A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (12 page)

If the commission had subpoena power and public hearings, Warren argued, it might be overwhelmed by mentally ill people “who believe they know of great conspiracies” and would demand to testify. “If we have the subpoena power, people are going to expect us to use it. Witnesses are going to have the right to come in and say, ‘here, I’ve got this testimony I want to give.’ … And if they are cranks, if they are nuts, we are in a bind.” If the commission then failed to call the “nuts” to testify, “they are going to go out and say we have suppressed the evidence.” Warren’s mailbag at the court was already full of letters and postcards from disturbed people—some of them threatening, many written in tiny, scrawled handwriting, his files showed—who claimed they were ready to reveal the hidden truth about the president’s murder.

With that, Warren sat back to hear the thoughts of the others. He seemed confident that his fellow commissioners—most nearly as busy with their lives as he was—would see the logic of his proposal.

Instead, the others pushed back, some to the edge of rudeness. He might be chief justice, deferred to in every other setting, but Warren was about to learn that many of these men intended to treat him as an equal. Several—Senator Russell, John McCloy, and Allen Dulles, especially—had been exercising power in Washington for decades, long before Warren arrived in the capital. And Warren had special reason to be wary of Gerald Ford, first elected to Congress in 1948, because of the friendship between the Michigan Republican and Richard Nixon.

McCloy, a sixty-eight-year-old lawyer, diplomat, and banker who had been a valued adviser to presidents since Franklin Roosevelt and was dubbed “The Chairman of the Eastern Establishment” a year earlier by
Esquire
magazine, was the first to stand up to the chief justice. He suggested Warren was downright foolish to trust government agencies to investigate their own shortcomings. McCloy did not use the word “cover-up” in describing what the FBI and Secret Service might do, but he came close.

“There is potential culpability here on the part of the Secret Service and even the FBI,” he said. “Human nature being what it is,” the agencies might submit “self-serving” reports about what had happened.

Warren was wrong about subpoena power, too, McCloy declared. The commission needed to be able to compel witnesses to testify, and to force agencies to turn over evidence. Without subpoena power, he said, the commission risked being seen as toothless. The investigation had an obligation beyond “the mere evaluation of the reports of agencies.… I think that if we didn’t have the right to subpoena documents, the right to subpoena witnesses if we needed them, that this commission’s general standing might be somewhat impaired.” Boggs and Ford agreed.

Seemingly startled to be challenged so openly at the commission’s first meeting, Warren put up no real fight. “If the rest of you think that we ought to have subpoena power, it is perfectly all right with me,” he said.

Next, Russell objected to Warren’s suggestion that the commission go without a staff of investigators. “We are going to have to have somebody” to review the flood of paperwork from the FBI, the Secret Service, and elsewhere, he said. “I hope that we can get a staff—not an army, but a staff of exceedingly capable men that will be able to formulate a report that will stand the most exacting scrutiny of any fair-minded person.”

He reminded Warren of the danger that the investigation posed to all seven of them—that if they did not have adequate resources to get the truth about the assassination and lay out the evidence clearly to the public, history would not forgive them. Whatever else they accomplished in their long careers, this might well be the work they would be remembered for. “The reputations of all of us are at stake in this thing,” Russell said, sharing with the others his anger with Johnson. “Frankly, I don’t know if I will ever feel the same to the president for putting me on this commission.… I told him I didn’t want to serve, and wouldn’t serve, but I couldn’t figure any way out of it.”

McCloy suggested that the commission find a “rattling good” lawyer to direct the staff as the commission’s general counsel, giving Warren the opportunity to offer his candidate: Warren Olney. The chief justice spent several minutes describing Olney’s career in California and in Washington, asserting that “there isn’t a man in my acquaintance who is any more honorable.” Olney, he said, was “a fellow with real ability.… I just don’t believe I could find anyone in the country who has comparable experience in this field for that kind of job.”

