Cicero's Lament.
Reflections Upon The Death of David William Belin,
Warren Commission Assistant Counsel.
(June 20, 1928–January 17, 1999)

By David R. Wrone

    In the declining years of ancient Rome as the great Cicero anguished over the impending collapse of the mighty state––conqueror of the known world––he lamented that the eternal city no longer possessed men of good character and high honor to guide it through its unending series of nation–shaking crises. To Cicero as to other troubled Roman thinkers of his era a rigorous and fine moral code played the decisive role for civic leaders to maintain the integrity and to enhance the quality of life in the state. The current leaders of Rome had become willing prisoners of corruption as well as men dedicated to petty self–interest who embraced dark private political intrigues over against the ends of the commonweal.
    Cicero believed that without men of tempered steel Rome must slowly degrade and soon perish. Reflections on his famous admonitions came to mind when I recently read in the New York Times of the death on January 17, 1999, of Attorney David William Belin, former Assistant Counsel of the Warren Commission, a man whose public life embraced virtues starkly antithetical to the cherished Ciceronian ones.[1]
    David William Belin was born on June 20, 1928, in Washington, D. C. and was reared in Sioux City, Iowa. In 1954 he graduated from Michigan Law School and moved that year to Des Moines where he began practicing law. He soon became successful as an attorney, in his later years being recognized as one of the most influential lawyers in the United States. He was quite wealthy. He had a large family, was influential in numerous meaningful charities, and was noted as an outstanding leader in Reform Judaism, especially concerned with interfaith marriages. Numerous friends lamented his passing.
    It is fair to state he took intense pride in his public service on two controversial federal commissions, but most especially on the Warren Commission. They seem to stand in his life as his only dazzling trophy for the Iowan attorney to display to his legion of associates, friends, and clients as the remainder of his three score and ten years were by the standards of any candid objective judgment mediocre and common.
    In 1964 Belin served as an Assistant Counsel on the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission, playing a major role. In 1975 President Gerald Ford appointed him director of the Rockefeller Commission to investigate the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Unlike other members of the eighty–four person staff of the Warren Commission who after a brief sally at rebutting incessant and copious charges of corruption and cover–up in the investigation and withdrew from the public fray, Belin spent the rest of his life publicly defending its findings. He was not shy. He spoke often and wrote extensively, including among his array of accomplishments two books that carefully affirmed the federal findings.
    To those without subject knowledge or any basis for making an informed judgment the former assistant counsel appeared from the public record he left to be an unimpeachable, sincere, unwavering defender of the Commission's work, an intrepid figure in his fierce stance against the legion of skeptics, nay sayers, and critics. Typical of this strange class of Belin supporters is Harrison Salisbury, famed managing editor of The New York Times, who in the introduction of Belin's first book, November 22, 1963, called it, "overpowering", "meticulous, precise and all embracing".[2] Another representative estimate of him by the benighted came from the editor of the Ames Tribune, Michael Gartner, who opined, "Belin . . . [knew] more about that assassination than did anyone else in the world".[3]
    Belin's personal affairs, his religious concerns and activities, his legal practice, his many significant charities, his financial advice, his directorships of several financial institutions, and his numerous friendships are of no concern for us here. Indeed, a candid person reading the printed record would be forced to conclude he led a solid private life and had a solid professional career, at least the way the ordinary of this earth measures merit.
    Our concern with Belin lies, however, in a different realm than the personal, that of his public service, primarily that portion concerned with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as well as with the nature of his thirty–four years of red dog defense of those seven fateful months of his life. It is there, in the record fully displayed in the public arena of his life, that we shall take the true measure of the man and levy an impartial judgment on the performance of his duty and its consequent impact upon our society.
    Perhaps a note on his physical appearance is in order. He stood a little less than six feet tall, and at the first glance a viewer would note he was relatively thin. He consistently dressed in expensive suits and white shirts, wearing typically a bow tie that revealed a too wide expanse of whiteness from his shirt to frame a head that one immediately thought was just slightly too small for the body. His chin was sharp, his ears clearly seen because of an ever–present neat haircut. The mouth was large and wide, overly so, the throat thin. The nose was slightly bulbous, but not to the disturbance of the face balance.
    What struck one most about his appearance were his eyes. Nature appeared not to have set them quite deep enough into the face. They clashed with a physical ailment of an unexplained nature. Beginning in the later seventies a facial tick or sudden severe squinting of his right eye began to be noticed in his television appearances, reaching in the eighties a very pronounced stage that disturbed anyone who watched him. He further seemed to acerbate the squint with an intense passion on an issue accompanied by a high energy level. On assassination issues he put forth too much passion, showed too much intensity, suggestive of a poseur, making a viewer uncomfortable while his staccato–like voice patterns and imperious tone carried the impression that he was condescending.
