A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (39 page)

In March, Specter said he was disappointed but not surprised when told that Mrs. Kennedy would not testify early in the investigation and that she might not be called to testify at all because of Warren’s reluctance to question her. “The Chief Justice had taken a protective stance toward Mrs. Kennedy,” Specter said later. It set a terrible double standard, he thought. If this had been a homicide case back at the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, police officers and detectives would have interviewed the victim’s spouse—especially one who had been at the murder scene—within hours of the crime. “In a first-degree murder case, the Commonwealth is obliged to call all eyewitnesses,” he said. “That’s because they’re that important to finding out the truth.” In the investigation of the assassination of the president, however, his widow might be asked no questions at all. “My view is that no witness is above the reach of the law to provide evidence,” Specter said. “I don’t think that Mrs. Kennedy was above that one iota.” He felt just as strongly that the commission needed to take testimony from President Johnson. The case for questioning the president was made stronger by the many conspiracy theories that he was somehow involved in the assassination. Specter insisted that he was ready to ask Johnson—“point blank”—if he had been part of a conspiracy. “Under other circumstances, he would have been considered a prime suspect,” Specter said later. “I don’t think President Johnson had anything to do with the assassination of President Kennedy, but I do not think that would have been an inappropriate question to ask.”

*

When Specter finally began taking testimony in Washington, his leadoff witnesses were the two Secret Service agents who had been in Kennedy’s limousine—first, Roy Kellerman, who had been riding in the right front seat, and then William Greer, the driver. Both were called to testify on Monday, March 9.

Kellerman struck Specter as “the casting model for the role” of a Secret Service agent. A former autoworker and Michigan state trooper, the soft-spoken Kellerman—so quiet that colleagues had jokingly given him the nickname “Gabby”—was “six feet four, weighed well over 200 pounds and was muscular and handsome.” While Kellerman might look the part, however, Specter was not convinced that the agent did his job well on the day of the assassination. He struck Specter as surprisingly unemotional, even blasé, when discussing the final moments of the life of the president he had been sworn to protect. Specter questioned why Kellerman did not jump to the back of the limousine, where Kennedy and Connally were grievously wounded, after hearing the gunfire in Dealey Plaza, at least to shield their bodies from the possibility of additional shots on the drive to Parkland Hospital. Kellerman insisted there was nothing he could have done; he felt he was more valuable to the victims by remaining in the front seat, where he could pass radio messages to Greer. Specter concluded that Kellerman “was the wrong man for the job—he was 48 years old, big, and his reflexes were not quick.”

Greer was a far more sympathetic witness. A fifty-four-year-old Irish-American immigrant who had arrived in the United States as a teenager, he still spoke with a slight brogue. He had joined the Secret Service after serving in the navy in World War II and then working for nearly a decade as a chauffeur for wealthy families in the Boston area. He made clear to Specter that he had been shattered by Kennedy’s murder. “He clearly felt deep affection for Kennedy, which I sensed had been reciprocal,” in part because of their shared Irish ancestry, Specter said. Greer was tormented by his actions in the motorcade, including his failure to hit the accelerator immediately after hearing the first shot. Photos and television film from the scene suggested he had actually hit the brakes after the first shot, turning around to see what was happening, possibly making Kennedy an easier target. When Jacqueline Kennedy learned those details later, friends said, she was furious, complaining that the Secret Service agents were no more capable of protecting the president than her children’s nanny would have been. Later, when William Manchester published his history of the assassination, he would report that Greer wept as he apologized to Mrs. Kennedy at Parkland Hospital, saying he should have swerved the car to try to save the president.

The chief justice, who sat through most of the witness testimony conducted by Specter, thought the young lawyer’s interrogation methods were methodical to the point of wasting time. Certainly, Warren thought, they were wasting
his
time. In the questioning of Kellerman and Greer, for instance, Specter asked the agents to give their best estimate of the time that passed between each of the shots, where each shot seemed to come from, and from how far away. He also asked them to mark on a map where they believed the motorcade had been when each of the shots was fired. Specter thought it was his obligation to ask about the most “minute details of the assassination,” no matter how much time it took. Warren disagreed, and he signaled his annoyance to Specter by tapping his fingers, loudly. During Kellerman’s testimony, Specter recalled, “the Chief Justice’s finger-tapping reached a crescendo,” and “he took me aside and asked me to speed it up.”

