| Richard Nixon 37th President of the United States |
|---|
| In office January 20, 1969 – August 9, 1974 |
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, (July 8, 1908 – January 26, 1979), s sometimes referred to by his nickname Rocky, was an American businessman and politician who served as the 41st vice president of the United States from December 1974 to January 1977, and previously as the 49th governor of New York from 1959 to 1973. Wikipedia
| Nelson Rockefeller |
|---|
| Official portrait, 1975 |
| 41st Vice President of the United States Under Nixon |
| In office December 19, 1974 – January 20, 1977 |
The United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States was set up under President Gerald Ford (Nixon resigned) in 1975 to investigate the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies within the United States. The commission was led by the Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, and is sometimes referred to as the Rockefeller Commission.
Cheney’s political career began in 1969, as an intern for Congressman William A. Steiger during the Richard Nixon Administration. He then joined the staff of Donald Rumsfeld, who was then Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity from 1969 to 1970.[21] He held several positions in the years that followed: White House Staff Assistant in 1971, Assistant Director of the Cost of Living Council from 1971 to 1973, and Deputy Assistant to the president from 1974 to 1975. As deputy assistant, Cheney suggested several options in a memo to Rumsfeld, including use of the US Justice Department, that the Ford administration could use to limit damage from an article, published by The New York Times, in which investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reported that Navy submarines had tapped into Soviet undersea communications as part of a highly classified program, Operation Ivy Bells.[27][28]
White House Chief of Staff
Richard Cheney was Assistant to the President and White House Deputy Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford from December 1974 to November 1975.[29][30][31] When Rumsfeld was named Secretary of Defense, Cheney became White House Chief of Staff, succeeding Rumsfeld.[21] He later was campaign manager for Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign.[32]
During the Ford Adminstration while he was Chief of Staff he removed 86 pagers from the Rockefeller Commssion on assasinations, likely data about him , George H.W. Bush, and Charles Harrelson, E. Howard Hunt, Nixon, and others.
The commission was created in response to a December 1974 report in The New York Times that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. The commission issued a single report in 1975, touching upon certain CIA abuses including mail opening and surveillance of domestic dissident groups. It publicized Project MKUltra, a CIA mind control study.
**** **** It also studied issues relating to the John F. Kennedy assassination, specifically the head snap as seen in the Zapruder film (first shown on television in 1975), and the possible presence of E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis in Dallas, Texas.[1]
Internal White House and Commission documents later showed that the Ford White House significantly altered the final report.
Future Vice President Richard Cheney edited it, and an 86-page section on CIA Assassination Plots was removed.
Both the White House and leaders of the commission itself significantly hampered the investigation. Despite this, senior staff and lawyers did object.[2] ******
A larger investigation, the Church Committee, was set up on 27 January 1975 by the U.S. Senate. The Nedzi Committee was created in the U.S. House of Representatives on 19 February 1975. It was replaced by the Pike Committee five months later.
In July 1975, The New York Times reported that unnamed staff sources within the Rockefeller Commission said that Sidney Gottlieb commanded the CIA’s LSD experimentation program, was personally involved in the experiment that killed researcher Frank Olson, then destroyed the program’s records in 1973.[3]
A larger investigation, the Church Committee, was set up on 27 January 1975 by the U.S. Senate. The Nedzi Committee was created in the U.S. House of Representatives on 19 February 1975. It was replaced by the Pike Committee five months later.
In July 1975, The New York Times reported that unnamed staff sources within the Rockefeller Commission said that Sidney Gottlieb commanded the CIA’s LSD experimentation program, was personally involved in the experiment that killed researcher Frank Olson, then destroyed the program’s records in 1973.[3]
DAVID W. BELIN PAPERS, (1961) 1963-98
Counsel to the Warren Commission,
Executive Director of the Rockefeller Commission,
Attorney, and Author
CONTENTS
Summary Description | Biographical Information | Introduction | Series Descriptions | Container List
INTRODUCTION
Soon after President Lyndon Johnson appointed the members of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (the Warren Commission), they began hiring a staff to assist them. The Commissioners and Executive Director J. Lee Rankin recruited a mixture of both experienced attorneys and promising younger attorneys. One of the young attorneys was David W. Belin of Des Moines, Iowa. Rankin paired Belin with senior attorney Joseph Ball and assigned them the task of determining the identity of President Kennedy’s assassin.
