A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (19 page)

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Back at Langley, all information about Oswald and the assassination was now being funneled into Angleton’s office, including the information being gathered in Mexico City by Winston Scott. Angleton, like Whitten, considered Scott to be a model spy.

The focus of the investigation changed dramatically under Angleton. For reasons he never fully explained, he turned the investigation away from the hunt for clues about a Cuban conspiracy. Instead, he wanted to focus almost exclusively on the possibility that the Soviet Union was behind the assassination, an idea that reflected his decades-long obsession with the Soviet threat. In his colleagues’ view, Angleton believed that while Castro was dangerous, Cuba was still a sideshow in the larger Cold War struggle between Moscow and Washington. From Angleton’s staff, three other counterintelligence analysts were chosen to work with Rocca; all were KGB specialists.

Whatever Angleton’s view, Castro had never stopped being the obsession of others at the CIA. During the Kennedy administration, the agency established a special unit, the Special Affairs Staff, or SAS, to direct secret operations to overthrow Castro. The SAS had its own counterintelligence analysts who, although they did not answer to Angleton, were supposed to work with his staff. In dealing with the Warren Commission, congressional investigators would later show, Angleton bypassed the SAS almost entirely; its analysts were never asked to look for evidence of a possible Cuban conspiracy in the president’s death.

On February 20, Angleton received what would seem to be troubling news. One of his deputies sent Angleton a memo reporting that at least thirty-seven documents had disappeared from the internal file the CIA had maintained on Oswald before the assassination. The missing documents included seven memos from the FBI, two documents from the State Department, and twenty-five CIA cables. Several weeks later, when the Warren Commission’s staff was invited to the CIA to review the file, Angleton’s team insisted that the file was complete. The commission’s records suggest its investigators were never told that, for at least some period of time, dozens of documents about Oswald had vanished.

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THE CHAMBERS OF THE CHIEF JUSTICE

THE SUPREME COURT

WASHINGTON, DC

JANUARY 1964

For a brief moment, Earl Warren thought Oswald might have been part of a foreign conspiracy. In the hours immediately after the assassination, when the chief justice heard the first reports about Oswald’s aborted defection to the Soviet Union, he thought there might be a plot involving the Soviets. “The only thing that gave me any pause about a conspiracy theory was that Oswald had been a defector to Russia,” he recalled.

But in the days that followed, especially after the initial police reports from Dallas seemed to establish that Oswald was the sole assassin, Warren’s instincts as a veteran criminal prosecutor overwhelmed any suspicion about a conspiracy. He was convinced that Oswald acted alone in Dealey Plaza. Although the crime was monstrous and had changed the course of history, Warren sensed that Oswald actually had much in common with the violent, impulse-driven, often mentally ill young thugs he had prosecuted in homicide cases back at the district attorney’s office in Oakland in the 1920s. Warren believed he knew how criminal minds worked and that Oswald had not needed anyone’s help to assassinate the president.

Within a week of Kennedy’s murder, Warren concluded that there was no conspiracy in Dallas or anywhere else. “I never put any faith in a conspiracy of any kind,” Warren said later. “As soon as I read about Oswald working at the Texas School Book Depository and leaving it as he did—the only employee to disappear—and after the gun was found, with the cartridges, it seemed to me that a surface case was established.” Warren insisted that he never shared these thoughts with the commission’s staff because he did not want to prejudice their investigation. Rankin said he never heard Warren rule out a conspiracy: “I never heard anything from him except find out what the truth was.”

