A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (35 page)

24

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

MARCH 1964

As the commission’s chief investigator on the Secret Service, Sam Stern did not need much time to figure out that President Kennedy had been a “sitting duck” in Texas and that the Secret Service had not done nearly enough to protect him in a city where violence might have been expected. Stern went back and read the newspaper clippings about UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson’s trip to Dallas that October, when Stevenson was hit over the head with a placard by a woman in a mob of anti-UN protesters. He read about the 1960 incident in which Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson were jeered and spat on in the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel. And yet in this same city, the Secret Service had organized a motorcade in which President Kennedy and the First Lady were driven slowly past crowds in an open-air limousine. The route took them past several tall buildings from which an assassin could easily position himself for a clear shot at the president; at least one assassin had apparently done just that.

Unlike some of the other young lawyers on the commission’s staff, Stern was able to master his part of the investigation in only a few weeks. What he discovered in his research on the Secret Service was discouraging, but it was not difficult to understand. The agency was, as he put it, “old-school, not up-to-date,” with agents protecting the president who had a “cop mentality” that was unsuited to outwitting even an unsophisticated assassin.

It didn’t help that Kennedy had always courted danger in his public appearances. He insisted on remaining accessible to crowds, often alarming his Secret Service detail by walking outside security perimeters to shake the hands of well-wishers. When traveling in a slow motorcade, he preferred that Secret Service agents walk alongside his presidential limousine rather than stand on special foot rails on the sides of the vehicle. He did not want them so close that it gave the appearance he had something to fear.

It was darkly fitting that the legislation creating the United States Secret Service arrived on President Lincoln’s desk at the White House on April 14, 1865—the day of his assassination. The Secret Service was established initially as the anticounterfeiting arm of the Treasury Department, which was then battling a flood of counterfeit currency after the Civil War. In 1901, a self-proclaimed anarchist gunned down President William McKinley, and the responsibilities of the Secret Service were quickly broadened to include presidential protection. At the turn of the century, no other federal law-enforcement agency was capable of carrying out the assignment; it would be another seven years before the federal government established the agency that would eventually become the FBI.

Stern was startled by much of what he discovered about the inadequacy of Secret Service procedures for out-of-town trips, beginning with its routine use of open-top limousines. The limousine used in Dallas—a 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible that bore the Secret Service codename “X100”—offered its passengers no protection whatsoever from a gunman shooting from above. A plastic bubbletop roof could be attached to the limousine to allow crowds to see the president in bad weather, but the roof offered protection from precipitation and extreme temperatures—not from gunfire. “It was not designed to be and is not bulletproof,” Stern wrote to Rankin. For at least three years before the assassination, the Secret Service had been trying, without success, to find a manufacturer to make a bulletproof plastic roof. (The proposed specifications called for “reasonably good protection against a .45 calibre sidearm fired at a distance of 10 feet.”) The bubbletop plastic roof was transported to Dallas on November 22 but was not used. The forecast that day was for unseasonably warm, sunny weather.

Stern found it hard to know where to begin in listing the other failings of the Secret Service. The agency, he discovered, had no policy of inspecting buildings along motorcade routes, with one exception: buildings were inspected every four years along the route of the presidential inaugural parade in Washington, DC. Asked by Stern why building inspections were not done routinely everywhere, the Secret Service said it lacked the manpower to carry out inspections in each of the dozens of cities a president might visit each year. “Surveys of hundreds of buildings and thousands of windows is not practical,” it told the commission.

But why, Stern asked, couldn’t the Secret Service at least inspect the buildings on a motorcade route that “present the most favorable vantage points to an assassin”? And why couldn’t a few agents conduct a “spot check of a random sample of buildings immediately preceding the motorcade”? A spot check at the Texas School Book Depository might have found Lee Harvey Oswald sitting with a rifle at the window on the sixth floor.

