A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (16 page)

And the autopsy report was, apart from a few crude anatomical drawings, just words on paper. Specter could only imagine how he would react when he had the chance—shortly, he assumed—to see the actual autopsy photos, as well as the X-rays of the president’s body. As a career prosecutor, he understood from the start how valuable those photos and X-rays would be.

10

THE OFFICES OF THE LAW FIRM OF DAVIS, GRAHAM & STUBBS

DENVER, COLORADO

JANUARY 1964

In the first days of January 1964, David Slawson, a thirty-two-year-old associate at one of Denver’s most prominent law firms, found himself busy with clients’ work. Not overwhelmed, just busy: partners at Davis, Graham & Stubbs admired Slawson’s ability to focus, almost totally, on the complicated corporate work in front of him and to get it done in a hurry. Unlike some of the other associates, the Harvard-educated Slawson did not need to stay at his desk late into the night to keep clients satisfied; he liked to get home at five if he could. He had not allowed his work to suffer even in the first days after Kennedy’s assassination. Slawson had loved the president and was shattered by his murder. He had worked in Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, initially at the urging of his law firm’s star partner, Byron “Whizzer” White, Slawson’s first mentor at Davis Graham. White, a lifelong Democrat, had managed the Kennedy campaign in Colorado. Within days of the election, White left Denver to become deputy attorney general under Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department; in 1962, he was named to the Supreme Court.

Slawson had hoped to follow White to Washington. With Kennedy in the White House, the nation’s capital had glamour and star power it had not known in Slawson’s lifetime; for many young, ambitious lawyers, Washington had suddenly become the place to be. It would take Kennedy’s death, however, to get Slawson his invitation to the capital.

The call came in early January, when Slawson picked up his office phone and heard the voice of a man he did not know—Howard Willens, who identified himself as a Justice Department lawyer assisting Chief Justice Warren in organizing the investigation of the president’s assassination. Willens had been directed to Slawson by a mutual friend, a State Department lawyer who had been a classmate of Slawson’s at Harvard. Willens asked if Slawson would be interested in joining the commission, and Slawson jumped at the offer; the only condition, he told Willens, was that his partners at the law firm would need to approve a leave of absence. There was no second-guessing about this, Slawson remembered. It would be thrilling to be part of the investigation to determine “what the hell really happened” in Dallas.

To Slawson’s relief, the firm’s partners quickly gave their permission, with the understanding that he would be gone no more than two or three months. He made plans to leave for Washington immediately. There was no reason for delay: he was unmarried and had no steady girlfriend, so nothing except work tied him to Denver.

Before departing, he began reading everything he could find in the local papers about the assassination and about the commission. He turned up copies of the
New York Times
—a precious commodity in faraway Denver at the time—and read about the commission’s plans to create teams of investigators, each focusing on a different aspect of the assassination. He was especially intrigued to read about the team that would investigate the possibility of a foreign conspiracy.

For many of his new colleagues, the “conspiracy” team seemed an unappealing assignment. The FBI appeared insistent that Oswald, and Oswald alone, had killed the president, and so the conspiracy team would probably be off on a wild-goose chase. Slawson, however, thought he was ideally suited for the work. He imagined it would be, at heart, a logic puzzle, in which investigators would have to tease out answers on the basis of little or no concrete information. He knew little about the Cold War beyond what he read in the paper each morning, but he assumed that if the Russians or the Cubans had been involved in the assassination, they would have tried to hide every bit of evidence pointing to their guilt.

Since his childhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Slawson had been good at puzzles. He had the ability, in the quiet of his mind, to sort through a complicated math or science problem. He did not necessarily need to see pictures or diagrams to work his way through a puzzle; he could do it in his head. That explained why mathematics and science had come so easily for him. He had originally dreamed of becoming a physicist. It was the career path he had first pursued at Amherst College, where he graduated first in his class, in 1953. Despite the shyness that would define him all his life, he was as popular with his classmates as he was smart—one classmate remembered him as Amherst’s “golden boy”—and he was elected president of his class. Slawson then arrived at Princeton for graduate studies in physics. He planned to focus on quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that explained the behavior of the tiniest elements of the universe—subatomic particles that could never be seen by the most powerful microscope, let alone by a human eye. He remembered the thrill at catching a glimpse of the world’s most famous physicist, Albert Einstein, who had lived in Princeton since fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. “Sometimes you’d be walking by, and there he was,” Slawson said.

