A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (15 page)

Rankin also decided that he wanted his friend Norman Redlich, a thirty-eight-year-old law professor at New York University, to join the staff as his chief deputy. Redlich had befriended Rankin two years earlier, when he invited Rankin, then newly arrived in New York, to join the NYU faculty to teach part-time.

Rankin thought that Redlich was precisely what he needed in a deputy, and he seemed untroubled that the Bronx-born Redlich had no background in criminal law or in anything that could be labeled as investigative work; Redlich’s specialty was tax law. Within days, he was on his way to Washington—the law school was closed until January for the winter holiday—at which point he would also begin to commute between Washington and New York.

In his early hiring decisions, Rankin said later, he was well aware of Ford’s insistence—and Warren’s agreement—that the staff members hired by the commission have no extreme political ties. And from what he knew of Redlich, there was no problem. Rankin saw a man much like himself—and like the chief justice, for that matter. Redlich, yet another graduate of Yale’s law school, was deeply committed to civil rights and civil liberties. His involvement in social justice issues had begun early: as an undergraduate at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the 1940s, he organized a protest against the one barbershop on the main commercial street in Williamstown over its refusal to cut the hair of black students. The shop abandoned the policy.

Rankin would later insist that he had known nothing about Redlich’s ties in the 1950s and early 1960s to civil liberties and civil rights groups that J. Edgar Hoover believed were fronts for the Communist Party. Rankin said he learned—too late and much to his dismay—that the FBI maintained a thick file on Redlich and his links to organizations that the bureau had labeled as “subversive.”

9

THE CHAMBERS OF THE CHIEF JUSTICE

THE SUPREME COURT

WASHINGTON, DC

The sealed envelope containing the autopsy photographs was forwarded from the Bethesda Naval Hospital to the chief justice at his chambers at the Supreme Court. An FBI inventory prepared on the night of the autopsy reported that all of the photos were four inches by five inches—twenty-two of them in color, eighteen in black and white.

In his fourteen-year career as a county prosecutor in Oakland, California, how many autopsy photos had Warren seen—hundreds, thousands? Back in the homicide squad in the DA’s office in Alameda County, it was a routine part of the job—best done on an empty stomach—to review autopsy and crime-scene photos and decide which of them could be shown to a jury without risk that some of the jurors would be so revolted that they would rush from the courtroom.

Now, all these years later, Warren thought he still had a strong stomach. But the photos of the president’s autopsy were awful in a way he could not have imagined. “I saw the pictures when they came from Bethesda Naval Hospital, and they were so horrible that I could not sleep well for nights,” he later wrote. The worst, he told a friend, were of the president’s head, which was “split almost wide open.” The skull was “disintegrated.”

Warren had been appalled by news reports, beginning only weeks after the assassination, about plans in Dallas and elsewhere to establish “museums” to commemorate the president’s death. “The president was hardly buried before people with ghoulish minds began putting together artifacts of the assassination,” the chief justice wrote. Some of the museum promoters—“these sideshow barkers,” as he described them—announced their intention to try to purchase Oswald’s weapons from the government for the central display cases. Warren remembered reading that the museum promoters “offered as much as ten thousand dollars for the rifle alone.… They also wanted to buy from the family the clothes of Oswald, his revolver with which Officer Tippit was murdered, various things at the Depository and they were even making inquiries about the availability of the clothes of President Kennedy. They also, of course, wanted pictures of his head.”

Now that he had seen the photos for himself, Warren said he did not struggle about what to do with them.
*
It was an easy decision: they would be locked away, forever, unless the Kennedy family decided otherwise. No one outside the family had the right to see them—and that included the other members of the commission and its staff, Warren decided. He ordered all of the autopsy photos, as well as all of the X-rays, be sent to the Justice Department, where Robert Kennedy would have control over them.