There were other simple precautions the Secret Service could have taken but didn’t. Stern wondered why the agency did not station agents with binoculars along a route to keep watch on the buildings the president was about to pass. Why didn’t the Secret Service ask the managers of buildings along a motorcade route to stay alert to the possibility of strangers or to seal windows temporarily?

He was appalled, he said, when he saw some of the television footage from the day of the assassination. Like the crowds lining the streets, Dallas police officers were caught up in the excitement of catching a glimpse of the president and First Lady; they were not looking up to see if there were threats, especially from the buildings above. “It was horrible,” Stern said. “If you look at the newsreels, the Dallas cops along the way are looking at Kennedy. There’s nobody checking the rooftops. Nobody is looking at the buildings. And yet there was Oswald, sitting in an open window.”

*

Back in Washington, the methods used by the Secret Service to identify potential assassins were almost laughably inadequate. Within the agency, a special unit, the Protective Research Section, or PRS, was supposed to maintain an elaborate, nationwide checklist of people who might pose a danger to the president when he traveled. Stern discovered that the list, which at the time included fifty thousand names, was made up almost entirely of the people who had sent threatening letters or packages to the White House or who had made threatening phone calls to the White House switchboard. The PRS maintained a separate “trip file” of about one hundred people who were considered especially dangerous, but a search of the file before Kennedy’s trip to Texas found no Dallas-area resident on the list—a surprise, Stern thought, given the attack on Stevenson the month before. It was absurd, he thought. “If some illiterate in Dallas didn’t bother writing a hate letter to the White House—but was out there beating Adlai Stevenson over the head—he wouldn’t make the list.”

The Secret Service did make contact with the FBI when the president traveled. Local FBI field offices were routinely asked to alert the Secret Service if they were aware of threats in cities the president planned to visit, and that happened ahead of Kennedy’s visit to Dallas. The FBI’s Dallas field office provided the Secret Service with the names of local residents who met the bureau’s criteria for a potential risk; Oswald’s name was not among them.

On the commission’s staff, it would be left to Stern to make the initial judgment as to whether the FBI’s Dallas office—and more specifically, Special Agent James Hosty—had violated the bureau’s guidelines in withholding Oswald’s name from the Secret Service. Not surprisingly, the Secret Service seemed eager to blame the FBI for what had happened. On March 20, Stern interviewed Robert Bouck, the director of the Protective Research Service; Bouck said that the FBI should have known to alert the Secret Service about Oswald, especially given his aborted defection to Russia and his weapons training in the marines. Stern was not so convinced. Whatever his radical politics, Oswald had no history of violence, and there was no record of him making any sort of threat against Kennedy or any other political figures. Hosty had known before the assassination that Oswald worked at the Texas School Book Depository, but Stern thought it understandable that the FBI agent had not made an instant connection between the book depository and the motorcade route that Kennedy followed on November 22. The route had been made public on the evening of November 18.

Stern felt sorry for Hosty, whose career in the FBI was obviously in tatters. “I didn’t think Hosty should be condemned over this,” he said later. “I could understand how a busy local FBI agent would not see Oswald as an immediate threat.” Stern also didn’t believe that the Secret Service agents in Texas who had gone out drinking the night before the assassination should be subjected to harsh, career-ending discipline. Drew Pearson, Warren’s friend, and other muckraking journalists in Washington were trying to make a scandal of it. “But I don’t remember being shocked or thinking it was so awful, or that Kennedy would have minded if he had known about it,” Stern said. He certainly did not think the drinking incident deserved special attention in the commission’s final report. “I think the story tells itself, it doesn’t need hyperbole,” he said.

Chief Justice Warren would come to a different conclusion.

