorcycle radio transmitter that had been left on when Kennedy motored through Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. After examining the tape, an acoustics expert told the committee that there was a "50% chance" that someone besides Lee Harvey Oswald had fired one shot at the President from the famous "grassy knoll." Two other sound experts enthusiastically raised the chances to "95% or better."

Until then, most of the committee members had been convinced that Oswald had acted alone, but they began hunting for a conspiracy. The report notes that the Mafia had good reason to hate the Kennedys because of Attorney General Robert Kennedy's crackdown on organized crime. The committee concedes that "it was unable to identify the other gunman or the nature and extent of the conspiracy." But it nonetheless concludes that it was "possible" that "an individual organized crime leader, or a small combination of leaders," had conspired to murder the President.

The committee's findings on the King assassination are equally suspect. The report speaks of a "likelihood of conspiracy" Unking a St. Louis patent attorney, now dead, and several associates with James Earl Ray Jr., the convicted slayer of King. Maybe so, but the committee offers no proof.

Still, eight of the twelve members of the House committee went along with the view that there was enough evidence in both the King and Kennedy cases to warrant the Justice Department's continuing the investigation, although nothing was found to overturn the basic conclusion of the Warren Commission 15 years ago: that Oswald had acted alone. Discussing the House report, Michigan Congressman Harold Sawyer, a dissenting member of the committee, called it "supposition upon supposition upon supposition." A former prosecutor, Sawyer was asked what he would have done in his old job if someone had laid the report in his lap. Said he: "I'd have put it in the circular file. There would be no way to prosecute."

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