Distortion in intellectual history is not a direct function of distance from the present. The recent past can create its own problems of perspective. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is a case in point. Is the controversy surrounding the assassination a worthy subject for an intellectual historian? After all, there is now little serious debate as to what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Mainstream historians regard the case as closed,Footnote ¹ an issue settled by the exhaustive and fair-minded deliberations of the Warren Commission, whose report, issued in the autumn of 1964, concluded that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, a sad and unsettled individual from a dysfunctional background, had killed the president. However, as we know, the topic remains, almost half a century later, a matter of huge fascination, but only outside the gates of the academy. The study of Kennedy's assassination is now best known to academics as a counterculture, which grossly caricatures the best practices of the academy and where extravagant theories tend to trump sound scholarship, plausibility and common sense. Indeed, this disjunction between the obsessions of amateur historians, known as buffs,Footnote ² and the reluctance of academic historians to lose caste by exploring subjects such as the Kennedy assassination which the wider public—but only the wider public—seems to find worthy of further research and explanation is, as Professor W. D. Rubinstein notes, an interesting sociological and historiographical phenomenon in its own right.Footnote ³ Writing in 1994, Max Holland, the journalist and intelligence historian, noted that the history of the Kennedy era was “bifurcated”. For academic historian writing on the Kennedy presidency the assassination is “treated as a footnote or afterthought if it is addressed at all”, while “very few of the more than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles that compose the vast assassination literature published since 1964 have been written by historians.”Footnote ⁴

Yet our current assumption that the assassination has long attracted only mavericks tends to obscure the topic's former salience among intellectuals. Matters were, it is sometimes forgotten, rather different in the mid-1960s, when the Kennedy assassination was also an issue of pressing concern to historians, philosophers and jurists. It raised central questions about the authority of sources, the reliability of evidence and the basic procedures of investigation, whether scholarly or juridical. Was the report of the Warren Commission to be taken at face value? Was it not, rather, to be treated like any historical document—set in context and subjected to rigorous historical analysis?

Nowhere did the Warren Commission provoke more high-level intellectual engagement than among Britain's university dons.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, it was in the United Kingdom that serious reservations about the Warren Commission first surfaced in the academic mainstream. In an apparently hyperactive dotage, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), the renowned mathematician, philosopher, Nobel Prize-winner for literature and former fellow and lecturer of Trinity College, Cambridge, established a British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee in 1964. Or, at least, as we shall see, a committee of this sort was set up under his supposed auspices, but whose principal begetter was, most probably, Russell's amanuensis, the American political activist Ralph Schoenman (b. 1935). One of the members of the British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee, Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003), the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, was prolific and outspoken in his public challenges to the orthodoxies of the Warren Commission. In turn, Trevor-Roper's outspokenness elicited a series of vigorous rebuttals from John Sparrow (1906–92), the warden of All Souls College, Oxford. Other leading intellectuals played a part in the debates. Among the defenders of the Warren Commission were Sir Denis Brogan (1900–74), a pre-eminent expert in modern French and American history who held the chair of political science at Cambridge University; Sir John Foster (1904–82), an MP and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, since 1924; and Arthur Goodhart (1891–1978), the American jurist who attained academic distinction in England first for a remarkable fifty-year stint as editor of the Law Quarterly Review and then as master of University College, Oxford, the first American to become head of an Oxford college. Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), the historian, prophet and author of the mammoth multivolume A Study of History (1934–61), declined Russell's invitation to join the British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee, but is thanked, along with Trevor-Roper, in the acknowledgements of the best-selling critique of the Warren Commission by Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment (1966). Moreover, both Trevor-Roper and Sparrow, as well as their friend, the philosopher Stuart Hampshire (1914–2004),Footnote ⁶ had connections to or corresponded with Professor Richard H. Popkin (1923–2005), the pioneering American historian of philosophy and expert on the sceptical tradition in Western thought, who was also one of the most dogged critics of the Warren Commission within the American intelligentsia. Indeed, it was Hampshire who brought Popkin's interpretation of the assassination to the attention of Robert Silvers (b. 1929), the editor of the New York Review of Books, in which it was first aired.

* * *

The prevailing culture of paranoia was all too apparent at the time of the assassination itself. Indeed, the American historian Richard Hofstadter (1916–70) first presented his influential essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at the University of Oxford on 21 November 1963, the very day before the assassination.Footnote ⁷ In January 1964 Brogan, a prescient commentator on American affairs, noted, ‘What legends will grow up around the death of John Kennedy it is too early to say.’Footnote ⁸ Yet within a few months—after an initial flurry of speculation and rumour-mongering had died down—the first wave of conspiracy theorists turned out to be few in number, uninfluential and largely confined to the margins of American culture. The main outlet for conspiracy theorists was a small, independent, New Jersey-based alternative monthly entitled the Minority of One, run by the Polish-born activist and political scientist M. S. Arnoni (1922–85), which began to run a number of pieces on the assassination from January 1964.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, only two books advancing conspiracy theories had been published by the time of the Warren Commission Report's appearance in September 1964. The first, by Thomas Buchanan, an American communist expatriate living in Paris, was more influential in Europe than in America. Indeed, in the published version of “The Paranoid Style”, Hofstadter noted in a footnote that “conspiratorial explanations of Kennedy's assassination have a far wider currency in Europe than they do in the United States”.Footnote ¹⁰ The other book to appear, which coincided with the report's publication, was Joachim Joesten's Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?. Joesten was a German-born Communist who had come to the United States to escape the Nazis, and who still retained strong leftist attachments, and the book was published by Carl Aldo Marzani (1912–94), an Italian-born American communist and Soviet frontman who, according to the evidence of the defector Vasili Mitrokhin, was in receipt of subsidies from the KGB.Footnote ¹¹ Predictably, Joesten attributed the assassination to a right-wing conspiracy, which happened to be the prevailing interpretation of the events of Dallas in senior Soviet circles.