*

As a former clerk to the chief justice, the thirty-five-year-old, Philadelphia-born Stern had a special perspective on Warren, and he was often quizzed by the commission’s other lawyers about what it was like to work for him at the Supreme Court. After getting his law degree at Harvard in 1952, Stern had been a clerk to a federal appeals court judge in Washington and then was hired by Warren in 1955. Stern and another of Warren’s clerks were put in an office that adjoined the conference room, which meant they could hear the justices deliberating cases next door. After the initial thrill of being hired at the court, Stern was disappointed that he did not have more opportunity to interact with Warren. Unlike other justices, the chief justice tended not to form lifelong bonds with his clerks. “He was very warm, but it was a kind of political warmth,” Stern said. “I never felt close to him personally.” Warren came closest to opening up to his clerks when they all came into the office on weekends to catch up on paperwork. “Warren would sometimes wander in Saturday afternoon and sit down and tell us war stories about California politics in the old days.” During these conversations, Stern remembered, Warren made clear his loathing for Richard Nixon, who in Warren’s view had cost him any chance at the White House.

Stern had a sense of how strongly Warren felt about Kennedy. Early in the Kennedy administration, Stern attended a reunion of Warren and his former clerks. The party was held at the Metropolitan Club, an elite men’s club close to the White House, and the president had turned up as a surprise guest. “Kennedy came and shook hands with everybody and told the chief justice how much he respected his work, and Warren just beamed,” Stern recalled. “He basked in it.”

Warren, Stern came to think, “would have made a fabulous president” himself. Whatever his legacy on the court, it was “sort of a waste” that Warren had finished up there, instead of at the White House. He was not a great legal thinker or scholar, but he was an extraordinary politician—a true leader, Stern believed. Warren had magnetism, and a sense of purpose and dignity, that made people eager to compromise and to sacrifice to help him. “He had the ability to bring antithetical groups together.”

As he had expected, Stern had little contact with the chief justice at the commission. From a distance, though, he became concerned about Warren’s health. He would catch a glimpse of the chief justice in the commission’s offices at the VFW building and “he was sick, rheumy,” Stern remembered. “I was worried.” He could see how Warren’s dual roles at the court and on the commission had begun to take a physical toll, even as the chief justice continued to appear in the commission’s offices each morning like clockwork, before walking down the street and pulling on his black robes to begin a full day at the court.

25

THE OFFICES OF REPRESENTATIVE GERALD R. FORD

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

WASHINGTON, DC

MARCH 1964

Gerald Ford wanted to get tough on Marina Oswald. Certainly Ford was being encouraged by his political advisers and by some hawkish anti-Communists on his staff not to rule out a conspiracy involving the Soviet Union or Cuba, and the many lies of Oswald’s widow raised new concerns that she was hiding evidence of a plot. He knew that some of the commission’s investigators suspected that Marina might, in fact, be a sleeper agent for Moscow. Perhaps she didn’t actually know about her husband’s plans to kill Kennedy, but she might have been sent to the United States to provide cover and support for Oswald while he carried out whatever secret plan the Kremlin had devised for him. That would explain why they had married so quickly after meeting and why they had been allowed to leave Russia.

In March, Ford wrote to Rankin to recommend that Oswald’s widow be questioned again, this time connected to a polygraph machine in hopes that she would be intimidated into finally telling the full truth. “A polygraph test for her on a voluntary basis would go a long way in satisfying the public’s interest in the whole matter,” Ford wrote. “We already know that she did not ‘volunteer’ a number of matters which have since come up.… Perhaps she is not ‘volunteering’ all she knows about Lee Oswald’s schools, activities and relationships with the Soviets.” Like several of the staff lawyers, he was worried that the commission did not know the truth about the reasons for Oswald’s visit to Mexico City—but that Marina did. “She appears to know something more about the Mexico visit than she told us.” He recommended that other witnesses be polygraphed “where there appears from the record certain inconsistencies or a failure to be completely frank.”

Ford continued to chafe under Warren’s leadership of the commission. The chief justice was never impolite with Ford and the other commissioners, but he was “brusque,” never treating them as equals, Ford said. “He made a number of decisions that, at least in the original few months, were unilateral.” Warren “delegated too much power to himself” and “there was no deviation from his schedule and his scenario.” A star football player at the University of Michigan in the 1930s, Ford used a football analogy to describe the chief justice: “He treated us as though we were on the team, but he was the captain and the quarterback.”