I explained what may still be missing today from the Air Force One tapes on pages 1660-1664 of volume V of my book, Inside the ARRB. What I wrote then about the LBJ Library version applies equally today to the "Clifton" version. Both journalist and author Theodore White (in his book The Making of the President, 1964), and Assistant Secretary of State Robert Manning (who was onboard the Cabinet plane bound for Japan, SAM 86972, when JFK was assassinated), both unequivocally stated that the President's assassin was identified to the occupants of both Air Force One and SAM 86972 by radio---and by implication, therefore, from the White House. "Crown," the White House Situation Room, is the font of all knowledge on the Air Force One tapes---there is no other reasonable candidate for who would have passed this information to the passengers on the two aircraft. Anyone who listens to the Air Force One tapes will understand that. White wrote on page 48 of his book, "On the flight the party learned that there was no conspiracy [and] learned of the identity of Oswald and his arrest...". Manning told the authors of the 1993 oral history, Let Us Begin Anew: An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency (p. 450-451), "The news then came in [after Pierre Salinger had been informed of JFK's death] that someone named Oswald who had been in the Soviet Union had done this."
The two accounts corroborate each other quite nicely. The only problem here is that Oswald had only been arrested on suspicion of shooting a policeman, and had not been charged with the murder of the President while Air Force One was in flight. Air Force One landed at 5:04 PM Dallas time, and Lee Harvey Oswald was not charged with the murder of the President until near midnight. It appears, from the accounts of White and Manning, that someone in the White House Situation Room ("Crown") jumped the gun, and prematurely incriminated Oswald, and blamed the assassination on a lone nut, well before the Dallas Police Department had even come to that conclusion. (And we know now that it was pressure from LBJ that caused Will Fritz, the Chief of Homicide at the Dallas Police Department, to stop blaming the assassination on an international Communist conspiracy, and blame it all on the lone suspect in custody. As LBJ told Fritz on the phone, "You have your man.") Furthermore, as quoted on Saturday morning in the Dallas papers, late Friday afternoon and early Friday evening, District Attorney Henry Wade was openly proclaiming that the assassination could not have been the work of one man. If this was Wade's tentative conclusion on Friday afternoon and early Friday evening, then how could the passengers on SAM 26000 and SAM 86972 be told that Oswald had done the assassination all on his own, unless they were being fed a cover story by the conspirators themselves?