Another marginal figure who was quick to question the conventional interpretation of events was the progressive lawyer and minor New York politician Mark Lane (b. 1927).Footnote ¹² In December 1963 a small, progressive paper, the National Guardian, carried a piece from Lane which was ostensibly the brief for Oswald's defence.Footnote ¹³ Oswald had, of course, already been killed by Ruby, and there was no need for a legal defence. Nevertheless, as a result of the publicity which the piece attracted, Lane's name and offer to represent Oswald came to the attention of Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, who retained Lane as Lee Harvey Oswald's defence counsel, at least for a short time. By April 1964, however, Marguerite Oswald and Mark Lane had fallen out. At this point Lane found a new vehicle for his championship of Oswald's cause, founding the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry, a populist counterweight to the Warren Commission, which was easily depicted as a select group of Establishment insiders.

Lane, through his connection with Bertrand Russell's amanuensis, Ralph Schoenman, played a critical role in the enlistment of key members of the British intelligentsia to the cause—at least at first—of due process and scepticism about the secret machinations of the Warren Commission, which met behind closed doors. In 1964 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation brought Lane to London. The key figure in this process was Schoenman, who ran the British branch of Lane's Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry and, it is reasonable to assume, was the moving force behind the British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee.

Schoenman was known to family and friends of the philosopher as “Russell's viper”. In the words of Ray Monk, Russell's biographer, Schoenman had “bright staring eyes and a carefully trimmed beard that, with no accompanying moustache, looked like a helmet-strap.”Footnote ¹⁴ Schoenman had studied philosophy at Princeton, and had come to the London School of Economics to do postgraduate work under the supervision of Ralph Miliband (1924–94), an influential figure on the New Left. He had first come to Russell's attention in the summer of 1960 when he wrote to the philosopher advocating a campaign of mass civil disobedience against nuclear weaponry. As he later confessed in a document disowning Schoenman, Russell was “by no means immune to flattery” which, somewhat surprisingly in the case of a Nobel Prize-winner, was “so rare as to be sweet” to his ears.Footnote ¹⁵

By this stage, Russell had modestly assumed the role of a non-governmental spokesman for mankind in general. The philosopher's court at his cottage in Wales had assumed the role of an independent arbiter of international affairs whose standing came from Russell's intellectual and—more controversially—moral authority. What mattered was not so much the actual words the philosopher might compose on a particular issue so much as his general endorsement of a stance. Nor did it matter much, it seemed, if Schoenman and his other amanuenses at Plas Penrhyn composed statements in Russell's name. Did not other world leaders have their secretariats who drafted public utterances on their behalf?Footnote ¹⁶ During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 Russell, in his self-appointed role as spokesman for civilization, bombarded world leaders with telegrams urging them to desist from war. Curiously, in the light of his later interest in the Kennedy assassination, the tone of Russell's remarks to Kennedy was terse—“Your action desperate. Threat to human survival. No conceivable justification . . . End this madness”—and much less conciliatory than his communication with Khruschev.Footnote ¹⁷

Notwithstanding the apparent contempt for Kennedy he showed during the Cuban missile crisis, or perhaps because the successful resolution of that episode indicated a willingness on the part of the neophyte politician to listen to and learn from the spokesman of civilization, Russell was disconcerted by the assassination of Kennedy. During the late spring and summer of 1964 Russell contacted a number of British luminaries in the arts, higher education and politics with the aim of setting up a committee of the great and good which might keep a watch on the proceedings of the Warren Commission. Foster was among the figures who declined Russell's invitation.Footnote ¹⁸ Nor was every sympathizer approached willing to participate in the work of the committee. Toynbee replied to Russell on 29 May 1964,

Less temperately, Sir Denis Brogan, the most eminent British academic at work on modern American politics, who was wholly out of sympathy with the project, bluntly refused to have anything to do with the committee.Footnote ²⁰ Toynbee and Brogan were right to suspect that the committee might do more harm than good, and might come to be perceived as an anti-American front organization. For example, the poet and literary critic Professor William Empson (1906–84), who endorsed the rationale of Russell's committee and agreed that it would be “harmful to let the matter remain in its present state of evident confusion”, could not resist an anti-American dig at the level of policing and governance in Texas: “The case for a gradual development of self-government among colonial peoples has always seemed to me strong, and whatever one may think about Kenya or the Congo valley it does seem clear that the liberation of Texas was premature.”Footnote ²¹

The British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee comprised, from the world of the theatre, the left-wing playwrights John Arden (b. 1930) and J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), and the critic Ken Tynan (1927–80); from the realm of science, the nutritionist Lord Boyd Orr (1880–1971)Footnote ²² and the gerontologist and sexologist Dr. Alex Comfort (1920–2000), who was later to achieve celebrity with The Joy of Sex (1972); the radical publishers John Calder (b. 1927) and Victor Gollancz (1893–1967); Caroline Wedgwood Benn (1926–2000), the American wife of the British Labour politician Anthony Wedgwood Benn; the film director Tony Richardson (1928–91); the Labour politician and man of letters Michael Foot (1913–2010); the comic novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972); Mervyn Stockwood (1913–95), the radical bishop of Southwark, who was committed both to alleviating the plight of the poor and to representing the Gospel message in the godless salons of the social and literary elite; the journalist and former editor of the New Statesman Kingsley Martin (1897–1969); the art critic Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968); and Empson and Trevor-Roper, as well as Bertrand Russell as chairman.

