A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (49 page)

He moved to Texas to try to make his fortune in the oil industry, first earning degrees in engineering and geology from the University of Texas. As an oilman, he then took on assignments in several countries, including Yugoslavia, France, Cuba, Haiti, Nigeria, and Ghana. He acknowledged that, while living in Texas at the start of World War II, he did some spy work—at the request of a French friend—on behalf of the French intelligence services. He was never an official employee of a French spy agency, he said, but “I collected facts on people involved in pro-German activity” and tried to outbid German firms for the purchase of Texas crude oil.

By 1962, he had settled in Dallas with his fourth wife, and it was there that he was introduced by other Russian expatriates to the Oswalds, who were then reduced to what de Mohrenschildt remembered as “dire poverty.” He was especially concerned for Marina—“a lost soul, living in the slums, not knowing one single word of English, with this rather unhealthy looking baby—horrible surroundings.” Over the next year, he estimated, he saw the Oswalds “10 or 12 times, maybe more.” He helped Marina escape from her husband for a time in the fall of 1962 after discovering that Lee had beaten her, leaving her with a black eye.

De Mohrenschildt recalled a visit to the Oswalds’ in the spring of 1963 during which Marina displayed a rifle that her husband had just bought. She mocked the purchase. “That crazy idiot is target-shooting all the time,” she said. De Mohrenschildt recalled asking Oswald why he bought the weapon. “I like target-shooting,” he replied. At the time, Texas newspapers were full of stories about the seemingly fruitless search by the police for a gunman who had attempted to kill retired army general Edwin Walker; the unidentified sniper, lurking outside Walker’s home in Dallas, had fired at him through a window, missing by inches. Marina would later acknowledge that she had known, within hours of the attack, that her husband was responsible.

During the visit, de Mohrenschildt said, he tried to make a joke about the Walker shooting. “Are you then the guy who took a pot shot at General Walker?” he remembered asking. “I knew that Oswald disliked General Walker, you see.”

Oswald did not answer, although a “peculiar” look came over his face. “He sort of shriveled, you see, when I asked this question.”

*

After months of careful review of the FBI files on the Paines and de Mohrenschildt, Jenner said he believed they had nothing to do with the assassination. In many ways, he came to see the Paines and de Mohrenschildt—their lives upended, dogged for years by a lingering suspicion about their ties to the assassination—as some of Oswald’s other victims. To be certain of their innocence, however, Jenner subjected all three to hours of questioning under oath, especially over evidence suggesting that they might have guessed what Oswald was about to do.

Jenner put it directly to Ruth Paine during her testimony in Washington: “Mrs. Paine, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

“I am not now and have never been a member of the Communist Party,” she said.

Jenner tried it a different way: “Do you now or have you ever had any leanings which we might call Communist Party leanings?”

“No,” she replied. “On the contrary.… I am offended by the portion of the Communist doctrine that thinks violence is necessary to achieve its aims.”

Her interest in the Russian language, she said, was the result of her faith. “God asked of me that I study language,” she explained. She chose Russian, she said, because it coincided with the efforts of the Quaker Church to organize exchange programs in the Soviet Union.

She invited Jenner and the commissioners to ask blunt questions to prove her truthfulness, even awkward questions about why her marriage had fallen apart.

“Members of the commission have voiced to me some interest in that,” Jenner admitted. “They are seeing to resolve in their mind who Ruth Paine is and, if I may use the vernacular, what makes her tick.… What was the cause of the separation between your husband and yourself, in your view?”

The answer, she said, was simple. Her husband was always kind and attentive, but he did not love her. Her tone was matter-of-fact. “We never quarreled, we never indeed have had any serious difference of opinion, except I wanted to live with him and he is not that interested in being with me.”

She acknowledged that, months before the assassination, she worried that Oswald was capable of violence—she knew he beat Marina—and that he might have a troubling connection to the Soviet embassy in Washington. She had found a copy of a letter he had written to the embassy, referring to FBI surveillance of his activities in Dallas.

