A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (45 page)

The lawyers moved on to the larger questions. They asked Scott and White if they personally believed that there might have been a foreign conspiracy in the assassination, and if Mexico City might have figured in it. No, both men said. They felt that “had there been such a conspiracy, they would at least by this time have had some firm indication of its existence.”

As the briefing drew to a close, Slawson remembered, Scott made an offer: Would the commission lawyers like to hear the actual recordings of Oswald’s calls? “We still have the tapes,” he said. “Do you want to listen to the tapes?”

“I don’t think I need to,” Slawson said. “I don’t think I’d learn anything.”

But Coleman did want to hear them: “As a good trial lawyer, I want to see and hear all the evidence.”

As Slawson headed upstairs to meet with a group of FBI agents, he said, he left his partner in the safe room, pulling on headphones as he prepared to listen to the recordings of Oswald’s voice.

Years later, after Scott’s death, Slawson was outraged when the CIA effectively declared that the scene he described in the agency’s safe room in Mexico City was a figment of his imagination—that Coleman could not have listened to the tapes because they had been routinely destroyed before Kennedy’s assassination. (Coleman added to the confusion when he later blamed a faulty memory and said he could not remember listening to the tapes, although he said he had no doubt about the quality of Slawson’s memory. “If David says it’s true, it’s true.”) The CIA’s claim that the tapes had been destroyed before the assassination was “a goddamned lie,” Slawson would say later.

*

On Friday, April 10, their second full day in Mexico City, Slawson and Coleman were taken by the FBI on a tour of the capital. They saw the exterior of the Cuban and Soviet embassies and consulates, the bus terminals where Oswald supposedly arrived in and departed from the city, and the Hotel del Comercio, the modest hotel where he had stayed. They saw the restaurant, next to the hotel, where Oswald ate many of his meals, always choosing the least expensive item on the menu. The restaurant’s employees recalled that Oswald was so frugal that he always passed up dessert and coffee, not realizing that they were included in the price of the meal.

After the tour, Slawson, Coleman, and Willens were driven to the offices of Luis Echeverria, a powerful Mexican official then on the verge of being named the country’s interior minister; he would later be elected Mexico’s president. Echeverria, who had been close to Scott for years, led off the conversation by offering his “strong opinion that there was no foreign conspiracy involved” in Kennedy’s assassination—“at least no conspiracy connected with Mexico,” Slawson said. Coleman pressed Echeverria for permission to interview Mexican witnesses, especially Silvia Duran. An interview with Duran might be possible, the Mexican said, although it would have to be informal—labeled as a simple social occasion—and conducted away from the American embassy. The government could not allow the commission’s investigators to “give the appearance of an official investigation being carried out by the American government on Mexican soil.”

Coleman said the interview with Duran was “of the highest importance” to the commission, and Echevarria said he understood why. Her testimony, he said, “was of the greatest importance” to Mexico, as well. It was her statements to interrogators that led the Mexican government to conclude “that no conspiracy had been hatched during Oswald’s visits to Mexico.”

Echeverria apologized and said he had to end the meeting promptly because he was expected at a lunch with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, then on a state visit to Mexico.

“
We
would like to have lunch with Silvia Duran,” Coleman said jokingly.

Echeverria replied with a rude joke about Duran, suggesting that Mexican women were less attractive than their Cuban counterparts. The commission’s lawyers would “not have as much fun as we thought because Duran was not a good-looking Cuban—only a Mexican.”

That afternoon, Slawson and Coleman asked other American embassy officials for their advice on how to arrange an interview with Duran. The ambassador’s top deputy, Deputy Chief of Mission Clarence Boonstra, said he doubted the Mexicans would ever allow them to see her, especially if it meant she had to be taken into custody again; she had already been arrested twice since the assassination, the first time at the request of the CIA. As Slawson remembered it, Boonstra “felt that the Mexicans were too politically sensitive to risk having her picked up a third time.” And from what the diplomat knew about Duran (Boonstra called her “a Communist”) and her husband (“a very militant Communist and a very bitter person in general”), he doubted she would agree to be interviewed voluntarily.

