A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (112 page)

I was fortunate to come across talented archivists and librarians to guide me through a mountain of evidence related to the assassination: Mary Kay Schmidt at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; William H. McNitt at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Karen M. Albert at the Arlen Specter Center for Public Policy at Philadelphia University; Sheryl B. Vogt at the Richard B. Russell Library at the University of Georgia; Brian C. McNerney at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; and also in Austin, Stefanie Lapka, Margaret L. Schlankey, and Aryn Glazier of the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas. Marie Fonzi, Gaeton’s widow, has a valuable collection of material gathered by her late husband from his work on the House Assassinations Committee.

I was relieved to discover the existence of private research groups that have created digital libraries of declassified material about the assassination, notably the Mary Ferrell Foundation (
www.maryferrell.org
), which has a searchable archive of more than a million documents related to the deaths of both John and Robert Kennedy, as well as of Martin Luther King. The foundation’s ninety-nine-dollar-a-year research fee was among the wisest investments I made for this book. Among the other groups with impressive electronic archives on this subject are the Assassination Archives and Research Center (
www.aarclibrary.org
) and History Matters, (
www.history-matters.com
).

The families of several of my sources have been unfailingly gracious as I have intruded into their lives, especially Kaaren Slawson, David’s wife; Paula Aynesworth, Hugh’s wife; and Laura and Tom Belin, David’s daughter and son. Laura and Tom’s loving devotion to their father’s legacy is an inspiration. I owe a special debt to the family of Charles William Thomas—especially to his widow, Cynthia, who took such a risk by talking with me after talking to no other reporter or author for decades about the most traumatic events of her life. I have huge admiration for Cynthia’s daughter, Zelda Thomas-Curti, who has the instincts of a reporter and who sensed years ago that the true story about her father was being hidden. I was delighted to be introduced to Charles’s other daughter, Jeanne-Marie Thomas Byron, in the final stages of writing this book and to learn that she, too, has been searching for the truth.

While I know he will disagree with my portrayal of him in these pages, I do thank Mark Lane for welcoming me into his home in Virginia and giving me an extended interview for this book. Whatever our disagreements, I know now that the title of his most famous, bestselling book about the Warren Commission,
Rush to Judgment,
was an appropriate one.

To my mother, Philippa Shenon, and the rest of my family in California and elsewhere, I apologize for my long absences from the dinner table because of the book project—this one—that I tried to keep a secret for so many years. To my friends Desmond Davis, Darnell Harvin, Betty Russell, Dino Sciulli, and Julian Wells in Washington, DC, thank you for keeping me company during so many long days and nights of writing.

ALSO BY PHILIP SHENON

The Commission:

The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation

About the Author

P
HILIP
S
HENON
, the bestselling author of
The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation
, was a reporter for the
New York Times
for more than twenty years. As a Washington correspondent for the
Times
, he covered the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the State Department As a foreign correspondent for the paper, he reported from more than sixty countries and several war zones. He lives in Washington, DC.

A Cruel and Shocking Act. Copyright © 2013 by Philip Shenon. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.henryholt.com

Cover image: Photographer unknown The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Shenon, Philip.

A cruel and shocking act: The secret history of the Kennedy assassination / Philip Shenon.

pages cm Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-8050-9420-6 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-42994369-7 (electronic book) 1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963—Assassination. 2. United States. Warren Commission. I. Title.

E842.9.S46 2013

973.922092—dc23

2013031968

e-ISBN 9781429943697

First Edition: October 2013

*
The whereabouts of the president’s brain became yet another mystery. In 1979, a special congressional panel that reinvestigated the president’s murder, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, said it had learned from Dr. Burkley that he had transferred a sealed stainless-steel bucket containing the brain to Kennedy’s former secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, who then stored it for a time in 1964 at the National Archives. The committee could not track the brain with certainty past that point. In its final report, the committee said it was told by former Yale Law School professor Burke Marshall, who represented the executors of Kennedy’s estate, that he suspected Robert Kennedy ultimately obtained the brain and other autopsy evidence and “disposed of these materials himself, without informing anyone else.” Marshall said, “Robert Kennedy was concerned that these materials would be placed on public display in future years in an institution such as the Smithsonian and wished to dispose of them to eliminate such a possibility.” (House Select Committee on Assassinations, vol. VII, “Medical and Firearms Evidence,” March 1979.)

*
At Hoover’s direction, the FBI had been hunting for years for evidence of Communist sympathizers on the faculties of major American universities; a few were uncovered on the faculty of Howard University, the historically black university in Washington, DC.

*
Given inflation, Hoover’s new $17,500 annual salary would be equivalent to about $171,000 in 2013.

*
In his memoirs, which were published posthumously in 1977, Warren revealed that he had reviewed the photos during the commission’s investigation, although he did not disclose exactly when in 1963 or 1964 the review had taken place.

