Entry dated :: June 30, 1965
Newfane, Vermont  
Wesley Liebeler :
The File Keeper


I borrowed my father’s Oldsmobile to drive to Newfane, Vermont. The reason for this trip, which took nearly five hours, was that I had a 2 PM appointment with Wesley J. Liebeler. He had spent more time than any other lawyer on the Warren Commission staff investigating Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged role in the Kennedy assassination.
I pulled up to Liebeler’s rustic house just before 2 PM. There was no car in the driveway. I rang the bell several times, but no one came to the door. So I waited in my car. Shortly after 3 PM, his wife, Celia, arrived in a battered pickup truck with their two young sons. After introducing myself, she said she had not heard from her husband but expected he would be arriving shortly. I helped her unload a chainsaw from the back of the truck, and, after she demonstrated how it worked, I spent the next three hours sawing off limbs from a fallen maple tree. I then joined her and the children for dinner in the kitchen.
It was not until 8 PM that Liebeler arrived. He was a slightly overweight man in his early thirties. He was surprised to find me waiting. He explained that he had forgotten to enter our appointment in his office calendar. He said he was too exhausted after his trip from Washington to answer questions about the Warren Commission. Instead, he invited me to stay over in the guest room, and said I should read through his “chronological files,” which were in two large cardboard boxes.
After calling my parents to get permission to keep the car another night, I stayed up until 5 AM reading through the documents. They included staff memos, draft chapters, a Commission symposium on Oswald’s possible motives, and two blue bound volumes of preliminary FBI reports, which had not been released to the public.
At breakfast, and until early that afternoon, Liebeler gave me an eye-opening account of the investigation. He ridiculed the seven commissioners, saying the staff called them Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs because of their refusal to question the claims of Oswald’s Russian wife, Marina (who was Snow White.) He said Dopey was Chief Justice Warren, who dismissed any testimony that impugned Marina’s credibility.
I asked him, “Who was Sleepy”?
He answered Allen Dulles, the former director of central intelligence. Dulles received this appellation because he often fell asleep during the testimony of witnesses and, when awakened, asked inappropriate questions. For example, an FBI fiber expert was in the midst of describing the bullet holes in the front of Kennedy’s shirt when Dulles woke up, looked at the blowup of the bloody shirt, and said, “He wears ready-made shirts, huh.” At another point, he spilled a wad of tobacco on a photograph of three bullets fragments and said, as if he had discovered new evidence, that he saw four fragments.
McCloy was dubbed Grumpy. According to Liebeler, he became angry when staff lawyers did not pay sufficient attention to his theories about possible foreign involvement.
He was also scathing about the initial FBI investigation, which he called “a joke.” As for the CIA, he said one of its theories was that Oswald might have been “brainwashed” into serving as a “Manchurian Candidate” assassin. He noted the agency had no basis for this “ridiculous theory” other than a decade-old study it had conducted on brainwashing techniques.
He answered questions for about four hours and gave me a brief tour of his farm. He then suggested that I keep the two boxes of documents. So I returned to New York with FBI reports that no one outside of the FBI and the Warren Commission had ever seen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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