A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (14 page)

The chief justice agreed, and after the meeting ended the reporters were called into the room. Warren announced the opening of the commission’s offices in the VFW building and briefly described the panel’s plans to recruit a staff of lawyers. He told the journalists that the commission had just begun to review the FBI report and could not comment on its contents, although he noted that the commission would now request all of the evidence and witness statements the FBI had gathered. “You understand that reports we are receiving are merely summary reports of what happened—and in more or less skeleton form,” he told the reporters. “We will have to see some of the materials upon which those reports are based.”

He called an end to the impromptu news conference after a few minutes and finished by wishing the reporters a Merry Christmas.

That afternoon, the Associated Press and other wire services carried articles about the chief justice’s comments. The articles were read within hours by FBI director Hoover, who was outraged to discover that Warren considered the multivolume FBI report as “merely” a summary of evidence in “skeleton form.” The commission’s inquiry was barely two weeks old, and the chief justice was engaged in “carping criticism” and “endeavoring to find fault with the FBI,” Hoover said. The next day, he called in Inspector James R. Malley, a veteran FBI supervisor who had been named as the bureau’s day-to-day liaison to the commission, to give him new orders. If Warren and the commissioners now wanted all of the bureau’s raw information about the investigation, they would get it—every bit of it, including every report about every tip from every “nut” who claimed to have an answer to the assassination; Hoover’s order to Malley meant the commission would be choked within days with tens of thousands of piece of paper. “I want all reports, whether of substantial nature or so-called ‘nut’ reports to be sent” to the commission, Hoover told Malley. “I want nothing to be withheld irrespective of what the volume might amount to.… Since the Chief Justice had asked for it, we should give it to him.”

THE OFFICES OF REPRESENTATIVE GERALD R. FORD

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

WASHINGTON, DC

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1963

The day after the meeting, Ford invited FBI assistant director DeLoach back to his offices on Capitol Hill, this time to share details of Warren’s plans to complete the commission’s investigation and release a final report “prior to July 1964, when the presidential campaigns will begin to get hot.”

The two men also discussed the advance leaks of the conclusions of the FBI’s report—the leaks that other commissioners were convinced had been orchestrated by the bureau. “I again went over very carefully with Congressman Ford the fact the FBI had not had any ‘leaks’ whatsoever,” DeLoach wrote later. He suggested to Ford that the leaks were coming from elsewhere—“from Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach and from the Justice Department, as well as from within the commission.” DeLoach suggested that Warren himself was leaking information through his friend Drew Pearson. “I told Congressman Ford in strict confidence that apparently Chief Justice Warren was quite close to Drew Pearson and obviously used Pearson from time to time to get thoughts across to the general public.”

Ford ended the conversation with a request. He and his family were about to leave for a skiing vacation in Michigan. “He wanted to take the FBI report with him yet he had no way of transporting it in complete safety,” DeLoach wrote. “I told him I felt the Director would want him to borrow from us one of our agent briefcases that contains a lock. He stated this would be ideal and he would appreciate the loan of a briefcase very much.” The FBI-issue briefcase was delivered to Ford the next day, with Hoover’s compliments.

8

THE HOME OF J. LEE RANKIN

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1963

Lee Rankin was not the sort of man to draw attention to himself. In the 1960s, when remembering his years at the Justice Department, he was much more likely to salute the hard work of his colleagues than to boast about his own role as solicitor general. It was Rankin’s family, not Rankin, who talked about the threats he had faced as a result of his work at the department, including a frightening incident in the late 1950s when they discovered a burning cross outside their home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington.

His teenage son Roger, who had left the dinner table to check on the family’s dogs, first saw the flaming wooden cross that someone had planted in the yard. “It was probably six feet tall,” he recalled years later. “There it was—a big, burning cross.”

