A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (48 page)

For many on the staff, Liebeler also fit the role of a charming rogue. Decades later, several would describe him as among the most memorable people they would ever meet; just the mention of his name would prompt a knowing smile. Slawson recalled him as “devil-may-care” in his attitudes toward authority, beginning with his demand that the commission’s incompetent secretaries be replaced. Griffin said that he and Liebeler “wouldn’t agree on anything” when it came to politics and that Liebeler would be vocal about their differences. “But even through all his aggressiveness, he had this tender quality to him,” Griffin said. “Even if he were saying that you were an idiot on some subject, he did it in a way that you knew he didn’t think you were an idiot.” Liebeler, he thought, “cared deeply about people.”

Others had less fond memories. Specter thought Liebeler was highly intelligent but also “prickly” and a “flake” who was prone to bizarre flashes of anger. He recalled going to lunch with Liebeler at The Monocle, a popular Capitol Hill restaurant near the commission’s offices, and watching, amazed, as his colleague blew up because the egg on his corned beef hash was not runny enough. “In a demanding, insulting voice, he brings over the waiter and says, ‘Goddamn it, when you cook the egg, it’s supposed to bleed onto the corned beef hash.’”

Warren made it clear that he did not like Liebeler, several of the lawyers recalled. Months into the investigation, Liebeler did what would have been—in most major law firms or government agencies at the time—the unthinkable. He began to grow a beard. “It was a great, beautiful beard—all red,” Rankin remembered. “It irritated the chief justice.” Warren was so upset that he told Rankin to order Liebeler to shave it off. Rankin said he tried to talk Warren out of it. “I said, ‘Look, he has a right to have his hair the way he wants it, and if he wants a beard, he has a right to that.’” Specter remembered thinking how hypocritical it was for Warren—the “great egalitarian and civil libertarian”—to be angered over Liebeler’s decision to allow his whiskers to grow out. The chief justice exacted his punishment, Specter recalled, by “banishing” Liebeler for a time to a different floor of the VFW building.

Liebeler titillated his colleagues with stories about his exploits in Washington with different women, and he enjoyed long nights of carousing and drinking, often inviting the other lawyers to join him. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was well under way, and although he had a wife back in New York, he intended to be part of it. “He was a crazy, huge womanizer,” Slawson remembered.

“He would do anything—absolutely anything,” recalled Griffin, who happily went home to his wife each night. “I live a very puritanical life. But Liebeler, despite all of his political conservatism, was not conservative about anything else.” With alcohol, “he had no restraint,” Griffin said. His nightly exploits were no secret because “he talked about it all the time.” Other staff lawyers saw no sign that Liebeler’s nighttime activities affected his work, and he returned to the office in the morning energized by the adventures of the night before. The alcohol seemed to have no effect, perhaps because he “was a big guy, maybe 6 foot 1 or 2, weighed 200, 220 pounds,” Griffin said.

Whatever the state of his marriage, Liebeler made clear that he was devoted to his two sons, who remained behind with their mother in New York while he worked in Washington. Over the years, his younger son, Eric, was willing to forgive his father for some of his failings because he so admired him “as a man who wanted to live every single damned day” as if it were his last. “He looked at every day as a day that he should do something interesting, something intense, something valuable.”

Liebeler was happiest and most productive when he disappeared to the family’s seventy-two-acre summer home in Vermont, on the outskirts of the Green Mountains National Forest. In joining the commission, he asked Rankin for permission to fly to Vermont every few weeks, at the commission’s expense, to work and clear his head. Rankin agreed, apparently not realizing that Liebeler would stuff his briefcase full of classified documents to read on the trip—a fact that would later come back to haunt them both.

*

Liebeler’s senior partner on the commission’s “Oswald team,” as it became known, was Albert Jenner, the high-powered litigator from Chicago. Their relationship collapsed almost instantly. The two men came to despise each other, and they barely talked after the first few weeks. “I finally decided to do my own thing and basically went ahead and did most of the original work myself,” Liebeler said. According to Specter, the differences in personality between Jenner and Liebeler could not have been more stark. While Liebeler was a modern-day Falstaff, “Bert Jenner was known principally by his dry attitude,” Specter said, remembering staff meals at which Jenner would insist that his food have no seasoning. “He ate salad with no dressing.”

