Mr. Miller. Yes.

Mr. Griffin. Thank you.

TESTIMONY OF WILLIAM J. NEWMAN

The testimony of William J. Newman was taken at 11 p.m., on March 25, 1964, in the office of the U.S. attorney, 301 Post Office Building, Bryan and Ervay Streets, Dallas, Tex., by Mr. Burt W. Griffin, assistant counsel of the President's Commission.

Mr. Griffin. Mr. Newman, my name is Burt Griffin. I am a member of the advisory staff of the general counsel's office of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. This Commission was set up pursuant to an Executive order of President Johnson on November 29th, 1963, and under a joint resolution of Congress, No. 137. The Commission has prescribed a set of rules of procedure. Pursuant to those rules I have been authorized to take your sworn deposition.

I want to tell you a little bit about what the general nature of the inquiry is. Of course, this was set up, as you know, after President Kennedy was assassinated and Lee Oswald died. Our instructions are to investigate, evaluate and report back to President Johnson on all the facts surrounding the assassination of the President and the murder of Lee Oswald.

Now, that includes going into the background of Oswald and Ruby, their associations and their motives anything that you can think of about them. We have no authority to send anybody to jail, except for perjury. We are not like the grand jury, in the sense if we find a crime, and we are not conducting this examination with the thought that anybody else is going to use this information to prosecute for crimes of anybody except for perjury.

The most important motivating force, I think, in this investigation is one of national security, not only from the standpoint of finding out as much as we can so that we can learn how to prevent all of the occurrences that have taken place in the last four months from ever happening again, but also, so we can determine if there is any possibility that there was more than one person involved with either one of these two men.

Now, we have asked you to appear here primarily to develop facts in connection with the murder of Oswald, but if you have any sort of information that would be relevant to the entire scope of our investigation, we would like to have it.