A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (25 page)

Specter came to like Adams, despite the older lawyer’s arrogance. Adams had an outspoken contempt for all places that were not New York City, and Specter, a native of Kansas, found his partner’s big-city chauvinism funny, not insulting. In their first meeting, Adams looked over Specter’s résumé and noted that the younger lawyer, the son of a Ukrainian émigré fruit peddler, was born in Wichita.

“Wichita?” Adams asked drily. “Where was your mother on her way to at the time?”

Adams showed up in Washington a few days after Specter had begun work in the commission’s office. He explained that he felt the investigation could move quickly, since Oswald was so obviously guilty. “He said, ‘It’s just another simple murder case,’” Specter recalled.

Adams deserved some of his self-regard, Specter knew. During his tumultuous eighteen-month tenure as New York’s police commissioner, beginning in January 1954, Adams took what were remembered as historic steps to root out corruption on the police force. He targeted a budding crime wave in the city by forcing hundreds of reluctant police officers out of desk jobs and putting them on street patrols, earning the public’s gratitude. After leaving the police department, he established himself as one of the city’s most sought-after and best-paid courtroom lawyers.

Specter remembered going to lunch with Adams near Lafayette Square, a few blocks from the White House, at an expensive French restaurant (“Frank Adams did not dine at any other sort of restaurant”), and Adams insisted on picking up the tab. He boasted to Specter that he could better afford the meal since “his daily charge for trial work was $2,500.” Specter gulped at what he considered “a giant sum of money.” Adams earned more in a day than Specter would earn in a month on the commission’s staff.

Almost from the start, Adams seemed uncomfortable at the commission. It was going to be a difficult assignment. He and Specter would have to produce a detailed, second-by-second chronology of the events of the assassination, as well as review and understand much of the medical and ballistics evidence. Adams, however, had “no drive for detailed work,” Specter said. At his law firm, he supervised five or six associates when preparing a case, he told Specter. But at the commission, he and Specter were on their own. “He was unused to working on a prolonged project with only one junior associate, and especially with one so young,” Specter said.

Adams soon established a routine. He usually arrived after eleven a.m. “He chatted briefly, fingered some files and phoned his New York office before finding some reason to leave,” Specter recalled. Adams had a pressing caseload back in New York that winter, he warned his partner in early January. “Adams told me right from the start that he had to work on a major antitrust case by mid-February—five weeks away—and he implied that he expected to finish the work by then.” Adams’s firm had a Washington office, and he spent many days there, rather than on Capitol Hill in the cramped office he shared with Specter.

After a few weeks, Adams disappeared altogether, essentially abandoning the commission. He came down to Washington on a handful of days that winter and spring, including the day in March that Specter had scheduled for the deposition of the navy pathologists who had conducted the president’s autopsy. Specter was introducing the doctors to Chief Justice Warren that day when Adams entered the room. He was such a stranger in the commission’s offices that Warren did not recognize him.

“Good afternoon, Doctor,” Warren said to Adams, who stood there, mortified not to be recognized by the chief justice.

“And that was the last we saw of Frank Adams,” Specter said.

Adams’s disappearance was fine with Specter, who was described by many of his colleagues as the single most self-confident young man they had ever met. “I thought it was an advantage not to have to work with anybody,” he explained. “I didn’t have to share the work. All I had to do was do it.”

After the initial staff meeting in January, Warren had little contact with the young staff lawyers, which disappointed many of them. He delegated responsibilities through Rankin and through Rankin’s two increasingly influential deputies—Redlich and Willens. Warren also met frequently with a few of the “senior” lawyers, especially his old friend Joseph Ball. The two men liked to swap stories about their early adventures in the law back home in California. “He was one of the finest men I ever knew,” Ball said of Warren. “He was strong physically, morally and mentally, and he had a great soul.”

Warren’s routine was to arrive in the commission’s offices early each morning, usually by eight, and then leave about an hour later for the Supreme Court, two blocks away. At about five, he would return, often remaining in the commission’s offices for several more hours.