Many of the commission’s newly hired young lawyers agreed later that they heard nothing at the start of the investigation to suggest that Warren had reached an early conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Several would have been disappointed to know it—because they had come to Washington determined to find a conspiracy in the president’s death. “I assumed conspiracy,” said David Belin, a thirty-five-year-old lawyer from Des Moines, Iowa, who had been hired on the recommendation of a classmate from the University of Michigan law school who was then working in the Johnson administration. (The classmate, Roger Wilkins, would go on to become a prominent journalist and civil rights activist.) Belin suspected that the conspiracy might have involved Castro, eager for revenge against Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis. Oswald’s murder might well have been the conspiracy’s second act, he thought. “I felt it was highly probable that there was a conspiracy, that Lee Harvey Oswald might not be the real assassin, despite the claims of the FBI, and that Ruby had killed Oswald to silence him.” He was thrilled by his assignment as the junior partner on the two-man team for Area 2, responsible for proving the identity of the assassin or assassins. The assignment would put Belin and his partner, Joseph Ball, the California lawyer, at the heart of the search for accomplices.

Burt Griffin, thirty-one, a former federal prosecutor in Cleveland, also suspected a conspiracy before joining the commission’s staff. He thought some group of racists, determined to put an end to Kennedy’s advances on civil rights, might have been responsible. “My initial reaction was it was some segregationist southerners,” he said years later. Willens had recruited Griffin, who also had a Yale law degree, to join the commission’s staff at the suggestion of a mutual friend from Ohio. Unlike so many of his young colleagues, Griffin had experience in Washington, having worked in the capital three years earlier as a clerk to a federal appeals court judge. He and his wife loved Washington and were excited to return. “I called home to tell my wife that we were going to Washington, and she was packing before I got off the phone.”

When he entered law school, Griffin had planned to apply his degree to a career in journalism or in politics, but he was diverted to the law because he was so successful at Yale. He actually hated the law school: “I didn’t think the faculty members were very interested in education; they were interested in indulging their egos with this old type of Socratic method.” Still, he excelled, and his grades earned him a job on the law review, “so I thought I must have some knack for it,” he said. After graduation, he found himself drawn further down a career path in the law, including a two-year stint in the United States attorney’s office in Cleveland, his hometown. He loved the job, he said; it allowed him to ferret out wrongdoing like the investigative reporter he had once planned to be, albeit with the advantage of subpoena power.

When he arrived in Washington in January, Griffin was struck by how few of his new colleagues had been prosecutors or had any other experience in law enforcement. He was the only one of the junior lawyers who had ever had significant contact with the FBI, and he warned the others that they needed to be wary of the bureau’s competence, and its honesty. As a federal prosecutor in Ohio, he had worked closely with agents from the FBI’s Cleveland field office, and he came away with little respect for J. Edgar Hoover and the bureau. “They were a bunch of bureaucrats,” he said. “They have a great myth about their ability.” If there had been a conspiracy to kill the president that was the least bit sophisticated, Griffin was not convinced the FBI had the investigative skills to uncover it. “They could only stumble on it.”

And Griffin had darker suspicions about the bureau. From the start, he worried that the FBI might try to hide the full truth about the assassination, to cover up its own mistakes with Oswald in Dallas. Griffin thought that the bureau, in a frantic effort to shield itself from the allegation that it had missed evidence of a conspiracy, would try to pin the blame solely on Oswald, whatever the evidence actually showed. “I thought the FBI might be trying to frame Oswald,” he said. Others on the commission’s staff, Griffin remembered, felt the same way. Several of the young lawyers were “downright excited” by the possibility that the commission would uncover a conspiracy, if only because it might disgrace Hoover, a man many of them already disdained. “We were determined, if we could, to prove that the FBI was wrong—to find a conspiracy if we possibly could,” Griffin said. “We thought we would be national heroes.”

Griffin was assigned to work as the junior lawyer on Area 5, investigating the background of Jack Ruby, and shared an office with Leon Hubert, the courtly Louisianan who would be his senior partner. Their office was cramped, about ten feet square; the two lawyers worked at desks placed side by side. As he introduced himself around the office, Griffin was impressed to encounter a former college classmate, David Slawson, who had been a year ahead of him at Amherst. Griffin remembered feeling intimidated: “I was in awe of Slawson—Phi Beta Kappa, president of the student body. I felt honored to be there with Slawson.”

