Judge
Griffin and the Man Who Killed the Man Who Killed Kennedy | Part 1
November
22, 2018 10:30 am Jesse Bethea
The
thing they tell you, if they were alive when it happened, is they remember
exactly where they were and what they were doing that day.
“I can
remember vividly.”
That’s
Burt Griffin. Some Clevelanders might remember Griffin. He was a judge on the
Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court for 30 years. Cleveland Scene once
called him “Gandalf” and the “wise old man of the bench.” But on that day, he
wasn’t a judge yet. Wasn’t even thinking about it. Or I guess he could’ve been
thinking about it — aren’t all lawyers thinking about it, just a little bit?
Anyway,
Griffin was just coming back to the offices of McDonald Hopkins & Hardy, a
Cleveland law firm that now just goes by the name McDonald Hopkins. It was
after lunch, a bit after 1 p.m. He got on the elevator in the office building,
and it was there someone told him that the president had been shot. I’m sorry,
Judge Griffin, do you want to take over the story?
“I’ve
told this story so many times,” says Griffin. “Repetition reinforces your
memory. It can also distort it.”
This is
the sort of even-handed wisdom Griffin will be dispensing frequently in this
story, and you will have to get used to it.
“Anyhow,”
Griffin again. “My initial reaction was, ‘those damned segregationists.’ I was
sure that he had been shot by somebody who was a segregationist.”
He
continued on into the office, where there were no televisions. Instead, the
employees of the law firm all gathered around a single radio the receptionist
kept, and as they listened they learned that President John F. Kennedy was
dead, killed by an assassin in Dallas.
“We
closed the office, went home and watched television for the next three days.”
Soon the
television said the Dallas police had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, a
20-something ex-Marine who they believed had shot the president and then killed
a Dallas police officer named J.D. Tippit. The details of Oswald’s life that
trickled up from Texas were incriminating, and not just for him. It turned out
Oswald had only recently returned to his home country after a short-lived
defection to the Soviet Union.
“When I
learned that Oswald had been arrested and had defected to the Soviet Union and
so forth I thought it was probably a frame-up,” says Griffin.
In this
new theory of Griffin’s, the frame-up was concocted not by segregationists but
by J. Edgar Hoover and the local Dallas authorities.
“They’d
found some guy who was a Communist — I wasn’t able at that point to distinguish
between a Marxist and a Communist — but he was a Communist,” says Griffin.
Burt
Griffin didn’t know that soon it would be his job to learn everything that
could be learned about that squat man with the fedora. And as for his idle
thoughts about a conspiracy of segregationists and/or J. Edgar Hoover
skullduggery, in a few weeks it would be his job to find out if there really
was a nefarious plot to murder our president. And a few decades after that,
he’d sit down with some annoying writer from Columbus to talk about where he
was and what he was doing on November 22, 1963.
I guess if
you’re like me, and you weren’t alive when it happened, there’s no one
particular date and time when you first learned about the JFK assassination. It
sort of seeps into American life, whether you want it to or not. It’s a myth we
all know by heart — a crisp, sunny November day, a young, stylish president out
for an afternoon drive with his young, stylish wife. There’s a cast of characters
with vague, ominous sounding names — The Umbrella Man, The Babushka Lady, The
Three Tramps. There’s Dealey Plaza, a Magic Bullet, a Grassy Knoll. Have you
ever heard of any other type of knoll? There’s only one knoll in the world and
it’s the grassy one in Dallas. The JFK assassination has its own geography.
Judge
Griffin wanted to know why any of this matters to me at my age, why I’d driven
up from Columbus to talk about the killing of a president who’d never been
president while I was alive. I told him it was a little bit because my mother
comes from an Irish Catholic family in which John F. Kennedy’s foibles and
failures are acknowledged, but the mere fact that he occupied the White House
with his name and religion means something in a primal sort of way. I told him
about my first exposure in the form of a children’s book I read when I was in
second grade. Somehow, when Miss Mahoney passed around a basket full of thin
books about Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, I happened to pull out
the one about John F. Kennedy and his untimely demise. It had illustrations,
right down to the red plume in frame 313 of the Zapruder Film. I was hooked for
life.
Thanks a
lot, Miss Mahoney.
But in
large part it’s the haunting, uniquely American mythology of it all that
brought me to Judge Griffin. And at the heart of that dark fairy tale is the
Lone Gunman, a character whose very existence we still question even today. But
why? Why should we? How can we stop?
I don’t
remember where I was or what I was doing when I heard the news that President
Kennedy was dead, but I’ve had to hear the news about a few dozen different
gunmen in my 26 years, and I remember where I was and what I was doing for just
about each one. And for each one, the conspiracy theories seem to get more
elaborate, more impenetrable. They beam out even before the bodies are counted,
somewhere between the first press conference and the second.
How do
we, as a nation, make sense of violence without resorting to the comforts of
conspiracy? For an answer, I thought, maybe I needed to go back. Back to the
big one, the mother of all conspiracies, and the guy — well, one of the guys —
responsible for getting the facts.