Among the young lawyers, only Specter had frequent face-to-face dealings with the chief justice—the result of Adams’s disappearance. As effectively the sole member of his team, Specter was left to conduct many of the commission’s most important witness interviews by himself, often with Warren listening in. Specter established a courteous, if sometimes chilly, relationship with the chief justice. Warren was used to people being intimidated in his presence; he clearly enjoyed being at the center of, and usually directing, conversations. Specter, however, would insist that he was never intimidated by the chief justice and that he stood up to him when necessary.

“It was a thrill to work for Warren,” Specter said years later. “We felt we were in the presence of history. But what was there to be intimidated about? I was not intimidated by him. I was aggravated by him sometimes.”

*

Specter formed an early bond with David Belin, the Iowa lawyer—in part, Belin believed, because he and Specter were Jews raised in stretches of the Midwest where Jews were a novelty, and often an unwelcome one. Belin made friends easily; he was ebullient, full of energy and ambition, and he relished his standing as the “Iowa country boy” and “hayseed” suddenly working among lawyers from New York and Washington. He was appalled by Adams’s disappearance from the investigation, and he urged Specter to protest. “Adams should have been asked to resign when it became apparent that he was not going to undertake his responsibilities,” Belin said later. He was grateful that his own partner, Joseph Ball, was so fully committed to the commission’s work. Ball had taken a leave of absence from his firm in Long Beach, and the Californian’s sweet charm and capacity for hard work made him popular throughout the commission’s staff. Specter remembered Ball as “cherubic, with a twinkle in his eye,” who “made women swoon, even at 62.”

Ball and Belin, responsible for finding evidence to prove that Oswald was the assassin, became so close that their names were often uttered together as a single word—“Ball-Belin”—by Rankin and his deputies. Early on, Ball, Belin, and Specter saw how their investigations would overlap, and they hit upon a way to divide up their duties. Ball and Belin “would handle all witnesses at the assassination scene except for those in the motorcade, whom I would handle,” including Governor Connally and the Secret Service agents, Specter said.

Specter took responsibility for the medical evidence, including the analysis of the results of the autopsy at the Bethesda hospital. Determining the source of the bullets—presumably, Oswald’s rifle—remained a subject for investigation by Ball and Belin. As for the scientific analysis of the ammunition, “we decided that the bullet in flight was the dividing point,” Specter said. “Before the bullet left the barrel, it was the responsibility of Ball and Belin. After striking the president, it was my responsibility.”

For all three men, the early days of the investigation were consumed by reading. Ball and Belin took nearly a month to read through all of the paperwork from Dallas produced by the FBI and the Secret Service. Belin established an index-card system that allowed the three men to cross-index the information they were receiving from different agencies “so we didn’t have to read everything twice,” Ball said.

They were all struck by the FBI’s apparent certainty about the number and sequence of shots in Dealey Plaza, especially since the three of them found the ballistics evidence so confusing. According to the FBI, Oswald fired three shots: the first hit Kennedy in the upper back or lower neck, the second hit Connally, and the third struck the president in the head—the fatal shot. But the FBI’s reports did not make clear how the bureau had arrived at those conclusions.

*

Down the hallway in the VFW building, Norman Redlich was preparing for the commission’s interview of Marina Oswald, and his research was exhaustive to the point of obsession. He outlined hundreds of questions that Oswald’s widow could be asked. He prepared a mammoth typed chart in which he laid out, chronologically, every significant moment of her life, beginning with her birth in the northern Russian city of Molotovsk on July 17, 1941, and continuing through the president’s murder in Dallas. He listed questions that could be addressed to her about every major event of those twenty-two years, with the questions divided into subcategories, based on information that she had given to other investigators. She could be challenged on everything she had already told the FBI and the Secret Service, as well as what others had said about her.

Redlich’s questions reflected his suspicion that Marina was something other than the innocent, bereaved young woman she claimed to be. As his questions showed, he believed she might in fact be some sort of Russian agent who had recruited her husband into espionage for the Soviet Union, or who had duped an unknowing Oswald into taking her to the United States for some sinister purpose. “If Lee was as unpleasant as he appears to have been in the U.S., it is hard to understand Marina’s ready agreement to leave her friends and family for a strange land with a difficult husband,” Redlich noted on one page of questions. “I feel we should attempt to discover whether Marina is the simple ‘peasant’ girl that everyone thinks she is.”