    The original composer of his personal attributes had somehow omitted the qualities of grace and decency to be employed when dealing with the subject of the assassination. He disdainfully refused even under the most objective of conditions to accord those responsible men and women who dissented from the official findings of the Warren Commission even the semblance of polite intercourse or exercise those social amenities that make us a human community and historically has stabilized us as a nation.
    This remark is easily misunderstood. It is common for most defenders of the Report and of Belin in particular to lump all critics of the official findings on the assassination investigation together, the responsible, the irrational, the erratic, and those who exploit, but this is as presumptive of the nature of their work as it is wrong. The responsible critics, the subject matter masters, whom Belin well knew about, are decent, articulate, polite, serious persons and with motivations of the highest order.
    An example of his treatment of critics drawn from his public appearances displays this character flaw. On a late seventies television show in Milwaukee, the Ralph Adam Fine Show, Belin before the program began crudely broke his verbal agreement and refused to appear on the same show with a genuine and respectable subject matter master critic. He caustically declined to greet the critic who was finally slated to follow him on the second portion of the program, and refused to even sit in the same waiting room with him. But at the close of the Belin portion of the session the "country lawyer" as he often referred to himself, relished, indeed strange to say actually blushed, at the lavish praise heaped on him by a noisome claque of abysmally ignorant college students and lost local right–wing admirers who like sheep to a bellwether had bleatingly crowded the studio to obtain his autograph for purposes unknown.
    This personal quality of spurn and insult to responsible critics unfortunately permeated Belin's being to form a core element that manifested itself in other dimensions of his public character. At the level of his writings and speeches on the assassination and coupled with his abysmal ignorance of the facts, this trait converted his efforts to address the crime into a type of blatant partisan argument. A careful review of his published works would immediately confirm this for even the most skeptical reader. They are stripped of most references to dissenting authors (except one or two favorite bete noirs like Mark Lane, notorious for scholarly ineptness, and straw men easily and joyfully pummeled by defenders of the Report) and are devoid of all references to the hundreds of thousands of pages of released federal documents, and massive amounts of documents disgorged by court cases. One would never imagine from reading his works that there were 3,000,000 pages of material available. He does not cite one. Unencumbered by the world of clashing, sifting scholarship normal historians and responsible researchers must contend with, he wrote his "true" history to the strident trumpets of great publicity and lavishly bestowed honor, at least among the elite press and media and certainly grateful politicians. An illustration is appropriate.
    In the summer of 1971 Sylvia Meagher published an article in a Texas weekly that severely undermined the testimony of a key Commission witness, Charles Givens.[4] Givens was a book handler in the Depository and had been the only person the Commission could muster to place Oswald on the sixth floor near the scene of the crime just before the assassination. The Report had said: "Givens thought this was about 11:55 a. m."[5] But Meagher demonstrated Givens had initially and emphatically placed him on the first floor at about that time. Belin published a rebuttal article in the same issue.[6]
    Meagher carefully noted that the records of the Commission show that on November 22, the day of the assassination, Givens had given authorities not one but two affidavits that revealed a starkly different account than the official one. In the shorter first one to Dallas police Givens noted he had left the sixth floor at 11:30 and gone to lunch.[7] In the extended second given later in the day he related to two FBI agents that he had gone to lunch and "at 11:50 a. m. he had seen Oswald reading a paper in the 'domino room' on the first floor".[8] Meagher then noted a FBI agent Robert Gemberling's February 13 report of a conversation with Lt. Jack Revill of the Dallas PD. He, Revill, Gemberling wrote, "stated Givens had been previously handled . . . on a marijuana charge and he believes that Givens would change his story for money."[9]
    Belin was acutely aware of Givens' affidavits for their content spill out in his Commission working papers. In a memorandum of February 25, 1964, with fellow Commission lawyer Joe Ball, David Belin wrote that Givens attested to seeing Oswald in the domino room just before noon and that three other witnesses also placed Oswald on the first floor at that time.[10] The next reference to Givens appeared on April 8 when he appeared in secret session before Belin in Dallas to be deposed with no one else present except the court reporter.[11] Under carefully constructed questions from Belin, the fully prepped Givens replied he had never told "anyone that" he "saw Lee Oswald reading a newspaper in the domino room around 11:50" and proceeded to place Oswald on the sixth floor.[12] Manifestly untrue, and to Belin's certain knowledge untrue, for he had in his lawyer's files Givens' sworn statements to the contrary, Givens' official account becomes the official story and sustains the lone Oswald as the assassin theory.