The team’s responsibilities were eventually divided up so that the two men did not have to cross paths. Liebeler focused on questions about Oswald’s possible motive, while Jenner looked for evidence of a domestic conspiracy involving Oswald’s contacts with people inside the United States after his return from Russia in 1962.

Back in Chicago, Jenner was a much-admired figure. He was one of the nation’s best-paid lawyers—he would be one of the first in the country to bill corporate clients $100 an hour—and clients did not quibble over the fees because of his success in the courtroom. He was also celebrated by civil liberties and civil rights groups for his commitment at the firm to offering free legal counsel to the poor and for championing pro bono appeals for death-row inmates. At the commission, he earned a reputation for hard work. Unlike other senior lawyers on the staff, Jenner spent most of his time in Washington until the investigation was over. Still, he baffled some of his new colleagues with his work habits and his obsession for detail. Alfred Goldberg recalled reading a draft report on Oswald written by Jenner that, at 120 pages, had almost twelve hundred footnotes, including one especially pointless footnote in which Jenner identified the exact geographical location of the Soviet city of Minsk, where Oswald had lived. Specter remembered a second “worthless” twenty-page report about Oswald that Jenner had written. “The word was that it was read and thrown in the waste basket.”

Jenner fit a mold that some of the young lawyers had encountered at their own firms. He was a high-paid litigator who knew how to win over a jury and impress a judge but who left the task of gathering evidence, and making sense of it, to junior associates. Certainly Jenner seemed to have no ability to organize his thoughts on paper. “Jenner was a pain in the ass,” Slawson remembered. “Everybody rolled their eyes.” Like other lawyers on the commission, Slawson wondered if Jenner suffered from a learning disability because, rather than read transcripts of witness interviews, “he had his secretary read them out to him,” hour after hour.

*

Liebeler and Jenner were both invited to call on the research services of John Hart Ely, the young lawyer who was about to go to work at the Supreme Court as one of Warren’s clerks. Ely took on several research projects for Liebeler and Jenner, including a survey of every home where Oswald had lived through his childhood and teenage years, beginning with the New Orleans orphanage where his mother placed him in 1942 at the age of three. It was notable, Ely thought, that Mrs. Oswald had dropped her son at the orphanage on the day after Christmas. If there was any doubt that Oswald was entitled to feelings of rootlessness, it was dispelled by Ely’s six-page memo, which listed seventeen different homes, in four different states, in places as far afield as Covington, Louisiana, and the Bronx, New York, in which Oswald had lived with his mother. Often, Oswald and his brothers would stay in a house, and a school, for only a few weeks before their mother would move them, often on a whim about where a better life might be found.

Ely was next asked to take on a detailed reconstruction of Oswald’s military career, which began on October 24, 1956, six days after Oswald’s seventeenth birthday, when he enlisted in the marines. Ely went through the records of Oswald’s training in boot camp, including his three-week instruction in the use of an M-1, the military’s standard rifle. When Oswald was finally tested on his weapons skills in December 1956, he ranked as a “sharpshooter,” the middle of the three rankings used in the Marine Corps. (The highest ranking was “expert” and the lowest passable ranking was “marksman.”)

Ely interviewed many of Oswald’s colleagues from the marines and got a consistent view of Oswald as withdrawn and antisocial—“loner” and “nonentity” were common descriptions. When drawn into conversations with other marines, Oswald readily acknowledged that he was a Marxist and hoped to visit the Soviet Union and perhaps live there. A fellow marine recalled that Oswald, who was studying the Russian language, “played records of Russian songs so loud that one could hear them outside the barracks.” Another said Oswald referred to other marines as “comrades” and that he used the Russian words for yes and no—“
da
” and “
nyet
”—in regular conversation. As a result, some of the marines began to refer to Oswald, to his face, as “Oswaldovitch.” One former marine recalled that Oswald had talked of wanting “to go to Cuba to train Castro’s troops.”

