Three days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a high Justice Department official urged that results of the FBI's investigation be made public to combat any notion that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone.
"The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, that he did not have confederates who are still at large, and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial," Nicholas DeB. Katzenbach wrote in a memo to the White House.Katzenbach then was deputy attorney general, outranked in the department only by Robert F. Kennedy, the slain president's brother. An FBI official, relaying Katzenbach's memo to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, said Katzenbach felt "he is having no success in selling the White House on the idea."
The memo was among thousands of Kennedy assassination files released for public viewing Friday by the National Archives.
It was known, from documents released six months ago, that President Johnson initially resisted the idea of creating a federal commission to investigate the assassination. In a conversation with a friend, he said, "This under Texas law. . . . We don't send in a bunch of carpetbaggers."
Katzenbach's memorandum was dated Nov. 25, 1963, the day after Oswald, the suspected assassin, was shot to death by Jack Ruby while being transferred by Dallas police.
"Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the communists," Katzenbach wrote. The words in parentheses are as he wrote them.
"Unfortunately, the facts on Oswald seem about too pat, too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.)," he wrote. "The Dallas police have put out statements on the communist conspiracy theory, and it was they who were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced."
Katzenbach said facts had been mixed with rumors and speculation.