A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (53 page)

Rankin led the questioning, and Hoover provided, as promised, a flat denial that the FBI had ever had any sort of relationship with Oswald. “I can most emphatically say that at no time was he ever an employee of the bureau in any capacity, either as an agent or as a special employee, or as an informant.” As for the possibility of a conspiracy: “I have been unable to find any scintilla of evidence showing any foreign conspiracy or any domestic conspiracy that culminated in the assassination of President Kennedy.” Hoover testified that he believed that Oswald killed President Kennedy and that he did it alone. It was true that the FBI had Oswald under surveillance at the time of the assassination, Hoover said, but the bureau had no indication that he was violent. “There was nothing up to the time of the assassination that gave any indication that this man was a dangerous character who might do harm to the president.” The
National Enquirer
article, he said, was an “absolute lie.”

That same day, immediately after Hoover’s testimony, Director of Central Intelligence John McCone and his deputy, Richard Helms, walked into the witness room to give their testimony. Like Hoover, they insisted under oath that they had no evidence that Oswald had ever been any sort of government agent or that he had been part of any conspiracy to kill the president. They said that Oswald’s trip to Mexico had been thoroughly investigated by the CIA and that the investigation had turned up nothing to indicate that Oswald had accomplices there or anywhere else.

*

In Dallas, Hugh Aynesworth had another big scoop in June. From sources he did not identify, he had obtained a copy of the “Historic Diary,” Oswald’s handwritten account of his aborted defection.

Marina Oswald said that much of the melodramatic “Diary,” which was so full of misspellings and grammatical errors that it suggested to the commission’s staff that Oswald was dyslexic, was actually written after they left the Soviet Union. It depicted Oswald’s disenchantment and eventual despair with life in Russia; he described his suicide attempt in the Moscow hotel room, as well as his failed effort to court another Russian woman, Ella German, before settling for Marina. “I married Marina to hurt Ella,” he wrote.

Two weeks after Aynesworth’s scoop in the
Morning News
, the entire diary was published by
Life
magazine. David Slawson, who was responsible for analyzing the journal for the commission, said he was horrified by the leaks. He was convinced they would endanger the lives of several Russians named in the diary who had assisted Oswald in ways that the Soviet government might consider treasonous. Slawson worried, in particular, about a Russian woman, a government tour guide, who met Oswald shortly after his arrival in Moscow and who may have tried to warn him of the bleak future he faced in Russia. Official tour guides “are normally under the control of the KGB,” Slawson knew. Her warning came in the form of a gift to Oswald—a copy of the Dostoyevsky novel
The Idiot
. (Oswald referred to it in his diary as “IDEOT by Dostoevski.”) The book, Slawson felt, was a “disguised warning that he was a fool and ought to turn back.” The guide, he feared, may have committed “a serious offense, similar to an FBI agent here secretly warning a Russian defector to go back to Russia.” Slawson also worried about the family of Alexander Ziger, who had befriended Oswald in Minsk; Ziger, too, had warned Oswald to return to the United States. “We have been informed that the Zigers for many years have been trying to escape from Russia” and that “they are probably more than usually susceptible to persecution” because they were Jews, Slawson wrote.

He had originally planned to cite only edited excerpts of the diary in the commission’s final report, to prevent the names of Oswald’s Russian contacts from being revealed. After the leaks, however, he felt the commission needed to “print the entire diary without any deletions whatsoever,” if it printed any of it. If the commission published only excerpts, it would draw attention to the portions of the diary that had not been published; it would be easy enough for the KGB to cross-check the commission’s report against what had appeared in the Dallas paper and
Life
to see what was missing.

The Dallas police and the FBI tried to determine who had leaked the diary. Marina Oswald was an obvious suspect, given her eagerness to sell other information, but she denied it.
Life
insisted that she was not its source, although the magazine reported that it had printed the diary “with her full permission” and had changed some names at her request “to prevent reprisals against Oswald’s acquaintances.”