#
I waited
for Judge Griffin at the Panera Bread on Richmond Road, not far from
Warrensville Heights. I wore a white, button-down shirt and a black tie. I’m
not sure why, exactly. It felt respectful. Like how they used to dress back
then. Griffin told me he’d be the guy in the red cap that said “Castine.”
Burt
Griffin was born and raised in Cleveland, educated in the Shaker Heights school
system. He went to Amherst College in Massachusetts. The draft was
still in effect back then, after the Korean War, so Griffin volunteered for two
years of service in the Army.
He attended Yale Law School, where he was an officer of the law review. Later
he clerked for a federal judge in Washington D.C. named — and Griffin wanted to
emphasize that this is true — George Washington. He spent two years as an
assistant U.S. attorney in Cleveland before joining McDonald Hopkins and
leaving government work. But not for long.
Griffin
walked up with his red Castine hat, carrying a briefcase. We shook hands and
went inside.
Now,
when you’re going to meet with someone and talk about the JFK assassination,
you kind of want it to be in a dark parking garage somewhere, or a sketchy
diner with a guy in the corner in a trench coat and aviators watching you the
whole time. But that’s not convenient for either of us, so the Panera will do.
We were barely inside before people started coming up to Griffin just to shake
hands and say hello. Griffin sees the same faces a lot at this Panera. It was
his office, more or less, as he wrote the book.
He
brought the book out onto the table between us. Thick, crisp white, plastic
covered and spiral bound. He calls it Searching For Truth In A Political
World: Kennedy, Oswald, and Ruby. He needs a publisher, he said, and the
right audience. But it’s his opus, his eager attempt to put on the record and
into the minds of readers his comprehensive testament as to how it all went
down. It started, of course, with the day everyone remembers where they were
and what they were doing. But Griffin became part of the story about a month
later when he got a phone call from some guy who worked for Jones Day.
“Because I had a classmate who was a new,
young lawyer at Jones Day, I got invited to cocktail parties with these Jones
Day lawyers,” said Griffin.
This
particular Jones Day lawyer didn’t work for Jones Day anymore. He worked for
Robert Kennedy, the grieving brother of the murdered president who still served
as Attorney General of the United States. The new Lyndon B. Johnson
administration was in the midst of putting together the President’s Commission
on the Assassination of President Kennedy, which would later be known for its
chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren.
By
December of 1963, the Warren Commission had commissioners. Now it needed
lawyers.
“They
were interested in diversity,” said Griffin. “In 1963… diversity meant
geographic diversity. It wasn’t racial, it wasn’t gender. I was from the
Midwest, they wanted someone from the Midwest.”
They
also wanted someone with experience in criminal prosecution, experience with
the federal judicial system, and crucially, experience with the FBI. Griffin
knew how the FBI and its agents operated under J. Edgar Hoover’s leadership,
and he didn’t share the reverence of the Bureau common to Americans in that era
of certain persuasions and complexions.
Despite
the experience he’d accrued by December of 1963, Griffin remains cynically
modest about how he ended up being asked to join the Warren Commission staff.
“I mean,
come on, don’t think it was some great, national search for the most qualified
person,” said Griffin. “It’s all a matter of luck.”
Joining
the Commission meant packing up everything, moving his wife and young children
to Washington, and leaving the private sector to work for the government once
again. But Griffin ultimately said yes to the government’s offer.
“This
may be the most interesting thing I’ll ever do in my life,” thought Griffin.
“And I don’t think it’s the most important thing I’ve done, but it is the most
interesting thing I’ve ever done.”
Judge
Burt Griffin was a young Cleveland lawyer when he was asked to join the Warren
Commission.
Griffin
doesn’t remember the details of his first day at the Warren Commission, but he
vividly remembers the first staff meeting in January of 1964 when Chief Justice
Warren came in to address all the young lawyers who’d be doing much of the
work.
“He said,
‘your only client is the truth,’” said Griffin. “We knew people would lie to
us, we knew that people would conceal things from us. But there was nobody who
was overseeing us in any way, or even from the outside who was suggesting that
we had to come up with some kind of an answer. In fact, we wanted it. We all
knew that if we could find a conspiracy, we’d be national heroes.”
If
Griffin had discovered a secret plot to kill JFK, “I’d have been the senator
from Ohio, not John Glenn.”
In
Griffin’s telling, the Warren Commission’s goal was never to debunk or dismiss
conspiracy theories. The point was to investigate, to find and to prove the
truth of what really happened, to banish the ghosts and lies from Dealey Plaza,
so that every American would know exactly what happened to their president,
once and for all.
It did
not work.
Judge
Griffin and the Man Who Killed the Man Who Killed Kennedy | Part 2
November
23, 2018 6:07 pm Jesse Bethea
President
John F. Kennedy was assassinated 55 years ago this week. Retired Cleveland
Judge Burt Griffin was part of the team that investigated what happened. Part 1
of this story can be found here,
Part 3 can be found here.
