A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (29 page)

*

Back in Washington, news of Ruby’s conviction meant that the commission’s staff could finally get to work on the ground in Dallas; as Warren had insisted, they had stayed out of Texas until then to avoid prejudicing the trial. Hubert and Griffin were among the first to travel to Dallas, where they began to interview witnesses about Ruby.

From the FBI reports and witness statements they had been reading for weeks, the two lawyers thought that Belli was, in many ways, correct in his description of Ruby. The circumstances of Oswald’s murder suggested Ruby was anything but a cold-blooded assassin dispatched to silence Oswald—the description some conspiracy theorists had tried to apply to him. “The fact that he would go forward and shoot some guy in the basement with a whole crowd of reporters around?” Griffin said years later. “What does that say about Ruby?”

The tumultuous lives of Ruby and Oswald had similarities, beginning with their tortured relationships with their mothers. Ruby’s mother was institutionalized repeatedly in mental hospitals during his childhood, and she and Ruby’s father were so neglectful of their children that Ruby was never sure of his exact age because his parents never bothered to record his birth date. As adults, both Ruby and Oswald had troubled dealings with women. The FBI questioned many witnesses about the possibility that Ruby—who never married and had a middle-aged male roommate in Dallas—and Oswald might have had “homosexual compulsions,” in the FBI’s terminology of the era.

Still, Hubert and Griffin worried that there was some part of Ruby’s biography they did not fully understand—that he might in fact have been motivated by more than a sudden, uncontrollable impulse to kill Oswald. They wondered, in particular, if someone might have encouraged Ruby, possibly gangsters from his past who knew he was susceptible to impulsive acts and who wanted him to silence Oswald. Ever since his youth in rough Chicago neighborhoods, Ruby had counted criminals among his friends. As an adult, he befriended gamblers and low-level associates of Italian-American crime families, as well as the families’ corrupt allies in the labor movement, especially in Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters Union. Phone records obtained by the commission showed that Ruby had placed long-distance phone calls to a “known muscleman” for Hoffa in the weeks before Kennedy’s assassination.

Hubert and Griffin were also interested in Ruby’s connections to Cuba. During his trial, Ruby confirmed that he had tried to do business there after Castro’s victory in 1959. FBI reports showed that Ruby traveled to Cuba that year and met in Havana with an associate of the Gambino crime family in Chicago; Ruby said he had hoped to sell fertilizer and jeeps on the island but that the venture “never got to first base.”

In the opening weeks of their investigation, Hubert and Griffin put together a detailed time line of Ruby’s activities in the weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. The chart began with dates in mid-September 1963, when the White House made a final decision that Kennedy would travel to Texas. It was the logical place to start. “That’s the first moment that anybody in Dallas or anywhere else could have decided that they were going to assassinate Kennedy,” Griffin recalled. “That was the demarcation point.” The chart was divided into vertical rows, with days of the week down one side of the page, matched up against FBI documents and witness statements that had some reference to Ruby’s activities on each day.

Hubert and Griffin also began to flesh out the rest of Ruby’s odd, complicated life dating back to his childhood. It occurred to them that they might have a much larger workload than the staff lawyers focused on the biography of Oswald, a man less than half Ruby’s age who had few real friends or associates. “Hell, there are two of us doing what eight other guys are doing on Oswald,” Griffin protested later.

In mid-March, Hubert and Griffin put together a detailed memo that outlined all of Ruby’s ties to organized crime and to Cuba, and they analyzed how those ties might possibly be linked to the murders of Kennedy and Oswald. The memo noted how Ruby had appeared intentionally to misstate the number of times he visited Cuba. He claimed to have gone only once, in 1959, for about ten days. But immigration records showed that he had been in Havana at least one more time that same year. The FBI found evidence that he might have had contacts with Cuban exiles in the United States who, like some of Ruby’s friends in organized crime, were eager to see Castro ousted. The Communist victory in Cuba meant the end of lucrative gambling and liquor operations long controlled on the island by American mobsters.