What changed Slawson’s life—and pulled him away from science—was what he saw on a television screen in his apartment building at Princeton in 1954. Between classes he sat, transfixed, by the live coverage of what would become known as the Army-McCarthy hearings—the Senate hearings that effectively signaled the end of the Red-baiting McCarthy era. Slawson found a hero in Joseph Welch, the army’s chief lawyer, whose testimony before Senator Joseph McCarthy turned into a showdown over the senator’s claim that the military employed Communists in defense plants. In his bravest moment, Welch turned to McCarthy and asked: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” This, Slawson decided, was what he really wanted to do—to be a lawyer who, like Welch, took on bullies while engaging in the great issues of the day. “This is the life I want,” he remembered thinking. He had already begun to worry that a career in physics would separate him too much from the rest of the world. “It wasn’t that I didn’t love physics,” he said. “It was because the life I could foresee in physics was one of cloistered work, doing long, difficult mathematical equations—analyzing the size of galaxies and stuff—and I thought no, no, I don’t want to do that.”

A year later, after earning a master’s degree, Slawson left Princeton to join the army; he decided to enlist rather than wait to be drafted. While in uniform he applied to Harvard Law School and was accepted. He paid for Harvard through the GI Bill and graduated near the top of his class, which earned him an editor’s post on the law review. After that, Slawson could have had his pick of jobs at law firms in New York, but he was intrigued by the idea of working for a small firm, in a smaller city, especially one where the outdoors beckoned. Denver, he thought, was an obvious choice since he loved mountain sports.

At Davis, Graham & Stubbs, Byron White had an eye for young talent, and he asked that Slawson be assigned to work for him. It was a heady thing to be associated with White, who had been a celebrity in Colorado for decades, first as an all-American halfback at the University of Colorado. After playing professional football for the Pittsburgh Pirates (the name was later changed to the Steelers), White won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University and then enrolled at Yale Law School. As a football player and as a lawyer—in almost everything he did, in fact—“Byron was a superstar,” Slawson recalled. It was White who turned Slawson into a Kennedy supporter. In the 1960 election, Slawson had planned to vote for Adlai Stevenson, but White pressed him to reconsider. “He gave me a bunch of stuff to read about Kennedy, and I read it, and I said, yes, I’ll switch.” White then made an arrangement with the firm that allowed his young protégé to work part-time on the Kennedy campaign.

Slawson was in the firm’s offices on November 22, the day of the assassination; a startled secretary broke the news to him. After the announcement of Kennedy’s death, the firm shut for the day. “Everyone was told they could go home,” said Slawson, whose apartment was walking distance from the firm. “I was tremendously moved. I think I went home in tears.” When Oswald was murdered two days later, Slawson watched the scene on television, thinking to himself that it was almost too much to comprehend. It did not occur to him that some larger conspiracy—first to kill the president, then to kill the president’s assassin—might explain what was happening. “I just thought, The world is going crazy.”

*

Within a week of the call from Willens, Slawson was on his way east to Washington, driving across the country from Colorado in a Buick sedan that his father had lent him. “It was one of those huge things, with fins, so inappropriate for me.” He wanted to reach Washington as quickly as possible. “I didn’t have much money, so I would drive as far as I could each day.” He arrived in Washington on Sunday night, January 19—it was the first time he had ever been in the capital—and found a room at a cheap motel. The next morning, he pulled on a coat and tie and showed up at the commission’s offices, where he was introduced to Willens and Rankin. He did not remember being asked what assignment he wanted. Instead, he was told that he would be the junior member of the “conspiracy” team, working under William Coleman. Slawson was delighted; it was exactly the assignment he wanted.