Warren convinced himself that the commission did not need the photos and X-rays, since the navy doctors who had conducted the autopsy were available to testify and the commission had full access to the written autopsy report, which contained hand-drawn diagrams of the wounds to the president’s body. The photos and X-rays were of no special value, Warren declared. The commission, he said, would have “the convincing testimony of the Naval doctors who performed the autopsy to establish the cause of death, entry, exit and course of the bullets.”

*

Other horrifying images from the day of the assassination were beyond Warren’s control. The public had already begun to see portions of the astonishing amateur film taken by a Dallas women’s wear manufacturer, Abraham Zapruder, who had captured the assassination on his Bell & Howell Zoomatic home-movie camera. The fifty-eight-year-old Zapruder had been standing near a grassy bit of Dealey Plaza a few feet from the Texas School Book Depository, a spot that reporters covering the aftermath of the assassination quickly began to refer to as the “grassy knoll.”

On Monday, December 9, Warren’s press officer at the Supreme Court, Bert Whittington, got a call from a representative of
Life
magazine, which had bought the film from Zapruder. In its “John F. Kennedy Memorial Issue,” the week before,
Life
had reproduced thirty frames of the film, beginning with an image of the president’s limousine as it began to move slowly down Elm Street in front of book depository. Published in black and white, the frames captured images of the president being struck by a bullet, apparently in the neck, and then dropping into his wife’s lap; later frames showed the First Lady trying to climb onto the trunk of the car in what the magazine’s editors described in a caption as a “pathetic search for help.”

In that issue,
Life
did not explain to its readers what it had left out—that the full twenty-six seconds of film were far more horrifying and that the film was in color. The magazine chose, in particular, not to publish the frame that captured the moment a bullet struck the president’s head, blowing away much of the right side of his brain in a halo of pinkish, bloody mist. “We felt that publishing that grisly picture would constitute an unnecessary affront to the Kennedy family and to the president’s memory,” recalled Richard Stolley, the
Life
correspondent who bought the film from Zapruder on behalf of the magazine.

In his memo to Warren, Whittington wrote that the magazine was offering the commission a copy of the entire film, in color. Warren returned the memo to Whittington with a handwritten note asking him to contact
Life
immediately and thank them for their cooperation. “We will undoubtedly want to see it and will advise,” he wrote.

A few days later, a copy of Zapruder’s film arrived in Washington, and Warren had a chance to see for himself what the magazine had chosen not to show its readers.

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

DECEMBER 1963

By late December, Rankin and Willens—the younger man’s authority grew by the day—decided on a final structure for the staff, which would initially total fifteen lawyers. Most of them would be assigned to two-man teams led by a “senior counsel” whose partner—a younger, less experienced lawyer—would have the title of “junior counsel.”

With Warren’s approval, Rankin and Willens settled on six areas of investigation. Area 1 would reconstruct a time line of everything that happened from the moment President Kennedy departed the White House on Thursday, November 21, to begin his Texas trip, until the moment his corpse returned to lie in state at the White House in the predawn hours of Saturday, November 23. Area 2 would gather evidence to establish—conclusively, it was hoped—the identity of the president’s assassin, presumably Oswald. Area 3 would reconstruct Oswald’s life. Area 4 would study the possibility that there had been a foreign conspiracy, with a focus, it was assumed, on the Soviet Union and Cuba. Area 5 would construct the biography of Jack Ruby and look for any possible connection between him and Oswald. Area 6 would investigate the quality of the protection provided to President Kennedy by the Secret Service, as well as the history of law-enforcement efforts to protect other presidents from harm.

Warren had little trouble coming up with the names of prominent, well-established lawyers for the “senior counsel” jobs. They were the sorts of lawyers the chief justice and Rankin had worked with every day of their careers for decades. William Coleman was asked to lead Area 4—the “conspiracy” team—since he had experience in foreign policy issues. That year, Coleman had become an adviser to the government’s newly created Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, so he already had a government security clearance.

