Special Section: IN THE PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH

THE seven unpaid members of the Warren Commission represented both parties and every major region of the U.S., had a common bond of integrity and accomplishment. As chairman, President Johnson picked Chief Justice Earl Warren, 73. From the U.S. Senate came Georgia’s conservative Democrat Richard B. Russell, 66, the leader of the Senate’s Southern bloc, and Kentucky’s liberal Republican John Sherman Cooper, 63, a former circuit judge and Ambassador to India. From the House came Louisiana’s Hale Boggs, 50, the House Democratic whip, and Michigan Republican Gerald Ford, 51, a Yale Law School graduate and an armed-services expert who is one of the most influential of all Republican Congressmen. In Allen W. Dulles, 71, former CIA chief, the Commission had an investigator well experienced in the ways of Communists, fascists and plain crackpots; in John McCloy, 69, it had a banker who distinguished himself as Harry Truman’s U.S. High Commissioner for Germany and as John Kennedy’s disarmament adviser.

FBI & CIA. To assist them, the Commission members named as their chief counsel James Lee Rankin, 57, a top Manhattan attorney who had been President Eisenhower’s Solicitor General, carried the Government’s argument in the 1953 school-desegregation cases and the Little Rock high school case. Rankin recruited a staff of 14 outstanding private lawyers and law professors. All 56 field offices of the FBI lent their help. So did the CIA, the Secret Service, the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service—and even the Soviet government, which sent in sketchy reports of Oswald’s 32-month stay in Russia and his visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico last September.

Not content to rely on secondhand reports, the Commission determined to investigate everything afresh. Earl Warren interviewed Jacqueline Kennedy in her Georgetown home and Jack Ruby in his Dallas jail (Ruby called him “Earl”). Every member of the Commission flew to Dallas one or more times, painstakingly retraced the movements that Oswald was known to have made on Nov. 22. They visited the rooming house where he lived, the theater where he was captured, the jail basement where he was shot. At the Texas School Book Depository building, each one went to the sixth-floor spot where Oswald had stood, shouldered the 6.5-mm. Mannlicher Carcano rifle that he had used—and took aim.

In New York City, Commission staffers interviewed the teachers and psychiatrist who years ago had known the young, tormented Lee Oswald; in New Orleans, they questioned those who had known him more recently from his pro-Castro work. They studied Oswald’s rambling diaries and letters, also read every book and major article that had been written on the Kennedy killing. FBI and CIA agents tried to discover and analyze every step that Oswald took during a curious trip to Mexico exactly one year ago. They questioned the drivers of the buses that Oswald rode to Mexico and back, and rounded up practically every passenger who had traveled with him. They spoke to waitresses at a restaurant where he often ate, to clerks and maids in the cheap Hotel del Comercio where he stayed. But with all that, the Commission could account for only one-fourth to one-half of Oswald’s time in Mexico.

At its closely guarded headquarters in Washington’s Veterans of Foreign Wars Building, the Commission questioned witness after witness. The first was Marina Oswald; the last on the schedule was James Rowley, chief of the U.S. Secret Service. In between came Manhattan Lawyer Mark Lane, an Oswald apologist who contended that the assassination was a right-wing plot, and University of Illinois Classics Professor Revilo P. Oliver, a Bircher who charged that it was a Communist plot. From 552 witnesses in all, the Commission gathered millions of words of testimony. All of it will be published in 24 500-page volumes that are expected to be released this week.

Midnight Oil. Last week’s summary report was several months in the writing; staffers framed the first draft, but the commissioners themselves wrote much of the final version, often working until midnight. The book that they delivered to President Johnson had 706 pages of text and 158 pages of photographs, charts and addenda.

It should become one of the best-thumbed books since the Bible. The New York Times printed the entire text in 48 pages of this Monday’s newspaper; the Times also joined with Bantam Books to publish a $1 paperback edition, hopes to rush out the first of 500,000 copies by this Wednesday. The Associated Press will publish a hard-cover edition to retail at $1.50, and Doubleday & Co. plans within a month to get out a hardcover edition that will retail for about $4. “To any objective observer, this report will settle the matter,” said Hale Boggs. “But anyone who wants to believe there was a plot will probably go on thinking so.”