A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (50 page)

Specter made harsh judgments, as well, about some of the other staff lawyers, especially those who had mostly disappeared from Washington. He did not know David Slawson well, but he knew that Coleman, Slawson’s partner, was almost never there. “I don’t know that Bill ever did anything.”
*
To Specter’s mind, almost all of the important detective work was being done by just four lawyers: “When it really came down to it, what you really had was Belin, Ball, Redlich and me.” He also admired the work being done by Howard Willens, Rankin’s deputy, despite the continuing whispers on the staff that Willens was there mostly to feed information back to Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department.

*

None of Warren’s decisions was worse, Specter thought, than his continuing refusal to allow the staff to review Kennedy’s autopsy photos. In Specter’s view, the crude artist’s drawings from Bethesda Hospital that supposedly depicted the president’s wounds were worthless. “They’re inexact, they’re misleading.” Throughout the spring, Specter had continued to plead with Rankin to get Warren to reconsider the decision. “I raised hell with Rankin.” One of Specter’s colleagues recalled seeing him in tears as he left a meeting to discuss the subject. Specter insisted he did not cry, but “I recall long, bitter arguments.”

David Belin remembered going to dinner with Specter one night at the restaurant The Monocle and suggesting that they both quit in protest over the photos. It would be an extraordinary step, they knew, possibly creating a scandal for the chief justice and the commission. Belin said he was as angry as Specter on the subject; he was offended that the chief justice seemed more determined to protect the Kennedy family’s privacy than to allow the commission’s staff to have access to vital medical evidence. The Kennedys, Belin said, were being treated as if “they were some sort of an elite, similar to the nobility of an eighteenth-century European monarchy.”

Years later, Specter did not dispute Belin’s memory of the dinner, although he insisted that he never thought of resigning. “I wasn’t going to quit over that,” he said. What he did instead was to make a formal protest—on paper, in a memo to Rankin—that would establish for the commission’s permanent record how angry he felt. “It wasn’t a cover-your-ass memo,” Specter insisted later. It was, he said, a final plea for the evidence he needed to do his job in determining exactly how the president of the United States had been murdered. “It was a memo written to try to persuade Rankin to get the goddamned photos and x-rays.”

The memo, dated April 30, began: “In my opinion, it is indispensable that we obtain the photographs and x-rays of President Kennedy’s autopsy.” He then listed the reasons why, noting that the commission took a terrible risk if it relied on the navy sketch artist’s depiction of the president’s wounds, instead of on the actual photos and X-rays; there was already discussion on the staff of reprinting the sketches in the commission’s final report. Specter reminded Rankin that the navy artist had never seen the photos or X-rays himself; the accuracy of the sketches depended on the “hazy recollections” of the Bethesda pathologists who were also being denied access to the photos—the photos they had ordered taken. Specter warned, presciently, that “someday, someone may compare the films with the artist’s drawings and find a significant error which might substantially affect the essential testimony and the Commission’s conclusions.”

In the memo, Specter proposed a solution. He recommended that the commission ask Robert Kennedy to grant access to the autopsy photos and X-rays in exchange for a commitment that the evidence would “be viewed only by the absolute minimum number of people from the Commission for the sole purpose of corroborating (or correcting) the artist’s drawings, with the film not to become a part of the Commission’s records.”

Specter’s memo was timed to an executive session of the commission scheduled for that same day. It would be the panel’s first meeting in more than a month. Rankin told Specter that he could make no promises but that he had been swayed by the young lawyer’s arguments, and he agreed to make an appeal to the commission on his behalf. Rankin knew that the argument for reviewing the autopsy photos and X-rays had become much more compelling in the wake of Connally’s testimony, which had been such a direct challenge to the single-bullet theory. If Connally continued to insist that he had been hit by a separate bullet, it might come down to the autopsy photos and X-rays to prove that the otherwise credible Texas governor was wrong.