Rankin recommended Francis Adams, fifty-nine, a Manhattan litigator who had been New York City’s police commissioner in the mid-1950s, while Warren offered the name of Albert Jenner, fifty-six, who was a name partner of a powerhouse Chicago law firm, Raymond, Mayer, Jenner & Block, later renamed simply Jenner & Block. Both men agreed to serve. Adams, who obviously had experience with crime scenes, was assigned to Area 1, which would reconstruct the events of the day of the assassination. Jenner was given responsibility for Area 3 and the investigation of Oswald’s past.

Warren was eager to hire an old friend from California, sixty-one-year-old Joseph Ball of Long Beach, who was among the state’s most successful criminal-defense lawyers and also taught at the law school at the University of Southern California. To Warren, Ball was a living rebuttal to the many lawyers in the East who still assumed their counterparts on the Pacific Coast were somehow less talented or sophisticated. Ball was put in charge of the Area 2 team, which would determine if Oswald was in fact the assassin.

With lawyers hired from the East, West, and Midwest, Warren also wanted representation from the South. Congressman Boggs came up with the name of a fellow Louisianan: fifty-two-year-old Leon Hubert, the former district attorney of New Orleans and a law professor at Tulane University who was then in private practice. Hubert was put in charge of Area 5 and the effort to reconstruct Ruby’s life story.

THE OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1963

Arlen Specter was a young man on the rise in Philadelphia, his adopted hometown. In 1963, the year he turned thirty-three, he was an assistant district attorney, and that June he became a local hero—certainly a hero in the district attorney’s office—after obtaining the conviction of several of the city’s most powerful Teamsters officials on racketeering charges. He was so impressive in the case that Attorney General Robert Kennedy called Specter to Washington for a face-to-face meeting to try to recruit him to join the Justice Department to assist in the prosecution of Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters’ national leader. Specter turned down the offer, in part, he said, because he hoped to run for local office in Philadelphia.

Colleagues in the district attorney’s office, as well his adversaries on the defense table, saw Specter as unusually self-confident, often to the point of being cocky and arrogant. Specter did not necessarily disagree with the description.

The recruiting call from the commission came on New Year’s Eve. It was about five thirty that afternoon, and Specter was still at his office, “trying to concoct an excuse for arriving home so late,” he remembered. His wife, Joan, was planning a New Year’s Eve party that night with some friends. The caller was Howard Willens, a classmate from Yale Law School. Now in his second week working for Chief Justice Warren on the assassination commission, Willens urged Specter to come to Washington to join the investigation.

Specter turned down the offer, citing the appeals court battles to come in the Teamsters case. At the party that night, however, he was convinced to change his mind. He mentioned Willens’s call to his wife and their guests and—to his annoyance, he insisted later—their response was unanimous: it was his duty to take the job. “They were all very excited about me going off to war—to fight to the last drop of Arlen Specter’s blood,” Specter said. He called Willens back and accepted the job.

Two weeks later, Specter arrived in Washington to discover the city buried under heavy snow. He trudged to the VFW building on Capitol Hill, where he was greeted by Willens and introduced to Lee Rankin, who, he remembered, was “paternal and soft-spoken, with a light humor.” Rankin explained the organization of the staff and told Specter that, given his youth, he would be the junior member of whichever two-man team he joined. Since he was among the first lawyers hired, Specter was given his choice of assignments. He selected Area 1, which would focus on Kennedy’s activities in the final hours of his life—and on the murder itself. “It seemed the most compelling,” Specter said. He did not want to spend that night in Washington—he wanted to sleep in his own bed in Philadelphia—so he filled his briefcase with some of the early investigative reports about the assassination and returned to Washington’s Union Station for the train ride home. “The paperwork would keep me busy for much of the week ahead,” he figured. He told Rankin he planned to return to Washington—full-time—in several days.

In the train, he sat down next to an empty seat “so I could read some of the material, taking care to shield it from other passengers.” He remembered that he turned quickly to the autopsy report from the Bethesda Naval Hospital and found it sickening to read, especially the description of Kennedy’s head wound. “As I read through the grisly details of the president’s wounds, I felt nauseated and depressed.”