Slawson did not know Coleman’s name, although he was impressed when he learned that his new partner had also graduated at the top of his class at Harvard and that he had been involved in
Brown v. Board of Education
. It was the first time that Slawson had worked closely with a black lawyer. He did not recall feeling intimidated by the assignment that he and Coleman were given. They were being asked to determine if a foreign government—most likely, the Soviet Union or Cuba—had just killed the president of the United States, an act that might easily lead to a nuclear war. “I wasn’t overwhelmed,” Slawson said, “I was thrilled.” That was true of many of his new colleagues. “I don’t think I ever doubted my intellectual ability,” Slawson said. “I don’t think any of us did.”

He got to work immediately. That afternoon he was asked to go to the lobby of the VFW building to meet someone who claimed to have evidence that would point to a conspiracy in the assassination. Slawson went downstairs and encountered a white-haired, well-dressed man—in coat and tie—who appeared to be in his late forties. At first, the man seemed reasonably articulate and coherent. “I didn’t want to cut him off, because maybe the guy had something,” Slawson recalled. Two hours later, an exasperated Slawson realized that “I had a paranoid nut on my hands.” The secret of the Kennedy assassination, the man said, could be found in a message written on a piece of paper that had been buried beneath a rock somewhere in Switzerland. “He wanted us to fly him to Switzerland, where he would point out the rock,” Slawson said.

After the man finally left, Slawson kicked himself for having wasted so much time listening to the man’s delusions. Later, he realized that the experience had been valuable. In his first hours on the commission’s staff, he had learned that many people who, at first, seemed sober witnesses with important information to share about the assassination were in fact “nutty as a fruitcake.”

Slawson recalled being introduced to Coleman that Friday, when Coleman made what would become his one-day-a-week visit from Philadelphia. The two men formed a close, frictionless partnership. Like several of the “senior” lawyers, Coleman planned to work only part-time on the investigation. He had warned Warren and Rankin that his appearances in Washington would have to be sporadic because of his caseload back at his firm. It was Slawson who would do most of the digging and writing, and that suited Slawson fine.

*

Early on, Slawson kept an open mind on whether the president had been killed in a foreign conspiracy. Coleman, however, was more suspicious. “At the beginning, I really thought it was the Russians or the Cubans,” he said, remembering how he feared the investigation might turn up evidence that would force the United States to go to war.

For several weeks, Slawson rarely left his small office on the fourth floor of the VFW building. He had thousands of pages of documents to read. He and his new colleagues were being flooded with classified files—many of them stamped
TOP SECRET
—from the FBI and CIA. Given his focus on possible foreign conspiracies, Slawson knew that he, more than most of the other staff members, would need to understand the CIA and how it operated. He was excited to realize that he would soon meet some real spies.

In dealing with the CIA, Slawson believed the commission might have an extraordinary resource in one of its members: Allen Dulles, who had led the CIA from 1953 until his ouster in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Dulles’s forced retirement produced surprisingly few hard feelings between him and President Kennedy. “He dealt with his ouster with a great deal of dignity, and never attempted to shift the blame,” Robert Kennedy said later. “The President was very fond of him, as was I.” It was Robert Kennedy, President Johnson said, who had recommended Dulles’s appointment to the Warren Commission.

Slawson assumed that if the CIA had information tying Oswald to a conspiracy, Dulles would know how to ferret it out. But that was before he actually met Dulles. When the two men were finally introduced, Slawson found the former spymaster to be surprisingly doddering and fragile. He still resembled a “boarding-school master,” in the words of Richard Helms, his former deputy at the CIA, with “parted gray hair, carefully trimmed moustache, tweeds and his preferred rimless, oval glasses.” But by early 1964, Slawson thought, Dulles had the look of a schoolmaster in ill health and well past retirement.

He seemed much older than his seventy years. It had been that way since the Bay of Pigs. Robert Kennedy recalled that Dulles had “looked like living death” in his final days at the CIA: “He had gout and had trouble walking, and he was always putting his head in his hands.” The gout lingered into his service on the Warren Commission. He often came into the offices of the commission and padded around in bedroom slippers because shoes were too painful. Years later, after learning how much Dulles had known—and possibly withheld—from the commission, Slawson still wanted to believe the best about him. He suspected that Dulles, after the humiliation of his ouster from the agency and in the haze of his final years, had simply forgotten many of the most important secrets he had once known.