Despite the media excitement which surrounded the formation of the committee,Footnote ²³ it does not appear to have functioned as a collective, and the dignitaries who agreed to join it were simply adornments on a letterhead. According to Trevor-Roper's recollection a decade later, “the ‘committee’ never met; it certainly never sat as a tribunal; and its ‘business’, as far as I could see, was simply the propagation of the Lane–Schoenman views under the aegis of other names.”Footnote ²⁴ While most of the Committee's members were sleeping partners, a few—as individuals—displayed zeal in the cause. During the early summer of 1964 Caroline Benn gave a television interview to the American network CBS and wrote an article on Mark Lane for Tribune, the Labour magazine.Footnote ²⁵ When the Warren Commission Report appeared in the autumn Empson would write to the New Statesman complaining that those who criticized the report were unfairly smeared as cynics.Footnote ²⁶

The attack on the Warren Commission began before its report had been published, and its first major critic was Bertrand Russell—or in this case, an informal committee of Russell, his American amanuensis Ralph Schoenman and Lane. At any rate, an article appeared under Russell's name in the September 1964 issue of Arnoni's Minority of One, entitled “Sixteen Questions on the Assassination”.Footnote ²⁷ Whether or not Russell was the principal begetter of “Sixteen Questions on the Assassination”, the thrust of the piece was in keeping with Russell's earlier involvement in left–liberal campaigns in the United States against apparent miscarriages of justice, and the Sacco–Vanzetti case in particular. Nicola Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti were executed on 23 August 1927 for an armed robbery and murder of a pay clerk in South Braintree, near Boston, committed in 1920. There were widespread fears that there had been a miscarriage of justice in the Sacco–Vanzetti case. Both Sacco and Vanzetti were followers of Luigi Galleani (1861–1931), the Italian anarchist, who had been deported from the United States, with some of his followers, in 1919. On his trips to the United States during the interwar era Russell had been a staunch advocate of the innocence of the Italian anarchists and had joined members of the American intelligentsia in the loud and prolonged campaign on their behalf. Russell continued to campaign on behalf of their cause long after the men had been executed.Footnote ²⁸ Nor was the Sacco–Vanzetti case an unparalleled example of the persecution of intellectual dissent. Russell had also been interested in the case of Morton Sobell (b. 1917), an atom spy on behalf of the Soviet Union, who had fled to Mexico where he was abducted by armed men who took him to the border and turned him over to the FBI. Sobell was then sentenced to thirty years in jail, though he was to be released in 1969 after spending over seventeen years in Alcatraz.Footnote ²⁹ Schoenman exploited Russell's sympathy for the dissident. In 1963 Russell contributed a fevered article entitled “The Myth of American Freedom” to Arnoni's magazine Minority of One, in which the author denounced the FBI as “a secret political police”, questioned the convictions of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, and described how America's hysterical media and its government bureaucracy connived in “the persecution of men of independent mind”, for there political and intellectual dissent were equated with wickedness and ipso facto were intolerable: “I am utterly convinced that if the conflict with the Soviet Union had never existed a different menace would have been adopted for the purposes of political persecution.”Footnote ³⁰ Sacco and Vanzetti, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Sobell, Hiss and Oswald were, to Russell, as well as to Schoenman, victims of secularized witch-hunts, parts of the apparatus of the old benighted confessional state which persisted in modern society. Yet, notwithstanding the concerns of Russell and Schoenman, the mainstream leftist intelligentsia within the United States welcomed the Warren Report, including the radical journalist and pamphleteer I. F Stone (1907–89) and the Trotskyite heavyweight of American letters Dwight Macdonald (1906?–82). Both turned out to be staunch defenders of the Warren Commission's conclusions.Footnote ³¹

There were similar voices of sanity in the British intelligentsia. In the December 1964 issue of Encounter, Sir Denis Brogan reviewed the Warren Commission Report, noting—pointedly—that while the bulk of his article had been written within five days of getting a copy of the Warren Commission Report, he was not as quick off the mark as “Lord Russell, Mr Ralph Schoenman and Mr Mark Lane, who had their opinions ready even before the Report was issued.” Nevertheless, while Brogan had nothing but contempt for the charlatanry of the conspiracy theorists, he recognized that some legitimate worries had arisen in the public mind about the killings in Dallas, and suggested how “confusion” might have arisen. It arose in large measure from the widespread assumption that the assassin or assassins “must” come from the right. Kennedy was a symbol for progressive forces in American politics and society, and his death did not, Brogan recognized, “bring tears everywhere”. Surveying the American political scene, Brogan argued that “if there were any motives for murdering the President, they were motives only on the Right”. The fact that the crime took place in Texas was of enormous political significance, for Texas was “the centre not only of violently reactionary doctrine but of reactionary power”. It was also the heartland of an emerging movement of “stern and unbending reactionaries, usurping the title ‘conservative’, who hoped to win Texas for a new Republican party owing more to John C. Calhoun than to Abraham Lincoln.” Acutely sensitive to the nuances of American politics, Brogan accurately prophesied the southern realignment which was to be such a transforming feature of American politics over the next forty years. Moreover, in the particular case of Kennedy's assassination there was, Brogan discerned, a creative dissonance between expectations and apparent reality. The reasonable assumption that, if there were a political motive to eliminate Kennedy, and in Dallas of all places, it must come from the right, ran up against the supposed fact that the apparent killer was a minor left-wing ne'er-do-well, a self-proclaimed Marxist who had even gone to live for a period in the Soviet Union, but this disjunction—and the very completeness of Oswald's left-wing curriculum vitae—merely reinforced the suspicion that therefore Oswald must be the left-wing patsy who would take the blame for a right-wing coup. Unsurprisingly, noted Brogan, “when this improbable villain was murdered he was in the hands of the police, and the cry of ‘frame up’ and ‘cover up’ was inevitable.” Moreover, it was clear that due procedures had not been followed in the immediate aftermath of the president's death. The autopsy should have taken place in the jurisdiction where the crime was committed, but, understandably, in the hurry and panic of the moment some of the required procedures had not been followed. Yet, however excusable, the fact that certain procedural lapses—illegalities, indeed—had occurred in the aftermath of the assassination, Brogan argued, had presented an irresistible opening for “the speculators, rumour-mongers and mischief-makers”. Indeed, it appeared that “the hasty examination made at Dallas differed from the thorough autopsy made at the Naval hospital at Bethesda”. Brogan confessed that when news of Kennedy's assassination had first broken, he had speculated on television about the likelihood of a right-wing conspiracy, a serious possibility given the extremist politics of Texas in the early 1960s and the marked antipathy there to Kennedy's liberal brand of politics. Nevertheless, Brogan concluded, “unlike some people, I can learn.”Footnote ³²

