A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (51 page)

The commission received so many letters denouncing Redlich that Mel Eisenberg, his deputy, was asked to write a form letter that could be sent out in response, defending his colleague. “The commission knows of no evidence which would cause us to doubt Professor Redlich’s integrity, loyalty and complete dedication to the work of this commission and the interests of the United States,” the letter said. A script was prepared so that the commission’s secretaries could read it out over the phone in answer to the many people who called in to attack Redlich.

The FBI’s background investigation of Redlich focused on his membership on the executive board of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. The FBI files also documented his opposition to the death penalty—seen by the bureau as evidence of potentially subversive views—and his work in organizing legal appeals for death row inmates held in New York State prisons. His work with a group of other law professors and students was credited with saving five men from the electric chair between 1960 and 1963.
Life
magazine quoted Redlich as saying that his ultimate goal was to see the death penalty abolished in New York State. Until then, “when I’ve saved a man from the chair, at least I’ve abolished capital punishment for him.”

The character witnesses interviewed by the FBI, including several of Redlich’s colleagues at New York University, as well as his neighbors in a university-owned apartment building in Greenwich Village, were glowing. They portrayed a man who could be prickly and had a sizable ego but who had an inspiring commitment to justice. Even the few people interviewed who disliked Redlich offered the sort of criticism that his admirers would have seen instead as evidence of his strength of character. The manager of his apartment building complained to an FBI agent about his campaign to desegregate public areas by allowing maids to use passenger elevators at the front of the building.

Outraged by the attacks on Redlich, many of the commission’s young lawyers protested to Rankin about what they saw as Ford’s “McCarthyism” and “red-baiting”—the terms they recalled having used to describe Ford’s actions. In 1964, McCarthyism was not a distant memory, and some of Redlich’s colleagues thought his career, even his physical safety, might be in jeopardy if he were dismissed, especially in such a public fashion. Redlich might find it impossible ever to get another job in government that required a security clearance.

Eisenberg, as close to Redlich as anyone on the staff, said he never saw fear on Redlich’s face—“he had a poker face.” Others, however, remembered the situation differently. “Redlich was scared,” David Slawson remembered. “And I was scared for him.”

Redlich’s wife, Evelyn, a Manhattan pediatrician, said that the attacks made for a “difficult period” for the family. The attacks were often tinged with anti-Semitism. She remembered how offended she was when, while visiting the family’s country home in Vermont, she overheard someone refer to her husband as “Earl Warren’s little Jew boy.” There was a moment of panic that summer when she heard a shot ring out near the Vermont home. For a moment, she feared, it had been fired by someone targeting her husband as a result of the attacks in Washington. “I was pretty upset, and the police came out,” she remembered. The police determined the shot had been fired by a local boy out hunting.

Rankin seemed undecided about how aggressively to defend Redlich. He had been responsible for hiring Redlich and giving him such a prominent role on the commission’s staff, and so Rankin accepted responsibility for the controversy. It bothered him, he said later, that Redlich had never warned him about his ties to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and other controversial groups. He thought Redlich should have told him.

*

After reading through the FBI report, Ford did not want to compromise. He wanted the thirty-eight-year-old law professor off the commission’s staff entirely. If Redlich refused to resign, Ford wanted him fired. He insisted that the commission hold a special meeting to discuss the issue, which Warren and Rankin scheduled for Tuesday, May 19. The situation was considered so grave that all seven commissioners showed up for the session.

Warren opened the meeting, then immediately turned it over to Rankin. The commission had gathered, Rankin said, to consider the results of the new, intensive FBI background checks on both Redlich and Joseph Ball. The reinvestigation of Ball had been prompted by complaints from right-wing activists in California who were still angry over his public criticism years earlier of the House Un-American Affairs Committee for its campaign to hunt down Communists among lawyers on the West Coast. Rankin reported that there was nothing in the FBI report to suggest Ball had any subversive ties, and the commissioners agreed that he should stay. “We need him very badly,” Rankin said.