One of the members of the Warren Commission was Representative Gerald R. Ford. Ford and Belin knew each other previously through their common ties to the University of Michigan.
After several months of work the Warren Commission completed its study of the assassination and produced a report. Almost immediately critics began attacking many specific points in the final report. Belin soon took up the task of defending the work of the Commission through letters, articles, and books. He continued this task for the rest of his life and was often referred to in the media as the “chief defender” of the Warren Commission report, although in a book published in 1973, during Earl Warren’s lifetime, Belin openly criticized aspects of the Warren Commission report. He much preferred being characterized as a defender of the truth about the assassination.
In January 1975, President Gerald R. Ford appointed the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Rockefeller Commission) to investigate alleged abuses of its charter by the Central Intelligence Agency. Ford personally selected his old friend and colleague David Belin to become Executive Director of the Commission. In addition to other charges that the Commission looked into, they investigated any possible CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Due to Belin’s close involvement in this issue in the past, he deliberately kept his role in this area to a minimum and turned over this aspect of the investigation to another Commission attorney.
After the Rockefeller Commission completed its work, Belin continued to write in support of the work of the Warren Commission, but also advocated more openness in government and restrictions on the role of the intelligence community. Beginning in 1975, in the wake of revelations that the CIA and FBI had withheld crucial information from the Warren Commission, he began lobbying for the release of all government documents relating to the Kennedy assassination, hoping that the opening of these records would clear up many misunderstandings about the assassination and inaugurate a new era of openness for the U.S. government.
Scope and Content of the Belin Papers
This collection contains documents from Belin’s service on the Warren Commission and Rockefeller Commission, but also documents his unofficial role as “chief defender” of the Warren Commission report.
The Warren Commission working documents are by no means a complete record of the work of the Commission or even a complete record of Belin’s work for the Commission. This small, but valuable, series includes summaries of interviews conducted by Belin, some Commission memoranda and correspondence, progress reports, exhibits and photographs, and drafts of portions of the final report. One interesting folder contains copies of Belin’s letters back to his law firm describing his work with the Commission.
Mr. Belin’s Rockefeller Commission documents are more extensive and include his correspondence with CIA and FBI officials, Commission members and staff, and the White House; staff interviews with witnesses; Commission meeting minutes and agendas; transcripts of his press conferences and those of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and members of the Commission; and draft reports. Although this is not a full record of the work of the Commission, it does document some of Belin’s key areas of interest and activity during the investigation. Due to Belin’s continuing interest in anything to do with the Kennedy assassination, he did retain copies of many documents on that topic even if he wasn’t directly involved in their creation. The collection also includes Belin’s working files for a book that he wrote, but never published, about the work of the Rockefeller Commission. Portions of some of the chapters from this book eventually appeared in his book Final Disclosure.
The largest portion of the collection concerns Belin’s role as “chief defender” of the central conclusions of the Warren Commission. The collection includes his correspondence with critics of the Commission Report, articles that he submitted to many different magazines; transcripts of his appearances on radio and television shows; and working files on his books about the Kennedy assassination. Among the Commission critics whose conclusions he derided were author Mark Lane (Rush to Judgment), executive director of the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations G. Robert Blakey, and filmmaker Oliver Stone (JFK). The collection also includes many documents released to Belin by government agencies after he filed Freedom of Information requests as part of his campaign to open all Kennedy assassination records to the public.
Related Materials (November 2010)
The Library’s most closely related material can be found in the Warren Commission series of the Gerald R. Ford Congressional Papers (16.8 linear feet). This series documents Ford’s service as a member of the Warren Commission and his subsequent book Portrait of the Assassin.
Additional material appears in the processed portions of the records of the U.S. Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission). These open materials deal with the investigation of possible CIA involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or in anti-Castro plots of the early 1960s. Major portions of the Rockefeller Commission records remain unprocessed and not available for research.
Additional scattered folders in various White House collections touch on the Rockefeller Commission, Kennedy Assassination and/or the Warren Commission. Please consult with an archivist to obtain a PRESNET search report listing the folders on any of these topics.