Among the slower learners, it might appear, was the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper. Notwithstanding his doubts about the conclusions of the commission and his association with conspiracy theorists such as Lane, it would, nevertheless, be crudely reductionist to describe Trevor-Roper as a conspiracy theorist. Rather Trevor-Roper—already, of course, a member of Russell's Who Killed Kennedy? Committee, and as such disposed a priori to be suspicious of the commission's methods—perceived that the Warren Commission provided the occasion for a fascinating public exercise in applied historiography. How did the historian transmute raw evidence into firm conclusions? The parallel with the ways in which the compilers of the Warren Commission turned the 20,000 pages and twenty-six supporting volumes of raw evidence into the Warren Commission Report and conclusions was all too obvious, and irresistible to the historian.

Trevor-Roper is an anomalous figure among the early critics of the Warren Commission, most of whom belonged to the political left. By contrast, Trevor-Roper belonged to the right, and sometimes his views were provocatively conservative, though this conservatism was eccentric and devoid of narrow conformism. At the core of his academic ethos was a commitment to intellectual freedom. It was this principle which had made him a troublesome anti-anti-communist during the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. Moreover, unlike other historians of the right, he recognized an element of truth—at least at the level of general explanation—in the Marxist theory of history, which, in other respects and at the level of detailed political narrative, he found sorely wanting.Footnote ³³

Trevor-Roper was by nature inclined to buccaneering. His reputation, indeed, derived not from undoubted distinction in his primary field of seventeenth-century history, but from daring and ingenious exploits in the aftermath of the Second World War. In September 1945 he was commissioned by Dick White (1906–93) of the British Security Service to counter pernicious Soviet-backed rumours about Hitler's supposed whereabouts by patiently reconstructing, from interviews with the surviving participants, the grisly finale of the Third Reich leadership in the Berlin bunker in late April of that year.Footnote ³⁴ Trevor-Roper's report formed the basis of his best-seller, The Last Days of Hitler, published in 1947. The experience also gave him the confidence to ask how hurried investigations of this sort in the heat of events might—or, unavoidably, might not—be executed to the standards of the academic historian. As with his own brief in 1945, the Warren Commission's remit was in some ways a political one; and, though he thought that political pressures, haste and expediency had contributed to the deformities of the commission's report, in substance Trevor-Roper's critique of the commission, though far from apolitical, was largely historiographical and of a theoretical nature. How did a miscellaneous set of testimonies from a variety of witnesses, some more reliable than others, assessed in private by a commission of political grandees, or more probably their staffs, become—against a rushed political deadline—the basis of a compelling—or even acceptable—historical interpretation of an event?

Moreover, Trevor-Roper, as should by now be vividly apparent, did not care for stifling orthodoxies, whether in public life or in historical interpretation. Indeed, although he chastised errors in other scholars, at the same time he despised—and recoiled from—pedantry. In his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Oxford he had made the point—unwelcome, almost certainly, to some in his audience—that mistakes could sometimes be fruitful, could indeed generate fascinating and unexpected lines of enquiry to the overall benefit of the discipline. “In humane studies,” Trevor-Roper contended, “there are times when a new error is more life-giving than an old truth, a fertile error than a sterile accuracy.”Footnote ³⁵ Trevor-Roper was by inclination a risk taker. Troubled as he was by some underexplained elements of the assassination and of the commission's report, he was brave enough to draw attention to the issues causing him puzzlement, whatever the cost to his academic standing. Furthermore, Trevor-Roper had firm views about the authority of scripture and of the proper role of the historian when confronted by a document. He believed that it was not the job of the historian to give assent to the truth of the Warren Commission Report, but to explain its context, how it had been put together, and its purpose. To do otherwise, it seemed, involved adopting an unhealthily prostrate position of quasi-religious deference to a human composition.

It so happened that in the autumn of 1964 Trevor-Roper was on sabbatical in the United States, as a senior research fellow at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles. On 13 December 1964 the Sunday Times carried an article on the Warren Report by Trevor-Roper, whose authority was presumably fortified by the fact that the Regius Professor had cabled it to London from the USA. Under the headline “Kennedy Murder Inquiry Is Suspect”, Trevor-Roper worried away at the Warren Commission's reluctance to address the major lacunae in the evidence presented to it. Why, asked Trevor-Roper, were the original notes for Kennedy's autopsy destroyed? Why was the original paper bag destroyed which had supposedly been used by Oswald to bring his rifle into the book depository under the pretence that he was carrying curtain rods? Moreover, “to complete this record of suppression and destruction, there is the destruction of the most important living witness, Oswald himself”. Trevor-Roper remained aghast at the murder of Oswald, “while under police protection, by Jack Ruby, an intimate associate of the Dallas police”. This further killing called out for closer attention than it had received from the commission. Nor were there any notes, stenographic records or tape recordings of Oswald's interrogation in Dallas by Captain Fritz and his associates in the Dallas police. This remarkable absence too called out for further analysis, not the “culpable indifference” displayed by an uninquisitive Warren Commission in its “vast and slovenly Report”. Trevor-Roper was disappointed in the Warren Commission's “uncritical acceptance (or rejection) of evidence” and “its reluctance to ask essential questions”. On the other hand, Trevor-Roper was well aware, as he reminded his readers, of the true purpose of the Warren Commission: to calm the fears of a democratic nation in an election year.Footnote ³⁶

