50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Nixon and the JFK Assassination

In her book, Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, former US president Richard Nixon's daughter, Julie Nixon-Eisenhower, recalled:

"On Friday, November 22, 1963, Tricia and I were just home from the Chapin School...and eating lunch in front of the television when we heard a bulletin that President Kennedy had been shot as his motorcade moved through the streets of Dallas, Texas. Within a half hour of that first sketchy report, my father burst into our apartment, just back from a business trip to the very city where the President had been attacked."

Yet, according to Coincidence Or Conspiracy? by the Committee To Investigate Assassinations:

"During his FBI interview on February 28, 1964, Nixon inaccurately stated that he'd left Dallas on November 20th--rather than on November 22nd. An FBI Report contained in Warren Commission Exhibit 1973 states the following:

`On Feburay 28, 1964, the Honorable Richard M. Nixon, former Vice President of the U.S. was contacted by the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Office, John F. Malone, and furnished the following information:

`Mr. Nixon advised that the only time he was in Dallas, Texas during 1963 was two days prior to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.'

"...While Nixon admitted in 1967 he had in fact been in Dallas a couple of hours before the shooting, he incorrectly told [Saturday Evening Post reporter] Witcover that he had come to Dallas the day before the assassination, November 21st, rather than November 20th, the date he actually arrived in the city...It does seem somewhatt peculiar that Nixon managed to forget where he was on November 22, 1963 during his February 1964 FBI interview..."

The same book also noted that "Efforts to review the Nixon episode were further hindered when the National Archives disclosed in 1976 that a `Letter of FBI of June 29, 1964 concerning Richard Nixon,' was one of the items missing from the Warren Commission records stored in the Archives building in Washington, D.C."

(Downtown 2/12/92)