He wanted to challenge Marina’s portrayal of herself as “the suffering wife trying to help this disturbed man” when, in fact, both the FBI and the Secret Service had developed a portrait of her as an emotionally cold woman who disparaged her husband to his face, in front of friends—even about his sexual performance. Redlich had detailed questions about Marina’s relationship with Ruth Paine. “There have been various suggestions that Mrs. Paine’s role in this story is not an innocent one,” he wrote, adding that suspicions had arisen, in part, because Paine’s in-laws were tied to “radical” left-wing politics. Michael Paine’s father had been prominent in the Socialist Workers Party of the United States.

Rankin and Redlich invited the other lawyers to submit questions to be posed to Marina. In a memo attached to his list, Specter suggested that whatever questions were going to be asked of Oswald’s widow, they needed to be asked quickly; he thought she might soon be dead. “She could be the object of foul play herself if someone would want to silence her to hide something,” Specter warned. If there had been a conspiracy and it had already ended in the deaths of the president and his alleged assassin, Marina Oswald’s life was almost certainly in danger, too.

*

Given the size of the egos involved, several of the lawyers were surprised they got along so well. Friendships were formed that, for some, would last the rest of their lives. “Nearly every day, we would be in and out of each other’s offices learning facts, questioning theories, arguing and questioning any preliminary conclusions or findings made as we went along,” Belin recalled. Several ate lunch together most days at the cafeteria in the national headquarters of the United Methodist Church, two blocks away from the VFW building. Often they would go out to dinner at nearby restaurants for what Specter remembered as “skull sessions” about the investigation.

Warren asked the director of the National Archives, Wayne Grover, for advice on recruiting a historian to the staff, and Grover said that some of the best in the government came from the Defense Department. He recommended two historians from the Pentagon—one from the army, the other from the air force. After interviewing both candidates, Rankin recommended the air force historian, forty-five-year-old Alfred Goldberg, a man of dry humor who had the instincts of a reporter. Goldberg had launched his career as a military historian while in uniform in Europe in World War II and later earned a PhD in history at Johns Hopkins University.

He was invited to meet Warren in his chambers at the Supreme Court and found the chief justice “very easy to talk to—friendly, pleasant, and I got to asking him questions. I asked him, why do you want to hire a historian?” Goldberg remembered. “And he said—and this is a direct quotation—‘I don’t trust all those lawyers.’”

Goldberg had assumed Warren wanted him to write a history of the commission and that his job would be to document the work of the investigation as it went along. No, Warren said. He wanted Goldberg to bring a historian’s eye to the events of the assassination itself and to be a writer and editor of the commission’s final report. The chief justice, he said, wanted a report that read like something other than a cold legal brief.

Goldberg was given an office on the fourth floor of the VFW building, adjacent to one occupied by a pair of senior IRS inspectors who were trying to reconstruct Oswald’s finances. Goldberg found their work fascinating. The tax agents, Edward A. Conroy and John J. O’Brien, were excited to explain to Goldberg what they were doing. They were in search of the slightest bit of evidence that might suggest Oswald had received money from foreign agents or some other group of conspirators. Goldberg said he was convinced that if Oswald had spent a penny more than he earned from his assortment of menial jobs, Conroy and O’Brien would find it; there was a reason why taxpayers feared an IRS audit, Goldberg now knew. “They got Oswald’s grocery receipts, they got everything,” he recalled. “It was remarkable.”

Goldberg received a less friendly reception from some of the commission’s other staffers. “A lot of the lawyers looked rather askance at having somebody else, other than a lawyer, involved in the investigation,” he said. He got a particularly frosty reception from Redlich, who planned to be the central author and editor of the final report and who was territorial about his authority. “I had the impression he was holding me at arm’s length,” Goldberg said. “He could be arrogant and high-handed.”