The commission lawyers said they still wanted to try, perhaps by inviting her to an informal meal, as Echeverria had suggested. Inspired by what they had come to learn about CIA spycraft, Slawson and Coleman proposed that they could arrange some electronic surveillance of their own, asking Duran to a lunch in a “private place” in Mexico City that could outfitted “with recording apparatus so that no notes would be necessary.” Boonstra had another idea. He suggested the commission bring Duran to the United States for an interview—and throw the Mexican government off her trail by labeling the trip as something else, perhaps a cultural exchange or for medical treatment. Duran might be willing to cooperate, he said, so long as she created no more trouble for herself with her own government. “The idea was worth considering,” Slawson replied, saying he would “bring it up at the highest levels of the commission after we returned to the United States.”

With Duran in hiding and with so many other obstacles put in their way, Slawson and Coleman gave up on the idea of interviewing her before they left Mexico. When they got back to Washington, they decided, they would pursue Boonstra’s idea of bringing her to the United States. Besides, Coleman wanted to return home to Philadelphia as quickly as possible, so he booked a flight out of Mexico City on Sunday. Slawson and Willens made reservations to return to Washington on Monday.

*

On Saturday night, the American embassy organized a reception for the commission’s investigators, and it was the setting for an odd encounter between Slawson and Scott. Slawson remembered that Scott pulled him aside for a chat, and the conversation quickly took an uncomfortable turn, with Scott telling him some of his uglier duties at the CIA. He told Slawson how he was regularly required to set traps for his CIA colleagues in Mexico City to see if they would betray the United States for money or some other reward. “He said he had to test his best friends and associates in the CIA every two or three years by offering some kind of bribe to see if they would go over,” Slawson recalled.

“It’s the hardest thing I do,” Scott said. “I wonder whether I would have joined the CIA if I’d known that was part of my work.”

Scott’s comments were so jarring—so out of place, in the middle of an otherwise relaxed embassy reception—that Slawson was certain that he was trying to send a message. He thought Scott was trying to do him a favor by convincing him not to give in to the agency’s recruitment efforts back in Washington. “I read that as his warning to me—don’t accept.”

The embassy party was memorable for Slawson for another, unfortunate reason. “They served good champagne and—you know champagne—I got so high and thirsty that when I got back to the hotel, I drank the tap water” by mistake. He quickly began to feel ill, and his trip to Mexico came to an ignominious end. “Sunday I was wiped out,” he said. “It was even difficult getting on the plane to go back to DC.” He felt better in a day or two, and he returned to the commission’s offices in Washington the next week with a mission. He was determined to find a way to bring Silvia Duran to Washington.

32

THE HOME OF JACQUELINE KENNEDY

WASHINGTON, DC

TUESDAY, APRIL 7, 1964

Jacqueline Kennedy was beaming. It was a few minutes before noon on Tuesday, April 7, four and a half months after the assassination, and this was William Manchester’s first appointment to interview Mrs. Kennedy for the book she had authorized.

“
Mr. Manchester
,” she said in that “inimitable, breathy voice,” welcoming Manchester into the living room of her new home on N Street in Georgetown. She closed the sliding doors behind her “with a sweeping movement, and bowed slightly from the waist,” he said later. She was wearing a black jersey and yellow stretch pants, “and I thought how, at 34, with her camellia beauty, she might have been taken for a woman in her mid-20s.” The relationship between Mrs. Kennedy and Manchester would later sour, but at the start of their collaboration, he thought she could not have been more gracious or helpful.

“My first impression—and it never changed—was that I was in the presence of a very great tragic actress,” he said. “I mean that in the best sense of the word.”

Manchester was in the first stages of researching the book, which was meant to be, essentially, the family’s authorized history of the assassination and its aftermath. In time, he came to believe that the project was an effort, above all else, to discourage other writers from attempting a similar project that the family could not control.

