A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (42 page)

Her testimony was equally chilling. In the moments after the shooting, she, like her husband, assumed he had been fatally wounded. “Then there was some imperceptible movement, just some little something that let me know that there was still some life, and that is when I started saying to him, ‘It’s all right. Be still.’” Then she heard the third shot. “It felt like spent buckshot falling all over us,” she recalled. But it was not buckshot. “I could see the matter, brain tissue or whatever, just human matter, all over the car and both of us.” She agreed with her husband that the shots had come from the rear—from the direction of the book depository. “From the back of us … to the right.”

*

Warren tried to puzzle out the single-bullet theory in his own mind. Back in the district attorney’s office in Oakland in the 1920s and 1930s, he had been involved in plenty of homicide cases in which bullets flew every which way into a body—and through one body into another—and so it made sense to him that the bullet that flew out of Kennedy’s throat might then have hit Connally. He was convinced by the argument that the bullet that hit Kennedy in the neck “just went through flesh” and had more than enough velocity to hit the man sitting directly in front of him in the limousine.

Connally, Warren decided, was mistaken in believing that he was hit by a separate bullet—understandable, given the shock that his wounds had caused. “I didn’t put much faith in Connally’s testimony at all,” the chief justice said later. He was bolstered in his view by another of the commissioners, John McCloy, a fellow army veteran from World War I. McCloy had fought in Europe and knew how confused soldiers could become on the battlefield after they were hit by bullets or shrapnel, often not realizing for several minutes that they had been grievously, and sometimes fatally, wounded. McCloy recalled to Warren that he knew of two soldiers struck by bullets who did not realize it “for a considerable time” and “then a few seconds later dropped dead.”

29

THE PENTAGON

WASHINGTON, DC

MARCH 1964

Again and again, Stuart Pollak, a twenty-six-year-old Justice Department lawyer, watched a startled Lee Harvey Oswald grimace in pain, clutch his stomach, and begin to die. In March, Pollak, on loan to the assassination commission, was given the assignment of reviewing the films that captured the scene at Dallas police headquarters on Sunday, November 24, as Jack Ruby emerged from a crowd of reporters and cameramen and killed Oswald. “I must have watched that 1,000 times,” Pollak said later. “I went over to the Pentagon, and they had a room there, a projection room, where they would play it for me, over and over and over again. All the footage taken from different television cameras of that shooting.”

Pollak was asked to determine if the film offered any hint that Ruby had accomplices in the crowd—maybe a police officer who tried to make way for Ruby to reach Oswald. The young lawyer was told to determine if there was eye contact, or any other sign of recognition, between Oswald and Ruby, given the rumors in Dallas that they had known each other. “I was looking for other people moving, other sights. Is there eye movement? Is Ruby acting alone? Is he getting any help from the cops?” Pollak asked himself.

After watching the film so many times, he was able to pick out nearly the full cast of characters in each of the frames—the individual reporters and police officers who were in the crush around Oswald. But he could not see anything that suggested a conspiracy or that suggested that Ruby and Oswald recognized each other. “We learned that there was not much to learn.”

Pollak was impressed by how much scrutiny was being given to every part of Oswald’s life, including its final moments, as a result of his murder by Ruby. If Oswald had lived and gone to trial, Pollak believed, the public might have accepted that the most important facts of the assassin’s life were revealed in the courtroom. Now, because he was murdered on live television and denied a trial, even the tiniest details of Oswald’s life and his death—frame by frame, millisecond by millisecond—were being analyzed. “I was impressed we were doing one hell of a job,” he said later.

Others had more success in picking out something significant in the newsreels from Dallas. Alfred Goldberg, the air force historian, was responsible for reviewing film of Oswald’s appearance at a late-night news conference at Dallas police headquarters on November 22, several hours after the assassination. The police wanted Oswald to make a public appearance before reporters to prove that he was not being mistreated in custody. After watching different versions of the film repeatedly, Goldberg noticed someone in the crowd of reporters and photographers who did not belong there—Jack Ruby, pretending to be a journalist. “There he was,” Goldberg remembered. “Ruby was standing right there, just a few feet from Oswald.” It was a valuable discovery, suggesting that Ruby had a chance to kill Oswald Friday night instead of waiting until Sunday; that argued against a conspiracy to silence Oswald, since the conspirators would seemingly want Oswald dead as quickly as possible, before he could spill any secrets.