The real debate, the commissioners knew, was about Redlich. Rankin opened the discussion by admitting that he felt some guilt over the controversy since “I am the one who hired Norman.” He reminded the commissioners of Redlich’s stellar legal credentials, first as a student at Yale Law School, where he finished first in his class in 1950, and now as a professor of constitutional tax law at NYU. “All I knew of him is good.” But Rankin’s choice of the verb in the past tense—“knew”—might have been deliberate. Rankin said that while “personally I feel there is no question of Mr. Redlich’s loyalty as an American citizen or his dedication to the commission,” his involvement in controversial groups had come as an unwelcome surprise. “I did know that he was very much interested in civil liberties and civil rights,” Rankin said. “I didn’t know he was a member of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.”

He warned the commissioners how difficult it would be to replace Redlich and how his departure would be a logistical disaster for the commission because Redlich was meant to be the principal writer and editor of the final report. “He has worked long hours, longer than anyone,” Rankin said. “I think he is more familiar with our work than anybody else.” Redlich had continued to read every investigative report that arrived in the commission’s offices—tens if not hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper—and his firing would mean the loss of all that knowledge. Rankin also urged the commissioners to consider how Redlich’s departure would damage morale. His colleagues were “very much disturbed about the attack on him.… They have worked intimately with him and are fully satisfied of his compete loyalty.”

It was then Ford’s turn, and he began by praising the man he wanted fired: “I would like to state for the record that I have been tremendously impressed with Professor Redlich’s ability. I think he is a brilliant man. And in the work I have seen in the commission, I think he has contributed significantly to what we have done. He has been very diligent.”

Ford insisted that he wanted to be fair to Redlich and not overstate the case against him: “As I read the report of the FBI, there is not a scintilla of evidence that he is a member of the Communist Party or has been a member of the Communist Party.” But Redlich, he said, was still tied to many controversial, potentially subversive left-wing groups. “I think it is regrettable that somebody as intelligent as he, and as nice a person as he, appears to get involved in some of these causes.” He reminded the others that he had attempted months earlier to head off just the sort of awkward situation the commission now faced—how he warned against hiring any staff member associated with “the radical right or the radical left.” And yet Redlich was hired anyway. “I think the facts are clear that we shouldn’t continue his employment,” Ford said, calling for a formal vote to dismiss him. “I would move that under the current circumstances, that the employment of Norman Redlich be terminated as of June 1.”

As the conversation moved around the table, Ford had reason to believe that he would win the vote. The three other lawmakers on the panel—Russell, Cooper, and Boggs—and Allen Dulles spoke up to suggest they agreed with Ford. Russell said the FBI files depicted Redlich as a “born crusader—and I think he is going to be controversial as long as he lives.” He continued: “I am not saying anything against his character or patriotism … but he has been tied up with a lot of fellow-traveling groups. For my part, I don’t want to take the responsibility of employing him.” Boggs said he was hearing criticism of Redlich from Democrats and Republicans alike. “This has been a matter of concern to those of us who serve in the Congress,” he said. “And it is not something that can be brushed aside. It has to be answered.”

It was left to Warren, then, to rescue Redlich. Warren had a well-earned reputation—first in California politics, then on the Supreme Court—for forcing onetime opponents to his side, and he was about to demonstrate to the commissioners how he went about it. Years later, Rankin would still be marveling at his performance at the meeting.

Warren’s disdain for Ford was well known to the other commissioners and to much of the staff. And so the chief justice began his defense of Redlich by feeding Ford’s own words back to him. “I have observed Professor Redlich here, and I have the same opinion of him that Congressman Ford has expressed,” Warren said. “I think he is an able man. And I have come to believe that he is a man dedicated to the work of this commission, also. I know the staff, every member of it, feels the same way about him, and they feel that a great injustice has been done by reason of this attack that has been made upon him in the Congress by a very few members.” Warren did not need to remind the other commissioners that Ford was among those “very few.”

