A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (54 page)

Like everyone else, Belin was exhausted. He calculated that he worked seventy hours a week—more even than Redlich, who never seemed to leave the office, even to sleep. And Belin was alarmed to realize that he would soon need to leave Washington, even with so much work left to be done on his part of the investigation. His partners at his law firm in Des Moines were insisting that he return. He planned to leave before Memorial Day and then commute to Washington for short stays when his firm allowed it.

One night Belin reflected on all of these frustrations in a conversation with Specter. The commission’s report would not be good enough, Belin declared. “I expressed my disappointment that what could have been a monumental piece of investigation with an extremely talented group of lawyers and a potential A-plus job was instead turning into a mediocre Class B piece of work.” The levelheaded Specter urged his friend to keep in mind that the investigation, whatever its failings, seemed to be establishing the facts about the assassination. “The most important thing is that we found the truth,” he told Belin.

Belin smarted that so many of his other ideas were ignored. He had continued to argue that Marina Oswald, Jack Ruby, and other key witnesses should be questioned using a polygraph. He wrote several memos on the subject to Rankin. If Marina Oswald found herself strapped to a lie detector, he wrote, she might reveal secrets about her life with Oswald in Russia—a subject on which the commission otherwise had almost no way of testing her credibility. “If she would refuse our request, it might indicate she had something to hide.” He felt almost as strongly about the need to polygraph Ruby, but that was rejected too, with “most of the staff lined up against me.” The chief justice sided with the staff against Belin. Warren described polygraphs as “instruments of Big Brother.”

*

Belin thought it was just one more bizarre coincidence in an investigation full of them—he was a friend of Jack Ruby’s rabbi. He had met the handsome, dynamic young rabbi, Hillel Silverman, of Congregation Shearith Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Dallas, in the summer of 1963 during a religious study mission that both men had taken to Israel.

So on one of his first visits to Dallas, Belin went to see his friend Rabbi Silverman, who had continued to visit Ruby regularly in jail. Belin told Silverman he recognized that much of what was said between a rabbi and a congregant was privileged, “but I wondered if he had any question about the existence of a conspiracy.” Did Silverman believe Ruby when he insisted he acted alone?

“Jack Ruby is absolutely innocent of any conspiracy,” Silverman replied. “Without a doubt.” Ruby had assured the rabbi that he had acted alone, and Silverman was certain he was telling the truth. Ruby told Silverman that if he had been acting on someone’s orders, he would have gunned down Oswald when he first encountered him on Friday night, at the police news conference. “Had I intended to kill him, I could have pulled my trigger on the spot, because the gun was in my pocket,” Ruby told Silverman. According to the rabbi, Ruby always offered the same explanation for why he killed Oswald: “to save Mrs. Kennedy the ordeal of having to come back for the trial.”

Given Silverman’s conviction that Ruby had acted alone, Belin had an important favor to ask, and he needed the rabbi to keep it a secret. “I told him that even though he was convinced that Ruby was not involved in an assassination conspiracy, the world would never be convinced unless Ruby took a polygraph examination,” Belin recalled. “I also told him that the Warren Commission would never ask Ruby to submit to one, but that Ruby himself could request one.” The polygraph might complicate Ruby’s appeal of his death sentence, but it was hard to see how his predicament could be much worse.

Would Silverman try to convince Ruby to request a polygraph? Belin asked. Ruby was scheduled to be questioned by Warren sometime in June. He could make the request directly to the chief justice.

The rabbi agreed to try.

39

THE OFFICES OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

WASHINGTON, DC

JUNE 1964

Robert Kennedy did not want to testify before the commission. It was a message relayed to the chief justice in early June by Howard Willens, in his seemingly awkward dual role as a senior member of the commission’s staff and as the Justice Department’s representative to the investigation.