“We were
all aware that if we had the wrong guy, if there was a conspiracy out there and
there was some lead that we hadn’t adequately followed, the country could be in
danger,” said Burt Griffin. “If we wrongly accused somebody, there would be
political turmoil. If we wrongly accused some foreign government, there’d be a
war. We were aware of all of that.”
To Griffin,
working on the Warren Commission represented a notion of public service that
has largely dissipated today.
“World
War II actually had a big effect on me and the Warren Commission,” said
Griffin. “We grew up in an era where patriotism and doing the right thing were
absolutely essential. If there was a conspiracy to assassinate the president we
were determined to find it.”
But
finding such a conspiracy — and above all, finding the truth — was always going
to be harder than it seemed. Griffin knew the details of President Kennedy’s
assassination would be hidden behind several layers of confusion,
misunderstanding and deceit. It was possible that people had conspired to kill
JFK. It was also possible that people would lie to hide how spectacularly they
failed to keep JFK alive. In particular, Griffin distrusted the FBI, from their
failure to recognize the threat Lee Harvey Oswald posed, to their investigation
after Oswald shot the president dead and ended up shot dead himself.
“I
worked with FBI agents,” said Griffin. “I also saw what their process was
here.”
Griffin
told me about how the FBI rushed out to interview some guy in Mansfield who
mouthed off in a bar after the assassination about how he was happy Kennedy was
dead. It happened that the guy in Mansfield was someone Griffin knew
personally, a man who struggled with alcoholism, but nevertheless the FBI ran
him down, “Like they have a lead onto a conspiracy.”
“So we
knew we were working with that kind of stuff,” said Griffin. “I basically
didn’t, and still don’t, have a lot of confidence in the ability of the FBI in
those days to have found a very well-planned conspiracy.”
The
Warren Commission had a tight structure. On the first level were the
commissioners themselves, who acted “like a jury” according to Griffin. Then
there were the staff attorneys like Griffin, who would investigate and present
evidence to the commissioners. But below that level, said Griffin, were the
unsung heroes.
“The
real work was done by these, literally, thousands of investigators that we
had,” said Griffin.
Staffers
from the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and other government entities were
constantly responding to requests from the Commission investigators, sending
file after file, page after page, of information that could’ve possibly been
relevant to figuring out who killed Kennedy and how. These reports filtered up
to the staff attorneys, and only a small fraction made it all the way to the
Commissioners.
“I
suppose you could say, yeah we did the work, but then you’ve got to say, but
all these other people were doing the work too,” said Griffin.
The
staff attorneys were divided into six teams of two — a senior lawyer
and a junior lawyer. Griffin, in his early 30s at that time, was the junior
lawyer in his pairing, with Leon Hubert as his senior partner. I asked Griffin
to describe what his office was like and he tried to map it out in the Panera.
“This
office that we were in was probably as wide as from that wall to maybe a little
wider than the opening between these two walls,” said Griffin, sweeping his
arms over the tables of studious Panera patrons before us. “Probably as long as
from there to the window.”
In all,
he outlined a space about the size, shape and volume of a freight container.
Every
pairing on the Commission staff was assigned to a specific “area” of the
assassination. One pair would investigate the possibility of a foreign
conspiracy. Another pair would study Lee Harvey Oswald, his biography and
potential motives. Burt Griffin was assigned to investigate the man who shot
Oswald — Jack Ruby.
#
At this
point in my life, I’m not a conspiracy guy. And frankly, my generation is the
one that has to deal with conspiracy theories on a daily basis. I’ve got some
news for you old folks: climate change is real and caused by humans. There was
never any QAnon, and no crisis actors at Newtown. But you all, your generation,
you’ve got Jack Ruby. And if there’s anything about the JFK assassination that
would make me think there was a conspiracy, it’s that dude.
I mean,
a guy commits the crime of the century, and just as that guy is getting perp
walked through the Dallas police basement, some other guy walks up out of
nowhere and pops him? Come on. I’ve seen movies. They call that a hit.
The only
thing that might convince me different is if I sat down with the man
responsible for investigating the assassin’s assassin. It so happens that when
that very man started investigating the assassin’s assassin 55 years ago, he
had the same two questions I still have.
The
moment when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Photo via the Warren Commission
Report.
“Why
did he do it?” and
“Who
the hell was this guy?”
“I knew
we had to carefully document everything we could find out about his life in
detail from the time anybody would have been aware that Kennedy was coming to
Dallas, which somehow or another we had pinpointed as mid-September,” said
Griffin. “With even greater specificity we needed to know what he was doing on
a minute by minute basis… from the minute the president was
shot until he shot Oswald.”
To complete this
chronology of Jack Ruby’s life and behavior, Griffin needed to identify and
locate witnesses, connections, colleagues, friends, acquaintances, assess their
credibility, collect their testimony and distill it into usable evidence.
Griffin read through all the relevant FBI reports, “including the one on my
friend from Mansfield.” He sent out instructions to investigators in other
government agencies and came up with more methods to collect more information
on Jack Ruby, including some plans that were too bonkers to be considered.
