A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (105 page)

The hostility between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Robert Kennedy was no secret to their aides. It was Hoover who—in a brief telephone call minutes after the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza—notified Kennedy that his brother had been shot. In this photograph, the two men are seen at a White House ceremony on May 7, 1963.

President Johnson meets in the Oval Office with Richard Helms, the career intelligence operative named by Johnson to run the Central Intelligence Agency. Helms would later admit there were caveats to his promise of full cooperation with the Warren Commission; he admitted he told the commission nothing about the CIA’s plots to kill Castro.

A formal portrait of the members of the Warren Commission, taken in the hearing room in the Washington, DC, headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, where the commission had its offices.
Left to right
: Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, Representative Hale Boggs of Louisiana, Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, former World Bank president John J. McCloy, former Director of Central Intelligence Allen W. Dulles, and commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin.

J. Lee Rankin, the commission’s general counsel and a former United States solicitor general, led the commission’s staff lawyers, who were divided into two-man teams made up of a “senior counsel” and a “junior” partner. In most cases, the junior lawyers did the bulk of the work.

Norman Redlich, a New York University law professor, was the central editor and author of the final report. Rankin’s decision to hire Redlich, linked by the FBI to left-wing groups the bureau considered subversive, would create a furor among the commissioners.

The commission’s staff gathers for a group portrait in the offices in the national headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Front row, left to right
: Alfred Goldberg, Norman Redlich, J. Lee Rankin, David Slawson (with glasses), Howard Willens (no glasses), David Belin.
Second row
: Stuart Pollak, Arlen Specter, Wesley Liebeler (with cigarette), Samuel Stern, Albert Jenner, John Hart Ely, and Burt Griffin.

David Slawson, one of the junior lawyers, stands next to Chief Justice Warren. Slawson was the commission’s key investigator on the question of a possible foreign conspiracy.

Arlen Specter, who was effectively abandoned by his “senior” partner in reconstructing the events of day of the assassination, would become known as the “father of the single-bullet theory.”

David Belin was the junior partner on the team responsible for identifying the assassin—Oswald, presumably.

Burt Griffin was the junior lawyer on the team investigating Jack Ruby’s background.

Alfred Goldberg, an air force historian, helped outline and write the report.

Melvin Eisenberg, Redlich’s deputy, became the commission’s in-house expert on the science of criminology and could knock down many of the conspiracy theories.