A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (34 page)

In a separate letter to Warren that began “Dear Chief,” Mrs. Graham did not disagree with her editor’s judgments. “I think him very intelligent and he was worried,” she wrote of Bernstein. “I apologize, as he does, for burdening you further. This was something he felt he must say.”

Warren wrote back to Graham, telling her Bernstein’s suggestions were “quite appropriate.” To Bernstein, he admitted in a letter that “you were as right as anyone could be” and that he had decided to change “my relationship with the press, which has been a delicate one at best. The commission was really between the devil and the deep blue sea. We desired no publicity whatsoever, but for a time, the pressure was almost hysterical.” He said that his words had been misunderstood, although he was not specific how. “I was quoted as saying that some of the testimony would not be released in our lifetime. I assure you that nothing is further from our desires or intentions.”

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There were, in fact, secrets that Warren intended to keep—possibly forever, certainly while the commission’s investigation was under way. Many of them involved the private life of Marina Oswald.

On Monday, February 17, Hoover sent a classified letter to Rankin with a bizarre—and, it was quickly determined, incorrect—report that the young widow might have been raped while she was in Washington to testify to the commission. The FBI had learned from a “confidential informant” that she might have been “subjected to sexual intercourse by force” by her business manager, James Martin, in her room at the Willard Hotel, Hoover wrote. The story had apparently originated with her brother-in-law, Robert, who had heard it from Marina herself after she returned to Dallas.

Rankin reacted instantly, calling a meeting that day with Secret Service inspector Thomas Kelley, who was serving as the agency’s liaison to the commission. The implications for the Secret Service were dire, since Mrs. Oswald had been under its protection in Washington. How could she have been sexually assaulted with its agents outside her hotel room door?

Rankin told Kelley that the Secret Service needed to determine immediately whether there was any hint of truth in this. Kelley was shocked, too, and “stated categorically that he had no knowledge” of anything like it, Rankin recalled. As Rankin watched, Kelley picked up the phone and called the Secret Service’s field office in Dallas and ordered that an agent drive out to Martin’s home that instant to see if Marina Oswald was still there.

The answer from Dallas came back quickly: Marina had left the Martin house and moved in with Robert Oswald. Two days later, FBI agents in Dallas interviewed her, and she insisted there had been no rape. Instead, she said, she had consummated, once and only once, a weeks-long romance with Martin. It occurred on Friday, February 7, in her hotel room, after she dismissed her Secret Service detail for the night. Martin, she said, had then slipped into her room. “I took a bath and was partly dressed when I reentered the bedroom. Jim finished undressing me, and thereafter we had sexual intercourse. It was with my consent, and I did not resist.” She said she had told Martin in Washington that while she would continue to refuse his proposal of marriage, she would be his mistress, even as she continued to live with Martin and his wife in their family home.

Marina and Martin returned to Dallas—and to Martin’s home—that weekend. On Sunday, during a visit to her husband’s grave, Marina told Robert about her sexual encounter with Martin. Appalled, her brother-in-law insisted that she break off her business relationship with Martin immediately and move in with him, and she agreed. She then went a step further and insisted that Martin’s wife be informed of everything that had happened. “His wife should know the whole truth,” she decided. She telephoned Mrs. Martin that night; with Martin listening in on an extension, Marina told Martin that she was “ending his services as my business manager and my lover.”

Her account to the FBI was relayed back to the Warren Commission, where Rankin was alarmed that the young widow—whose credibility seemed so essential to the case the commission was making against her husband—might now be the subject of scandal. He knew the story, if it ever became public, could easily demolish the commission’s portrayal of her as the guileless, shattered woman who had bravely identified her husband as the president’s killer. Now she might be portrayed instead as a conniving home-wrecker.