He remembered that even as they rushed out the front door to douse the flames with a garden hose, he saw nothing like fear on his father’s face, even though his family was now almost certainly under threat by the Ku Klux Klan or some local band of racists. “He never expressed that kind of emotion—of fear or of worry,” his daughter, Sara, said years later. “I can’t remember him worrying about anything. He seemed to be always in control. He was reserved, self-effacing, quiet.”

The cross-burners were never caught, although Rankin’s colleagues were sure that he was being threatened because of his work at the department to expand the reach of federal civil rights laws. For several days after the incident, FBI agents were assigned to protect the family; the agents sat in an unmarked car on the street outside as the Rankins slept.

J. Lee Rankin—he had not used his first name, James, since childhood—had been recruited to the Justice Department by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, a fellow Nebraskan who had run Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential campaign. Rankin, forty-five years old when he arrived in Washington, was first given the position of assistant attorney general for legal counsel, a prestigious post in which he acted as the department’s top in-house lawyer. In 1956, he was named solicitor general, a job that made him the administration’s chief lawyer in cases before the Supreme Court.

In both jobs, Rankin found himself in the front lines of the Justice Department’s efforts to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws in the face of violent opposition by segregationist groups. He helped draft the administration’s legal briefs in support of black Kansas schoolchildren in the
Brown v. Board of Education
case. Chief Justice Warren had always been impressed by Rankin’s no-nonsense, unflappable style during his appearances at the Supreme Court, especially when Rankin—a thin man whose thick glasses gave him an owlish, professorial look—argued for expansion of civil rights and civil liberties protections. In 1962, after Rankin left for private practice in New York, he returned to the court to argue on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union in the landmark case known as
Gideon v. Wainwright
, in which the court agreed with the ACLU and ordered that criminal defendants had to be provided with a defense lawyer if they could not afford one.

On December 6, 1963, Warren telephoned Rankin in New York and offered him the job of general counsel on the assassination commission, and he asked Rankin to begin immediately. Later, both men remembered that Rankin put up a brief struggle over accepting the assignment, telling the chief justice that he was just starting to build his private law practice and that it would be difficult to leave New York. He warned Warren that some members of the commission might not want him, likely a reference to Senator Russell and Rankin’s role in
Brown v. Board of Education
and other civil rights cases. But Warren was insistent, saying that he already had the approval of the full commission. He assured Rankin that the job would not require an extraordinary time commitment. “He said it would not last more than two or three months,” Rankin recalled.

Warren and Rankin were Republicans of a similar stripe—progressives who took special pride in the history of the GOP as the party of Abraham Lincoln. They had both admired President Kennedy. “My dad was heartsick over the assassination,” remembered Sara Rankin. The two men also shared a similar pride in their humble backgrounds; neither man was born to anything resembling privilege.

Rankin, a graduate of the University of Nebraska Law School, had always worked hard, sometimes obsessively so. His wife, Gertrude, urged him to reject Warren’s offer. She told her children she feared the job would consume her husband to the point of endangering his health. She had seen it before during their years in Washington, when he would return home every night with a briefcase bulging with paperwork; he disappointed his children by setting aside every Sunday afternoon to read legal briefs and prepare himself for the workweek ahead at the Justice Department.

Rankin was a perfectionist who would ask a secretary, very politely, to retype a letter or a legal brief if there was the smallest typographical error; he did not like the appearance of correction fluid. “If you made a typo, you’d begin all over again,” said his daughter, who sometimes helped him with secretarial work. “He wanted the letter to look right, even if you had to type it four or five times.”

Warren and Rankin had a friendly but formal relationship during Rankin’s years as solicitor general. That appeared to reflect Rankin’s modesty and shyness more than anything else; he seemed unwilling to presume to consider himself a possible intimate of the chief justice, a man he revered. Now, at the commission, Rankin intended to work
for
—not so much
with
—Warren and the other commissioners. He was their employee, the attorney they had hired for this job. “The substantive decisions were all made by the commission,” Rankin said later. “I didn’t have authority to execute on my own.” (His deference to authority and exquisite manners might explain why he—unlike Warren Olney, his former colleague at the Justice Department—had not made an enemy of J. Edgar Hoover.)