Later that summer, a Dallas police detective, H. M. Hart, reported to his superiors that he identified a suspect in the leaks: Congressman Gerald Ford. In a July 8 memo, Hart wrote that a “confidential informant” had reported that Ford, who had access to the diary through the commission’s files, sold a copy to the
Morning News
and that he had also offered it to both
Life
and
Newsweek
. Executives of the news organizations then paid $16,000 to Marina Oswald “for the world copyright of the diary,” Hart wrote. Ford would insist that he had nothing to do with the leaks, and FBI investigators would later say that they determined that the source of the leaks was a supervisor in the Dallas police department. Still, Ford was so alarmed by the rumors that he requested that the FBI take a formal statement from him denying that he had sold information to news organizations from out of the commission’s files. The statement was drawn up by FBI assistant director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, Ford’s long-standing contact at the bureau, during a meeting with Ford in his congressional office. Ford “desired to unequivocally state, and to furnish a signed statement if necessary, that he did not leak the information in question,” DeLoach reported.

The truth, told years later, was that Ford had nothing to do with the leak. Hugh Aynesworth, the Dallas reporter, would eventually acknowledge that he had sold the diary to
Life
that summer, for $2,500. The sale was approved by his editor at the
Morning News
, with an understanding that the money would be paid to the reporter’s wife, allowing Aynesworth to argue that—technically, at least—he had not taken money from
Life,
which might have been a violation of the newspaper’s internal rules for its employees. Aynesworth said that
Life
had promised him that the
Morning News
would be credited in the magazine with the scoop, a promise that the magazine did not keep. Although he would never confirm or deny reports that he had obtained the diary from Marina Oswald, Aynesworth acknowledged that he arranged to have
Life
pay her a fee of $20,000 since “if anybody actually owned the diary, I believed it was probably Marina.”
*

38

THE TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY

DALLAS, TEXAS

SUNDAY, MAY 24, 1964

Each week brought some new, exasperating decision by the chief justice, or so it seemed to Arlen Specter. Throughout the spring, Specter and others on the staff pushed to conduct on-site tests in Dallas, including a full reconstruction of the scene in Dealey Plaza. The staff lawyers proposed to capture the scene just as Oswald would have seen it out the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald’s rifle would be taken back to the building, and a camera would be attached to the top of it, allowing a photographer to capture the images as a limousine resembling Kennedy’s was driven slowly past. Men of a similar size to Kennedy and Connally would be placed in the limousine, lined up as in the Zapruder film. It would be a valuable way of testing the theory that a single bullet fired from the sixth floor could have passed through the bodies of both victims.

To Specter’s astonishment, though, Warren did not want any on-site tests at all; he did not feel they were necessary. “Warren was dead-set against it,” Specter said. “He thought staff was making too big a deal of it.” He recalled Warren saying, “We know what’s happened. We’ve got the FBI report.” Through Rankin, the staff pressed Warren to reconsider. And possibly sensing a rebellion led by Specter, the chief justice yielded.

The reconstruction, which was conducted with the help of the FBI, was set for the early morning of Sunday, May 24. Sunday was chosen in the hope of avoiding traffic disruptions downtown. Warren did not plan to be there himself; he would hold off going to Dallas until June, when he planned to take testimony from Jack Ruby.

The reconstruction went well, and Specter said he was even more confident about the single-bullet theory as a result. The FBI had done what the commission had requested. The camera attached to Oswald’s rifle offered the images that Specter had hoped for, including a clear picture of how a single bullet fired from the sixth floor would have passed through Kennedy’s neck before hitting Connally. Zapruder’s camera, and two other home-movie cameras that had captured the scenes of the assassination in Dealey Plaza, were also brought to Dallas for the reconstruction, and the FBI was able to replicate the images from those cameras, as well.