Marina’s morals, and her truthfulness, were about to come under even closer, more substantive scrutiny. Robert Oswald was the next witness scheduled to testify before the commission in Washington and, in advance of his appearance, he had provided the panel with a copy of a handwritten diary he had kept since the assassination. The diary contained an alarming entry from a month earlier—Sunday, January 12. On that day, Robert wrote, he and Marina planned to visit Lee’s gravesite, and he went to James Martin’s home to pick her up. Before the drive, he said, Martin pulled Robert aside to reveal something Marina had just told him—that her husband had plotted to kill former vice president Richard Nixon when Nixon visited Texas sometime in 1963. In the car, Robert asked Marina about the Nixon story and she confirmed it.

To several of the commissioners, the disclosure was a shocking new blow to Marina’s credibility. She had told no one else about a plot to kill Nixon; certainly she had not mentioned it in her appearance before them in early February.

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Ford was dumbfounded when he heard about the Nixon plot. “Could it be possible that Marina had simply forgotten this incident?” he asked himself. Or could she have some sinister reason to keep this secret? “The many-sided Marina now had another side,” he said.

During his testimony to the commission, Robert Oswald was composed and to the point. He impressed the commissioners with his intelligence. “Here was a young man, conservatively dressed, soft-spoken, conscientiously trying to recall incidents of his family’s history of many years ago,” Ford recalled. “I wondered whether I could have been as precise if asked similar questions concerning my own family.”

Robert testified that he had reluctantly come to the conclusion that his brother had killed the president and that he had done it alone. He believed Lee had the skills with a rifle to kill Kennedy, especially since the president’s motorcade passed slowly in front of the Texas School Book Depository. Like his brother, Robert had served in the Marine Corps, and he knew that Lee had been rated as a competent marksman by his military trainers. Both brothers liked to hunt, and Robert said that Lee had told him about bird-hunting trips he had taken while living in Russia.

He was asked in detail about the Nixon threat, and repeated what he had written in his diary. He recalled how Marina had told him on the day of the graveyard visit that “Lee was going to shoot Mr. Richard M. Nixon” when Nixon was in Dallas one day in 1963 and that she had “locked him in the bathroom all day” to stop him. Robert had no explanation for why she had failed to share the story with the commission.

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Despite the weeks of tension between Rankin and Hoover, the two men now shared a common concern—about Marina Oswald and her secrets.

On February 24, Rankin called Hoover to discuss the new revelations about Oswald’s widow. Rankin said he was worried both about the disclosure of her illicit relationship with Martin and about whether her continued dishonesty—he was apparently referring to the belated discovery of the Nixon plot—meant she might still try to flee the country. He said he wanted the FBI to place her under aggressive, round-the-clock surveillance.

Hoover provided his deputies with a detailed memo about the phone conversation: “Mr. Rankin said he would hate to have her run out on us, which is always a possibility, particularly down in Dallas, and he was wondering about a stakeout on her in which we would watch her and see who is visiting her for a while.” Rankin, Hoover said, asked for the FBI director’s opinion of Marina’s character and “if I didn’t think it was odd that Marina considered being willing to be Martin’s mistress.… I said that I did. It shows certainly the complete lack of character.” Marina before and after the assassination “were like two different people,” Hoover said. Before the president’s murder, she was “sloppy and unattractive, but somebody got a hold of her and got her fixed up and all that probably put ideas into her head.” The two men agreed on the danger of a leak to news organizations about her dalliance with Martin, and how that would undermine her credibility. “People are talking down there in Dallas,” Hoover warned.

Rankin and the director had a common contempt for Martin and for Marina’s former lawyer, James Thorne. The two Texas men had refused to accept her decision to dismiss them; they continued to insist on their cut of the rights to her story. Rankin told Hoover he understood that she already had signed contracts with publishers and news organizations that guaranteed her “an excess of $150,000, so it can be seen how much money is involved.”

“This is just a nasty shakedown,” Hoover replied. “These two individuals are doing everything in their power to make as much money out of her.”

Rankin told Hoover to use his own judgment in determining how long to maintain surveillance of Marina. The commission, he said, wanted to determine “what kind of people are visiting her when she does not know she is under surveillance.” Hoover recommended her phones be tapped. The wiretaps would carry little legal or public-relations risk since there would never be a trial in which their existence would be revealed, he said. Within days, eight FBI agents were assigned to the surveillance operation, which would monitor Marina at her home and as she moved around Dallas. Her phone was tapped. The FBI also secretly entered her new rented home and placed microphones in light fixtures that looked down on her living room, her kitchen, and her bedroom.