At one
point, while he was attempting to get records from every telephone Jack Ruby
could have touched, Griffin proposed that the Commission freeze every record of
every phone call
in the country from six months prior to the assassination, so they could be
sifted through for clues, possibly by a computer.
“I don’t
know why the hell I thought this,” said Griffin.
To be
fair, a computer today could probably do the job, but in 1964 it was
impossible, so they scrapped the plan. Griffin had plenty of work to keep him
busy anyway. On a typical day, Griffin would arrive at the Commission offices
at eight in the morning, walk home for dinner with his wife at children between
six and eight at night, then walk back to the office and continue working until
11.
A
diagram in the Warren Commission report depicts Jack Ruby’s route into the
Dallas police basement. Photo via the Warren Commission Report.
Ruby’s
trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald delayed Griffin from obtaining
necessary testimony, and introduced other, more bizarre complications,
particularly involving the conduct and capabilities of the Dallas Police
Department. The president and the president’s assassin had been murdered less
than a week apart and both men were surrounded by Dallas cops on both
occasions. It doesn’t get more “you had one job”
than that. Griffin needed to
find Ruby’s motive for killing Oswald, and influence from Dallas cops — many of
whom frequented Ruby’s nightclubs — had to be on his list.
“There
was always the possibility that he did it because someone put him up to it,”
said Griffin. “So then the question was, who might put him up to it?”
The
Dallas police, said Griffin, “had a personal reason for being angry. Oswald had
killed one of their own men. So we knew there was the possibility that somebody
had, if not conspired with Ruby, there could at least have been somebody who
let him in.”
I asked
Griffin about his own relationship with the Dallas police, but he immediately
saw through the question.
“Do you
know my answer on this?” said Griffin. “You know about Sergeant Dean?”
My own
fault. You don’t prosecute a prosecutor. And so we come to Griffin’s version of
the Sergeant Dean affair.
#
It was
Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade (the Wade from Roe v.
Wade) prosecuting Jack Ruby, and one of Wade’s witnesses was a Dallas
police sergeant named Patrick Dean. Dean claimed to have information that Ruby
had planned to kill Oswald days in advance — crucial evidence for Wade to prove
premeditation in Ruby’s actions.
But Dean
also happened to be responsible for security in the same basement where Ruby
strolled in unhindered and killed Oswald. And Griffin thought something was off
about Dean’s account of the shooting in the basement.
“I took
his testimony and he said what he saw and what he knew,” said Griffin. “After
he’d given his testimony, we took a break, and during the break I said
something to him which essentially was, ‘You don’t know everything that we
know.’ And I obviously said something to him about my not thinking that he’d
told us everything, and maybe I even said that he didn’t tell the truth.”
According
to Griffin, he suggested, in so many words, that Dean might want to talk to an
attorney and rethink what he wanted to tell the Commission.
“I said,
you know, even things that you might think aren’t significant, in light of
other things that we know, may be significant or might tie in somehow,” said
Griffin. “That was the basic tenor, thrust of my conversation.”
Griffin’s
less-than-subtle suggestion came out of a suspicion he still holds today.
“I
believe that Dean saw [Ruby] coming down,” said Griffin. “Dean does mention
that he saw Ruby in the line of police officers waiting for Oswald before Ruby
shot him. And he gives some indication that he saw him a few feet before he got
into the line. My own feeling is that yes, he did see Ruby and he could have
taken his own initiative to get Ruby the hell out of there. But he didn’t do
it.”
The
Dallas authorities responded to Griffin’s challenge immediately, complaining to
the Warren Commission that Griffin had threatened one of their cops with
perjury.
“Now, in
retrospect, I can see how he thought that,” said Griffin. “But I certainly
never used any words like that.”
Though
he’s unwavering in his belief that Dean’s testimony, in whatever way and for
whatever reason, was not the full truth, the retired judge cannot help staying
judicious.
“Some
people can convince themselves that what they’re saying is true,” said Griffin.
“As many times as I’ve thought about taking Dean’s testimony, I recognize that
I’m looking at this from 55 years ago. But I know how I feel, and that is he
wasn’t trustworthy.”
Ultimately,
however, the potential culpability or incompetence of the local authorities
doesn’t factor into Griffin’s final analysis of why Jack Ruby did what he did.
Instead, it’s a story so bizarre that it seems quite sensible. It’s a story I’d
never heard before I sat down in the Panera on Richmond Road. It’s the story of
the… I’m sorry, Judge Griffin, what did you call it?
“The
Weissman ad.”
Right.
The Weissman Ad.
#
On the
morning of November 22, 1963, Jack Ruby is just a regular guy trying to submit
some newspaper ads for his strip club. It’s the weekend tomorrow, and plenty of
upstanding Dallas gentlemen will want to know what delights they’ll be missing
if they don’t visit his Carousel Club. And so on November 22, Jack Ruby is at
the offices of the Dallas Morning News when he first sees the
Weissman Ad.
