DAVID W. BELIN PAPERS, (1961) 1963-98

Soon after President Lyndon Johnson appointed the members of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (the Warren Commission), they began hiring a staff to assist them.  The Commissioners and Executive Director J. Lee Rankin recruited a mixture of both experienced attorneys and promising younger attorneys.  One of the young attorneys was David W. Belin of Des Moines, Iowa.  Rankin paired Belin with senior attorney Joseph Ball and assigned them the task of determining the identity of President Kennedy’s assassin.

One of the members of the Warren Commission was Representative Gerald R. Ford.  Ford and Belin knew each other previously through their common ties to the University of Michigan.

After several months of work the Warren Commission completed its study of the assassination and produced a report.  Almost immediately critics began attacking many specific points in the final report.  Belin soon took up the task of defending the work of the Commission through letters, articles, and books.  He continued this task for the rest of his life and was often referred to in the media as the “chief defender” of the Warren Commission report, although in a book published in 1973, during Earl Warren’s lifetime, Belin openly criticized aspects of the Warren Commission report.  He much preferred being characterized as a defender of the truth about the assassination.

  In January 1975, President Gerald R. Ford appointed the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Rockefeller Commission) to investigate alleged abuses of its charter by the Central Intelligence Agency.  Ford personally selected his old friend and colleague David Belin to become Executive Director of the Commission.  In addition to other charges that the Commission looked into, they investigated any possible CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination.  Due to Belin’s close involvement in this issue in the past, he deliberately kept his role in this area to a minimum and turned over this aspect of the investigation to another Commission attorney.

  After the Rockefeller Commission completed its work, Belin continued to write in support of the work of the Warren Commission, but also advocated more openness in government and restrictions on the role of the intelligence community.  Beginning in 1975, in the wake of revelations that the CIA and FBI had withheld crucial information from the Warren Commission, he began lobbying for the release of all government documents relating to the Kennedy assassination, hoping that the opening of these records would clear up many misunderstandings about the assassination and inaugurate a new era of openness for the U.S. government.

Scope and Content of the Belin Papers
  This collection contains documents from Belin’s service on the Warren Commission and Rockefeller Commission, but also documents his unofficial role as “chief defender” of the Warren Commission report.

  The Warren Commission working documents are by no means a complete record of the work of the Commission or even a complete record of Belin’s work for the Commission.  This small, but valuable, series includes summaries of interviews conducted by Belin, some Commission memoranda and correspondence, progress reports, exhibits and photographs, and drafts of portions of the final report.  One interesting folder contains copies of Belin’s letters back to his law firm describing his work with the Commission.

  Mr. Belin’s Rockefeller Commission documents are more extensive and include his correspondence with CIA and FBI officials, Commission members and staff, and the White House; staff interviews with witnesses; Commission meeting minutes and agendas; transcripts of his press conferences and those of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and members of the Commission; and draft reports.  Although this is not a full record of the work of the Commission, it does document some of Belin’s key areas of interest and activity during the investigation.  Due to Belin’s continuing interest in anything to do with the Kennedy assassination, he did retain copies of many documents on that topic even if he wasn’t directly involved in their creation.  The collection also includes Belin’s working files for a book that he wrote, but never published, about the work of the Rockefeller Commission.  Portions of some of the chapters from this book eventually appeared in his book Final Disclosure.

  The largest portion of the collection concerns Belin’s role as “chief defender” of the central conclusions of the Warren Commission.  The collection includes his correspondence with critics of the Commission Report, articles that he submitted to many different magazines; transcripts of his appearances on radio and television shows; and working files on his books about the Kennedy assassination.  Among the Commission critics whose conclusions he derided were author Mark Lane (Rush to Judgment), executive director of the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations G. Robert Blakey, and filmmaker Oliver Stone (JFK).  The collection also includes many documents released to Belin by government agencies after he filed Freedom of Information requests as part of his campaign to open all Kennedy assassination records to the public.

Related Materials (November 2010)
 

The Library’s most closely related material can be found in the Warren Commission series of the Gerald R. Ford Congressional Papers (16.8 linear feet).  This series documents Ford’s service as a member of the Warren Commission and his subsequent book Portrait of the Assassin.

Additional material appears in the processed portions of the records of the U.S. Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission).  These open materials deal with the investigation of possible CIA involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or in anti-Castro plots of the early 1960s.  Major portions of the Rockefeller Commission records remain unprocessed and not available for research.

Additional scattered folders in various White House collections touch on the Rockefeller Commission, Kennedy Assassination and/or the Warren Commission.  Please consult with an archivist to obtain a PRESNET search report listing the folders on any of these topics.

Among the collections held by the National Archives and Records Administration are the official records of the Warren Commission, personal papers donated by Commission member Richard Russell and General Counsel J. Lee Rankin, and a number of other related collections.  Researchers should also contact the John F. Kennedy Library and the Lyndon B. Johnson Library for information on their holdings about the assassination and its investigation.