The next witness before the commission was Martin, her spurned lover and former business manager. He used his testimony to describe the young Russian widow as craven and greedy. He admitted that he had been part of a sham publicity campaign on Marina’s behalf “to create in the public mind an image of a bereaved widow and a simple lost girl. The image is not true.”

Warren had made the decision in advance that Martin would not be asked about his romance with Mrs. Oswald or about their sexual encounter in Washington. Even so, the chief justice allowed Martin to offer a full, damning indictment of her character. “She is too cold,” he said, telling the commissioners that Marina showed little grief over her husband’s death. The grief she did express “didn’t ring true,” he said. “The closest I ever saw her to really showing any emotion, at all, was when—it was about a week after she had been there—she saw a picture of Jackie Kennedy.” At the sight of the president’s widow, Marina teared up.

Martin recalled how Marina tried to portray herself in interviews as a devout Christian and that, as a result, gifts of Russian-language bibles began to arrive in the mail. “To my knowledge she has never read the first page of one of them,” he said. “She never cracked a bible.” More offensive, he suggested, was the way she mocked well-meaning donors who sent in small amounts of money to help her and her children: “Someone would send a dollar—I don’t know, maybe it was their last dollar—and she would look at it and throw it aside and say, ‘Oh, it’s just a dollar.’” She was lazy around the Martin household, often leaving his wife to care for Marina’s children, he said. “She got up between 10 and 11 o’clock every day.… The only household chores she did was wash the evening dinner dishes, and occasionally she would vacuum.”

Martin admitted that he had known about the Nixon threat and that he had advised her to stay silent. “‘Don’t go around telling people something like that,’” he said he told her. He worried that her credibility might be damaged further if investigators learned—after all of her other lies—that she had withheld information about yet another of her husband’s plots to assassinate a prominent public figure.

Norman Redlich sat in on the questioning of Martin. Whatever contempt he felt for the witness, Redlich suspected he might be telling the truth—that Marina Oswald was not who she appeared to be. “As Martin’s testimony indicates, there is a strong possibility that Marina Oswald is in fact a very different person—cold, calculating, avaricious, scornful of generosity, and capable of an extreme lack of sympathy in personal relationships,” he wrote in a February 28 memo to Rankin. He said that might help the commission understand why Oswald killed Kennedy. “If Lee Oswald was the assassin, the character and personality of his wife must be considered relevant in our determination of motive. There are many possible explanations for the assassination—a foreign or domestic plot, Oswald’s insanity or Oswald’s political motivations.” Another possibility, he wrote, was that “Oswald was a mentally disturbed person with delusions of grandeur who was driven to commit this act by a wife who married him for selfish motives, degraded him in public, taunted him about his inadequacies and drove him to prove to her that he was the ‘big man’ he aspired to be.”

“Neither you nor I have any desire to smear the reputation of any individual,” he told Rankin. “We cannot ignore, however, that Marina Oswald has repeatedly lied to the Secret Service, the FBI, and this commission on matters which are of vital concern to the people of this country and the world.”

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The FBI was also continuing its surveillance operation against Mark Lane, at the commission’s request. Through his FBI sources, Ford gathered his own information on Lane. On February 12, he had another meeting with Cartha DeLoach, Hoover’s deputy, to discuss the commission’s work. Two days later, DeLoach wrote back to Ford enclosing an “attached memorandum, which you specifically indicated an interest in.” The three-page memo, typed on plain paper, not on FBI stationery, was a summary of what the FBI knew about Lane, including his ties to left-wing groups that the bureau labeled as Communist fronts. There were details on his marital history and sex life. “It was reportedly general knowledge in local New York political circles that Mark Lane and a young single girl had maintained an intimate sexual relationship during 1960 and 1961 and had lived together,” the memo said. In Hoover’s FBI in 1964, an unmarried man’s affair with an unmarried woman was a fact worth recording.
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