*
The airport was named for John Foster Dulles (1888–1959), secretary of state under President Eisenhower and the brother of Allen Dulles, the former director of Central Intelligence and a member of the Warren Commission.

*
Given inflation, $25,000 in 1964 would be equivalent to about $188,000 in 2013.

*
Lane would later say that he did not talk to anyone who claimed to have witnessed the Carousel Club meeting. The information, he said, had instead come to him secondhand from the late Thayer Waldo, a reporter for the
Fort Worth Star Telegram
—the same reporter who told Drew Pearson about how Secret Service agents had gone out drinking the night before the assassination. Asked if he believed the meeting had actually taken place, Lane told the author of this book in 2011, “I have no idea now, and I had no idea then.” (Lane interview.)

*
Given inflation, $36,000 in 1964 would be equivalent to about $271,000 in 2013.

*
Ruby’s acquaintances offered stomach-churning stories to the FBI about his relationship to his pets. One witness described watching as Ruby casually masturbated one of his dogs in front of visitors. Another described Ruby allowing his dogs to lick blood from his hand after a deep cut with a kitchen knife.

*
Years later, Lane would insist that he had not harassed Helen Markham, suggesting instead that he had done a service by revealing that such a seemingly important witness before the Warren Commission could be confused about what she had seen. He noted, correctly, that Markham’s credibility had been damaged by the fact that she initially claimed to the commission under oath that she had never talked to him. “It’s not badgering,” said Lane, adding that he remains convinced that Oswald did not kill Tippit despite the many other witnesses who said otherwise. “It’s only what every lawyer in the world always does” in cross-examination. “No lawyer will look at that and say I did anything wrong.” He acknowledged that he had taped the call without notifying Markham, although he said that was legal so long as he did not divulge the contents, which he did not do; it was the commission that released the transcript. In its final report, the commission would describe Markham’s testimony as “reliable” and that “even in the absence of Mrs. Markham’s testimony, there is ample evidence to identify Oswald as the killer of Tippit.” (Lane interview; Warren Report, p. 168.)

*
Warren would later insist that the commission had been fair to Oswald, even in death, through an arrangement made in February with the president of the American Bar Association, Walter E. Craig, who agreed to evaluate the commission’s work “in fairness to the alleged assassin and his family.” Although Craig was invited to cross-examine witnesses and offer the names of witnesses who should be called, the records shows that he and two associates had little involvement in the investigation. (See Warren Report, pp. XIV–XV)

*
Lane said he knew the FBI and other government agencies had placed him under surveillance and that they were trying to gather derogatory information about his private life. After he began to speak out about the Kennedy assassination, he said that he was routinely stopped by U.S. immigration authorities when returning from speaking trips abroad. He suggested he was most offended when he was temporarily detained in 1964 at New York’s newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport—“I was not allowed into the city where I was born” without harassment. As for the FBI effort to compile derogatory information and share it with members of the Warren Commission, Lane suggested he wore it as a badge of honor. “They did the same thing with Martin Luther King,” he said. (Lane interview.)

*
Ruby denied any connection to Hunt and insisted he was given the scripts at a local trade fair at which Hunt family companies were promoting their Texas-made food products.

*
Those news reports, especially in the
New York Times
, were later found to have been seriously exaggerated. In later years, others journalists and researchers determined that only a few witnesses near the scene of Genovese’s murder would have been in a position to see or hear anything.

*
The commission would not learn until June that Lane had tape-recorded his telephone call with Markham.

*
Although Specter offered this account in his memoirs and noted it in interviews with the author of this book, the Jewish holiday actually began later in the month. In 1964, the first day of Passover was Saturday, March 28.

*
Connally’s remark that “they” were trying to kill the occupants of the limousine would often be cited by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Texas governor knew that there was more than one gunman. Connally said later he meant no such thing and that he accepted the conclusion that Oswald had acted alone.

*
Although commission records would show that Coleman worked substantially fewer hours than most of the lawyers, Specter appeared unaware before his death in 2012 that Coleman had taken on special assignments for the commission away from Washington.

*
Specter would finally be shown the autopsy photos in the National Archives in April 1996, when he was a United States senator from Pennsylvania. He described what he saw: “The photos are gruesome. John F. Kennedy is lying on an autopsy table, his handsome face discolored and distorted by the gaping bullet wound in his head. As I looked at the slain president, I was struck again by the same waves of nausea that had hit me when I first read the medical reports 35 years earlier. I was also struck by the president’s clearly robust physical condition, which somehow made the photographs even more ghastly. Kennedy, at 47, had well-defined, muscular shoulders and arms, a flat stomach and a full head of hair.” (Specter,
Passion for Truth
, p. 89.)

*
In fact, Hosty had kept his handwritten notes, a fact that he later insisted he had not remembered at the time of his testimony to the commission. “Several months after the Warren report was released, I discovered the notes among my papers in my desk. Realizing their significance, I chose to hang on to them, and I kept them safely stored away.” (Hosty,
Assignment: Oswald
, p. 146.)