In the following week's Sunday Times an article by Trevor-Roper's Oxford colleague, John Sparrow, the warden of All Souls, left much of the Regius Professor's original case in shreds. Sparrow respected cleverness, but despite his headship of an Oxford college his professional background was as a chancery lawyer, and he had little or no time for academic concerns, such as the historical sensitivities which appeared to have motivated Trevor-Roper. Whereas the academic historian worried about the somewhat arbitrary processes by which raw evidence was transmuted into narrative, Sparrow perceived only commendable due process given the circumstances and the lack of any convincing alternative to the narrative proposed by the commission. At the outset Sparrow confessed his admiration for Trevor-Roper's “intellect and ability”, but, with a show of regret, felt compelled to point out that the original article was a “travesty”, a piece “so marred by bias and blotted with inaccuracies that it is hard to believe that it was written by the honest and intelligent man that he is.” Few members of the public would have the stamina, inclination or opportunity to read the Warren Report, but now that the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford had lent his name to the cause of “the crackpots and the credulous” it would be harder to dispel the miasma of suspicion which had begun to enshroud the report. Unfortunately, Trevor-Roper had been slapdash in his handling of the evidence, and it came ill from him to be so critical of the commission in this very respect. Trevor-Roper was mistaken on the question of Kennedy's supposed frontal entrance wound. More seriously for Trevor-Roper, though the matter itself was of negligible significance overall, he had misinterpreted the issue of the large, brown paper bag. The police had handed in the original bag, as well as constructing their own replica. “Of course,” Sparrow summarized fairly, “this misrepresentation of the evidence was not deliberate, he just misread or misinterpreted it, being obsessed with what he calls a ‘pattern’ of ‘suppression’ and ‘destruction’ of evidence by the police, a pattern that exists not in the facts, but in his own mind”. However, Sparrow concluded, Trevor-Roper could “perhaps, take comfort from the reflection that it is not the first time that a respected figure has come a cropper in public through slipping up upon a paper bag”.Footnote ³⁷

Trevor-Roper replied to Sparrow in a further article in the Sunday Times of 3 January 1965. He was insistent that he had no interest in advancing a “rival theory” to that advanced in the Warren Report; nor did he mean either to “propose” or even to “suggest” some kind of “vast conspiracy”. As a historian he was temperamentally suspicious of “conspiratorial solutions”. Indeed Trevor-Roper pointed out that he had never suggested that “the conclusions of the Warren Report were necessarily wrong”. They might even be correct. Rather, his concerns were technical and lay with the composition, procedure and methods of the Warren Commission. As a historian he was fascinated by the ways in which evidence was arranged in a “pattern”. Trevor-Roper drew certain conclusions from the gruelling timetable which lay behind the report's evidence gathering, composition and rushed publication. The commission had begun work in February 1964, and was still taking evidence on 15 September—evidence that amounted to twenty-six supporting volumes comprising around 20,000 pages; yet the final report was handed to President Johnson on 24 September and could be found in bookstores two days later. “Clearly,” reasoned Trevor-Roper, the report's “main conclusions had been reached, and its separate chapters composed, before the last witnesses had been heard.” Trevor-Roper insisted that several “essential questions” remained unresolved, notwithstanding the Warren Commission Report: “precisely how the President was shot”, “whether Oswald had accomplices”, and “the real motives, or connections, of Ruby”. Nevertheless, he confessed that as far as the paper bag was concerned, Sparrow was absolutely correct in his criticism. Trevor-Roper would, in his own words, have to “eat humble pie”.Footnote ³⁸ Alas, these modifications were insufficient to appease Sparrow. In the Sunday Times of 10 January 1965 Sparrow replied once more to Trevor-Roper: “Concerning his treatment of evidence, Professor Trevor-Roper says he has had to ‘eat humble pie’. I am afraid I have to offer him a second helping: his further article is as full of inaccuracies as his first.”Footnote ³⁹

Behind the public combativeness, however, private relations between Trevor-Roper and Sparrow were warmed by an affectionate clubbiness which did not preclude a degree of irritation with, as well as a sneaking regard for, the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the other.Footnote ⁴⁰ While public sparring was undoubtedly paralleled by private frictions, there was a measure of cordiality in what deserves to be termed a friendship, and collusion between the pair extended beyond their private responses to the Warren Commission affair. Their intellectual hobby horses were not entirely dissimilar, nor were their attitudes to style, expression and wit; though there were clear differences between the methods and sensibilities of the historian and the chancery lawyer.

Sparrow was keen to repair his friendship with Trevor-Roper. On 25 January 1965 the warden of All Souls wrote an apologetic letter to Trevor-Roper: “Surely we can continue to disagree, and even perhaps to argue about this vexed question, and remain friends?” Sparrow regretted that, while Trevor-Roper had taken the first public rejoinder in good part, the second had struck a nerve. Sparrow hoped it was not the “mild joke” about “humble pie”, “which I would certainly have omitted if I had thought you would take it seriously”.Footnote ⁴¹ Trevor-Roper conceded to Sparrow in a letter of 19 February 1965 that he did not “agree with Mark Lane, who looks at the evidence, in my view, with a distorting prejudice, which isn't necessary”.Footnote ⁴² Sparrow wrote a further conciliatory letter to Trevor-Roper on 22 February 1965, hopeful that they could discuss the Warren Commission “later on when the smoke, or din, of battle has died down”. In one thing, however, they were agreed, Lane was not a “worthy ally” of Trevor-Roper's.Footnote ⁴³