So why had she permitted him into her home at all? And why, given what she knew, did she then help him get a job at the Texas School Book Depository? Jenner thought Paine had reasonable answers to both questions. She had not wanted Oswald in her home for the weekend visits. “I would have been happier had he never come out.” But she was eager to help Marina and excited at the chance to improve her Russian. She also welcomed the company that Marina offered. With her marriage over, “I was lonely.” She readily acknowledged that she helped get Oswald his job at the book depository and explained, in detail, how it happened. She had been at a “coffee klatch” with a group of women friends, including Marina; one of the women mentioned that her brother worked at the book warehouse and that a job might be open there. Marina pleaded with Paine to call the warehouse. The job was available, and Lee was hired in October. Paine insisted she had no idea the warehouse was on Dealey Plaza.

Jenner spent most of two full days taking testimony from de Mohrenschildt, who required several hours just to get through a summary of his globetrotting life story, beginning with his childhood in Russia. He seemed to understand why people might assume the worst about his friendship with Oswald, given de Mohrenschildt’s own unconventional, “bohemian” life. “All sorts of speculation have arisen from time to time,” he admitted to Jenner. “I am very outspoken.”

The more he answered Jenner’s questions, the more his story about his unlikely friendship with Oswald made some sense. De Mohrenschildt said he found Lee Oswald a “sympathetic fellow” who seemed to want to improve himself even though he was “a semi-educated hillbilly.” The Oswalds, he declared, “were very miserable, lost, penniless, mixed up.” He said he found it laughable to imagine that the Soviet Union or any other foreign power would recruit Oswald as a spy. “I never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important,” he said. “An unstable individual, mixed-up individual, uneducated individual, without background? What government would give him any confidential work?”

He said he continued to feel sorry for Oswald even after discovering he beat Marina. “I didn’t blame Lee for giving her a good whack on the eye.” Marina, he said, openly mocked her husband in front of the de Mohrenschildts for his failings as a husband, including his lack of interest in sex. De Mohrenschildt said he sensed that Oswald was “an asexual person.” Marina was “straightforward about it,” telling the de Mohrenschildts, with her husband listening, that “he sleeps with me just once a month, and I never get any satisfaction out of it.”

De Mohrenschildt said he and his wife were so uncomfortable with Marina’s open complaints about her sex life that they cut off their friendship with the Oswalds in mid-1963, just as de Mohrenschildt was about to move to Haiti for a business venture. “This is really the time that we decided just to drop them,” he said. “We both decided not to see them again because we both found it revolting, such a discussion of marital habits in front of relative strangers, as we were.”

Although he found it impossible to believe that Oswald was a spy, he did say he worried at times that Oswald was somehow up to no good. “He had been to Soviet Russia—he could be anything,” de Mohrenschildt said. He testified that he asked another Russian expatriate friend in Dallas, “Do you think it is safe for us to help Oswald?” The friend said he had been in contact with the FBI about Oswald and that the bureau had no concerns.

De Mohrenschildt said he believed he also mentioned Oswald’s name in 1962 to another friend, Walter Moore, who was known to be “a government man—either FBI or Central Intelligence,” and that Moore offered nothing to suggest Oswald was a risk. The commission later determined that Moore was, in fact, a CIA official based in Texas whose office was responsible for gathering information from Dallas-area residents who had recently visited or worked in Communist countries. The investigation found no evidence to show that Moore had ever been in contact with Oswald, although the commission’s disclosure of a friendship between Moore and de Mohrenschildt would feed conspiracy theories about the assassination for decades to come.

35

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

MAY 1964

At their late-night staff dinners, Specter and some of the other young lawyers began to mock the commissioners. They joked about “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” with Warren and the other commissioners in the role of the dwarfs. “Snow White was alternatively Marina or Jacqueline Kennedy,” Specter said. “Warren was Grumpy,” while Congressman Boggs of Louisiana was “Happy” because he sometimes arrived in the commission’s office after “having had several cocktails late in the afternoon.” Specter thought that Dulles qualified either as “Sleepy” or “Dopey,” given the former spymaster’s strange, sometimes barely coherent presence.