    Belin, by this record, suborned perjury. With such a serious documented account by Meagher placed before him and before the world one would suppose Belin would carefully respond. He did not.
    Belin replied to Meagher's charge of irregularity by the extraordinary tactic of not addressing any of the salient facts in the article! Instead he slandered her by calling her a "deceiver" and a "sensationalist" writer. How revealing of his standard of scholarship. It was patent office simple: If one agreed with the Warren Report that person was objective and good, if not one became a despised sensationalist and irresponsible critic of American institutions. Belin proceeded to discuss in detail only the closed–door April testimony of Givens for all the world as if that was the only evidence of merit to be addressed. It was not relevant to the documented charges. He then doted over his self–defined crushing of Meagher the sensationalist.
    Any serious reader of Meagher's article would immediately observe its scholarly base, neutral vocabulary, careful development, and no charges levied or suggested but only germane questioning put forth. To her many friends Meagher was the epitome of reserve, dignified in appearance, polite, careful in her comments, fair to the point of exasperation, and serious. But such was the public character of David Belin that he chose to defame a lady rather than confront her facts.
    Belin's harsh treatment of Sylvia Meagher typifies the character of his approach to the investigation of JFK's assassination. This was true from his first week of work. He actually violated the fundamental premise of objectivity that underpins honest work in discussion of criminal matters a sine qua non of procedure. He began his work at the Warren Commission with the unforgivable and political premise of Oswald's lone guilt in the assassination and developed "evidence" to fit that thesis. The supporting documentation to sustain that statement is of the best and unquestionable.
    In a January 30, 1964, memorandum, to J. Lee Rankin, General Counsel of the Commission and in charge of the inquiry, Belin at the preliminary stage of the investigation sets forth an extended discussion of the evidence that revolves around the presumptive conclusion Oswald was the assassin of President Kennedy.[13] By this presumption of guilt Belin is exposed as a fabricator. A caution is in order. His scenario outlined in the memorandum is not what many casual observers might rush to judgment and call a theory that Oswald killed President Kennedy, for a theory has as its basis some elements of fact that must be utilized. In January Belin simply had no facts, had done no investigation. Nothing. For the next seven months he followed his fabrication blindly and doggedly to the expense of truth, to the subordination of fact, and to the disavowal of his duty, embracing in his own character the very charge of scholarly corruption that for the next thirty years he falsely tried to tar the responsible critics.
    Let us next turn to Belin's treatment of the murder of Police Officer J. D. Tippit murder, his of handling witnesses, and some further instances of his treatment of evidence.
    By facts alone the Commission could not get Oswald to the scene of the Tippit murder in time to have killed the police office since the evidence clearly excluded him. It assigned the task of overriding the barrier of evidence to Belin.  Belin placed much emphasis on the murder of Tippit.[14] According to the official (and Belin's) scenario Oswald fled the Depository[15], took a taxi[16] and performed the physical impossible by getting off at three different stops[17] and then walked three blocks[18] to his rooming house[19], picked up his pistol[20] and jacket[21], left[22] at 1:03[23], walked[24] a mile[25], shot Officer Tippit[26] who had stopped him for questioning[27], and then had fled to the Texas theater[28]. Tippit's murder, Belin argued, was the key to understanding the murder of JFK, for here the evidence was clear and overwhelming of the murderous nature of Oswald.[29] He often referred to the murder as the Rosetta Stone of the assassination,[30] earning for himself among critics the deprecating sobriquet of "The Rosetta Stone Man".[31]
    Let us examine how Belin determined that Oswald killed Tippit.[32] In the complete absence of evidence he utilized the bizarre technique of reconstruction. If he, Belin, could reconstruct the crime the way he imagined Oswald must have done it, then Oswald killed Tippit. This device to skirt the absence of facts must strike even the most resolute supporter of the Commission as the stuff of the irrational but it is the repeated tactic of Belin. Of course, he had no other alternative. Nor was he alone. The Warren Commission consistently resorted to this desperate method throughout its investigation of the crimes of November 22. In Belin's hands though the invented flourished as a great method to deceive.
    Belin consciously omits from his account exculpatory evidence Oswald could not have reached the Tippit murder scene in time to have killed him. Observe how he fiddles with and masks the time to frame Oswald rather than to seek the truth. The Report asserted Officer Tippit died at 1:15[33] because Domingo Benavides called the murder in over the officer's car radio at 1:16.[34] Since Oswald left the rooming house after 1:03, not at 1:03[35] that gives Oswald less than twelve minutes to walk one mile.[36] Belin timed the walk from the rooming house at seventeen minutes and forty five seconds[37] without objective monitoring of his fidelity to fact that an error ridden map he entered as evidence makes suspect.[38] That means Oswald could not have arrived at the scene of the crime until 1:22[39] or seven minutes or more after Tippit was dead.[40] In the Report Belin renders the timing of Oswald's walk from the rooming house to the scene of the murder invisible[41], leaving the reader without that concrete reference. This is in a text studded with various facts and assorted times trusting readers must assume Oswald could and he did reach the scene in time.[42] Yet, even with his own walk disproving Oswald's culpability Belin knew from the police logs as well as from citizen Benavides[43] who told him that he was not the first person to call in the murder.[44]
