Gerald Ford White House Altered Rockefeller Commission Report in 1975; Removed Section on CIA Assassination Plots
White House Aide Dick Cheney Spearheaded Editing of Report to Dampen Impact
New Documents Cast Further Doubt on Commission?s Investigation, Independence
Washington, DC, February 29, 2016 ? The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney.
Today?s posting includes the entire suppressed section on assassination attempts, Cheney?s handwritten marginal notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the public. The documents show that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political operatives.
This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period.
See more at: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/2016-02-29/gerald-ford-white-house-altered-rockefeller-commission-report-1975-removed
More fascinating stuff, I thought the Rockefeller Commission actually did some work on the JFK assassination.
McAdam's discussion:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/wecht.htmSo, not one, not two but I believe three federal government studies of the JFK assassination were done but perhaps, not much from the Rockefeller commission. I frankly do not know.
It sounds like documentation has now been released that were initially held back by the Rockefeller commission decades ago.
It appears Georgetown has a treasure trove of articles to read through concerning the political events of that time.