This estimate of Trevor-Roper's standing was not universally shared in the common rooms of Oxford. Unconvinced by Trevor-Roper's grasp of the American political and legal systems,Footnote ⁴⁴ the jurist Arthur Goodhart, the former master of University College, Oxford, launched a robust defence of the Warren Commission's procedures.Footnote ⁴⁵ There were “sound reasons”, Goodhart believed, why the Warren hearings had been held in private. After all, the commission had not been engaged in the trial of an accused; rather it had gathered evidence and reached conclusions. A public hearing might have been unfair to third parties, because the witnesses were allowed—“and even encouraged”—to give evidence regarding any rumours they had heard, which might generate leads for further investigation. Moreover, the commission needed to guard against the danger that malicious witnesses might seek to smear innocent parties. Once again, the demands of privacy were thoroughly justified. Witnesses “seemed to gain confidence in the quiet atmosphere of a private hearing”. Nor were there any problems associated with the airing of hearsay evidence in an open setting. In particular, there was the need to avoid compromising the trial of Jack Ruby, which had not concluded until 14 March 1964. Goodhart had no concerns whatsoever about the actions of the US authorities. Indeed, what struck the jurist were the similarities between the procedures followed by the Warren Commission and the British Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921.Footnote ⁴⁶

Yet not all English jurists agreed. Goodhart's defence of the commission was queried by an anonymous writer in the New Law Journal.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, Sir John Foster of All Souls,Footnote ⁴⁸ a robust defender of the commission from the smears of the buffs, nevertheless raised concerns about the medical evidence of Kennedy's wounds and about Ruby's access to Oswald. Foster took seriously the far from unjustified anxieties of those bystanders in Dallas—a reasonable cross-section of the population—who had witnessed Kennedy's assassination or the Tippit murder,Footnote ⁴⁹ and who, according to Lane, had since then either been violently assaulted or been threatened with violence by persons unknown. Such incidents, surely, were “coincidental”, but this only went to reinforce the point about the endemic violence in Texan society, and the need to investigate properly the various threats of assassination which had been circulating at the time of Kennedy's visit to Dallas. Was Oswald guilty? Foster concluded that “if the archaic rules of evidence obtaining under the English and American legal systems had been followed, if hearsay had been excluded, and if witnesses had been able to claim immunity, as Mrs Lee Oswald, as a wife, could have done, the guilt of her husband might not have been established according to the rules of a Texan or English criminal trial.” The procedures adopted by the Warren Commission were admirably designed to get at the truth, Foster believed, except in one crucial respect: “it would have been better to have had some form of cross-examination”. What was needed, he contended, was “an advocate for Oswald”. Foster found some plausibility in Lane's theory that the commission started out with the idea that Oswald was a lone assassin and therefore “disregarded evidence which ran counter to that assumption”. Despite his distance from the Warren buffs, Foster felt that Lane in particular was “justified in bringing forward points of criticism”, and that, while such criticisms certainly deserved to be answered, it was wrong to brand such critics “neurotics”. The assassination was a “world-wide tragedy” which would continue to “excite men's imaginative speculation”.Footnote ⁵⁰

* * *

In the course of 1966 conspiracy theories became a less peripheral concern of the American media, though the British intelligentsia continued to play a crucial role. Stuart Hampshire, who shared with Richard Popkin an interest in the history of seventeenth-century philosophy,Footnote ⁵¹ drew the attention of Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, to Popkin's researches on Oswald. Popkin's book, The Second Oswald (1966), would begin life as an essay in the New York Review of Books.Footnote ⁵² Popkin worried at knots in the evidence, not least at what seemed to be reliable sightings of Oswald in two places at once in the months before the assassination. This prompted the conjecture that Kennedy had been shot by two gunmen, one an Oswald-lookalike, with Oswald the fall-guy for the killing. It was a daring and controversial thesis, but Trevor-Roper was able to reassure Silvers of Popkin's high scholarly standing in early modern intellectual history.Footnote ⁵³

In spite of the growing acceptability of the conspiracy theorists in the United States media, Mark Lane continued to encounter serious problems with New York publishers. Dwight Macdonald vetted the manuscript of Lane's Rush to Judgment for the Viking Press,Footnote ⁵⁴ who declined to publish it, as did a number of other publishers. The book was rescued by Bodley Head in the United Kingdom, which published it in 1966. The book went on to be a global best-seller, with 225,000 copies on the market by January 1967. Trevor-Roper's support for Lane undoubtedly played a significant role in the book's publication, though by now the historian had become somewhat suspicious of Lane and his methods, and was at last prepared to say so in private and—sotto voce—in public. Trevor-Roper confessed his doubts about Lane to a Finnish judge with whom he corresponded on matters pertinent to the Kennedy assassination:

Trevor-Roper did indeed supply an Introduction to Lane's book, notwithstanding his doubts.Footnote ⁵⁶ By a further irony, in his acknowledgements Lane thanked both Trevor-Roper and Toynbee,Footnote ⁵⁷ whose historical work and capacity for balanced and discriminating assessment of evidence Trevor-Roper had savagely assailed on more than one occasion.Footnote ⁵⁸