    At 1:10 T. F. Bowley had called in the murder[45] and Tippit was already dead when he had arrived on the scene[46] making the murder of the officer by Oswald an absolute impossibility for he would not and could not arrive for another 12 minutes.[47] To overcome the impossible Belin simple rendered Bowley invisible like a picture of a second edition Soviet encyclopedia missing a figure that was in the first edition.[48] Bowley was never deposed[49]; he does not appear in the Report[50]. Years later a critic braced Belin on his lie. In an April 1975 debate at Vanderbilt University critic Harold Weisberg confronted Belin with his duplicitous use of Benavides instead of Bowley to fabricate Oswald's time. A flustered Belin changed the subject.[51] That exposing session is why he never again ventured on a public platform with genuine subject matter masters, but either appeared solo or with theorists who knew not the facts, yet they prattled.
    Belin treated the evidence and eyewitnesses to the Tippit murder scene with the same sustained deceit and false depiction as he had in his timing of Oswald's alleged walk. He had to. He had no other choice if the Commission's dictates that Oswald was the murderer were to be carried out. First we note the absence in the record of information on what should have been done. Belin and the FBI and the police did not go door to door and search for evidence and eyewitnesses to the shooting. You would never know of this dedicated refusal to follow standard investigative techniques and employ commonsense from the works of Belin or from the many Commission statements and its records. By silence they render this exceptional instance of corruption invisible in order to perfect a Procrustean bed they had prepared of Oswald's guilt.
    Second, Belin corrupted evidence. Charlie Virginia Davis' experience is typical of the witnesses the Des Moines country lawyer used.[52] She first described a man as the killer who was different from Oswald and related how he had stopped in flight and emptied his pistol for the second time[53] and left empty shells for her to find.[54] But what was the reality? Actually she was lying in bed in her living room at the time of the shooting but nevertheless picked Oswald out of a police line up improperly composed of men in good dress, of different age, and with calm composure to highlight the tee–shirt clad, bruised and cussing Oswald.[55] She did this after she had seen him on television and her mind had been falsely primed by these suggestive images, and then she said she could not "say for sure".[56]
    There were three types of empty shells found at the scene, four 38 caliber's of two different manufactures[57] and one 7.5mm.[58] The latter was soon dropped from sight. None of them connected with Oswald's pistol.[59] The bullet slugs allegedly found in Tippit's body actually dribbled into the Commission offices from Dallas police over a period of three months, found in odd drawers and the like, which is as tainted a chain of possession and as irregular a procedure as could be imagined, which Belin carefully masks. They were never linked to Oswald's pistol.[60]
    Oswald had absolutely nothing to do with the murder of Tippit.
    In other parts of the assassination investigation Belin treated other witnesses and evidence with the same corrupt devices as he did in the Tippit murder. The cab driver, William Whaley, was used to trace Oswald from the Depository to the rooming house.[61] A farce of a witness he would do well as a buffoon in a rural tent show.[62] He testified Oswald wore two jackets when he wore none[63], that he left Oswald at three different addresses[64]. He picked the wrong man, No. 3, from the police line–up[65], that he signed a blank affidavit for the District Attorney's office "to fill in"[66]. He could not identify Belin himself after Belin had picked him up and driven him from the airport three weeks earlier and had spoken with him that morning before deposition.[67] Under Belin's transmogrifying writing skills, however, this disaster of a witness becomes a key and solid witness in the investigation of the murder of the President of the United States.[68]
    Of the thousand persons in Dealey Plaza William Brennan alone could be found who would place Oswald in the sixth floor window,[69] a man who also saw three Negro employees used as ear witnesses in two windows just below.[70] He sat on a wall on the far side of Elm Street and claimed to have looked up at the windows.[71] He picked Oswald out of the police line–up.[72]
    But Brennan testified to a physical impossibility, that the Oswald figure stood and pointed his rifle.[73] On the Zapruder film Brennan is seen not looking up.[74] He viewed the police line up twice.[75] The first time he swore Oswald was not the man he saw.[76] He went home where he saw Oswald twice on television and then went back to the police station.[77] The second time he picked out Oswald, which is simple perjury.[78]
    Belin took this treasured and lone witness to Dealey Plaza to reenact his testimony, finding in the play a substitute for life. To assist his man the assistant counsel closed all the windows in the Depository except the window from where Oswald was supposed to have fired the shot and the two windows where the three Negroes allegedly squatted.[79] Later during testimony he asked Brennan to look at a photograph made of the reenactment view and to circle the window where he had seen Oswald and the windows where he had seen the three Negroes. Brennan selected a closed window on the fifth for the three Negroes, one that could not be opened, and circled two that Oswald stood in, a closed one and its open pair on the sixth, an impossibility too.[80] He becomes a key Belin witness corrupted to place Oswald in the window at the time of the assassination, another perjurer that the Commission built its case upon.[81]
