A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (13 page)

Hoover had reason to be elated, and not just by Ford’s offer. The FBI director now had early evidence that Ford and some of the other commissioners were ready to put up a fight against the chief justice.

“Well-handled,” he wrote at the bottom of DeLoach’s memo.

The FBI’s former number-three official, Assistant Director William Sullivan, who broke with Hoover years later and was forced into early retirement, recalled Hoover’s excitement over Ford’s offer to feed information. Over time, he said, Ford protected the FBI by “keeping us fully advised on what was going on behind closed doors.… He was our man, our informant, on the Warren Commission.”

*

The investigation of Kennedy’s assassination would be the largest criminal inquiry in the bureau’s history, up to that time, as measured by the number of agents and man-hours devoted to the inquiry. The investigation was centered in Dallas, where scores of agents had been temporarily deployed from around the country. Extra agents were dispatched to New Orleans, where Oswald had been born and where he lived for part of 1963; to New York, where he had spent part of his childhood; and to Mexico City. Even so, just days after the assassination and certainly by early December, Hoover seemed ready to declare that Oswald—and Oswald alone—was responsible for the president’s murder.

On Sunday, November 24, the day of Oswald’s murder and two days after Kennedy’s assassination, Hoover told Walter Jenkins, one of Johnson’s top aides at the White House, that the FBI intended to prepare a report that would “convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” Hoover appeared willing to overrule deputies to make a public declaration that Oswald had acted alone. On Tuesday, November 26, one of his senior deputies wrote to the director to say it was wrong to make any quick judgments about the assassination, including a final determination that Oswald was the lone gunman. “We must recognize that a matter of this magnitude cannot be fully investigated in a week’s time,” he argued.

Hoover disagreed and made his annoyance clear in a handwritten note he jotted at the top of the memo: “Just how long do you estimate it will take? It seems to me that we have the basic facts now.” Three days later, on November 29, Hoover told President Johnson in a telephone call that “we hope to have the investigation wrapped up today, but probably won’t have it before the first of the week.”

That estimate proved much too optimistic, but on Monday, December 9, the FBI presented the Warren Commission with a five-volume, four-hundred-page report that, as promised, effectively identified Oswald as the lone killer. “Evidence developed in the investigation points conclusively to the assassination of President Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald, an avowed Marxist,” the report said. The FBI did not completely rule out the possibility of a conspiracy involving Oswald, but the report offered no hint of anyone else involved in Kennedy’s murder. There was the clear suggestion that although the FBI had Oswald under surveillance earlier that year as a possible Soviet spy, the bureau had never had reason to believe he posed a threat to the president. It was the findings of that report that had been leaked to reporters a week earlier.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1963

Warren and the other commissioners gathered at the National Archives for their third meeting, which would center on a discussion of the FBI report.

Lee Rankin, newly arrived as general counsel, attended the session, and the chief justice said how pleased he was that Rankin could assume much of the burden of organizing the investigation. “He’s been with me most of the time since our last meeting and we have been trying to tend to the housekeeping part of this thing,” Warren said.

The chief justice opened the meeting with other good news—he had found office space for the commission at the newly opened headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the national veterans group, on Maryland Avenue. Conveniently, the five-story, marble-facade building was just two blocks from the Supreme Court and a few minutes’ walk from the Capitol. The commission could occupy the entire fourth floor of the building—about ten thousand square feet—and its members had been invited to use the VFW’s large, ground-floor conference room for important witness interviews and other gatherings. “We have everything we need over there,” Warren said.

The commission had been assigned its own phone number and would soon have its own telephone operators and receptionists, he announced. That news would be a relief to the bank of phone operators at the Supreme Court building who had grown alarmed by the bizarre, sometimes threatening calls from people who claimed to know dark secrets about the assassination.

Warren also reported that he was receiving good cooperation elsewhere. The General Services Administration, the federal logistics agency, had found an office administrator to organize the commission’s payroll system and other bookkeeping. The National Archives had dispatched an archivist to help organize a filing system for what would soon be a flood of documents, many classified as top secret and higher. “We’re in business over there,” Warren said.

The conversation then turned to the FBI report. The appraisal by most of the commissioners was harsh. Warren and several others said they found the report incomplete and confusing—astonishingly so—and so badly written that it was hard to follow from one sentence to the next; parts of it were written in something like shorthand. “The grammar is bad and you can see that they did not polish it up at all,” McCloy said.

Their alarm about the report was matched by their annoyance that so many details had been leaked—apparently by the FBI—before anyone at the White House or the commission had had a chance to read it. “Gentlemen, to be very frank about it, I have read that report two or three times and I have not seen anything in there that has not been in the press,” Warren complained.

“I couldn’t agree with that more,” Russell said. “Practically everything in there has come out in the press at one time or another, a bit here and a bit there.”

While the report left no doubt that the FBI considered Oswald the lone gunman, it was full of gaps about the medical findings and about the physical evidence gathered in Dealey Plaza. McCloy said he had read—more than once—the sections about Oswald’s rifle and the trajectory of the bullets fired at the president’s limousine, and he could not make sense of the ballistics evidence. “This bullet business leaves me confused,” he said. “That is very unsatisfactory.”

“It’s totally inconclusive,” Warren agreed.

Boggs was surprised that the report said almost nothing about Governor Connally and his near-fatal injuries. It left Boggs with “a million questions.”

The report also failed to provide basic information about Oswald’s biography and his foreign travels, including his trip to Mexico that fall. It offered only a brief description of his firearms training in the Marine Corps. “There are all kinds of questions in my mind,” Boggs said. “He was such an expert marksman, for instance. Where did he do his practicing?”