At the commission meeting, Rankin did not mention Specter’s name—that would have antagonized Warren, Specter assumed—and instead framed the request for the autopsy photos and X-rays as an appeal from the entire staff: “The staff feels that we should have some member of the commission examine these pictures.” He acknowledged what the commissioners apparently already knew—that the photos and X-rays were in the custody of Robert Kennedy and that the attorney general did not want to release them to anyone. Rankin said he had initially shared Kennedy’s concern. “I thought we could avoid having those pictures … being a part of our record, because the family has a strong feeling about them,” Rankin said. “They don’t want the president to be remembered in connection with these pictures. That is their basic thought.”

But Rankin said he had changed his mind, especially given the confusion about the ballistics evidence. “A doctor and some member of the commission should examine them sufficiently so that they could report to the commission that there is nothing inconsistent with the other findings,” he said, adding that the attorney general might now be agreeable to a compromise. “I think that he would recognize the need and permit that limited examination.”

Warren, however, remained unconvinced. He agreed to allow Rankin to approach Kennedy to ask about a limited review, but the chief justice wanted it understood that “we don’t want those in our record.… It would make it a morbid thing for all time to come.” And those were Warren’s last words to the commission on the subject of the autopsy photos and X-rays, at least according to the long-classified transcripts of the commission’s executive sessions. Within weeks, Warren had declared, once and for all, that the photos and X-rays were off-limits to the commission’s staff and that they would remain in the attorney general’s custody indefinitely. “They were just too horrifying,” he explained later. “I take full responsibility for it.”

*

The April 30 meeting represented a surrender on a different question, one that had dogged the commissioners from the start: Could they state with absolute certainty that Oswald had never worked as some sort of agent or informer for the FBI or the CIA? Both agencies had insisted, repeatedly, that they had no relationship, formal or informal, with the president’s assassin. But why, then, had the FBI apparently tried to cover up evidence of its contacts with Oswald in Dallas before the assassination? And why had the CIA held back, and then misstated, some of the evidence about its surveillance of him in Mexico?

The solution, Warren decided, was for the commission to say what it knew—that the investigation had found no evidence that Oswald had worked for either the FBI or the CIA—and then to place the men who ran the two agencies under oath to attest to it. J. Edgar Hoover and John McCone should be made to testify, under threat of a perjury charge, that Oswald had never been in their employ. Warren also wanted both men to state, under oath, that there had been no conspiracy to kill Kennedy: “I would like to take their testimony because of these statements—statements from the right and the left—that there
has
been a conspiracy,” the chief justice said. Hoover and McCone needed to say under oath that they knew of no evidence “that there has been a conspiracy with anybody—government, individual or otherwise.”

At the meeting, Warren said that the commission should also now consider taking testimony from Robert Kennedy, not so much as the head of the Justice Department, but as the brother of the slain president. He argued that Kennedy’s testimony would go a long way toward convincing the public about the truth of the commission’s findings; it would be hard to imagine that he would hide information about a conspiracy to assassinate his own brother. “If he was to testify he had no information,” Warren said, “I would think that with any reasonable person, it would have tremendous force.” Rankin agreed: “It is hardly believable that the brother of the president would stand by if there was some conspiracy in the United States to dispose of his brother.”

The commissioners continued to be deviled by the conspiracy theorists—and continued to monitor them secretly with the FBI’s help. Beyond the surveillance of Mark Lane, they requested the FBI’s background files on Thomas Buchanan, the Yale-educated American writer for the French magazine
L’Express
, who was continuing to press his theory that ultraconservative businessmen in Texas were behind the assassination. The bureau’s files on Buchanan detailed how he had exiled himself to Europe after he was fired as a reporter by the
Washington Star
in 1948, when editors discovered his membership in the American Communist Party.