Ely heard differing recollections of Oswald’s life away from the barracks. There were conflicting reports about his drinking habits—some recalled Oswald getting drunk, while others recalled no drinking at all—and his attitude toward women. There were persistent rumors that Oswald was homosexual, mostly because he was so rarely seen in the company of women off base. Other sorts of rumors, involving firearms and violence, stuck to him. He was court-martialed after he injured himself with an unregistered .22-caliber pistol that he had purchased privately; the pistol fell out of his locker and discharged, wounding him above the left elbow. He was court-martialed again as a result of a fight with one of his sergeants. Ely also reported allegations, never substantiated, that Oswald was involved in the death of another marine, Private Martin Schrand, who was killed by a shot from his own weapon in January 1958, when both men were stationed in the Philippines.

Ely was surprised by how little attention the commission’s investigators—and the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies—were paying to Oswald’s career in the marines, and he recommended that several of Oswald’s marine colleagues be tracked down and questioned under oath about what they had witnessed during Oswald’s nearly three years in uniform. “In the Marine Corps, Oswald was doing a great deal of serious thinking about Marxism, the Soviet Union and Cuba,” Ely wrote.

*

Jenner took on the assignment of investigating the background of people in Dallas who had befriended Oswald and his family and who, it was initially suspected, might have been involved in the assassination. The commission had asked the FBI to conduct background investigations on three people in particular: Ruth Paine; her estranged husband, Michael; and George de Mohrenschildt, the fifty-two-year-old Russian-born geologist who was the closest thing that Lee Oswald had to a real friend in Dallas.

The Paines came under suspicion in part because of their liberal views on foreign affairs and civil rights, which isolated them from their neighbors in the conservative suburbs of Dallas. Ruth’s interest in the Soviet Union received particular scrutiny. A Quaker, she had been studying Russian since 1959 and had participated in a Quaker pen-pal program with Soviet citizens. She said her interest in learning Russian had brought her into contact with Marina Oswald; the two women were invited to a party attended by several Russian expatriates, which ultimately led to a friendship.

The Paines’ marriage had fallen apart in 1962, and Michael had moved out that fall. Early in 1963, Ruth invited Marina—then caring for her one-year-old daughter, June, and pregnant again—to move in. Newly unemployed, Lee was planning to leave Texas in April to find work in his hometown of New Orleans. So Ruth, who had two children of her own, proposed that Marina remain with her until Lee found a job and could afford to support the family in Louisiana. Ruth said she welcomed Marina’s presence as a chance to improve her Russian.

Marina followed her husband to New Orleans in May; Ruth Paine drove her there. But Oswald had trouble holding a job in Louisiana, just as he had in Texas, and the Oswalds returned to the Dallas area that fall. Rather than live with her husband as he looked for work, Marina moved back in with Ruth and remained there until the day of the assassination. During the week, Lee lived in a boardinghouse in Dallas, commuting on the weekends to the Paine home in nearby Irving.

After the assassination, the Paines drew attention to themselves by their strangely placid reaction to the chaos around them. To some investigators, that seemed to suggest that the Paines might have known of Oswald’s plans. A Dallas homicide detective, Guy Rose, told the commission he was startled when he arrived at the Paine home on the afternoon of the assassination, before Oswald’s arrest was announced, and Mrs. Paine came to the door and said calmly, “I’ve been expecting you to come out—come right on in.” Later, Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, and his brother Robert fed the suspicion of the Paines as somehow being involved in the president’s murder.

De Mohrenschildt had a background out of a Cold War thriller. Worldly and sophisticated, fluent or conversant in at least six languages, he was born in czarist Russia to an affluent family with ties to the nobility. His parents fled to Poland when the family faced persecution as the Communists came to power in Moscow. He entered the United States in 1938 despite suspicions, noted in State Department files, that he might be a spy for Nazi Germany. He denied any Nazi ties, and none was ever proved. He initially settled in New York and worked in several different jobs, including filmmaking; for a time, he was a polo instructor. He mingled easily in high society in Manhattan and spent summers on the beaches of Long Island. Jenner and other commission lawyers were startled to discover that de Mohrenschildt’s Long Island friends included the family of Jacqueline Bouvier, the future wife of President Kennedy. “We were very close,” de Mohrenschildt said of the Bouviers. “We saw each other every day. I met Jackie then, when she was a little girl.” The future First Lady was “a very strong-willed child, very intelligent and very attractive.”