    David W. Belin's most important task for the corrosive forces controlling the simulated or sham investigation came when he, and he alone, manipulated the evidence to put Oswald at the scene of JFK's murder. Without his efforts the Warren Commission would have been unable to charge Oswald with the crime.
    In the first months of its inquiry the Commission struggled against the solid and unimpeachable evidence that Oswald was not on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting, which exonerated Oswald from having fired the shots that killed JFK. This implacable barrier appeared impossible to circumvent by sophistry and misrepresentation or to ignore by mockery and deprecation for the problem had become generally circulated in the press.
    Almost immediately after the shooting had begun on November 22 motorcycle policeman Marrion Baker had abandoned his cycle at curbside and had rushed into the Depository where he joined building manager Roy Truly in a mad dash up the stairs to the higher floors.[82] From the second floor landing Baker saw Oswald in a lunchroom through the small window of an automated door. Baker and Truly entered the room where the officer confronted Oswald "calmly standing"[83] at a Coke machine who Truly said worked in the Depository. The two then proceeded up the stairs to continue their search. Examination of witnesses and consideration of the physical difficulties made Oswald's flight from the sixth floor to the Coke machine to arrive before the panting Baker and Truly did impossibility. This excluded Oswald as the assassin. And, Baker did meet Oswald. This is established by Truly.[84]
    It is at this point that Belin enters. His task was to make the evidence prove Oswald could have fired the shots on six, scrambled down four flights of stairs in time to meet Baker. In the absence of fact, he contrived a faked reconstruction and asserted that to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He timed Oswald twice and Baker twice.
    For Oswald he utilized a FBI agent to run from the window on the sixth floor to the second floor.[85] The agent in rushing through the door to the stairs handed the rifle off to Secret Service Joe Howlett who walked over to a stack of boxes to simulate the hiding of the rifle. The first flight of the FBI agent to the second floor took 1:18 minutes and the second time 1:14.[86] But fakery suffused it all.
    The rifle had been originally found by deputy sheriff Seymour Weitzman well hidden under some boxes. "It was covered with boxes. It was well protected . . . I would say eight or nine of us stumbled over that gun a couple of times."[87] To hide the rifle inside a wall of boxes beneath heavy boxes according to the evidence and to wipe the boxes clean of fingerprints would take much more time, perhaps a minute more. No one ran on the sixth floor, so the agent would have to add more time to accommodate a walk.[88] The rifle was cleaned; the slowly closing automatic door had to be firmly shut after Oswald passed through it for Baker found it closed; he had to be inside twenty feet.[89] None of this was included, which would add many more seconds if not a minute to the time.
    From the outside Baker was timed from curb to the Coke machine in 1:30 and in 1:14.[90] But he faked Baker's route too. He had Baker walk when actually Baker made a mad dash careening people aside.[91] He started after the last shot when Baker started at the sound of the first, adding five seconds.[92]
    The facts of the reenactment meant Baker got to the lunchroom over a minute, perhaps two minutes, before Oswald could possibly travel down the stairs to the lunchroom, which is a physical impossibility and means Oswald was not on the sixth floor at all over the noon hour. At the same time two women employees on the fifth floor left immediately after the shots and traveled down the stairs, the only way down, and Oswald was not on the stairs nor heard.[93] If in flight he had to have been on the stairs at that time. Belin simply made them invisible. Jack Dougherty was on the fourth near the stairs and he heard no one on the stairs.[94] His testimony was ignored.
    Throughout his tenure as assistant counsel and later as an author Belin upheld FBI intimidation of witnesses, a characteristic feature of the Bureau's brutal investigation of the crime. One of the numerous illustrations of Belin's support of its tactics is in their efforts to force the eyewitness Arnold Louis Rowland to change his testimony given before Belin.[95] Rowland, whose memory was keen and had points within it independently affirmed, testified that prior to the arrival of the Presidential limousine he saw someone other than Oswald in the sixth–floor easternmost window of the Depository and saw other armed men in other windows. This was entirely unsatisfactory to the FBI who had decided on November 22 that Oswald alone and unaided slew JFK.[96]
    The FBI's treatment of Rowland is clear. It was part of Belin's files and was utilized by him without qualm and without revealing to the public the severe twisting of Rowland's arm by the Bureau. Trying to force testimony from a young and decent witness in a presidential murder was of no significance for Belin when he served higher interests than performing his sworn duty. Two agents visited Rowland seven times to interview him, were harsh in their treatment of him, and possibly visited him on other occasions not recorded, as they attempted to change his story. He stood fast. His wife also testified and buttressed his statements.[97] But when she sought to change an error in the transcript of her testimony, Belin refused her permission.[98] He changed his own errors, however.[99]