Staff meetings could resemble an Ivy League reunion, reflecting Willens’s preference for graduates of a handful of elite law schools. If the commission’s staff botched the investigation, they joked, their law professors back at Harvard and Yale would have some explaining to do. Griffin and the other three Yale graduates were matched by an equal number from Harvard, and many other lawyers with Harvard law degrees would arrive at the commission as the months passed. The Harvard graduates: Slawson and Coleman; Samuel Stern, a thirty-four-year-old Washington lawyer who had been a law clerk to Chief Justice Warren and was now a member of the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering; and Melvin Eisenberg, who graduated first in the Harvard Law class of 1959 and worked at a large New York firm, Kaye Scholer.

Stern became the one-man team responsible for Area 6. He would evaluate the Secret Service and its performance in Dallas, as well as research the larger history of how presidents had been protected from assassins over the years. He was the only junior lawyer without a senior partner. Warren felt that the subject matter could be handled by a single lawyer, and he trusted the quality of Stern’s work.

Even though Eisenberg was still new to Kaye Scholer and knew that even a temporary absence might endanger a climb to partner, he jumped at the invitation to join the commission. “It was like meeting my wife,” Eisenberg recalled. “From the moment I met her, I wanted to marry her.” Besides, he had grown disenchanted with life in a big law firm. “At Harvard and the law review, you’re the center of the world, and then all of a sudden, I found myself writing memos” for older lawyers he barely knew. He had already been thinking about leaving the law for a career as an English professor.

Eisenberg was assigned to work as Redlich’s deputy, a recognition that Redlich might otherwise be buried under a mountain of paper, given his decision to volunteer to read every document that entered the commission’s offices and then decide how the paperwork should be divided among his colleagues. For his first major assignment, Eisenberg was asked to make himself an expert on the science of criminology—fingerprints, ballistics, acoustics, eyewitness testimony—and determine which evidence the commission should pay most attention to and which it could ignore. Since he had no background in law enforcement, Eisenberg turned to books. The Library of Congress was two blocks away, and he requested a collection of its best works on criminal science.

It was no secret among the junior lawyers that most of them shared the same political leanings; they were registered Democrats, considered themselves liberals, and had supported President Kennedy. The odd man out was Wesley James Liebeler, known to his friends as Jim, a thirty-two-year-old New York litigator who was a graduate of the University of Chicago law school and was recommended to the commission by the school’s dean. Born in Langdon, North Dakota, and raised on the farmlands of the Great Plains, Liebeler was a fiercely outspoken Republican who liked to boast about his intention to vote for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in the presidential election that November. He made it clear that his conservatism did not extend to his private life, however, and, to the amusement of his new colleagues, he liked to boast about this, too. Within days of arriving in Washington, he told his colleagues—he told almost anyone who would listen, in fact—that he intended to use his time in the capital to meet women. That he was married and had two children back in New York seemed no hindrance at all.

Liebeler was named the junior lawyer on Area 3; he and his senior partner, Albert Jenner, would be responsible for investigating Oswald’s life. From the start, Liebeler was less respectful than his colleagues in dealing with Rankin, Redlich, and Willens. He told Specter that he worried Willens had been brought onto the commission’s staff from the Justice Department as a “stoolie” for Robert Kennedy—a stool pigeon who would protect the attorney general’s interests, whatever they might be.

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Rankin was struck by the wariness of Warren and some of the other commissioners to speak—even privately, among themselves—about the possibility that there had been a foreign conspiracy to kill Kennedy. There was no similar fear, Rankin said, among the young lawyers, who were ready to follow the facts. He recalled conversations among the lawyers about what would happen “if we find a conspiracy with the Soviet Union involved or Cuba” and how that could lead to a nuclear showdown. And they seemed unfazed by that prospect, even of war, Rankin remembered. “They were eager to get the information and get it out and didn’t care who it hurt or helped,” he said. “Maybe that is youth and a lack of recognition of all the hazards.” He also saw a determination by the staff lawyers—especially the young ones, at the start of their careers—to get to the truth about the president’s murder because they knew their “reputations would be destroyed” if they participated in anything that could be labeled a cover-up.