Among the collections held by the National Archives and Records Administration are the official records of the Warren Commission, personal papers donated by Commission member Richard Russell and General Counsel J. Lee Rankin, and a number of other related collections. Researchers should also contact the John F. Kennedy Library and the Lyndon B. Johnson Library for information on their holdings about the assassination and its investigation.
The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was established by President Lyndon B. Johnson through Executive Order 11130 on November 29, 1963,[1] to investigate the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy that had taken place on November 22, 1963.[2] The U.S. Congress passed Senate Joint Resolution 137 authorizing the Presidential appointed Commission to report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, mandating the attendance and testimony of witnesses and the production of evidence.[3] Its 888-page final report was presented to President Johnson on September 24, 1964,[4] and made public three days later.[5] It concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald acted entirely alone.[6] It also concluded that Jack Ruby acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later.[7] The Commission’s findings have proven controversial and have been both challenged and supported by later studies.
The Commission took its unofficial name—the Warren Commission—from its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren.[8] According to published transcripts of Johnson’s presidential phone conversations, some major officials were opposed to forming such a commission and several commission members took part only reluctantly. One of their chief reservations was that a commission would ultimately create more controversy than consensus.[9]
Other investigations[edit]
Three other U.S. government investigations have agreed with the Warren Commission’s conclusion that two shots struck JFK from the rear: the 1968 panel set by Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the 1975 Rockefeller Commission, and the 1978-79 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which reexamined the evidence with the help of the largest forensics panel. The HSCA involved Congressional hearings and ultimately concluded that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, probably as the result of a conspiracy. The HSCA concluded that Oswald fired shots number one, two, and four, and that an unknown assassin fired shot number three (but missed) from near the corner of a picket fence that was above and to President Kennedy’s right front on the Dealey Plaza grassy knoll. However, this conclusion has also been criticized, especially for its reliance upon disputed acoustic evidence. The HSCA Final Report in 1979 did agree with the Warren Report’s conclusion in 1964 that two bullets caused all of President Kennedy’s and Governor Connally’s injuries, and that both bullets were fired by Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.[33]
As part of its investigation, the HSCA also evaluated the performance of the Warren Commission, which included interviews and public testimony from the two surviving Commission members (Ford and McCloy) and various Commission legal counsel staff. The Committee concluded in their final report that the Commission was reasonably thorough and acted in good faith, but failed to adequately address the possibility of conspiracy.[34]
In his September 1978 testimony to the HSCA, President Ford defended the Warren Commission’s investigation as thorough.[35] Ford stated that knowledge of the assassination plots against Castro may have affected the scope of the Commission’s investigation but expressed doubt that it would have altered its finding that Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy.[35]
On October 10, 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew (a Republican) was forced to resign following a controversy over his personal taxes. Under the terms of the 25th Amendment, a vice presidential vacancy is filled when the president nominates a candidate who is confirmed by both houses of Congress. President Richard Nixon (a Republican) thus had the task of selecting a vice president who could receive the majority support of both houses of Congress, which were then controlled by the Democrats.
President Nixon considered selecting former Texas Governor and Treasury Secretary John Connally, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and California Governor Ronald Reagan.[1] However, Nixon settled on House Minority Leader Gerald Ford of Michigan, a moderate Republican who was popular among the members of Congress (in both parties) and who was good friends with Nixon.[1] Ford won the approval of both houses by huge margins, and was sworn in as the 40th vice president of the United States on December 6, 1973.[1][2]
On August 9, 1974, Ford ascended to the presidency after the Watergate scandal led to the resignation of President Nixon, becoming the only unelected president in American history.[a]
ashington, DC, February 29, 2016 – The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney.
Today’s posting includes the entire suppressed section on assassination attempts, Cheney’s handwritten marginal notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the public. The documents show that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political operatives.
This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period.
Among the highlights of today’s posting:
- White House officials of the Ford administration attempted to keep a presidential review panel—the Rockefeller Commission—from investigating reports of CIA planning for assassinations abroad.
- Ford administration officials suppressed the Rockefeller Commission’s actual report on CIA assassination plots.
- Richard Cheney, then the deputy assistant to the president, edited the report of the Rockefeller Commission from inside the Ford White House, stripping the report of its independent character.
- The Rockefeller Commission remained silent on this manipulation.