Was Trevor-Roper's Introduction to Rush to Judgment to be understood as an endorsement of the book's argument? Trevor-Roper urged Lane's readers to be just as critical when they read Lane as when they read the Warren Commission Report. “Amateur detective work” of the kind peddled by Lane was “always a little suspect”. Lane and Trevor-Roper were, however, operating on different planes. Trevor-Roper's focus—unlike Lane's—was not limited exclusively to the report itself; rather, he viewed the report as a window onto larger historiographical problems. There was a similarity between the ways in which historians turned evidence into narrative and then into conclusions, and the ways in which the Warren Commission had transformed a vast amount of raw evidence into apparently definitive findings. To follow particular details through the twenty-six volumes of Warren Commission hearings, then through the report itself, and on to the report's summary and conclusions, according to Trevor Roper, was “to see, sometimes, a quiet transformation of evidence”. The Warren Commission might be “defective”, without the need to attribute any “sinister” motive to the chief justice, his fellow commissioners, or the commission staff. An “innocent” explanation would suffice, whereby the commission merely “overlooked inconvenient evidence”. Consider the time pressures under which the commission worked. Consider the huge quantity of material out of which it had to draw its conclusions. It seemed natural enough to Trevor-Roper that, like historians overwhelmed by vast quantities of data, the commission and its staff had “invariably accepted the interpretation which supported the conclusion which had already been accepted when the material was presented to them.” A “pattern” had been “coaxed and forced by a process which, had there been an advocate on the other side, might have been totally discredited before judgment could be given”. How was one to draw a line between “subjective and objective evidence”? Experts could err. Did the commission do enough to interpret notionally “objective” evidence? Historical interpretation was not, argued Trevor-Roper, a zero-sum game. Of course, if the choice before readers was a simple alternative between accepting the commission's report or believing that Chief Justice Warren was complicit in a vast conspiracy to cover up Kennedy's assassination, “then moderate, rational men naturally (and in my opinion rightly) prefer to believe the former proposition.” However, rarely was the historian faced with such stark alternatives: “between complete acceptance of a questionable argument and the assumption that such an argument is deliberately fraudulent, there are many gradations; and miscarriages of justice, or misinterpretations of history, when they arise, generally arise not from corrupt purpose but from human error”. In particular, there was a tendency towards “simplification” at work—the pressure to reach some sort of conclusion from a huge “amorphous mass of testimony”. But what if, in sifting the evidence, one found the pattern “too soon” and then read the remaining evidence exclusively in the light of the pattern one had discovered? Even the “most reputable scholars” fell into errors of this type. Why not the Warren Commission?Footnote ⁵⁹

Trevor-Roper's fullest account of the Warren Commission Report and its flaws came in an extended essay-cum-review article in the French popular magazine L'express in early September 1966, under the title “Qui a tué Kennedy?” (Who Killed Kennedy?). Here Trevor-Roper confessed that he had never believed the Warren Report, not least because the commission had not got round to asking whether—but only why—Oswald had killed Kennedy. Moreover, within the report he had detected “des lacunes nombreuses et graves” (“a number of serious omissions”) in the section devoted to the identity of the assassin. The report was not “un honnête résumé” (“a fair summary”) of the testimony of the twenty-six volumes of supporting evidence. Had not twenty-three out of twenty-six bystanders testified that the shooting had come from “une butte herbeuse” (“a grassy knoll”) in front of the presidential limousine? Did not the doctors at Parklands Hospital give evidence that the bullet had entered the front of Kennedy's head? But the report concludes that Kennedy was shot from behind. Furthermore, could all those shots have been fired so quickly and so accurately? Even for a demotic French magazine audience Trevor-Roper raised technical historiographical issues. The Warren Report should be subjected to what the Germans called Quellenkritik, or source criticism. The investigation needed itself to be investigated. What were the report's purposes? How was the evidence collated and the report formulated? Revealingly, Trevor-Roper, an anticlerical of long standing who derived sport from cheeky questioning of Christian dogma's basis in historical evidence,Footnote ⁶⁰ compared the Warren findings to “textes sacrés” (“holy scriptures”). He drew parallels between the perception of the Olympian omniscience of Chief Justice Warren and his colleagues and the view that the Bible was a product of the Holy Spirit. It had become heresy to question any aspect of the report, however minor the quibble: “ceux qui n'acceptaient pas le Rapport avec une foi aveugle étaient automatiquement taxés d'impiété” (“those who did not accept the Report with a blind faith were automatically charged with impiety”). By contrast, Lane and Popkin, whose books Trevor-Roper was reviewing for L'express, he bracketed with enlightened critics of scriptural inerrancy. Trevor-Roper's irreligion informed his suspicions of the reverence shown in most quarters of the establishment towards the Warren Report.Footnote ⁶¹

However, by the end of 1966 Trevor-Roper's association with Mark Lane was causing him increasing personal embarrassment. The New York Times of 21 November 1966 reported that, although Lane himself had had no communication from Senator Robert Kennedy in the course of his researches, Lane claimed that “Robert Kennedy sent a message to Professor Trevor-Roper, who wrote the introduction to my book in which he said to keep up the good work”.Footnote ⁶² The New York Times went on to record Trevor-Roper's firm and unequivocal denial that any such message had been received. This might have been the end of the matter. However, Lane's repetition of this claim during an interview published in the February 1967 issue of Playboy magazine was to cause Trevor-Roper considerable personal anxiety, a worry which recurred at various points throughout the year. The Playboy interviewer led Lane towards one of the most obvious weak points in the case for a conspiracy—how to make sense of the silence of the Kennedys.

Playboy was presumably not a familiar sight in Oxford senior common rooms, and Trevor-Roper could easily have brazened out the ensuing fuss. Indeed, in a letter of 28 March 1967 to Sparrow Trevor-Roper announced definitively: “I shall take no public notice of Playboy.” However, things were not so straightforward, as he revealed in that same letter: “Lane's statement is the result of a misunderstanding by him of an indiscreet observation made not by me but by another person in my presence, who had got the facts wrong.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Who might this person be? The answer is revealed in a further anxious letter on this topic from Trevor-Roper to Sparrow on 30 October 1967: “The villain of the piece is Xandra [Lady Alexandra Trevor-Roper]. She made a double mistake: first, she indiscreetly repeated a private conversation; secondly, she got it wrong.” Trevor-Roper urged Sparrow not to refer to this in print as it would draw attention fact that Trevor-Roper's wife “had made a muddle”,Footnote ⁶⁵ and Sparrow chivalrously agreed.Footnote ⁶⁶

