This committee is holding its first formal meeting next week. It has representatives of the President's Office of Science and Technology, of the Department of Defense, which is the Advanced Research Projects outfit, of the CIA, an individual who is highly competent in their file section and who understands the setting up of complex files and retrieval, that sort of business, and four people from PRS, the PRS head inspector, Mr. Thacker, the head of the research and development, Mr. Bouck, the head of the files section, Mr. Young, and Mr. Stoner, who is now handling the liaison job.
There will also be, although the individual has not yet been named, a representative of the FBI, and with that I think that we will be able to develop criteria that will both be useful to us and be an improvement on criteria that was so far developed with the help of outside consultants.
Mr. McCloy. Mr. Secretary, the impression has been gained, I think, by the Commission that perhaps too great emphasis has been directed to the mere investigation of the threat, of the particular individual, the crank, or the fellow that sends the poison food or the threatening letter, and perhaps not enough in a broader scope, recognizing, of course, that you can't be too broad without defeating your own purpose, but that there are perhaps groups or other areas of ferment that could provoke an attack quite without the threat. Would you comment on that?
Secretary Dillon. Yes; one of the criteria that is presently out is meant to cover individuals who have threatened bodily harm to any high Government official, with the idea that threat might be switched and visited upon the President.
That would have worked in this particular case in Dallas if that had been a specific criterion on at that time, which it wasn't. We are just talking about threats to the President. So I think that was one obvious case.
We hope that this committee would be able to possibly come up with other groups that can be identified that would fit into this without bringing in too many names.
There is one that may or may not work out. I just cite this as an example. People with bad conduct records in the Marine Corps for some reason have had a very bad record thereafter and there is quite a connection of crime with that class of individual.
It may be that it would even be worthwhile, if it is not too large, to cover this. Why that is so, nobody has quite figured out. I think the eye was focused on them because of this event in Dallas, but then it was discovered that this group has been involved in an awful lot of other crimes of violence.
Mr. Dulles. As you read the Oswald life story, it looks as though he was going into the Marines as a kind of escape.
Secretary Dillon. It could have been.