Goldberg had taken on the larger assignment of gathering all of the television film from Dallas that captured images of the assassination—from the national television networks, as well as footage from their local affiliates in Texas and from independent channels. He eventually tracked down seventeen hundred pounds of film and, through his air force contacts, arranged to have it all flown to Washington aboard military planes.

*

Pollak was one of several young lawyers who passed in and out of the commission’s office on temporary assignment. It was his second chance to work under the chief justice. After graduating from Stanford and then earning a law degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard in 1962, Pollak was immediately hired on as one of Warren’s clerks. He shared a view that was similar to that of Sam Stern, the other former Warren clerk on the commission staff. “The Chief Justice was not an intellectual heavyweight, but he had uncanny common sense and decency,” Pollak said. Warren was eager to have the court issue rulings that reflected what was best for the country, sometimes without worrying over legal technicalities or precedent. “He’d say, ‘cut through the law.’”

Pollak joined the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in the summer of 1963. On the day of the assassination, he was in the waiting room outside the office of Assistant Attorney General Herbert “Jack” Miller, the head of the division, when the first word arrived from Dallas. Miller, he remembered, emerged from his office, shaken. “He came out the door to tell me the terrible news, ‘The President has been shot,’” Pollak recalled. “It wasn’t clear if he was dead or alive.”

Miller asked him to rush to the department’s library “to find out what federal jurisdiction we have” to prosecute a presidential assassin. Pollak was gone for about an hour—Kennedy’s death was announced while he was in the library—and he returned with what he thought was a startling discovery. “We had no jurisdiction,” Pollak remembered. “Shooting the president was not a federal crime.”

Pollak’s immediate supervisor was Deputy Assistant Attorney General Howard Willens. After Willens joined the commission’s staff, he invited Pollak to join him, an offer that Pollak turned down. Early in 1964, Willens tried again, this time offering Pollak the chance to help write the final report. This time Pollak agreed, and he shared an office with Alfred Goldberg. The next several months were, Pollak said, the most intense working experience of his life. “In my whole career, I never put in more hours—every night, every weekend.”

There were days when Californians, beginning with the chief justice, Pollak, and Joseph Ball, seemed everywhere in the commission’s offices. Richard Mosk, a Los Angeles native, had followed a year behind Pollak at both Stanford and Harvard Law School. The twenty-four-year-old Mosk knew Warren through his father, Stanley Mosk, then California’s state attorney general. The younger Mosk wrote to the chief justice to ask for a job on the commission, and he was hired in February and given the title of associate.

Richard Mosk’s first assignment was far from glamorous: he was asked to study the history of congressional subpoenas and create a subpoena form that the commission could use. The work quickly got more interesting, though, if somewhat quirkily so. In March, he was asked to determine who was behind a series of mysterious classified ads that appeared in the two major Dallas daily newspapers in the weeks before the assassination. The first, on October 15, appeared in the personal-ads section of the
Morning News
: “Running Man—Please call me. Please! Please! Lee.” The second was published the next day. “I want Running Man. Please call me. Lee.” Had Lee Oswald used the classifieds to make contact with a coconspirator in the assassination who had used the code name “Running Man”? After a few phone calls, Mosk was disappointed to discover that the ads were simply part of a publicity campaign for a new movie,
The Running Man
, starring Lee Remick. (The film also starred the British actor Laurence Harvey, and it became Hollywood legend that the film was a commercial failure because it opened at about the time of the assassination and starred someone named Lee and someone named Harvey.)

Mosk was also asked to list all of the books that Oswald had checked out of public libraries in Texas and New Orleans, to see if his reading offered any clues about a possible motive for the assassination. “He was pretty well read for an uneducated guy,” Mosk said. “I don’t think he had a high IQ, but at least he was trying to read this stuff.” The list included several biographies of world leaders, including Mao and Khrushchev, as well as Kennedy. Oswald also liked spy novels, including Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers.