Within hours of Warren’s call, Rankin sat down with a yellow legal pad in his apartment on Sutton Place on the East Side of Manhattan and began to outline how the investigation might be organized. Warren had agreed to allow him to divide his time between Washington and New York, with the understanding that Rankin would conduct the commission’s work by phone when he was back in Manhattan. Rankin quickly developed a routine and became a regular on the Eastern Airlines shuttle. “On Monday mornings, he was on the first shuttle out of New York down to Washington,” his eldest son, Jim, remembered, “and then he would work all day Monday, all day Tuesday, and then Wednesday night he would come home, with tons of stuff in his briefcase.”

*

Rankin got to work quickly in Washington, establishing his base at the newly opened Madison Hotel, a few blocks from his old offices at the Justice Department. He would work out of his hotel room until the commission was ready to move into its new offices on Capitol Hill.

Warren had given authority to Rankin to hire a staff of young lawyers, subject to the chief justice’s veto. “He may have asked me about people sometimes, but I left it to Rankin,” Warren said later. The chief justice did urge Rankin to look for young men—there appears to have been no discussion of hiring women—from different parts of the country, not just from the Boston–New York–Washington corridor that produced most of the government’s top lawyers. (Warren did not need to remind Rankin that the Boston-to-Washington corridor had produced neither of them.) The chief justice told Rankin that he “wanted the men to be independent and not to have any connections that might later be embarrassing.”

Rankin recruited one of the staff’s first lawyers from the Justice Department. For weeks after the assassination, Robert Kennedy had been away from his offices at the department’s headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue; his staff could see that he was too deep in mourning to carry out any but his essential duties. That left Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach in charge, and he assigned a promising young lawyer from the department’s criminal division, thirty-two-year-old Howard Willens, to serve as the department’s liaison to the commission. Willens, a Michigan native who had graduated seven years earlier from Yale Law School, was told that the assignment would last several months and that he would remain on the department’s payroll.

Willens arrived at the commission’s office on Tuesday, December 17. Rankin was immediately impressed by the take-charge young lawyer, and he asked Willens if he would consider working for the commission full-time—both as the Justice Department’s representative and also as a senior member of its staff. Three days later, with Katzenbach’s approval, Willens signed on.

Challenged years later about whether his dual roles had posed a conflict of interest, Willens insisted there had been none, even though a central question before the commission was whether the assassination was somehow linked to foreign policy decisions of the Kennedy administration—decisions in which Robert Kennedy had a central role, especially about Cuba. “No one could seriously maintain that the Department of Justice headed by Attorney General Kennedy had any interest in this investigation other than the most thorough and honest canvassing of all the available facts,” Willens said. Later, some of the commission’s critics would maintain precisely that.

Rankin asked Willens to help him search for other young lawyers, and Willens called friends and colleagues at the Justice Department, as well as prominent law firms and law school deans around the country, to ask for the names of candidates. The search quickly reflected his ties to Yale, as well as to his many friends and associates who were graduates of his alma mater’s great rival, Harvard Law School, and a handful of other elite law schools. “I do concede that there is here a predominance of lawyers from Yale and Harvard,” he said later in reviewing the staff list.

Rankin was eager to hire a prominent black lawyer. Given how much he valued his reputation as a civil rights advocate, Rankin understood how hypocritical he—and the chief justice—might look if the commission did otherwise. He thought there was an obvious candidate: William Coleman of Philadelphia, and Warren said he was delighted by the suggestion. Coleman, forty-three, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, had become the first black law clerk in the history of the Supreme Court when he was hired in 1948 by Justice Felix Frankfurter. Even while establishing himself as one of the nation’s most sought-after corporate litigators—his client list would eventually grow to include many of the nation’s most powerful corporations, including Ford Motor Company—Coleman had become a key behind-the-scenes figure in the civil rights movement. He was coauthor of the key legal brief filed on behalf of the black schoolchildren in
Brown v. Board of Education
.