- Rockefeller Commission lawyers and public relations officials warned of the damage that would be done to the credibility of the entire investigation by avoiding the subject of assassinations.
- President Ford passed investigative materials concerning assassinations along to the Church Committee of the United States Senate and then attempted—but failed—to suppress the Church Committee’s report as well.
- The White House markup of the Rockefeller Commission report used the secrecy of the CIA budget as an example of excesses and recommended Congress consider making agency spending public to some degree.
The Rockefeller Commission, the White House and CIA Assassination Plots
By John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi
The current controversy over drone attacks has an important backstory. During the 1970s it became known that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had plotted the murder of foreign individuals. These persons for the most part were prominent leaders or even heads of state. That the U.S. government had in any way been engaged in murder became a dark charge against the CIA, and helped inflame the political climate in a way that ensured investigations of the U.S. intelligence agencies would occur.
During those 1975 investigations, particularly those of the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, allegations of CIA involvement in assassinations were among the most important lines of inquiry. President Gerald R. Ford himself had a key role in triggering the investigations, inadvertently but artlessly revealing the fact of CIA involvement in plotting assassinations during a meeting with press editors.[i]
There had already been revelations of illegal domestic activities by the CIA. These led to the creation of a presidential panel under Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, and committees of inquiry in both houses of the United States Congress. Ford’s January 1975 admission of CIA involvement posed a dilemma for the administration. Vice President Rockefeller attempted to head off inclusion of the subject, restricting consideration of assassinations to the question of what role Cuba might have had in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That proved unacceptable to some members of his own commission, among them then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan. When the Rockefeller Commission took a vote on whether to include charges of CIA assassination plots in its inquiry, the group overrode its own chairman.[ii]
Rockefeller’s key opponent in the fight over investigating assassinations was the panel’s staff director, David W. Belin. A lawyer for the Warren Commission, empanelled to look into the Kennedy assassination in 1963-1964, Belin had been handpicked by Ford for the Rockefeller group. Ford, one of the Warren commissioners, was confident of Belin’s loyalty, but this time the lawyer fought hard to investigate deeply.
The investigators sought CIA documents on assassination plots conducted in its history and information on administrative routines. They also questioned key witnesses. As CIA lawyer John S. Warner admitted under questioning, the agency “certainly” had “no specific authorization” to conduct assassinations (Document 7). Warner additionally admitted he was “not clear” that a president had the constitutional authority to order an assassination, though that “might” lie within his powers.
Documents in this electronic briefing book reveal the views on the assassination reports of not only Belin but key members of his staff. At the time, in the spring of 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee) was just being constituted but the Rockefeller Commission inquiry was already in progress. Days after Church Committee members met with President Ford, press adviser David Gergen advised the president to say nothing about assassinations (Document 1).
The jurisdictional and procedural issues regarding whether to include an investigation of assassination plotting, so far as the Rockefeller inquiry was concerned, were fought out over this same period (Documents 2,3,4,5). White House officials, including panel chairman Rockefeller, continued a rearguard action in opposition, first to covering CIA assassination plots at all, and later to including that material in the Rockefeller Commission report. Belin continued to press for the coverage, took a primary role in interviews the commission conducted for this part of its inquiry, and became the main author of the portion of the report dealing with CIA plotting against Fidel Castro (including Operation ZR/RIFLE).
The Rockefeller Commission collected a wide array of evidence, as illustrated by a staff member’s report on what could be learned from the papers of former CIA Director John McCone, and a CIA compendium document on the ZR/RIFLE project (Documents 8, 9, 10).
As of mid-April 1975, Belin expected to have the assassination portion of the panel report complete by the end of the month. He so informed White House officials. However, the CIA dragged its feet on providing materials, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who initially promised cooperation, provided little. Kissinger became a major actor in the struggle to suppress the Rockefeller assassinations report.[iii] When Belin scheduled a press conference to announce the panel’s assassination findings, deputy assistant to the president Richard Cheney and White House Counsel Philip Buchen, citing Kissinger’s concerns, intervened to induce Belin to cancel it.
As the Rockefeller Commission moved toward finalizing its report, panel staff concluded that the assassinations issues were going to be buried. Several recorded their objections to this course (Documents 11, 12). The Rockefeller Commission’s public affairs director, for one, observed that leaving out assassinations would make the report seem like a cover-up and cast doubt on the Commission’s entire project (Document 13). Nevertheless Belin and staff could not prevent determined superiors from holding back the entire subsidiary report that dealt with assassinations.