His praise was so effusive that anyone who chose to challenge Olney’s appointment might have sounded impertinent, even insulting, to the chief justice. But that is what happened, and Ford led the attack. Olney might be “an excellent recommendation,” Ford said, but the close relationship between Warren and Olney was well known—the FBI had quietly made sure of that—and “with your long relationship with him, there can be some, unfairly perhaps, who would then say the Chief Justice is dominating the commission and it will be seen as his report rather than the report of all of us.

“I don’t want the commission to be divided,” Ford said. “I don’t want it to be your commission or the commission of half of us or otherwise.”

McCloy made no judgment on Olney’s qualifications, but he agreed with Ford that there should be a broad search for a general counsel to oversee the investigation. “I have a feeling that we ought to look and pick out the best damned man,” he said. “Personally, I would like to take a look myself at Olney.”

The collegial Boggs seemed to sense that Warren was offended by the questions about Olney, and the Louisianan rose to defend the chief justice. “I think the chairman needs a counsel with whom he can be completely at ease,” he said. “The Chief Justice should have someone that he has total, absolute confidence in.”

Warren made a final pitch for Olney—and if not Olney, someone else of talent and experience who would be available in a hurry. The chief justice said he needed someone who understood the inner workings of law-enforcement agencies and the rest of the government and would not require “months and months to learn their way around” the capital. He put the plea in personal terms: “If I don’t have a counsel that I know very well with whom I can work from the very first day, I know I won’t even see my family Christmas day,” he said. “I’m going to have to stay here every day, because a man just doesn’t drop into Washington, no matter how good a man he is, and know his way around.”

The meeting ended at twelve forty-five, after nearly three hours, with the commissioners scheduled to meet again the next afternoon.

*

The FBI’s quiet lobbying campaign had worked, and when the commissioners gathered the next day—Friday, December 6—the appointment of Olney was a dead issue. Ford, Dulles, and McCloy informed Warren that they all had reservations about Olney, with McCloy revealing that he knew Olney was “at swords-point with J. Edgar Hoover.” Warren had given up. “I would not want to have anyone here that would not have the full confidence of the commission,” he said. “So as far as I’m concerned, the question of Mr. Olney for counsel before the commission is closed.”

Overnight, McCloy had called friends in Washington and on Wall Street, asking for the names of other experienced lawyers for the job. Several people, he said, had recommended J. Lee Rankin, who had been solicitor general in the Eisenhower administration and was then practicing law in New York. “Rankin seems to be a man of high character, high integrity,” he said.

The mention of the name came as a relief to Warren. A fifty-six-year-old Nebraskan, Rankin was a familiar, friendly face to the chief justice. As solicitor general, he had represented the government before the court in many of the most important cases of the 1950s. In an earlier job, he had argued for the Justice Department on behalf of the young children and their parents in Topeka, Kansas, who had sought the desegregation of their local schools in
Brown v. Board of Education
. “We saw a great deal of him over in the Supreme Court because he argued all of the top ones himself,” Warren said. “He’s a splendid man in every respect.… He’s a human being.” Rankin, he said, was “not political in any sense.”

Russell recommended that, if Warren and McCloy were agreed, the commission should hire Rankin. The other commissioners voiced no objection. Warren made plans to call Rankin that night.

Before the meeting ended, McCloy raised another question. The discussion among the commissioners had focused so far on the FBI and the Secret Service and the information those two agencies would be asked to provide to the commission. But what about the Central Intelligence Agency? Had the chief justice or anyone else been in touch with the CIA to determine what it knew about the assassination—and about Oswald and his travels in Russia and Mexico?

“No, I have not,” Warren replied, “for the simple reason that I have never been informed that the CIA had any knowledge about this.”

“They have,” McCloy shot back, seeming to scoff at the chief justice’s naïveté in suggesting the CIA would know nothing of value about Oswald. Pressing Warren, McCloy said, “Don’t we have to ask them?”

“Of course we do,” the chief justice replied, seeming to realize his earlier answer had been foolish. “I think we have to ask them.”