At their meeting in April, the commissioners passed around copies of an article published a week earlier by United Press International that focused on Buchanan. It began: “Millions of Europeans refuse to believe that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was not part of a larger conspiracy that has still not been exposed.” Buchanan had become a media phenomenon in Europe, and he was about to find a new audience in the United States. His book,
Who Killed Kennedy?
, was scheduled to be published in English in May. He was being treated as credible by reputable news organizations across Europe, including, in Britain, the BBC and the
Manchester Guardian
. The UPI article noted that Lane was traveling across Europe that spring, giving well-attended speeches to argue for Oswald’s innocence.

Warren told his fellow commissioners that he was so worried about the conspiracy theorists—Buchanan and Lane, in particular—that he wanted to open the commission’s files to a handful of reporters in advance of releasing the final report. He proposed that the commission quietly invite UPI and its news-agency rival, the Associated Press, to begin to review the investigation’s paperwork and speak with its staff. The agencies would then be asked to suggest avenues of inquiry that the commission might have missed—“anything that may be in their minds as to what should be investigated,” Warren said. It would be a way of proving that the commission had nothing to hide. McCloy thought it was “an important suggestion,” especially given how conspiracy theories had taken hold in Europe. “What with Mr. Lane’s visits over there, there is a deep-seated feeling that there is a deep conspiracy here.”

*

Thomas Kelley, the Secret Service inspector who served as his agency’s liaison to the commission, traveled to Dallas with Specter in May for some final on-the-ground investigation. During the trip, Kelley pulled Specter aside and said he wanted to ease what he knew were Specter’s concerns over not having seen the president’s autopsy photos and X-rays. Kelley said he had a photo of Kennedy’s corpse and that he would share it with Specter when they got back to their hotel. “When Kelley and I were alone in a hotel room,” Specter recalled, “he showed me a small picture of the back of a man’s body, with a bullet hole in the base of the neck, just where the autopsy surgeons said Kennedy had been shot.”

He said he assumed that Kelley had been dispatched by Warren or someone else on the commission to show him the picture—possibly to calm him down before his protests about the medical evidence became public. “They knew they were having trouble with me,” Specter remembered. “This was an era before whistleblowers,” but still the commission wanted to placate him because of what it feared he might do. The photo resolved nothing in Specter’s mind. He had no way of knowing that this was even the president’s body. “It was a bunch of horseshit,” he said later. “I know what evidence is.”
*

Back in Washington, Alfred Goldberg was shown what he believed were other unauthenticated Secret Service photos of Kennedy’s body on the autopsy table. As he looked through them, he said, he understood more clearly than before why Warren had been determined to block the staff from seeing them. “I just remember seeing those photos and being appalled by them.”

36

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

TUESDAY, MAY 19, 1964

Norman Redlich was frightened, several of his colleagues could see. In April, Gerald Ford stepped up his behind-the-scenes attacks, hoping to convince the other commissioners that Redlich needed to be forced off the staff before his presence did lasting damage. Ford had new ammunition for his fight: the full FBI background report on Redlich had been completed in March, and it documented his years of involvement in civil liberties and civil rights groups that the FBI labeled as subversive.

Other, very public attacks were being made on Redlich by some of Ford’s Republican colleagues in Congress, as well as by a group of powerful right-wing newspaper columnists and radio commentators. In a speech on the House floor, Representative Ed Gurney, a Florida Republican, called Redlich’s appointment to the commission “an incredible violation of U.S. security,” since he had been given access to top secret government documents. The fervid anti-Communist radio broadcaster and newspaper columnist Fulton Lewis Jr., once a close ally of Senator Joseph McCarthy, had taken up the campaign. Redlich was denounced in several newspaper editorials. “It is absolutely inconceivable that Chief Justice Earl Warren would hire, or permit to be hired, a key staff official with the left-wing and civil disobedience background of Norman Redlich,” the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
thundered. “Having a man on the commission who advocates defiance of United States anti-Communist policy is beyond belief.” In May, the
New York Times
ran a brief news story about the controversy under the headline, “Warren Panel Aide Held a Defender of Reds.”