Hubert and Griffin were also struck that, immediately after the assassination, Ruby had publicly demonstrated a more-than-routine knowledge of Cuban affairs. At a police news conference on the night of Kennedy’s murder, Ruby, sitting among reporters and pretending to be a reporter himself, had spoken up after Dallas district attorney Henry Wade misstated the name of the pro-Castro group that Oswald had claimed to join earlier that year. Wade described it as the “Free Cuba Committee.” Ruby corrected him, blurting out, “Henry, that’s the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” Why, Hubert and Griffin wondered, had he known that?

They also questioned whether Ruby was telling the truth when he insisted that he had not known Oswald. There was at least one intriguing, if indirect, tie between the men. The housekeeper in the Dallas rooming house where Oswald lived at the time of the assassination, Earlene Roberts, had a sister who was close to Ruby. Roberts’s sister had been asked by Ruby in the 1950s to invest in one of his nightclubs. The sister told the FBI that she had met with Ruby as recently as November 18, four days before the assassination, to discuss a different investment.

Hubert and Griffin were excited by the idea that there might be much more to Ruby’s story—a possible connection, even, between Ruby and Oswald before the assassination. If there had been a conspiracy to murder Kennedy, it might be unraveled by understanding Ruby, not Oswald. And yet, from the first weeks of the investigation, the two lawyers felt ignored by the commission—especially by Rankin, who had so much control over what information gathered by the staff was shared with Warren and the other commissioners. “Hubert and I were totally on the periphery,” Griffin said.

Rankin did not invite conversation with Hubert and Griffin or praise their work. “Hubert was there every day, but Rankin ignored him,” Griffin said. “He didn’t think Rankin respected him.” While Rankin would regularly step into the offices of some of the other staff lawyers to ask for updates on their work, he “seldom came in to talk to us.” The situation was made worse by Hubert’s debilitating shyness. He seemed intimidated. He may have been a powerful figure in legal circles in Louisiana, but here in Washington he was working with young men drawn from the Ivy League and the nation’s finest law schools, and from powerful institutions like the Supreme Court and the Justice Department.

“He was a nervous guy,” Griffin said of his partner. “He was a chain-smoker who started the day with a cold Coca-Cola and drank Coke all day,” growing jittery from the caffeine. “He treated me with total respect,” Griffin said later. “I felt he put me on a pedestal, which is maybe why I thought he was naive.”

Hubert locked in a perception that he was not up to the job with a ponderous, awkwardly written memo to Rankin in February in which he asked that the commission compile a list of every person who crossed the border into the United States in the months before the assassination and everyone who had left the country in the weeks that followed—hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of names that would have to be checked, by hand, against lists of possible suspects. Hubert acknowledged that the move might be “totally impractical,” but “even if the job is not done, the final report must show that it was considered and must show why it was not done.” The memo dismayed Rankin and his deputies, who saw it as a needle-in-the-haystack request that would waste the commission’s time.

After the request was denied, Hubert wrote again to Rankin, urging that the full commission be made aware that the proposal for the massive name-check was suggested—and turned down. He defended the request again, arguing that the list might, in fact, turn up the name of an assassin. “A culprit would want to get out of the U.S.,” he said. He questioned whether “Americans not yet born” would accept the fact that the commission had not reviewed every bit of evidence that might point to a conspiracy, even if gathering the information was onerous.

In the case of Ruby, he warned, the available evidence did not allow for any firm conclusions about his motivations for killing Oswald, and the commission would be wrong to suggest otherwise. “The fact is that so far, the Ruby materials on hand are not sufficient either to exclude the possibility of a conspiracy or to warrant a conclusion that there was none.” In the weeks that followed, Hubert grew more bitter over the way he was being ignored, to the point where he began to consider resigning. “He was demoralized,” Griffin said.

