A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (57 page)

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THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 1964

Secret Service director James Rowley had reason to fear for his job when he testified before the Warren Commission; certainly he had cause to fear that his ninety-nine-year-old agency might not survive the commission’s investigation. The Bronx-born, fifty-six-year-old Rowley was the first director of the Secret Service to have a president assassinated on his watch, and he would face the toughest questioning of any senior government official who came before the commission. Other law-enforcement agencies—the FBI, in particular—might have intentionally tried to hide information from the investigation. In the case of the Secret Service, however, the cover-up seemed indisputable. Warren had evidence of what he considered outrageous misconduct—the decision by several Secret Service agents in the president’s motorcade in Dallas to go out drinking the night before the assassination—and of how Rowley had tried to hide the details of the episode from the public. Some of the chief justice’s anger may have been stoked by his friendship with Drew Pearson, who had broken the story about the agents’ drinking on the radio program that he used to promote his newspaper column. Whatever the reasons for his outrage, Warren walked into the commission’s hearing room on the day of Rowley’s testimony with the attitude of a prosecutor.

Shortly after nine a.m. on June 18, Rowley was sworn in, and he was immediately hit with questions about the drinking incident. It was Rankin’s first substantive question, in fact: “Did you learn in connection with the trip when the assassination occurred that certain of the Secret Service agents had been in the Press Club and what is called the Cellar, in Fort Worth, the night before?”

Rowley: “Well, that came to my attention through a broadcast that Mr. Pearson made—that agents were inebriated the night before.” He said he immediately dispatched a Secret Service inspector to Texas to investigate.

Rankin: “What did you learn?”

Rowley admitted that much of what Pearson had reported was true, although Rowley said he did not believe that any agent was drunk, as Pearson had claimed. The internal investigation showed that a total of nine agents had been out drinking; three had each downed a scotch, while “the others had two or three beers” each. The next day, at least four of those agents were assigned to the motorcade, including Clint Hill, the agent who appeared to have saved Jacqueline Kennedy’s life.

Rankin asked: “Did you learn whether or not there were any violations of the regulations of the Secret Service by these men?” It was a question to which Rankin—and Warren—already knew the answer.

Rowley: “Yes, there was a violation.”

To make the commission’s point as clearly as possible, Rankin then asked Rowley to cite the specific regulation in the Secret Service manual that barred drinking on duty, and then to read it out loud. Rowley was handed a copy of the employee manual; he turned to the first chapter of Section 10: “Employees are strictly enjoined to refrain from the use of intoxicating liquor during the hours they are officially employed at their post of duty or when they may reasonably expect that they may be called upon to perform an official duty.”

The rules were stricter for agents assigned to the president’s personal detail. Rowley was asked to read those out, as well: “The use of intoxicating liquor of any kind, including beer and wine, by members of the White House detail and special agents cooperating with them, or by special agents on similar assignments while they are in a travel status, is prohibited.” It was a firing offense, Rowley admitted, reading out the rest of the regulation: “Violation or slight disregard of the above paragraphs or the excessive or improper use of intoxicating liquor at any time will be cause for removal.”

Rankin asked the next question with what was, for him, uncharacteristic aggressiveness: How could Rowley be sure that his agents might not have saved the president’s life? “How can you tell that the fact that they were out as they were the night before … had nothing to do with the assassination?” Rankin asked. “Have you done anything to discipline these men for violations of the regulations of the Secret Service?”

Rowley defended himself and the agents. He said he believed that the agents in the motorcade had performed in “an exemplary manner,” whatever the aftereffects of the alcohol. “I did consider what type of punishment would be provided,” he said. “Then I also considered the fact that these men in no way had—their conduct had no bearing on the assassination.” To punish them might lead the public to believe “they were responsible for the assassination of the president. I didn’t think this was fair, and that they did not deserve that.… I did not think in the light of history that they should be stigmatized with something like that, or their families or children.”

Warren was having none of it: “Don’t you think that if a man went to bed reasonably early, and hadn’t been drinking the night before, he would be more alert than if they stayed up until 3, 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, going to beatnik joints and doing some drinking along the way?” Warren was using Pearson’s description of the Cellar, an all-night club, as a “beatnik joint.”

As the president’s motorcade traveled through Dallas, Secret Service agents were supposed to be scanning the crowd and the buildings along the route for threats, Warren noted. The commission had heard testimony from witnesses who said they saw a rifle barrel pointing out of the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository before the shots rang out, yet the Secret Service agents missed it entirely. “Some people saw a rifle up in that building,” the chief justice said. “Wouldn’t a Secret Service man in this motorcade, who is supposed to observe such things, be more likely to observe something of that kind if he was free from any of the results of liquor or lack of sleep than he would otherwise? Don’t you think that they would have been much more alert, sharper?”

