No verbal description really captures the voluminous and disorganized nature of the twenty-six volumes [of the Warren Commission investigation]. Numerous side trips were necessary to relate the approximately eight thousand pages of documentary exhibits in the last eleven volumes to the five thousand pages of testimony in the first fifteen. Given a normal schedule and a reasonable curiosity, that task could easily stretch to a year.
In 1965 the twenty-six volumes lacked an index. They were like a library without a card catalog. One had to plow through everything to find anything. The chaos seemed planned. In 1965, the prevailing climate was one of confusion and a sense of mystery, an uneasy feeling the government was deliberately hiding something.
Volume 18 began with eighty pages containing the Zapruder film and the first mystery: Four frames were missing. A splice appeared across frame 212 with no explanation. Immediately following the Zapruder frames were State Department telegrams concerning the Oswald case. One cable referred to the accused as “Lee Harvey Oswald, former Marine and …” And what? Forty-two spaces were blanked out. What was under that excision, asked one wit: ”… star of stage, screen, and radio”?
In volume 22 were reports filed by the Secret Service agents who were with Kennedy in Dallas. Why were so many of them dated November 29, 1963?
Volume 23 contained a 216-page FBI transcript of the Dallas Police radio on November 22; but wasn’t there a 134-page transcript back in volume 17? Oh, well, there must have been two transcripts. No, in face there were three — one in volume 17, one in volume 21, and a third in volume 23. What were the differences? To compare them carefully and find out could take one person about two weeks.
David S. Lifton