Warren Report ‘INADEQUATE’ SECURITY IN DALLAS

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30558, 29 September 1964, Page 8

Warren Report ‘INADEQUATE’ SECURITY IN DALLAS

Secret Service Failed To Check Buildings On Route (N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) WASHINGTON, September 28. A thorough and critical public review of the procedures for protecting the life of the President appears certain to follow the report of the Warren Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy, says Reuter’s Washington correspondent. Running through the commission’s report was the indirectly expressed but nevertheless clear thought that if the authorities had taken adequate precautions the tragedy of last November 22 might not have happened.

The Commission gave special critical attention to the inadequacies of the Secret Service, the branch with the primary responsibility for protecting the President’s life. It absolved the Secret Service agents who were with the President at the time but firmly concluded that the Secret Service had failed to take efforts to identify persons considered as threats to the President before the fatal motorcade in Dallas on November- 22.

The report also said that the Secret Service, before the President’s trip to Dallas, did not investigate any building along the motorcade route. The F.8.1.—a separate agency which does not have any direct responsibility for protecting the President—had considerable information about the President’s accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, but, according to the report, did not communicate it to the Secret Service. “A more carefully co-ordin-ated treatment of the Oswald case by the F. 8.1. might well have resulted in bringing Oswald’s activities to the aitten-

tion of the • Secret Service,” the Commission observed: The Commission was equally firm in its criticism of the Dallas Police Department for inadequate security measures which, it said, led directly to the shooting of Oswald on November 24 by the Dallas night club propriei tor, Jack Ruby. The police measures for Oswald’s safety, the Commission said, “unfortunately did not include adequate control of the great crowd of newsmen that inundated the Police Department building.” The Commission’s comments about the part played by the press could also become the subject of public debate and possible review: The Chief Justice and his ■I colleagues noted that the

primary responsibility for failing to control the crowd of reporters belonged to the police, but said part of it “must be borne by the news media.” “On previous occasions, public bodies have voiced the need for the exercise of selfrestraint by the news media in periods when the demand for information must be tempered by other fundamental requirements of our safety,” it said. The Commission clearly rejected all the theories—many of them from Europe—that there was a conspiracy of the Right or the Left which led to President Kennedy’s assassination: This part of the report occupied 131 pages. It concluded with the observation: “This commission discovered no evidence that the Soviet Union or Cuba were involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. Nor did the commission’s investigation of Jack Ruby produce any grounds for believing that Ruby’s killing of Oswald was part of a conspiracy.” Oswald, a mental misfit, confused by Marxism and racked by hatred of authority, was judged today to have assassinated President Kennedy, “acting alone and without advice or assistance.” The seven-man Commission said it had thoroughly investi-

gated, In addition to other possible leads, all facets of Oswald’s associations, finances and personal habits, particularly during the period after his return from the Soviet Union in June, 1962.