Warren told Specter that it was “unrealistic to expect meaningful answers to questions about the elapsed time” between the shots, especially when the agents had no clear memory of hearing the individual shots. But Specter refused the chief justice’s order to hurry up. “No, sir,” he recalled telling Warren. “These questions are essential.” Specter reminded Warren that people would “read and reread this record for years, if not decades, and perhaps over centuries.” He had plenty of experience with appeals courts back home in Pennsylvania and he knew how appeals judges scrutinized trial transcripts, looking for a prosecutor’s smallest error or inconsistency. The commission’s transcripts would be more closely reviewed than any transcript of any case he would ever prosecute. Specter thought that Warren, who had spent so much of his law-enforcement career managing prosecutors instead of prosecuting cases himself, did not understand that. “I don’t know if Warren had any comprehension of what a transcript would look like,” Specter remembered. “This was my work, and I was going to do it right.”

Warren was not pleased with Specter’s defiance, “but he didn’t order me to change my approach,” Specter said. “Aside from drumming his fingers, Warren did not interfere with this examination.”

The next Secret Service agent to testify, Clint Hill, was the true hero of the day of the assassination, Specter thought. He believed that anyone who closely reviewed the Zapruder film could see that Hill, a thirty-one-year-old North Dakotan who had been with the Secret Service for nine years, had saved Jacqueline Kennedy’s life. Hill had been in the follow-up car directly behind the presidential limousine; when he heard the first shot, he jumped into the street and ran toward the Kennedys, climbing onto the trunk of the presidential limousine. “I was amazed every time I watched the Zapruder film and saw Hill dash to the limousine, barely grasp the handle of the left rear fender and leap on the small running board at the left rear just as the car accelerated,” Specter said. The young agent pushed Mrs. Kennedy back in the limousine as she began to climb onto the trunk. Without his actions, Specter said, “Mrs. Kennedy would have tumbled into the street when the Lincoln accelerated, into the path of the speeding backup car.”

Specter was forgiving of Hill’s acknowledgment that he had broken Secret Service rules by going out drinking the night before the assassination; the agent admitted he had a Scotch and soda at the Press Club in Fort Worth and then went to another club, where he remained until he returned to his hotel at two forty-five a.m. Whatever the aftereffects of the alcohol, Specter believed that “Clinton Hill’s reflexes could hardly have been quicker when they were needed to save Mrs. Kennedy’s life.”

Hill offered Specter a convincing, if horrifying, explanation, for why Mrs. Kennedy had attempted to climb onto the trunk. “She had jumped up from the seat and was, it appeared to me, reaching for something coming off the right rear bumper of the car,” Hill said.

Specter: “Was there anything back there that you observed, that she may have been reaching for?”

Hill thought she had been reaching for bits of her husband’s skull that had been blown off by the second bullet to hit him. The blast “removed a portion of the president’s head and he had slumped noticeably to his left,” Hill said, remembering the bloody mist and particles of flesh in the backseat of the limousine. “I do know that the next day we found the portion of the president’s head” on the street in Dallas. He recalled that his only impulse was to get the First Lady back into the passenger compartment. “I grabbed her and put her back in the back seat, crawled up on the top of the back seat and lay there.”

*

Specter was also responsible for reviewing the medical evidence, and much of it was a mess, he quickly discovered. The record created by the emergency-room doctors at Parkland Hospital and later by the autopsy-room pathologists at Bethesda Naval Hospital, was full of contradictory, inaccurate information. Specter sensed early on how the confusion might give birth to conspiracy theories. The problems began within hours of the assassination, when doctors at Parkland held an ill-advised news conference. Facing a crowd of frantic reporters, Dr. Malcolm Perry, who had attended the president in the emergency room, seemed to say that one of the bullets that hit the president had come from the front of the motorcade instead of from the Texas School Book Depository or some other point behind Kennedy’s limousine. “Yes, it is conceivable,” said Perry, a comment suggesting at least two gunmen. An alarmed reporter from
Time
magazine, Hugh Sidey, warned Perry, “Doctor, do you realize what you’re doing? You’re confusing us.”