The
Weissman ad as it appears in the Warren Commission’s final report. Photo via
Warren Commission Report.
“Welcome
Mr. Kennedy, to Dallas,” announces the newspaper ad in big, black letters.
The
full-page advertisement then goes on to criticize Kennedy for various policies
and actions — real, fake or exaggerated — that seem too soft on communism. The
ad’s content, especially looking at it in the political context of 2018, is
pretty tame. But the way Burt Griffin tells it, Jack Ruby didn’t care much what
the ad said, but who was said to have paid for it.
“The
American Fact-Finding Committee,” it reads at the very end. “An unaffiliated
and non-partisan group of citizens who wish truth. Bernard Weissman, Chairman.”
Shortly
after seeing this ad, Jack Ruby learned the president had been killed, and
according to Griffin, the Weissman ad and the assassination of John F. Kennedy
may have somehow conjoined in his mind. In Griffin’s theory, Ruby got it into
his head that not only were the people responsible for the Weissman ad also
responsible for the assassination, but the group’s use of the name “Weissman”
was meant do direct blame for the killing at the Jewish community of Dallas.
And so Jack Ruby — who was born Jacob Rubenstein — launched a one-man
investigation into the JFK assassination to prove the innocence of his people.
“[Ruby]
proceeds to spend much of the next two days trying to find Weissman,” said
Griffin. “He’s a great researcher. He looks in the telephone directory and can’t
find Weissman’s name.”
Ruby
goes to the synagogue and asks his rabbi if he’s ever heard of Weissman. No
luck there. He checks a street directory. Still no Weissman.
“Ruby’s
spending a great amount of time trying to find Weissman and becomes convinced
that Weissman doesn’t exist,” said Griffin.
In
Griffin’s theory, the presence of the name Weissman on an anti-Kennedy ad
appearing on the same day as Kennedy’s murder, as well as the questionable
existence of Weissman himself, all seem to confirm in Ruby’s mind that someone
is trying to link the assassination to the Jews of Dallas. In this scenario,
Griffin sees a motivation for Jack Ruby’s actions: to protect his people from
reprisal by taking justice into his own hands.
The path
that Griffin’s version of Ruby takes from a newspaper ad to murdering Lee
Harvey Oswald is convoluted, but not unconvincing. And few people have spent
more of their life than Burt Griffin (225 days, according to Philip Shenon’s A
Cruel and Shocking Act) studying Jack Ruby. So I asked Griffin the obvious
question: Was Jack Ruby mentally ill?
“Ruby
was mentally ill. By the time his trial came, Ruby was mentally ill,” said
Griffin, with a caveat. “Would Ruby’s obsession about this whole thing, about
the anti-Semitism… be considered mental illness at the time it occurred? I
don’t know.”
For
evidence that Ruby’s fear of anti-Semitism in Dallas was valid, Griffin
suggests you look no further than Ruby’s murder trial.
An armed
Jack Ruby approaches Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police
Department. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
“What
happened to Ruby, total injustice,” said Griffin. “Ruby was indicted not as
Jack Ruby, but as [Jack] Rubenstein, AKA Jack Ruby, even though he had… legally
changed his name in the late 1940s to Ruby.”
Not only
did the prosecution seem to be capitalizing on Ruby’s former, more Jewish name,
Ruby was alleged to have planned the killing of Oswald days in advance, even
though he was simply out and about, sending off money orders to strippers he
employed, and left his dog in his car when he strolled with remarkable ease
into the Dallas police basement. All of this would seem to indicate Ruby’s
actions were neither part of a conspiracy, nor premeditated at all. He saw an
opportunity for vigilante violence and took it.
Ultimately,
errors in Ruby’s original trial drove the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to
reverse judgement in his case and order another trial in a different county.
Ruby died before his second trial could take place.
Here you
might think there’s a loose end. OK, not just one loose end, this is the JFK
assassination after all. But what’s the whole deal with the American
Fact-Finding Committee and its chairman, Bernard Weissman, the man who didn’t
exist? Well, it turns out he did exist. He just didn’t live in Dallas. Weissman
was just out of the Army, and along with five other veterans, he organized the
American Fact-Finding Committee as a right wing organization to steer the
conservative movement in the United States.
As part
of their efforts, the small group sent emissaries to Dallas, which they
considered, said Griffin, “the center of right-wing activities in the United
States.” There the nascent political organization made contact with retired
General Edwin Walker, a prominent anti-communist, segregationist, right-wing
political leader. And in April of 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to shoot Edwin
Walker through his dining room window.
“The
next part I’m gonna tell you we didn’t even know,” said Griffin. “And that is
that after Oswald shot at Walker and missed, there was a wave of anti-Semitic
violence in Dallas because the supporters of Walker were convinced that Jews
were the ones that shot at Walker. So there’s this ironic connection between
all of this kind of stuff.”