The commissioners questioned why the report had only sketchy information about Ruby, who, it was rumored in Texas, might have known Oswald. “They have obviously done a lot to establish the life and habits of Oswald,” Boggs said, “but there is still little on this fellow Ruby, including his movements, what he was doing, how he got in there—it’s fantastic.”

Even Ford, the FBI’s reliable defender, admitted that the report “did not have the depth that it ought to have.”

The report’s glaring inadequacies had changed Warren’s mind about the scope of the commission’s investigation. It would need to be much bigger, and it would take longer, he admitted reluctantly. He told the other commissioners that he now believed they needed to issue a government-wide demand for all “raw materials” about the assassination. In the FBI’s case, the commission would need to see all of the thousands of witness statements and evidence reports that its agents had already prepared in Dallas and Washington, as well as all the reports they would prepare in the future.

“It will take quite a while to digest that mass of material,” Russell warned. “I think it will take a truck.”

“Yes,” Warren conceded. “I have no doubt.”

Warren was also now ready to begin to assemble a staff to work under Rankin. He recommended that the commission hire “perhaps half a dozen” experienced lawyers from around the country—in some cases, veteran trial lawyers drawn from nationally prominent law firms—and then match them up with promising, younger lawyers who would do most of the actual digging.

The young lawyers would be hired full-time, with their senior partners asked to contribute whatever time they could; they would be divided into two-man teams, each given responsibility for some part of the investigation. One team would do a complete investigation of Oswald’s life—“traced from the day of his birth right down to the time he was assassinated,” Warren said. A separate team would do the same for Ruby.

The other commissioners supported the concept. They raised no objection to Warren’s plan to hire lawyers—and for the moment, only lawyers—to conduct the initial investigation. The seven commissioners, all of them lawyers too, seemed to assume from the start that a law school degree was the essential credential for members of the commission’s staff.

In the wake of the shoddy FBI report, Russell was brave enough to say what some of the other commissioners might have been thinking—that the commission’s staff would need to consider the possibility that the FBI was getting this wrong. He said there was a chance that the bureau, innocently or intentionally, would misstate the facts about the assassination. Someone on the staff, Russell said, should act as “a Devil’s Advocate who would take this FBI report”—and whatever reports were eventually turned over by the CIA and other agencies—and “go through it and analyze every contradiction and every soft spot in it, just as if he were prosecuting them.” There should be at least one staffer who would evaluate the evidence “as if he were going to use them to prosecute J. Edgar Hoover.”

Ford raised a different issue. He said he wanted to be certain that lawyers hired for the staff would have no strong political views that might influence the investigation. “This is a serious concern I have, and I think we’ve got to be scrupulously careful in this regard,” he said. The commission’s staff members should not be “involved in one extreme or the other.”

“I don’t believe we should have ideologists either,” Warren agreed. “We’re looking for lawyers, not ideologists.”

*

The conversation turned to other questions that had been raised, but not answered, in the FBI report. The commissioners had questions, especially, about Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine. The FBI report said that Oswald, although he was not living with his wife and children at the time, had stored his rifle in the Paine home until the morning of the assassination.

Boggs suggested that Marina might be tempted to flee home to Russia. “She’s a Russian citizen, and she might just take off and leave,” he said. Dulles said he was also “rather worried about that,” given reports that Marina had written to the Soviet embassy in Washington before the assassination to ask about returning home to Russia.

McCloy had questions about another woman who, he thought, was central to the commission’s investigation—Jacqueline Kennedy. It might be seen as distasteful, he acknowledged, but the panel needed to interview her as quickly as possible. The former First Lady was, in many ways, “the central witness” in the investigation. “She’s the chief witness as to how those bullets hit her husband,” McCloy said. “I don’t think you should cross-examine her, but after all she was a witness right alongside of her husband when the bullet struck.” She might have information that was available nowhere else. Wasn’t it possible that the president had shared—only with her—some concern about dangers he might face in Dallas, and from whom? “I just think it’s going to look strange if we don’t” interview her, McCloy said.

McCloy traveled in many of the same social circles in New York and Washington as the Kennedy family, and he knew that Mrs. Kennedy had begun talking to friends—freely—about the assassination. The young widow seemed to find it cathartic to share even some of the gruesome details of what had happened. “I think it’s a very delicate thing to do, but I’m told that she’s quite prepared to talk about it,” McCloy told his fellow commissioners. “I’ve talked to one of the members of the family about it.”

Warren hesitated, as he would so often do when the panel discussed the Kennedy family. The commission was just getting organized, the chief justice pointed out; it did not have enough information to “question witnesses in the formal way,” especially the former First Lady. “When you’re going to talk to someone like Mrs. Kennedy, I think we ought to know exactly what we want to find out from her.”

McCloy questioned Warren’s judgment; the delay in interviewing Mrs. Kennedy was a mistake, he said. “I think a month is going to go by before you’re in that position and I think that is dangerous.”

“Do you think she’ll forget, Jack?” Warren asked.

“Yes,” McCloy replied. “Your mind plays tricks on you. She’s got it very definitely in mind now, and I’m told that she’s physically in a position where she can do it.” He suggested the commission ask Robert Kennedy for guidance on how to approach his sister-in-law. “You can talk to Bobby about that. He might have an idea.”

Warren made no commitment on how—or when—Mrs. Kennedy would be interviewed. Years later, McCloy would look back on this exchange as evidence that the chief justice would be much too protective of Jacqueline Kennedy and her extended family.

*

There was a final item on the commission’s agenda that day—how to deal with the crush of reporters waiting outside the meeting room at the archives, all of them hoping for some scrap of news about the commission’s deliberations. Russell, now in his fourth decade of dealing with the Washington press corps, said it would be dangerous to allow the reporters to leave without giving them something. “You have to feed them a little because they expect it.”