*

Specter got other welcome news. New ballistics tests supported the single-bullet theory; they showed that the metal fragments in Connally’s wrist were so tiny that they could have come from the same bullet that passed through the president’s neck. The Parkland bullet would have weighed 160 or 161 grains before firing; it now weighed 158.6 grains. X-rays of Connally’s wrist showed that the fragments left in his body probably weighed much less than the difference.

The trajectory of bullets fired from Oswald’s rifle, and the damage they could do to flesh, were tested independently by both the FBI and the military. The army’s Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, a high-security Defense Department research center outside Washington, used Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle for a series of tests beginning in April. Army scientists were asked if they could confirm that the rifle could have produced the wounds suffered by Kennedy and Connally. The test results, described in an army report, made for grim reading. In trying to replicate the effect of bullets when they struck the two bodies, the scientists fired the rifle into a series of different targets, including gelatin-filled human skulls and the arms of human cadavers. Thirteen heavily anesthetized goats were also used as targets to re-create the wounds to Connally’s chest; the goats were covered in layers of cloth resembling the suit jacket, shirt, and undershirt that the governor had been wearing. Animal lovers on the commission’s staff cringed at the army photos of the tests, including one of the live goats strapped in place, waiting to be shot.

The army tests also largely supported the single-bullet theory. “The results indicated that the wounds sustained by the President and Governor Connally, including the massive head wound of the president, could be produced” by Oswald’s rifle and the sort of bullets he used, the report stated. “The bullet that wounded the president in the neck had enough remaining velocity to account for all of the governor’s wounds.” In support of the single-bullet theory, the report raised an obvious question: Where did the bullet that hit Kennedy in the neck go—if not into Connally’s back? There was no other sign of it in the limousine. If the bullet had struck something else in the vehicle, the report said, “the damage would have been very evident and much greater than the slight damage that was found on the windshield.”

Like his colleagues and many of the doctors and scientists he interviewed, Specter said he had stopped being troubled by a disturbing phenomenon seen in the Zapruder film: the way the president’s head snapped backward when he was hit by the second shot, as if the bullet had come from the front, not the rear. Doctors and ballistics experts explained to the commission’s investigators that it was often difficult to guess how flesh reacted to a bullet strike; the wound could cause spasms of the nervous system that moved the body in unusual ways. The movements could seem to a layman to defy physics, they said. It was a grisly thought, Specter admitted, but he compared what he saw in the Zapruder film to what he had seen as a child back in Wichita, when his father killed a chicken for the family meal. After the bird’s head was cut off, its body would continue to move uncontrollably, Specter recalled. “Just instinctively, I analogized it to the chicken,” he said. “It’s just spasms, just nerves.”

*

David Belin could often seem like the commission’s cheerleader, but for all of the Iowan’s exuberance at the beginning of the investigation, he often found himself discouraged that spring. “As fascinating as the work was, there was almost an equal amount of frustration—frustration about secretarial help, frustration about not enough lawyers to do the investigation, frustration about the sham” of the commission’s decision to treat Marina Oswald so delicately, even after it was clear that she had lied under oath. There was “frustration about the whole course of our work.” He was angry with Rankin, who was supposed to be the go-between for the commissioners and the staff lawyers. “At no time was there a proper line of communication between the commission and its lawyers, nor for that matter was there a proper exchange of ideas between and among Rankin and the lawyers,” Belin said. He considered himself, along with Specter, a father of the single-bullet theory, yet the commissioners seemed to have no interest in discussing even that important subject.

Belin thought he had valuable suggestions for how the final report should be written. In a memo, he pressed for the central report to include long excerpts from the testimony of important witnesses, so readers could understand the full impact of what they had to say. That would require more than one volume, he believed. “I wanted to have a great amount of the testimony set out verbatim, which I felt would be the most effective way to show the truth.” But he could not get an audience with Rankin and others even to discuss the proposal. “In this, as in almost everything else, I felt that I ‘never had my day in court’—we were too busy with the trees to see the forest.”