Perry later admitted he had not inspected the wounds closely enough to make any judgment about where the bullets had come from, but many news reports that afternoon treated his speculation as fact. No news organization may have created more confusion that day than the Associated Press, the nation’s largest wire service, which stated in one of its early reports that Kennedy had been shot “in the front of the head.” (The AP also had to correct reports that afternoon that Johnson had been slightly wounded in the gunfire and that a Secret Service agent in the motorcade had been killed.)

The autopsy report was also full of gaps, reflecting the Bethesda pathologists’ rush to complete their work. The doctors did not have time even to trace the path of the bullets through the president’s body, which would normally be routine in the autopsy of a gunfire victim. Two FBI agents who had observed the autopsy took down—and stated as fact—what the pathologists later described as their ill-informed speculation that the first bullet to hit the president had not penetrated deeply into his body but had instead fallen out of the hole in his back.

Before taking the formal testimony of the Bethesda pathologists, Specter went to the naval hospital outside Washington to interview the doctors on Friday, March 13. He asked Ball, perhaps the most experienced trial lawyer on the commission’s staff, to join him. At the hospital, they tracked down Commander James Humes, the pathologist who had overseen the autopsy. An agitated Humes demanded that Specter and Ball show him identification. “He was very suspicious,” Specter said, recalling that he dug out “the only credentials Ball and I could produce”—the building passes they used to enter the commission’s offices in Washington. “My pass didn’t look very official to begin with, even less so because the typeface used for my name didn’t match the print on the card.”

Humes was still not satisfied, and it took an order from a senior hospital administrator, a navy admiral, to make him cooperate. “He was scared to death,” Ball remembered. “He didn’t want to talk to us.”

Specter and Ball pressed Humes first to explain why there had been so much confusion about the path of the first bullet. Humes told the two lawyers the path had not been obvious, since the doctors at Parkland Hospital had performed a tracheotomy to allow the president to breathe, masking the exit wound in the throat. Early in the autopsy, Humes said, word came from Dallas that the Parkland doctors had performed heart massage on the president and that a bullet had been found on a hospital stretcher. That led Humes and his colleagues to speculate out loud, over the autopsy table, about the possibility that the bullet might have been pushed out of Kennedy’s body when his heart was massaged. But it was just speculation, and it was wrong, Humes said. As the autopsy continued, the pathologists could see that the muscles in the front of the president’s neck had been badly bruised—proof, they thought, that the bullet had passed through his neck and then exited out the front.

Humes said he and his colleagues at Bethesda were startled when they learned weeks later that the FBI agents in the autopsy room had continued to promote the heart-massage theory in their formal reports. An FBI report issued in December stated flatly—and incorrectly—that “there was no point of exit” for the bullet that entered the president’s back. A separate FBI report in January stated flatly—and incorrectly—that the bullet “penetrated to a distance of less than a finger’s length.”

Specter had brought a copy of the autopsy report with him, and he asked Humes to go through it, line by line, and to explain how the navy pathologists had reached their conclusions. He asked Humes to provide a chronology of the drafting and editing of the report. Where were the early drafts?

It was then, Specter said, that Humes admitted that he had destroyed all of his notes, as well as the original copy of the autopsy report, to prevent them from ever becoming public. He had burned them in the fireplace of his home in suburban Maryland, he said, because they were stained with the president’s blood from the autopsy room and he was worried that they might become some sort of nightmarish museum exhibit. Specter was astonished at the disclosure, he said. He recalled thinking—at that moment, as he sat there in front of Humes—that this had the makings of a scandal if it became known outside the commission. In Philadelphia, Specter had spent enough time with trial judges and juries, not to mention cynical courthouse reporters, to know what the reaction would be to the discovery that such essential documents had been incinerated. It would “give people an opening to say there was a cover-up.”