Are we
all together now? I know there were some twists and turns there, and I can
understand if some of us fell off the wagon, as it were. I can only tell you
that, listening to the recording of this interview at the Panera on Richmond
Road weeks later, I personally sound flabbergasted — a word I do not use
lightly.
At some
point I said to Griffin, “It all seems like a series of coincidences that’s
easily spun into a conspiracy.”
“And
yet,” replied Griffin. “The message here is that so much of important events
can be the product of coincidences. Because it’s very clear that these people
are all acting without any knowledge of each other.”
To
Griffin, the influences of anti-Semitism on Jack Ruby’s behavior that week in
1963 make more sense than an assassination plot. They were also understated in
the final Warren Commission report, spawning hundreds of conspiracy theories.
If you don’t have the context, it’s easy to assume Jack Ruby was a pawn in a
labyrinthine conspiracy. It’s almost the only thing that makes any sense. At
least that’s what I thought before I sat down at the Panera on Richmond Road,
with little to no knowledge of Ruby’s mental health, his Judaism, and his
legitimate fear that anti-Semitic violence might lurk around every corner.
“This
whole business about Ruby fearing anti-Semitism, there are a lot of valid
reasons why Ruby would feel that way,” said Griffin.
“Now
that’s something…” said Griffin before trailing off. “We could not write the
Warren Commission report about that. There’s no way we could write this.”
And so
the final report of the Warren Commission was without context, a terrifying,
pressurizing context that might’ve mattered to Jack Ruby, and so it should
matter to those of us who want to understand him and every other part of the
president’s murder.
“As an
important fact as racism is to this country’s history, to blacks and whites,
anti-Semitism…” said Griffin, before looking up at me. “Look, your family, on
what, your mother’s side? Irish Catholics, the prejudice that Catholics and the
Irish faced in this country. And all you’ve got to do is have once incident of
this in your life and you can never forget it. It’s like the one incidence of
sexual assault. You don’t forget these things, and you remember who did it.”
At some
point during his explanation of Ruby’s motives, Griffin was cut off by more
friends who just happened to be passing through the Panera on Richmond Road.
“Hey
Linda,” said Griffin. “Do you want to come over here and tell my friend whether
you think there was a conspiracy?”
Over to
our table walked Linda Rocker, yet another retired judge from the Cuyahoga
County Common Pleas Court. “You would give me the opportunity,” said Judge
Griffin to Judge Rocker, “to introduce him to sane people who think there was a
conspiracy.”
It turns
out that Rocker doesn’t totally buy Griffin’s theories.'
“I mean,
including the Jack Ruby thing, where he supposedly acted because he was worried
that Jews would be nailed for the assassination… he was either a complete
nutcase, which he may have been, I mean Burt makes a good argument that he was
not a picture of sanity,” said Rocker. “Or he had other connections with the
Mafia in particular and he was gonna do that or he was gonna get shot down and
go away.”
My God,
I love how Clevelanders talk.
Judge Rocker
has a hard-boiled, person-on-the-street view of the whole thing, the same sort
of view I had before I talked to Griffin. The sort of view that slaps you when
you start to disregard the idea of an obvious conspiracy in favor of a messy,
demoralizing, horrifying coincidence.
“As
former judge on the same bench as this guy,” said Rocker. “I’ve come to the
conclusion that there really is no such thing as coincidence.”
Judge
Griffin and the Man Who Killed the Man Who Killed Kennedy | Part 3
November
24, 2018 5:00 pm Jesse Bethea]
President
John F. Kennedy was assassinated 55 years ago this week. Retired Cleveland
Judge Burt Griffin was part of the team that investigated what happened.
“It was
superficial,” said Burt Griffin of the Warren Commission’s final report,
presented to President Johnson and the public in September of 1964.
The
report’s final conclusion, of course, was that there was no evidence of a
conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald did it. He had all
the signifiers we recognize today — a troubled loner with delusions of historic
greatness. If it had happened today, we’d all have Twitter fights over whether
to call him a terrorist or an active shooter or what have you, nothing would be
solved and no one would be satisfied. And that’s more or less how it went back
then too.
Judge
Burt Griffin holds a framed photograph of the Warren Commission members. Photo
by Jesse Bethea.
“Frankly
I was prepared, if people had started to criticize us… to be somewhat
supportive of those people,” said Griffin. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve gone
to a lot of their conspiracy conferences, because I want to know who these
people are. But they’re so much obsessed with things that are completely wrong
and some of them lie completely… I’ve felt it’s so much better to spend my time
trying to point out where these people are horribly off-base or complete
liars.”
With the
final report written and the Warren Commission disbanded, Griffin returned to
his old law firm in Cleveland. He would go on to join the
Cleveland Legal Aid Society as that group’s executive director, and then two
years later he was asked to lead the Legal Aid Society for the entire country.
“But
then a major change came to my life, because my wife suddenly died of
leukemia,” said Griffin. “I mean it was like, she died two days after she was
diagnosed. Our kids were then five and eight.”