Meanwhile at the White House, Cheney led the way in “editing” the Rockefeller report—including suppressing the assassinations section. The final draft of the full report contained a brief passage noting that President Ford had asked the panel to investigate the assassination plots after its inquiry began, that the staff had not been able to complete the investigation, and that Ford had then asked that assassinations material be turned over to him. The Cheney edit inserted doubts by adding that it was unclear whether assassinations fell within the scope of the Commission’s mandate, thus resurrecting jurisdictional issues which had previously been resolved. The revised language also reduced President Ford to a bit player—asserting only that he had “concurred” inthe panel’s decision to investigate rather than that he had revealed the existence of CIA plotting and then been obliged to modify the Commission’s terms of reference to include an investigation of the matter. White House editors also changed the original text, from indicating that records were still in the process of being turned over to the president, to the statement that it already “has been” done.
Document 19 reviews the substance of the Commission’s evidence and findings relating to assassinations. In Document 20, White House lawyer Buchen discusses the substance of the findings.
The White House “edit” (Document 15) provides clear indications of the direction of the White House’s concerns vis-à-vis the conclusions of the wider Rockefeller Commission investigation. The report had determined that various intelligence agency actions were illegal and explicitly called them “unlawful.” The edit resisted that formulation and talked instead about actions that merely exceeded agencies’ statutory authority. The Cheney-supervised edit made a single exception—the White House changed Commission language which found the CIA had exceeded its authority in the course of drug experiments to say that these had been “illegal” (p. 37).
Rockefeller investigators had probed White House-CIA relationships that landed the agency in trouble during Watergate as a result of White House instructions to provide psychological profiles of prominent individuals, disguises for White House operatives, and documents on past CIA activities. The full Commission had then approved a recommendation (number 23 on its list) which specified that a single, authoritative channel be established for all White House requests to the CIA and that this be routed through the NSC staff. Following CIA internal directives (ones that had, among other things, resulted in the compilation of the “Family Jewels”), the Rockefeller Commission made clear that any CIA employee who questioned the “propriety” of any White House order should take that concern either to the CIA director or the agency’s inspector general. The White House editors changed this directive (in renumbered Recommendation 26 of the published report). Now, employees were to be instructed only to question requests that came outside the authorized channel, and to state their concerns only to the CIA director. Improper requests came off the table, and the inspector general was not to have automatic jurisdiction.
Among the abuses that led directly to President Ford creating the Rockefeller Commission were charges the CIA had compiled dossiers on American citizens and infiltrated political groups that opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam. In this instance the Rockefeller panelists entered a blanket finding that the files and lists of citizen dissenters were “improper.” The White House edit changed this conclusion, indicating that the “standards applied” had resulted in materials “not needed for legitimate intelligence or security purposes,” and that this merely applied to “many” records gathered about the antiwar movement (see unnumbered page revising p. 41 in the report).
White House editors eliminated a Commission recommendation (number 17 in the original text) that applicants for agency positions and foreign nationals acting on behalf of the CIA be informed more clearly that they could be subjects of U.S. security investigations. The Cheney-inspired edit also added recommendations the Rockefeller panel had not voted. One (Recommendation 29 in the published report) advocated for a new civilian agency committee to be formed to resolve concerns about the use of CIA-developed intelligence collection mechanisms (overhead photography) for domestic purposes.
Another White House-originated point (Recommendation 20 in the published report) sought to increase public confidence in the integrity of the intelligence agencies by instructing them to review their holdings of secret documents periodically with the aim of declassifying the maximum amount of material. This recommendation was more honored in the breach.
In a related case, White House editors eliminated a lengthy commentary from one of the commissioners, the former solicitor general of the United States, Erwin N. Griswold. A detailed footnote quoted Griswold as saying that an underlying cause of the problems confronting the CIA was its pervasive atmosphere of secrecy, and recommending Congress consider making public the CIA budget (page 132-3, renumbered p. 15 in Document 15, footnote 2). The commission quoted Griswold in the context of a recommendation about the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. White House editors converted Griswold’s statement into part of the main text which the entire Rockefeller panel had supposedly agreed upon, and used it to buttress a recommendation to create a joint committee of the Congress to oversee the CIA and other intelligence agencies and went on to Recommendation 4 — that Congress consider making the CIA budget, to some degree, public.