    In 1975 President Gerald Ford appointed Belin director of the Rockefeller Commission, a necessary step to save his presidency. Ford faced a quandary brought on by the popular disgust and anger at the Central Intelligence Agency relating in part to charges it assassinated JFK: If the inquiry into the assassination conducted by the Rockefeller Commission was to go amiss it would wreck Ford by demonstrating that as a Warren Commission member he participated in a deliberate cover–up of the facts of the crime and framed Oswald. Belin was guarantee that would not occur. The choice of "the country lawyer" proved the excellence of presidential judgment, for Belin carefully conducting a sham inquiry.
    How successful was he? Twenty years after his investigation the Assassination Records Board pulled 250,000 documents on Oswald from the CIA files that Belin had refused to seek.[100] And that is only the tip of the iceberg, for masses remain, perhaps now forever unattainable. In the course of his work Belin also received the results of the CIA study of the Zapruder film that showed shots were fired at times incompatible with the lone gunman theory, requiring a conspiracy to have operated on Dealey Plaza. With that certain scientific study in his hand Belin elected to bury it in the files and did not report upon it. Yet even with knowledge of that devastating finding he shamelessly continued to address the nation and chastise dissenters from the official conclusions on the murder with the patently false charge that only Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK.[101]
    It is a singular fact that the publications and major articles of David W. Belin appeared only under the aegis of the powerful newspapers and media who have resolutely sustained the findings of the Warren Commission and those of its faithful echo Belin. Moreover, they have done this with an unbroken fierceness reminiscent of followers of a perverted religious ideology rather than being objective critical examiners of ideas and institutions. The only enemies of Belin's work on the assassination investigation lay external to these power systems: honesty, decency, fidelity, and love of country held by responsible commercial publishers, weekly magazines of critical opinion, rural press, and dissenting scholars.
    How do we account for the praises of Belin's Commission work? These are without exception by individuals ignorant of the facts. Harrison Salisbury's laudatory introduction to Belin's first book can be dismissed as the desperate efforts of an ideologue to promote a political understanding of the assassination. He possessed neither factual knowledge of President Kennedy's assassination nor an understanding of the literature of dissent. Nor did his reporters on the Times. His is an imagined view, an ideological construction of the nature of American society and is husk not grain. The ludicrous commentary by the Ames Tribune' editor that Belin possessed superior, indeed imperial, knowledge about the assassination is dust of Belin's incessant propaganda promoted by persons who obviously have no concept of how to grapple with the facts of the crime of presidential assassination.
    David W. Belin represented one of those small men of corrupt principles who dot the American landscape of the twentieth century, one made without conscience, devoid of shame, and shorn of wisdom who operate at the second level of federal government to maintain those forces and individuals of reaction opposed to public government. Those men promote a private agenda corrosive to the democratic way of life. Fortuitously placed in life, endowed with great wealth and provided a fine education, he possessed sufficient material means to furnish himself and family not only a decent life but also one with a cup overflowing. He only had to choose a life with meaning.
    Belin spurned the proper path of truth and justice, decency and principle. He consciously aided and carefully abetted an American form of coup d'etat both by framing an innocent person for the murder of the chief executive and by enabling a proper inquiry to be blocked. To achieve this diabolical end he suborned perjury on numerous occasions, consistently corrupted physical facts, and baldly lied about chronologies; he misrepresented fundamental facts, clipped from the record critical information, and ignored the mitigating statements of many witnesses. In the course of his activities he permitted as he encouraged FBI agents to intimidate witnesses, falsify reconstruction scenarios, and omit from their interviewing tactics primary witnesses and essential physical evidence that would have exonerated Lee Harvey Oswald.
    Without Belin to falsify the criminal investigation the Warren Commission could never have constructed its Report and would have been unable to charge Oswald with the murder of the President of the United States. He was an indispensable person. He knew beyond quibble on which side of the grisly issue his immediate opportunities lay and understood how to construct from it his future career as a man of insight and special purpose. And, he was also quite capable of doing it.
    Cicero's lament that a powerful state faces mortal dangers arising from the inimical acts of men without principles seems especially prescient and applicable to the modern American nation. The actions of David W. Belin in deliberately corrupting evidence in the investigation of President Kennedy's murder to block a legitimate inquiry while fastening the guilt upon an innocent man certainly demonstrates its outcome. From the perspective of the twentieth century Belin's character perfectly fits in the expanding world of the 1930s National Socialist state of Germany as well as those forces dismantling the old, once cherished, democratic United States of America.