Lee
Harvey Oswald’s mugshot. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Once
again, Griffin left Washington and came back to Cleveland, now as a single
father. Ten years after John F. Kennedy’s murder, Griffin wasn’t dwelling on
the assassination or the Warren Commission. Though he knew the final report was
superficial, he was confident in its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the
lone gunman, and that his death at the end of Jack Ruby’s gun was the result of
a coincidence — perhaps a series of them. And coincidence was not done with
Burt Griffin.
As part
of his patient willingness to engage with conspiracy theorists, Griffin agreed
to attend a screening of the 1973 JFK assassination thriller Executive
Action. Griffin sat through the film, which depicts a right-wing cabal plotting
to kill Kennedy, and was asked to speak afterwards. He told the audience that
the most accurate scene of the movie was one in which Lee Harvey Oswald buys a
car. The rest was nonsense. And after that was over, Griffin met a very good
friend of the filmmaker’s wife.
“She
came up to me and I thought that she kind of winked and smiled at me and so
forth, so I wanted to meet her,” said Griffin. “The result of that was I got
invited over to someone else’s house for dinner with her and I’ve never seen
anybody since.”
They’ve
now been married for 43 years.
“So,
that was the coincidence from the Warren Commission that changed my life.”
Not long
after that, the people of Cuyahoga County elected Burt Griffin to the bench.
“You
only get these jobs because you have name confusion,” said Griffin. “Anybody
who claims that he or she is a judge because they’re some outstanding person is
not truthful.”
Over the
next 30 years, Griffin used his position to push for community service
sentencing, mental
health court dockets and counterbalancing prosecutorial
aggressiveness, largely distancing himself from tough-on-crime theatrics.
“I was
very interested in sentencing reform,” said Griffin. “And that’s one of the
reasons I never had any great ambition to do anything else.”
I asked
Griffin if his time on the Warren Commission ever influenced his career or his
decisions as a judge. He looked off and thought for a moment, letting the
sounds of a normal Monday in the Panera hang in the air.
“I think
it helped me get elected.”
#
It
wasn’t even a month after Burt Griffin and I had this conversation that a man
walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and shot 11 worshipers to death. The gunman
was apparently motivated in part by an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that the
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was importing “invaders” to the United States in
the form of Latin American refugees.
But as
Griffin and I sat across from each other in the Panera on Richmond Road, we
knew nothing of what was coming. We lived in a simpler time, with only all the
rest of this country’s political violence to trouble us. Mass and micro
shootings alike, all the way back to the beginning.
“We’re
so proud of our democracy, but we’re like a banana republic,” said Griffin. “No
other country that I know of in the world has had four presidential
assassinations, so what kind of great democracy are we?”
The
cover page of Judge Burt Griffin’s manuscript on the JFK assassination. Photo
by Jesse Bethea.
When
Griffin first set out to write his book, he envisioned a reexamination of all
the presidential assassinations of American history —
Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy. But amid
all that presidential killing — and all the other killing besides — Griffin
knows the Kennedy assassination is the one that haunts us still. Perhaps in
more ways than we’re comfortable with.
“This
is, for you and people your age, the same thing that the McKinley assassination
was for me,” said Griffin. “This is interesting past history. But the danger
that I see in this is that by building up this idea that we can have a
conspiratorial world, we foster this type of conspiratorial mentality, rather
than getting people to say, hey let’s look at a lot more details.”
The
details will get you after a while, and poke holes in your precious conspiracy
theory. The details and the coincidences.
“Like it
didn’t rain that day,” said Griffin. “If it’d been raining, the top would’ve
been up in the goddamn limousine.”
Lee
Harvey Oswald’s mugshot. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
No, it
didn’t rain that day. It didn’t rain that day, and our government could not
have orchestrated 9/11 in secret. The Clintons did not organize a global child
prostitution network. The migrant caravan is but a caravan of migrants. And Lee
Harvey Oswald was neither a patsy, nor an agent of some foreign government, nor
an agent of our own government. He was an angry, disturbed young man with a
gun. And when has such a person ever brought terror down upon our nation?
Conspiracy
theories are extremely useful for reinforcing one’s political outlook. The JFK
assassination is a perfect example. If you are a leftist, Oliver Stone type,
your JFK conspiracy might implicate the vast military industrial complex. If
you’re more conservative, Oswald’s Marxist sympathies and his stint in the
Soviet Union might become the focal point of your conspiracy theory. Either
way, it’s always your adversaries who did the bad thing. Wake up, sheeple, and
all that.
But a
conspiracy theory also comforts while professing to discomfort. The idea that a
mythical They are pulling the levers of the universe is meant to be a
wake-up call, but really the illusion of order helps many of us sleep at night.
The conspiracy theory promises that all the terrible things are part of a plan,
all has been considered and none of the ends are loose. The conspiracy theory
promises that our history does not turn simply on the whims of unstable gunmen.
The conspiracy theory absolves us of responsibility, because if our society is
secretly controlled by dark forces then we are ultimately blameless for our
society’s failings.