20

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

FEBRUARY 1964

In late February, the commissioners decided it was time for a face-to-face confrontation with Mark Lane, the New York lawyer who had emerged—seemingly from nowhere—as their biggest public critic. Warren was furious about Lane. The investigation was “plagued” by him, the chief justice said later. He found it difficult to believe that a previously obscure civil rights attorney and one-term New York state legislator had managed to turn himself into a national celebrity in just a matter of weeks, with what Warren believed were absurd claims about the assassination. Lane was taking advantage of the commission’s decision to conduct its hearings in private and limit its public statements, allowing Lane to make outlandish claims that the commission had little ability to correct. “Pure fabrication,” Warren said of the conspiracy theories spread by Lane. “Absolutely nothing to do with it.”

This was personal for Warren, since Lane was trying to convince the public that the chief justice was complicit in a conspiracy to hide the truth about the president’s murder, even to blame the assassination on an innocent man. Warren told friends he could not understand why respectable journalists gave any credibility to either Lane or his client, Marguerite Oswald. And yet there Lane and Mrs. Oswald were, day after day, on the front page of major newspapers, spreading their “outrageous” theories about the assassination. Lane was also becoming a celebrity in Europe: he was embraced by a number of left-wing intellectuals, including the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who established a London-based group to support Lane’s work. (Russell’s group called itself The British “Who-Killed-Kennedy?” Committee, and its other members included the writer J. B. Priestley and Oxford historian Hugh Trevor Roper.)

Secretly, the commission became so worried about Lane that it began to have his movements followed closely by the FBI. The bureau had already begun conducting limited surveillance of Lane’s appearances around the country when, on February 26, Howard Willens prepared a memo that outlined the commission’s options in having the FBI step up the monitoring of Lane. Within days, apparently at the commission’s urging, the bureau’s surveillance operation was expanded. Through the winter and spring, Lane was trailed by the FBI almost everywhere he went in the United States. The bureau reported back regularly, often daily, about Lane’s whereabouts and the details of his attacks on the investigation.

In a separate memo in late February, Willens proposed that the commission also call Lane to Washington to testify. It would be a way of blunting Lane’s ability to argue, as he did regularly, that the commission was ignoring evidence that could vindicate Oswald. If Lane had evidence, he could present it to the commission directly. If he had nothing, that would be evident, too. “We are aware that Mr. Lane is making numerous speeches to the effect that he has information indicating that Lee Harvey Oswald is not the assassin of President Kennedy, and that the commission has not requested that information,” Willens wrote. In calling him in to testify, “I think we should make an explicit request for all documents possessed by Mr. Lane regarding the assassination.” The commission agreed, and the invitation to Lane went out.

*

Lane’s unofficial investigation of the Kennedy assassination had become his full-time job. He looked everywhere for witnesses or evidence pointing away from Oswald as Kennedy’s assassin. He had a road map in locating the witnesses from Dealey Plaza and from the scene of Tippit’s murder thanks to the stack of police witness statements from Hugh Aynesworth in Dallas.

One early victim of his methods was Helen Markham, the forty-seven-year-old Dallas waitress who said she had watched Oswald gun down Tippit and then identified Oswald in a police lineup. She appeared to have been the witness closest to the murder scene—only about fifty feet away. Lane telephoned Markham and, without telling her, tape-recorded the interview. When he was promised immunity from prosecution later that year in exchange for the tape, the recording would be seen by the commission’s staff as proof of Lane’s efforts to bully unsophisticated witnesses into saying things they did not believe.

According to a transcript of the phone call, Lane briefly introduced himself before launching into questions.

“Could you just give me a moment?” he asked Markham, claiming that he had heard from Dallas reporters that she had described Tippit’s killer as “short, stocky and had bushy hair”—descriptions that did not match Oswald. Oswald’s autopsy report showed that he was of normal height (five feet, nine inches) and thin (about 150 pounds), with thinning hair.

“No, no, I didn’t say this,” Markham replied, sticking to her original description of Oswald.

Lane tried again. “Well, would say that he was stocky?”

Markham: “Uh, he was short.”

Lane: “And was he a little bit on the heavy side?”

Markham: “Uh, not too heavy.”

Lane saw an opening: “Not too heavy, but slightly heavy?”