David W. Belin, June 20, 1928–January 17, 1999

Belin, David W. Final Disclosure: the full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy.  New York: Scribner's, 1988.

Belin, David W.  November 22, 1963.  You are the Jury.  New York: New York Times Book Co., 1973.

Belin, David W.  "Truth Was My Only Goal", The Texas Observer, August 13, 1971.

"David Belin, co–owner of Tribune, dies at 70," Ames (Iowa) Tribune, January 18, 1999.

Gartner, Michael, "David Belin was a kind man and a good friend," Ames (Iowa) Tribune, January 18, 1999.

Hansel, Jeff. "Eminent attorney Belin dies," The Des Moines Register, January 18, 1999.

Hearings Before the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.  Washington: GPO, 1964.  26 volumes.

Meagher, Sylvia.  "The Curious Testimony of Mr. Givens," The Texas Observer, August 13, 1971.

Pace, Eric.  "David W. Belin, Warren Commission Lawyer, Dies at 70," New York Times, January 18, 1999.

"Prominent Des Moines Attorney Dies," Associated Press.  January 18, 1999.

Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Washington: GPO, 1964.

Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States.  Washington: GPO, 1955.  The Rockefeller Commission.

Roffman, Howard.  Presumed Guilty.  Lee Harvey Oswald in the Assassination of President Kennedy.  Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975.

Warren Commission records.  National Archives.

Weisberg, Harold.  Post Mortem.  Frederick, MD: by the author, 1975.
            X, 54–55, 333, 403, 470, 490–493, 501, 503, 606.        

Weisberg, Harold.  Whitewash. New York:  Dell edition, 1966.
            61, 85, 87, 93–5, 118, 153–7, 208.
            Author edition, 1965. 21, 36–37, 41–42, 56, 77–79, 110–111.

Weisberg, Harold, Whitewash II. New York: Dell edition, 1967.
            Chapter 8, 120–153.
            Author edition, 1966.            Chapter 8, 71–93.

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