It
didn’t start with the JFK assassination, of course, and it certainly didn’t end
there. Violence followed by conspiracy followed by violence followed by
conspiracy followed by violence followed by violence followed by violence.
Remember when I wrote about the shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue, just 500
words ago? Since then, 12 people were shot to death in a massacre at a bar in
Thousand Oaks, California. The culprit was a 20-something ex-Marine. At least
there don’t seem to be any widespread conspiracy theories about this one. Yet.
I don’t
know if I expected Griffin to have an answer to any of this. I suppose that
would’ve been silly. If someone on the Warren Commission knew how to exorcise
conspiracy theories, we wouldn’t be here, would we? Fifty-five years later,
Griffin knows the Warren Commission failed. Not in its core mission to find the
truth, but in its unspoken mission to disseminate the truth to the public and
convince us that the truth was truth.
“We all
went back to our jobs,” explained Griffin. “I went back to McDonald Hopkins and
went on with my life, but we should have had a process set up, one to respond
to these things with real media consciousness… We also needed to have a unit in
the Justice Department that made it absolutely clear that if anybody had any
new information, they wanted it. And then as they were getting this new
information, they should’ve been announcing what their conclusions were.”
This
solution, if one can call it a solution, is a grim prospect. Playing
whack-a-mole with every single lie that springs forth from every single act of
violence seems impossible. OK, “seems” is a cop-out. It is impossible. We can’t
have a commission for every shooting, and there are days when it feels like we
are all buried under a landslide of violence and lies and somewhere in the
debris is a single boulder called the JFK assassination and we can’t even sort
that one out.
Judge
Burt Griffin wants people to think critically and reject conspiratorial
thinking. Photo by Jesse Bethea.
“I toss
it back at you,” said Griffin. “Why do journalists feel that when somebody
makes an outlandish statement, they’re obliged to publish it? Why don’t they
just bury it and say, ‘This is some nut, why should I publish it?’”
That one
took me aback. Here I must answer to the judge for all journalists — I don’t
always think I am one — with my own philosophy developed not from instruction
or experience, but just youthful outlook. Put it another way; I’m a 26-year-old
freelancer and Burt Griffin investigated the JFK assassination. I don’t know
anything about anything.
But I
gave him my opinion. That I, like all journalists, have been on the receiving
end of “WHY AREN’T YOU COVERING THIS????” emails. I’ve felt the dueling
pressure to ignore what is unimportant but pay more attention to the obscure.
Funny how everyone has their own idea of what that means. And then there’s the
awkward fact that sometimes the nut who makes outlandish statements is an
elected official, and there may be some value in publishing such things if only
so the voting public can know that someone who appears on their ballot does,
occasionally, lie.
Griffin,
to his credit, commiserates. Journalists, he said, are in a “terribly difficult
situation.”
“You
struggle with the problem,” said Griffin. “How do you know whether I should be
believed? I may be all bullshit. It’s true, it’s a very tough job that you guys
have. That’s why the more I think about this the more I think the contribution
I can make is to some people in academia. Get as many people as possible to be
able to think critically.”
If the
conspiracy theories are comfort food, critical thinking is the vegetable, and
no one has yet figured out how to make the public eat it. Who shot JFK might
well be the least of our troubles and frankly, at this point, it’s probably a
lost cause anyway.
“I’m
prepared to accept the fact that the idea around this event is never going to
go away, that there was a conspiracy, that something is being hidden,” said
Griffin.
The
National Archives possesses the rifle Lee Harvey Oswald used to kill JFK.
Allegedly. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Still,
for all that resignation, Griffin does his part. His book, Searching For
Truth In A Political World, is supposed to be just part of the solution —
one whack at one mole. He doesn’t expect to make money from it. He wants it to
go to history teachers, political science professors, a tool for the next
generation to guide them through a world of violence. The book, “which is
probably too long,” is Burt Griffin’s final chapter in the Warren Commission
report, 55 years later.
It came
time, eventually, to shake hands and go our separate ways. We left the Panera
on Richmond Road and carried on in our wounded country, one traumatized by
violence and the lies that birth violence and the lies birthed by violence. A
country that would rather believe a shadowy cabal was responsible for the death
of a president than think it was the delusions of an angry young white man.
Not that
I can completely fault us for our fantasies. It’s a little bit disgusting that
this pathetic little man got to insert himself into our national story. It’s a
little bit disgusting that his gun remains in our National Archives, preserved
by the same people charged with preserving our Declaration of Independence, not
to mention Jackie’s pink dress. It’s a little bit disgusting that we even have
to know Lee Harvey Oswald’s name. But the alternative to the Lone Gunman is
infinitely worse, because the alternative is a lie.
From the
Panera on Richmond Road, it’s about a two-hour drive to Columbus and something
like 17 hours to Dealey Plaza. But it turns out it’s only 40 minutes to Kent
State. I looked it up later. It’s 40 minutes to Kent. It’s 30 minutes to
Chardon. It’s 2018, and none of the gunmen are alone.
SUPPORT JFKCountercoup if you can.
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