Kennedy did not explain—at least not on paper—why he felt so strongly that he should not be required to testify. Warren decided not to press the issue; he seemed willing to accept that it would just be too painful for Kennedy to be questioned by anyone about his brother’s murder. Not surprisingly, the chief justice did not bring the commission’s young lawyers into the decision. Had they been asked, several said later, they would have pressed for the attorney general’s testimony, especially about whether he suspected a conspiracy. Robert Kennedy knew who his brother’s enemies were. He had been, almost without question, the president’s closest adviser during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and in dealing with other threats from the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the nation’s other foreign adversaries, as well as in battling domestic foes like the Mafia and corrupt union leaders. If there had been a conspiracy, he might at least have had a strong guess about who was behind it, and why. David Slawson knew how important Kennedy’s testimony might be, especially with respect to Cuba. It was well known in foreign policy circles in Washington that after the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy had put his brother in charge of the government’s secret war against Castro. “He was the president’s confidant on Cuba,” Slawson said.

Instead of sworn testimony, Kennedy was willing to offer a brief written statement to the commission. After consulting with Kennedy and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Kaztenbach, Willens sent a memo to Rankin that attached drafts of two letters. The first would be signed by Warren and sent to Kennedy, asking if the attorney general had any information that he wished to share with the commission. The second letter was for Kennedy’s signature and was a response to the chief justice; the attorney general would confirm that he had no information to share. “The Attorney General would prefer to handle his obligations to the commission in this way rather than appear as a witness,” Willens wrote.

In the memo, Willens said that Kennedy had made clear to him that he had not been closely following the commission’s investigation, which helped explain why he had so little to add. “The Attorney General informed me that he has not received any reports from the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding the investigation of the assassination, and that his principal sources of information have been the Chief Justice, the Deputy Attorney General and myself.”

Warren’s letter, which was dated June 11, read in full:

Dear General:

Throughout the course of the investigation conducted by this Commission, the Department of Justice has been most helpful in forwarding information to this Commission’s inquiry.

The Commission is now in the process of completing the investigation. Prior to the publication of its report, the Commission would like to be advised whether you are aware of any additional information relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy which has not been sent to the Commission. In view of the widely circulated allegations on this subject, the Commission would like to be informed in particular whether you have any information suggesting that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy. Needless to say, if you have any suggestions to make regarding the investigation of these allegations or any other phase of the Commission’s work, we stand ready to act upon them.

On behalf of the Commission, I wish to thank you and your representatives for the assistance you have provided to the Commission.

Given Warren’s decision not to press him to testify, the commission expected a grateful Kennedy to sign his response letter quickly and send it back. Instead, to the surprise of Warren and the staff, it would take him months to reply.

*

Other than the attorney general, perhaps no one had more influence with President Kennedy than special assistant Kenneth O’Donnell, the wiry forty-year-old Massachusetts lawyer who was the heart of the circle of White House aides known as the “Irish Mafia.” O’Donnell, who had been part of the planning for the Texas trip, had been in the motorcade in Dallas. He had been in a Secret Service car directly behind the president’s limousine.

He told the commission he did not want to testify, either. He had his secretary at the White House inform Arlen Specter that another close Kennedy aide, Dave Powers, who had been seated next to O’Donnell in the motorcade, could be called instead, since Powers would offer identical testimony. Specter protested to Rankin, and O’Donnell was eventually convinced to testify, although he was not required to appear in the commission’s offices. Instead, Specter and Norman Redlich went to the White House on Monday, May 18.

O’Donnell’s account of the Dallas trip conformed to the testimony of others, although he had a remarkable story to tell about his final conversation with the president on the morning of the assassination. They had talked, he said, about how easy it would be for someone with a rifle to kill Kennedy. The setting for the conversation was the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, as the president was preparing to leave for Dallas. “The conversation took place in his room, with Mrs. Kennedy and myself, perhaps a half hour before he left the hotel,” O’Donnell said. “As I can recollect, he was commenting to his wife on the function of the Secret Service, and his interpretation of their role.”