One book on the list was worth special scrutiny—
The Shark and the Sardines
by former Guatemalan president Juan José Arévalo, an allegorical tract about the domination of Latin American nations (“the sardines”) by the United States (“the shark”). In late April, Mosk wrote a memo to David Slawson to highlight a passage of the book in which Arévalo wrote that foreign “statesmen” involved in the suppression of Latin America should be “purged, possibly by armed rebellion.” Mosk noted ties between the book’s publisher and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the pro-Castro group that Oswald had claimed to support, and that the book’s author and translator were “all intimately connected with the Castro government.” The translator, June Cobb, an American woman then living in Mexico City, was later revealed to be a paid CIA informant, and she would later figure prominently in the investigation of Oswald’s mysterious trip to Mexico.

Mosk shared an office with another young lawyer on temporary assignment to the commission: John Hart Ely, twenty-five, who had graduated from Yale Law School the year before and had just been hired as one of Warren’s clerks on the court. Ely had agreed to work at the commission until his clerkship began. Two years earlier, he had worked as a summer associate at the elite Washington law firm of Arnold, Fortas & Porter. The firm asked him to write the first draft of a Supreme Court brief on behalf of a pro bono client, Clarence Gideon, the Florida prison inmate whose name would be memorialized in
Gideon v. Wainwright
, the landmark case in which the Warren court ruled that indigent criminal defendants were entitled to a free lawyer. Ely was justifiably proud of his part in the case, and he showed Mosk a copy of an issue of
Time
magazine that spring that noted his role in Gideon’s brief. “He flips the magazine to me, and I put my feet up on my desk” to read the story, Mosk said. That produced a mortifying moment for Mosk, since just then Lee Rankin walked through the door of their office. “It was the first time Rankin had ever walked into our office, and there I was, with my feet upon the desk, reading
Time
magazine.” Mosk would make a far better impression as the weeks went on.

Ely was about to have his own awkwardness with Rankin—over the discovery of a distasteful fact about Oswald’s health. Ely had been assigned to do a thorough review of Oswald’s service in the marines; he summarized what he found in a memo on April 22. He went through Oswald’s personnel files, including his medical records, and he came across information that he thought should be brought to the attention of the other lawyers, including the fact that Oswald had a Japanese girlfriend while stationed in Japan in 1958 who was “possibly a prostitute” and that he was diagnosed that same year with gonorrhea.

Rankin, the commission’s paperwork suggests, was appalled that Ely was willing to put on paper something so vulgar—even if it was true. The seemingly prudish Rankin spoke with Ely on May 5 to make his displeasure clear; later that day, Ely offered an abject apology, insisting in a memo that he had been misunderstood and that he was not recommending any further investigation of the matters. “I mentioned Oswald’s venereal disease, just as I mentioned every other fact I had encountered,” Ely wrote. “I tried to treat it like any other event in Oswald’s life, and intended neither to suggest that it is probative of whether or not Oswald killed President Kennedy, nor to ‘smear’ Oswald.” As Rankin had insisted, the commission’s final report made no mention of Oswald’s bout with a sexually transmitted disease or of his possible romance with a prostitute.

30

THE OFFICES OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY

DALLAS, TEXAS

TUESDAY, MARCH 24, 1964

With each passing week, the commission’s contempt for the Dallas police department grew stronger. It was not just the department’s incompetence, especially when it came to the chaos that had allowed Oswald to be killed in police custody. Often it was the inability of Dallas police officers to tell the truth, even under oath.

Commission lawyer Burt Griffin was convinced, for example, that Dallas police sergeant Patrick Dean had lied repeatedly about the circumstances of Oswald’s murder. An eleven-year veteran of the force, Dean had been responsible for security in the basement of police headquarters on the morning that Ruby slipped in and gunned down Oswald. The fact that Ruby had managed to get into the supposedly secure basement was proof either that Dean and his colleagues had not done their jobs or, more alarmingly, that someone on the force had helped Ruby, maybe in the knowledge that he would kill Oswald. Griffin thought it was possible that the delusional Ruby had been encouraged to act by policemen who wanted vengeance for the damage that Oswald had done to the city’s reputation.