JFK Remembered: 50 Years Later (2013)

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The documents also shed light on how senior news executives, who have bought into one interpretation of the facts, are highly resistant to revisit the evidence. Buying In. CBS News jumped onboard the blue- ribbon Warren Commission.

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. In a special report, CBS and its anchor Walter Cronkite preempted regular programming and, with the assistance of reporter Dan Rather, devoted two commercial- free hours to endorsing the main tenets of that report. However, despite Cronkite and Rather giving the Warren Report their public embrace, other people, who were not in the employ of the mainstream media. Some of these citizens were lawyers and others were professors, the likes of Vincent Salandria and Richard Popkin. They came to the conclusion that CBS had been less than rigorous in its examination. By 1. 96. 7, the analyses challenging the Warren Report.

Top prime- time producer Les Midgley later joined the effort. CBS News vice president Gordon Manning sent the proposal on to CBS News president Richard Salant in August 1. Manning tried again in October, suggesting an open debate between the critics of the Warren Report and former Commission counsels, moderated by a law school dean or the president of the American Bar Association.

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The idea was to give the two sides. John Connally who disagreed that he and Kennedy had been hit by the same shot, a claim that undercut the .

John Connally, who was also wounded, is seated in front of Kennedy. Without the assertion that a single bullet inflicted multiple wounds on.

The magazine story ended with a call to reopen the case. In other words, there would be a chance for American .

Again, this approach offered the potential for a reasonably balanced examination of the Kennedy assassination. At this point, Manning was joined by producer Midgley, who had produced the two- hour 1. CBS special. But the title itself suggested a level of skepticism that had not been part of the earlier proposals. The Higher- ups Intervene. However, then CBS senior executives began to intervene.

Salant wrote a memo to John Schneider, president of CBS Broadcast Group, telling him that he might refer the proposal to the CBS News Executive Committee (CNEC). According to information that a former CBS assistant producer Roger Feinman obtained during a legal hearing against CBS, plus secondary sources, CNEC was a secretive group that was created in the wake of Edward R. The upper management at CBS did not like the controversies that these reports generated among influential segments of the American power structure. There was a perceived need to tamp down on such wide- ranging and independent- minded investigations.

After all, the CBS executives were part of that power structure. CBS News president Salant epitomized that blurring of high- level corporate journalism and America. Salant had gone to Exeter Academy, Harvard, and then Harvard Law School. Huddleson attended Harvard Law with Salant and, like Stanton, was on the board of the Rand Corporation.

The other lawyer was Bayless Manning, Dean of Stanford Law School. They told the CBS representatives that they were against the network undertaking the project on the grounds of .

Huddleson also steered the CBS team to cooperative scientists who would counter the critics. On his return to CBS headquarters, Manning saw the writing on the wall. He knew what his CBS superiors really wanted and it wasn. So, he suggested a new title for the series, . However, unaware of what Salant was up to, on Dec.

Midgley circulated a memo about how he planned on approaching the Warren Report project. Mc. Cloy, one of the Warren Commission members. In this memo, Mc. Cloy wrote that . The CBS brass wanted a defense, not a critique. Salant asked producer Midgley, . But eventually his head was turned, too.

While the four- night special was in production, Midgley became engaged to Betty Furness, a former actress- turned- television- commercial pitchwoman whom President Lyndon Johnson appointed as his special assistant for consumer affairs, even though her only experience in the field had been selling Westinghouse appliances for 1. But there is another point about how Midgley was convinced to go along with Mc. Cloy. Around the same time he married Furness, he received a significant promotion, elevated to executive editor of the network.

CBS hired consultants who were rabidly pro- Warren Report to appear as on- air experts while others would be hidden in the shadows. In addition to the clandestine role of Mc. Cloy, some of these consultants included Dallas police officer Gerald Hill, physicist Luis Alvarez and reporter Lawrence Schiller. Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F.

Kennedy. Officer Hill was just about everywhere in Dallas on Nov. He was at the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald worked and allegedly shot the President from the sixth floor; Hill was at the murder scene of Officer J. D Tippit, who was allegedly shot by Oswald after he fled Dealey Plaza; and he was at the Texas Theater where Oswald was arrested. Hill appeared in the CBS 1. But Roger Feinman found out that Hill also was paid for six weeks work on the show as a consultant. During his consulting, Hill revealed that the police did a .

They found nothing in his pockets at the time, which begs the question of where the bullets the police said they found in his pockets later at the station came from. That question did not arise during the program since CBS never revealed the contradiction.

As demonstrated by authors Josiah Thompson (in 2. Gary Aguilar (in 2. Alvarez misrepresented some data in some of his JFK experiments. The relevant documents were not declassified until the Assassination Records and Reviews Board was set up in the 1.

The last thing these consultants wanted to do was to expose the faulty methodology that the Warren Commission had employed. Longtime CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite. As in 1. 96. 4, Walter Cronkite manned the anchor desk and Dan Rather was the main field reporter. After all, Cronkite and Rather had done a seven- month inquiry. Then, Cronkite showed books and articles critical of the commission and mentioned that polls showed that a majority of Americans had lost faith in the Warren Report. At that point, the network special revealed its purpose, to discredit the critics and reassure the public that these people could not be trusted.