His five interviews with the president’s widow, conducted between April and July, were, not surprisingly, the most wrenching he would conduct for the book. Mrs. Kennedy talked about everything, including exactly what had happened inside the limousine when the shots rang out at Dealey Plaza. “She would withhold nothing during our interviews,” he said. “About half of the people I interviewed displayed deep emotional distress while trying to answer my questions, though none of the other sessions were as affecting as those with Jackie.”

The interviews were taped by Manchester on a bulky but reliable Wollensak reel-to-reel recorder. Under his agreement with the Kennedy family, his ten hours of taped conversations with the former First Lady were to be handed over to the planned Kennedy presidential library in Boston when the book was finished. “Future historians may be puzzled by the odd clunking noises on the tapes,” Manchester wrote. “They were ice cubes. The only way we could get through those long evenings was with the aid of great containers of daiquiris.” Mrs. Kennedy and Manchester smoked throughout the interviews, so “there are also frequent sounds of matches being struck.”

At the offices of the assassination commission, Arlen Specter and the other staff lawyers were well aware of Manchester’s book—it was a topic of fevered gossip around Washington—and of what amounted to Manchester’s parallel, Kennedy-family-approved investigation. It angered Specter that Manchester was interviewing Mrs. Kennedy even as the commission’s staff was being denied access to her by the chief justice. Specter asked why it was acceptable for the president’s widow to talk to a journalist about the assassination but not acceptable for her to be interviewed by the federal commission charged with explaining to the American public why their president had been murdered.

He did not know the extent of it, but Mrs. Kennedy was just one of several important witnesses who agreed to be interviewed by Manchester that spring. Robert Kennedy consented to a taped interview on May 14, although he proved to be far less forthcoming than his sister-in-law. “His replies are abrupt, often monosyllabic,” Manchester said. In some cases, Manchester got access to important government witnesses long before the commission. Four days after meeting with Mrs. Kennedy for the first time, he interviewed Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, who would not testify before the Warren Commission until mid-May. And unlike the commission, Manchester was allowed to question both President and Mrs. Johnson. The White House granted an interview with the First Lady on June 24. The president initially offered to meet for a face-to-face interview but “found he could not bear to do it,” Manchester said. Instead, he provided written answers to a list of the author’s questions.

Through the winter and early spring, Specter continued to press for interviews with the Johnsons, and he drew up long lists of questions to ask them, just as he had for Jacqueline Kennedy. Specter would be disappointed, again, by Warren. The chief justice raised no objection when the White House announced that President Johnson, instead of testifying to the commission, would prepare a written statement about his memories of the day of the assassination. The 2,025-word statement would not arrive at the commission’s offices until July 10, and it was seen by some of the new president’s political enemies—especially by aides to Robert Kennedy—as self-serving and inaccurate. Johnson portrayed himself as having done all he could in the hours after the assassination to comfort Mrs. Kennedy and to seek counsel by telephone from the attorney general—conversations that, in some cases, Robert Kennedy said never occurred.

The chief justice would later concede that he should have pushed for face-to-face testimony from Johnson, if only to avoid the appearance that the commission had left questions unanswered by such a key figure. “I think it would have been a little better if he had testified,” Warren said years later. “But he sent word to us that he would give a statement and Mrs. Johnson would give a statement. So we didn’t even discuss it with him.”

For her part, Mrs. Johnson’s testimony came in the form of a transcript of a tape recording she made on November 30, eight days after the assassination. Commission staff members remembered it as a beautifully rendered depiction of all she had witnessed. She described arriving at Parkland Hospital and looking back toward Kennedy’s limousine as she was rushed into the emergency room: “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw, in the president’s car, a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat. I think it was Mrs. Kennedy, lying over the President’s body.” Later, inside the hospital, Mrs. Johnson found herself “face-to-face with Jackie” in a small hallway. “I think it was right outside the operating room,” Mrs. Johnson said. “She was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.”