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A redacted call in Commission Document 206
The phone call
Michael told Ruth he felt sure Oswald killed the president, but he didn't feel Oswald was responsible. Then came the next sentence, telling her that they both knew who was responsible for the assassination.
Buried in a file
When commission lawyers asked Michael about it, he denied saying it. The call never appeared in the Warren Report. It was reduced to a few sentences in an FBI file called Commission Document 206, and in that file the source was redacted. The names of the people on the call were redacted too, leaving a male voice and a female voice, and the phone numbers were not identified.
For more than a decade, the sentence lived only in that buried report. When the files were opened in the 1970s, it came out that the two voices were Michael and Ruth Paine.
How did the JFK files come to be opened?
Pressure grew in the 1970s after the 1974 amendments to the Freedom of Information Act and the work of the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1976 to 1979. In 1992 Congress passed the JFK Records Collection Act, which created the Assassination Records Review Board. The board gathered and released millions of pages of records from agencies including the FBI and the CIA. The act set a 25-year deadline for release, which fell in October 2017.
How did the Warren Commission gather its facts?
The Warren Commission worked for about ten months and relied heavily on the FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA for the raw reports it reviewed. FBI findings reached the commission as numbered documents, which is how a file came to be called Commission Document 206. The commission delivered its report to President Johnson on September 24, 1964. Twenty-six volumes of testimony and exhibits followed in November 1964.
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