If the commission gave in to pressure to fire Redlich, “it would be branding him as a disloyal individual—and that is a hurt that can never be remedied as long as a man lives,” Warren continued. “It affects his wife, it affects his children.… I am told that one of the commentators, in reporting on what went on over in Congress, even gave his home address in New York, and I am just sure for the sole purpose of harassing his wife and his children. And I am told that they have been harassed by this thing, and they will be harassed, just as long as the injustice remains.”

Warren then boxed in Ford. The chief justice declared that if Ford and the others really wanted to force out Redlich, the commission would hold a tribunal in which Redlich could defend himself. “The least we could do would be to give him a trial, where he can defend himself, and where he can show that he is a good American citizen and is not disloyal,” Warren said. “That is the American way of doing things.”

At first, only one commissioner stood with Warren—John McCloy. Characteristically, McCloy’s argument was less passionate than practical. Redlich, he said, was “a man who is definitely somewhat addicted to causes,” but he was no security risk. “I think if I had known about this at the beginning, I would have raised my eyebrows,” McCloy admitted. “But there is no use crying over spilled milk.” If the commission fired Redlich, it would be perceived as giving in to pressure from right-wing critics, which would then open the investigation to attacks from the left. “I don’t see how it is going to help us one single bit to remove him,” McCloy said. “This is a good man, he has an honest approach, even though he leans in this direction.”

Then Rankin spoke up with a pair of additional warnings for the commissioners—both of them seemingly ominous. With Redlich gone, he said, the commissioners would face the prospect of having to write the report themselves, or finding someone as hardworking to do it as the man they had just fired. “I did not conceive that you wanted the task of trying to make the draft yourself,” Rankin told the commissioners, as if that would be the only option left to them. The commissioners, he said, also needed to be reminded that if they dismissed Redlich as a security risk, they would effectively be admitting that they had allowed a possible subversive to spend months rifling through some of the government’s most classified national-security files. Those allegations would be “the worst thing that could happen to this commission.”

Russell was the first to back down. “We are in a predicament either way,” he said.

And then a humbled Ford—not eager to take the job of chief prosecutor at the “trial” that Warren was now proposing for Redlich—withdrew his motion entirely. “I would not have employed anybody that was affiliated with any organization or any cause of one extreme or the other,” he said. “But I don’t want to belabor the question. I think I have rather extensively, on the record, expressed my view.”

Warren hurriedly ended the meeting. Redlich’s job was safe, and he would be at work within days drafting the commission’s final report.

Word of the commission’s decision was met with delight—and relief—among Redlich’s colleagues. It quieted some of the criticism that was becoming common on the staff about the chief justice. Warren had redeemed himself; certainly it renewed some of the young lawyers’ faith in the chief justice as a champion of fair play and decency.

Redlich’s gratitude was evident in the way he now dealt with his job. Before then, he had usually been among the lawyers who pushed back against the commission’s demands that they speed up their work and begin writing the final report. After his job was saved, however, some of Redlich’s colleagues found him suddenly eager to do whatever the chief justice wanted—to meet Warren’s demands for the commission to issue a conclusive final report within weeks. “Redlich’s tone changed,” Burt Griffin said. “It made a big difference. My sense was that once his job was safe, Redlich stopped resisting the pressure to get the job done more quickly than the rest of us” believed was possible. “Warren had saved his skin, and he knew it.”

37

THE HOME OF JAMES HOSTY

DALLAS, TEXAS

THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 1964

The phone rang at about ten thirty p.m. in the Dallas home of FBI Special Agent James Hosty. It was Thursday, April 23, and the late-night caller was Hugh Aynesworth of the
Dallas Morning News
. The reporter had unwelcome news.

“We’re running a story tomorrow,” Aynesworth said, “and I wanted to see if you wanted to make a comment.”