Thus the White House edit both put words into Rockefeller Commissioners’ mouths and dispensed with concerns they had expressed. Apart from the substantive issues raised thereby these actions amounted to direct political interference with a presidential advisory panel. Ford may have been comfortable with his subordinates’ maneuvers, but they helped drain credibility from the Commission’s investigation, as the panel’s own staff had warned in discussions of whether to include its assassinations report (Documents 11, 12, 13, 14).
The White House strategy for releasing the Rockefeller report is detailed in talking points and strategy memoranda (Documents 16,17,18). In the end, in a complete reversal of the actual inquiry, the only assassination material to make it into the report concerned whether the CIA had conspired to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.[iv]
Richard Cheney and Gerald Ford failed in their effort to suppress the assassinations portion of the Commission’s work. Rather, the media, alerted to the issue by the president himself, kept pressing until Ford declared he would turn over the assassinations material to the Church Committee. The president essentially kicked the controversy down the road. The Commission’s files and interview records related to assassinations gave Church investigators a blueprint and a boost in their own inquiry. Senator Church’s committee moved quickly and completed its investigative report in October 1975. Along the way investigators compiled more than 8,000 pages of depositions or testimony, covering 75 witnesses over 60 days of hearings, most held in executive session. Committee staff analyst Loch Johnson, who later authored a classic account of the “Year of Intelligence,” found many revelations almost unbelievable, in some cases “requiring a suspension of disbelief few serious novelists would ask of their readers.”[v]
With the committee at the point of asking that the full Senate release its report, on October 31 President Ford wrote Senator Church to ask that the report be kept secret on national security grounds (Document 21). Several days later the committee voted to reject Ford’s demand, and Church answered his letter on November 4, writing, “in my view the national interest is better served by letting the American people know the true and complete story . . . . We believe that foreign peoples will, upon sober reflection, admire our nation more for keeping faith with our democratic ideals than they will condemn us for the misconduct itself” (Document 22). In a display of legislative strategy, on November 20 the Senate convened in a secret session to debate releasing the Church assassinations report but failed to delay or prevent its being made public, because the committee had approved the report while the full Senate took no vote on whether to enforce a rule that would have held up release.
The sordid story of CIA assassination plots came into the open most authoritatively in the Church report. Its revelations did not destroy the republic, contrary to White House and intelligence community warnings. The committee recommended that a prohibition on assassinations be written into law, even supplying language that could be used in such a statute. Their prohibition would have covered not only foreign officials but members of an “insurgent force, an unrecognized government, or a political party.”[vi]
The White House took a different tack. A steering group of officials working on the political crisis of the “Year of Intelligence,” proposed that President Ford issue an executive order (E.O.) to govern intelligence agencies and operations, and that the order include a prohibition on assassinations. Senator Church objected that anything a president set by fiat could be changed by fiat as well, by means of a future executive action. Besides, the Ford executive order, issued in February 1976, lacked the definition that would have been supplied by the Church Committee-recommended statute. President Jimmy Carter issued his own executive orders on intelligence, in a preliminary form in May 1977 and in a reworked version in January 1978. The assassination prohibition would be widened somewhat, by removing the word “political,” which the Ford E.O. had used as a qualifier (as in “political assassination”), and by extending the ban beyond government employees to anyone working for or on behalf of the United States. The Carter ban would be repeated verbatim in President Ronald Reagan’s E. O. 12333, issued on December 4, 1981. Every subsequent president has continued the ban, and the Reagan E.O. itself remains in force.
[i] See John Prados, The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy and Presidential Power. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp. 160-161.
[ii] Nicolas Djumovic, “Ronald Reagan, Intelligence, William Casey, and the CIA: A Reappraisal,” Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, April 2011, pp. 7-8.
[iii] Prados Family Jewels, pp. 163-165.
[iv](Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States(Rockefeller Report), June 1975, pp. 251-269.
[v] Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985, p. 50. A new edition of this book will appear very shortly from the University of Kansas.
[vi] United States Senate (94th Congress, 1st Session). Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, pp. 289-290.
Dynastic Successions Book 