Kennedy, he recalled, said that “if anybody really wanted to shoot the president of the United States, it was not a very difficult job—all one had to do was get into a high building with a telescopic rifle, and there was nothing anybody could do.”

Specter asked O’Donnell what Mrs. Kennedy had thought of her husband’s bleak appraisal. “I think the general tenor of the conversation was that she agreed that this was—in this democracy—this is inherent.”

In his testimony, O’Donnell let slip something that he quickly regretted telling the commission’s lawyers, and it would give Specter a taste of how tightly the Kennedy family intended to control the narrative of the assassination. Specter asked O’Donnell to describe the trip back to Washington aboard Air Force One, and his conversations with Mrs. Kennedy in the plane. Characteristically, Specter focused on the smallest details.

“What did you talk about?” he asked.

“We reminisced,” O’Donnell said.

“Did she have anything to eat on the trip back?”

“No, I think we both had a drink,” O’Donnell said. “I tried to get her to take a good strong drink.” She accepted the drink—a Scotch and water, it was later reported—but preferred to talk, he said.

After completing the interview, Specter returned to the commission’s offices and was confronted by an agitated Rankin.

“Why did you ask O’Donnell about Mrs. Kennedy having a drink on the plane?”

“Lee, I didn’t do that,” Specter replied, explaining that O’Donnell had volunteered the information.

“Well, they’ve called us and they’re madder than hell about it,” Rankin said. “They’re complaining.”

Specter guessed that O’Donnell had panicked at the thought that the public might learn that the First Lady had sipped alcohol to settle her nerves on the day of her husband’s murder, as if that had been a sign of weakness. “I think what happened to O’Donnell was that, after he blurted out that she had a drink, he got very goddamned nervous, and he wanted to shift the blame to me,” Specter said later.

“It never happened,” Specter told Rankin. “Check the transcript.” The transcript proved that Specter was right.

*

By late spring, it appeared to the staff that Warren intended to finish the commission’s investigation without taking testimony from Jacqueline Kennedy. He had never hidden his discomfort at the prospect of formally questioning her about the circumstances of her husband’s death, and he had put off the subject for months, even after it was raised so insistently by Specter. Warren was as protective of the former First Lady “as he would have been of one of his own daughters,” Specter said later. When he pressed Rankin about scheduling her testimony, he always got the same answer: “No decision had been reached.”

Specter was told, but was never able to confirm conclusively, that Warren gave in and finally agreed to interview Mrs. Kennedy only at the insistence of fellow commissioner John McCloy. In conversations behind closed doors, McCloy was said to have become furious on the issue, telling Warren that the commission had no choice but to interview her. She had been in the motorcade; she was the closest eyewitness to her husband’s murder. And besides, “she’s talking about the assassination at all the cocktail parties in Washington,” McCloy told Warren. Certainly it was known to both men that she was discussing the assassination with William Manchester for his book. Specter said he was told that during the argument, McCloy pointedly kept referring to Warren as “Mr. Chairman” instead of “Mr. Chief Justice,” which McCloy would have known was a “cutting insult” to Warren, normally a stickler about being referred to by his title on the court.

If there was going to be an interview with Jacqueline Kennedy, however, Warren was going to conduct it himself, with none of the commission’s young staff lawyers present. Specter, who had taken testimony from the other passengers in the Dallas motorcade, would be told nothing about the interview until after it occurred. Warren also decided that he would take Mrs. Kennedy’s testimony at her home. He was not going to insist that she travel halfway across the capital to see him.

*

Shortly after four p.m. on Friday, June 5, Chief Justice Warren’s official town car pulled up in front of 3017 N Street, the Colonial-era brick mansion that Mrs. Kennedy had purchased a few weeks after the assassination. Shaded by magnolia trees, the seventeen-room home was in the choicest part of Georgetown, just down the street from a much smaller town house where she and then senator Kennedy had enjoyed their first years of marriage.