7

THE OFFICES OF REPRESENTATIVE GERALD R. FORD

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

WASHINGTON, DC

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1963

Gerald Ford asked for the meeting. He invited FBI assistant director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, the bureau’s chief congressional liaison, to stop by his offices on Capitol Hill on the morning of Thursday, December 12, a week after the first meeting of the assassination commission. Ford had an offer to make to the bureau. “Upon arriving, he told me he wanted to talk in the strictest of confidence,” DeLoach wrote to Hoover later that day. “This was agreed to.”

Throughout his congressional career, Ford, like Lyndon Johnson and so many others on Capitol Hill, had gone out of his way to stay close to the FBI. Over the years, the bureau had come to see Ford as a reliable friend, especially when it came time to round up support each year for the FBI’s budget requests. Ford was a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which decided how the federal budget was divided up among agencies. Now, in his work for the commission, Ford would seize on a new opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to the bureau.

Fifty-year-old “Jerry” Ford of Grand Rapids, Michigan, presented himself to his constituents as one of them—another modest, polite, amiable midwesterner. On Capitol Hill, he was known for his level head and good humor, and Democrats admired his internationalist approach to foreign policy. But his congressional colleagues saw a side of Ford that was not often on display to Michigan voters—that of a fiercely ambitious, sometimes ruthless politician who knew how to choose friends and allies who might help advance his career. In 1948, he had defeated a Republican incumbent to enter the House. From his first days in Congress, Ford surprised his staff by speaking openly about his dream of being elected Speaker someday. In early 1963, he was named chairman of the House Republican Conference—the Republican Party’s third-highest leadership post in Congress—after ousting the veteran incumbent. In the 1960 general election, his friend Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential nominee, was reported to have come close to choosing Ford as his running mate.

Ford reached out to the FBI within weeks of arriving in Washington in 1949. He used one of his maiden speeches on the House floor that winter to call for a pay raise for Hoover, announcing that he was the author of a newly introduced budget amendment that would increase the FBI director’s salary by 25 percent—from $14,000 to $17,500 a year—which would keep Hoover among the best-paid officials in the federal government.
*
The director, he said, was a national hero who deserved every penny: “The monetary reward proposed by my amendment, after long years of faithful and devoted service, is small compensation for his invaluable contribution.”

Almost fifteen years later, Ford saw his appointment to the Warren Commission as a way to establish a national reputation—and also to further his alliance with Hoover. Over the years, Ford repeatedly insisted that he had resisted President Johnson’s invitation to join the commission, citing his heavy duties in the House. But the release of Johnson’s White House phone recordings decades later showed that in fact Ford had accepted Johnson’s offer eagerly and without hesitation.

For the FBI, Ford’s appointment meant that the bureau had a valuable contact—and a defender, if needed—on the investigation. In an internal memo shortly after the commission’s membership was announced in late November, Hoover wrote that Ford could be expected to “look after FBI interests.”

It turned out that Ford was willing to go even further to help, as he explained to DeLoach when the two men took a seat in the congressman’s office. Ford said he was willing to be the bureau’s secret source on the commission—in particular, to help the bureau keep an eye on the chief justice. It was the bureau’s decision to make. Did the FBI want him to serve as an informant?

“Ford told me he was somewhat disturbed about the manner in which Chief Justice Warren was carrying on his chairmanship,” DeLoach wrote in a memo later that day that went straight to Hoover. “He explained that the first mistake that Warren made was his attempt to establish a ‘one-man commission’ by appointing a chief counsel, Warren Olney, that was his own protégé.”

Ford told DeLoach that during the commission’s initial discussions, he and others objected to Warren’s idea of installing Olney. “Warren put up a stiff argument” to try to rescue Olney’s appointment, Ford informed DeLoach, but “a compromise was made when the name of Lee Rankin was mentioned.” The memo suggested that Ford was unaware—or at least unwilling to acknowledge that he knew—that the FBI had organized a behind-the-scenes campaign to block Olney.

He then made his offer to DeLoach. “Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as to the activities of the Commission,” DeLoach wrote. “He also asked if he could call me from time to time and straighten out questions in his mind concerning the investigation. I told him by all means he should do this. He reiterated that our relationship would, of course, remain confidential. We have had excellent relations with Congressman Ford for many years.”