Sparrow's survey of the assassination literature, “After the Assassination”, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 14 December 1967 as a lengthy piece of around 18,000 words,Footnote ⁶⁷ and was published in the USA by Chilmark Press the following year as a short book of seventy-seven pages under the title After the Assassination: A Positive Appraisal of the Warren Report. Sparrow remained discreet, of course, about the Playboy revelations, but in a spirit of mischief described Trevor-Roper as “Mr Lane's disciple”, knowing full well that Trevor-Roper's relations with Lane were somewhat more ambiguous. Sparrow traced linkages between Lane's American Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry and the British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee, between Trevor-Roper and Lane, and throughout the network of buffs. Of course, Sparrow conceded, there was no dastardly conspiracy at work among the critics of the Warren Commission, so “no need to suppose any concerted plan of action on the part of the critics or to impute sinister motives to any of them: to do so would be to fall into their own besetting error.” He drew the lesson that “the intellectual”—not a class he admired despite, or perhaps because of, his headship of an Oxford college—“can be duped as completely as the man in the street”. Sparrow noted that “those who attacked the Report enjoyed an advantage over its defenders: they find a more exciting story to tell.” Sparrow shrewdly perceived where the true intellectual attraction lay in this topic for future historians—in the world of conspiracy theory associated with the assassination, not in the assassination itself. The “real mystery” concerned “not the doings of the protagonists in Dallas during the fatal week”, but “the subsequent performance of the mystery-makers themselves and the success of their campaign”. Posterity would ask, Sparrow prophesied, what provoked this outbreak of “demonology, and how were its exponents able to cast their spells so widely and compel belief in their lurid denunciations?”Footnote ⁶⁸

In his TLS piece Sparrow had made particular sport with Professor Popkin and his arguments, not least because Popkin's primary interest in the philosophy and history of scepticism rendered him such an obvious target for Sparrow's wit: “Such intense scepticism as Professor Popkin's needs a great deal of credulity to support it: in order not to believe the probable there is so much of the improbable that he has to believe in.” In the manner of those pseudo-scholars who attributed the works of Shakespeare to the ghost-authorship of Francis Bacon and thought that they had discovered within Shakespeare's supposed oeuvre some “hidden cipher”, Popkin followed “the clue wherever it leads him, oblivious of attendant inconsistencies”.Footnote ⁶⁹

Yet the day after the publication of Sparrow's onslaught on the buffs in the TLS, he wrote to Popkin, whom—in private at least—he had singled out as an opponent of a different stamp from the others he had cited: “We are both friends of Stuart Hampshire's and you may remember paying a visit here a year or so ago, when we discussed a subject that fascinates us both.” Popkin had visited England during the summer of 1966. Sparrow wanted to make clear to Popkin that his critique of The Second Oswald was different in kind from his general denunciations of the assassination buffs:

Sparrow also made it clear to Popkin that his letter was not meant to disarm him, and that he was not on that account to “pull [his] punches” in reply.Footnote ⁷⁰

Unfortunately—both for Trevor-Roper and also for Sparrow, who was now a co-conspirator with Trevor-Roper in the cover-up of Xandra Trevor-Roper's faux pas regarding Robert Kennedy—Sparrow's TLS piece raised again the Robert Kennedy issue. On 22 December 1967 John P. Roche, a special consultant to President Lyndon Johnson, wrote to the TLS from the White House to congratulate the paper for Sparrow's demolition of the conspiracy theorists:

Roche noted that “a sane society operates largely on common-sensical notions of trust and leaves conspiratorial black masses to a priesthood of marginal paranoids.” This was gripping copy—and on White House notepaper. The TLS was keen to publish the letter straightaway. Yet Roche, in the course of his letter, touched on the response of Robert Kennedy to the assassination and its investigation:

Sparrow welcomed the endorsement from the White House, but it revived the issue which had been niggling Trevor-Roper ever since Lane's Playboy interview, and Sparrow felt it necessary to write again to Trevor-Roper on 18 January 1968 to assuage his concerns.Footnote ⁷² Sparrow's discreet but vigorous firefighting on behalf of his supposed rival appears to have worked, and the question of Trevor-Roper's relations with Robert Kennedy died away.

By the 1970s the donnish protagonists at the British end of the Warren debate regarded it as a spent controversy, and none would make any serious contribution to the ongoing debate on the Kennedy assassination. Sparrow, who retired from the wardenship of All Souls in 1977, never retracted his defence of the Warren Commission, and continued both to correspond with anti-buffs and to demolish conspiracy theories as they appeared.Footnote ⁷³ Nor did Trevor-Roper, it seems, ever change his own views on the assassination. Now ennobled as Lord Dacre of Glanton and elected master of Cambridge's oldest college, Peterhouse, in 1980, he happily lent his name to a sensationalist account of the assassination by the journalist Anthony Summers.Footnote ⁷⁴ On this occasion, Sparrow did not dish out a further helping of “humble pie” to his friend. Nevertheless, Trevor-Roper's endorsement seems considerably more cavalier than his rushed authentication—quickly recanted—of the Hitler diaries three years later, for which he was forced to eat more humble pie than he really deserved.Footnote ⁷⁵

* * *

This curious case study in intellectual history exhibits major figures in the world of philosophy, history and jurisprudence debating issues which were—within a matter of a decade or so—to dwindle into the stuff of modern folklore and the trivia of the monomaniacally obsessed.

Ironically, the part played by British intellectuals in debating the merits and flaws in the commission's report conferred a crucial measure of legitimacy on its early critics, who were, for the most part, well outside the mainstream of the American intellectual establishment.

The story also cast a rare light on what might be called the secret history of intellectual debate. It turns out that, notwithstanding their public mudslinging, Sparrow and Trevor-Roper maintained back channels of communication which reinforced their solidarity as dons and a surprising degree of detachment from their publicly stated positions. The dons—irrespective of their gladiatorial disagreements in public—had a strong sense of their corporate identity as a polite and collegial mandarinate, which set them apart even from their own purported allies among the non-academic laity. Warren Commission buffs have long complained that the intellectual establishment does not take them seriously; indeed that the academic establishment reinforces the Warren Commission conspiracy by marginalizing its critics. There was, of course, no academic conspiracy to rubbish the critics, but the amateur buffs would not be misguided in finding the academic community suspiciously close-knit.