An Attorney for Oswald

When Manhattan Attorney Mark Lane asked to sit in on the Warren Commission's hearings as attorney for Lee Harvey Oswald, Commission Counsel J. Lee Rankin stiffly refused. Last week the commission changed its mind. It named Walter E. Craig, president of the American Bar Association, to defend Oswald's interests, with the right to examine "every facet of the case."

At the outset of the investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren made clear that the panel was not to be a prosecuting agency. The seven members of the commission have matchless reputations for integrity; no one doubted that their examination of the evidence and interviewing of witnesses would be completely fair. Nevertheless it was true, as the Warren Commission conceded in a statement last week, that Oswald never consulted a lawyer before he was shot. Said the commission: "That there was reasonable cause to believe he was the assassin is unquestioned, but he did not have the opportunity to meet the accusation according to the American way of justice." Appointment of an independent lawyer to advise the commission, attend hearings and examine the evidence, said the statement, will help insure that "the test of truth has been met."

Earl Warren personally asked Craig to take the job. Craig, who has been confirmed by the Senate as a federal judge in Arizona, pondered for a few days, then agreed, as a "public service of the legal profession." While praising Craig's appointment, Eugene Rostow, dean of the Yale Law School, had a further suggestion. International concern over the circumstances of President Kennedy's death, said Rostow, would best be satisfied if commission hearings were public, "as nearly as possible in the familiar pattern of a trial."

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