Slawson, the staff lawyer who worked with Dulles most closely, was increasingly convinced that Dulles, seventy-one years old, was demonstrating signs of senility, perhaps brought on by his humiliating public ouster from the CIA after the Bay of Pigs debacle. Dulles often dozed off at commission hearings, and his gout seemed to get no better over the months of the investigation. When Malcolm Perry, the emergency-room doctor from Parkland Hospital in Dallas, arrived in the commission’s offices to give testimony in March, he was pulled aside by Dulles, who asked if Perry had any suggestions for his painful feet. “Sorry, it’s not my field,” the startled Perry told him.

Over time, Specter came to agree with Slawson that Dulles may have forgotten much of what he knew about American intelligence operations directed against Castro and other foreign adversaries who might have wanted to see Kennedy dead. And it was possible, he thought, that Dulles never knew some of the agency’s most closely held secrets; his deputies could have kept the information from him, maybe even at his request, to allow him plausible deniability. When Dulles joined the commission, “everybody thought he was really smart,” Specter said. “He turned out to be a nit.”

Dulles did, unintentionally, bring lighthearted moments to some of the commission’s otherwise most somber hearings. Specter recalled having to struggle to avoid laughing when, during an examination of vials that contained two metal fragments removed from Kennedy’s body, Dulles stopped the proceedings with the startling announcement that actually the vial contained four fragments, not two. The FBI agent who attended the session “raced from one end of the table to the other to inspect the contents of the vials,” Specter recalled. “The agent took two of the fragments and crushed them between his fingers.”

“No, Mr. Dulles,” the agent said in exasperation. “These are two flakes of tobacco that fell out of your pipe.”

Specter was not the only one to snicker, he recalled, when Dulles became confused during the testimony of Dr. James Humes, the Bethesda pathologist. In discussing what became of Kennedy’s clothes in Dallas, Humes explained how the president’s tie had been cut off at Parkland Hospital to help him breathe. Following procedure, the fabric was cut to the left of the loop. “Dulles may have been distracted, or maybe he’d dozed off,” Specter said, because when Humes held up the two pieces of the obviously expensive blue-pattered Christian Dior tie, Dulles, who spoke in the manner of an English school don, saw the knot and blurted out: “By Jove, the fellow wore a ready-made tie.” Specter remembered that “we all found it funny that anyone, even for a moment,” could think that the dashing John Kennedy “would wear a ready-made.”

Dulles deserved credit for at least making the effort to attend the testimony of essential witnesses. That was not true for the majority of the commissioners. From what Specter could see, most of them remained ignorant of even the basic facts of the assassination: “I don’t think the commissioners ever knew much about the case.” Warren and the other commissioners never invited the junior lawyers into their executive sessions, and Specter said that in their few encounters with the staff, most of the commissioners “came and they sat there—they never asked any questions, made any suggestions. We ran the investigation ourselves.”

Few among the staff lawyers were more critical of Warren than Specter. He tried always to qualify his criticism, describing Warren as a great chief justice. “He had a deep sense of decency … the moral conscience of the nation.” But Specter felt that Warren lacked any similar intellectual depth. “Warren wasn’t much of a lawyer. He wasn’t brilliant. He wasn’t even really smart.” In running the commission, he said, Warren’s stubbornness and impatience—and, most alarmingly, his unshakable loyalty to the Kennedys—damaged the investigation. Specter believed Warren was taking shortcuts in the investigation, rushing it in ways that threatened to create new conspiracy theories. Since Warren was convinced early on that Oswald acted alone, “it was all cut-and-dry for him.” His’s attitude was “let’s get the goddamned thing over with,” Specter said. “Warren wanted to get everything done in a hurry.”

Specter felt that placed a grave burden on the staff, given Lee Rankin’s unwillingness to stand up to the chief justice. The young lawyers felt obligated to try to block or overturn some of Warren’s worst decisions—for the sake of the chief justice’s own reputation. “We really felt we were the guardians of Warren,” Specter said. “Warren was doing a lot of screwy stuff. We had to be sure he didn’t get into trouble. Is that bad to say? It happens to be the truth.”