“Yes, sir,” Rowley conceded. “But I don’t believe they could have prevented the assassination.”

Warren was not done. The misconduct went beyond the agents, he suggested; it went to Rowley’s own performance, since the Secret Service director was apparently willing to ignore misconduct by his own employees. “It seems to me that they were all given a complete bill of health,” Warren said. “I just wonder if that is quite consistent with the facts that the commission should have.”

Rowley: “As I said earlier, we don’t condone their actions, nor do we try to belittle the violation. But in the circumstances, I took the decision that I thought right.… I don’t think that these people should be blamed for the tragedy.”

Weeks later, Warren was dismayed when he read draft chapters of the commission’s final report dealing with the Secret Service and its performance in Dallas. The drafts, written by Sam Stern, Warren’s former clerk at the court, did not include any direct criticism of the agents who had gone out drinking. Nor did Stern offer any harsh criticism in the draft chapter of the failure of FBI agent James Hosty to alert the Secret Service to Oswald’s presence in Dallas. After months of turning himself into the commission’s in-house expert on the Secret Service, Stern still could not muster any outrage over the drinking incident, and he continued to be impressed that so many Secret Service agents and their supervisors seemed genuinely to grieve over what happened in Dallas, and to accept some responsibility for the assassination. It came as an awkward surprise for Stern to discover how differently the chief justice felt. Warren ordered Stern’s drafts rewritten to make direct attacks on the Secret Service agents and on Hosty. “We would have looked silly if we hadn’t mentioned the Secret Service agents going out the night before the assassination,” Warren said later. “We would have looked bad if we failed to point out that the FBI had had reason to look up Oswald before the event, knowing all that it did.”

*

Much as Warren wanted to be tough on the Secret Service, Gerald Ford wanted to be tough on the State Department. The department was a traditional foe for Ford and other conservative Republicans in Congress who saw it as a bastion of liberal Ivy Leaguers all too eager to reach accommodation with nations behind the Iron Curtain. Many department officials were still traumatized over the attacks that had been made on their loyalty by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

Ford told aides he believed there was evidence of incompetence, if not worse, at the department in its dealings with Oswald over the years, beginning with its decision in 1962 to allow him to return home from Russia. Why should Oswald have been allowed to reclaim his full rights as a citizen after he announced to American diplomats in Moscow, shortly after he arrived there in 1959, that he wanted to renounce his citizenship? The department had not only allowed Oswald to return to the United States, bringing with him a new Russian wife; it had provided him with a loan of about $400 to cover his travel costs. Ford was also outraged, he said, over the public statements issued by the State Department in Washington, within hours of Kennedy’s murder, that there was no evidence of a foreign conspiracy in the assassination—a judgment made before any real investigation had begun.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk was called before the commission on Wednesday, June 10, to answer questions about his department’s performance. David Slawson was the staff lawyer responsible for preparing the list of questions for Rusk. He had always found the dour, fifty-five-year-old Georgian to be a remarkably unimpressive figure—a view widely shared, it turned out, inside the Kennedy administration. “Rusk seemed to be a deliberate non-thinker,” Slawson decided.

Kennedy had chosen Rusk, a career diplomat, to run the State Department over several more high-profile, certainly more charismatic candidates because the president “intended to be his own Secretary of State,” according to Kennedy’s friend and adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. As time went on, the president despaired of Rusk’s meekness and his unwillingness to voice an opinion. “It was generally impossible to know what he thought,” Schlesinger wrote. “His colorlessness of mind appeared almost compulsive.” Jacqueline Kennedy told Schlesinger shortly after the assassination that her husband had intended to replace Rusk in a second term. “Dean Rusk seemed to be overtaken by that apathy and fear of making the wrong decision,” she said. “It used to drive Jack crazy.”

Rusk had been kept on at the department by Johnson to show continuity with Kennedy’s foreign policy, and Rusk, seemingly more comfortable with a fellow southerner in the White House, became more assertive. He would go on to become a public champion of Johnson’s plans to escalate the military commitment in Vietnam.

In his testimony to the commission, Rusk had little to offer beyond what the State Department had been saying consistently since Kennedy’s death—that it did not believe the Soviets or Cubans were involved. “It would be an act of rashness and madness for Soviet leaders to undertake such an action,” he said. “It has not been our impression that madness has characterized the actions of the Soviet leadership in recent times.” As for Cuba, “it would be even greater madness for Castro or his government to be involved.”

Rankin stepped in, asking Rusk if he had read the cables sent to Washington immediately after the assassination from then U.S. ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann, who was convinced that Castro was behind the murder. Rusk acknowledged that he had read the cables and that they had “raised questions of the most far-reaching character involving the possibility” of a foreign conspiracy, “so I had a very deep personal interest in that at the time.” But the investigation of those allegations by the CIA and the FBI in Mexico and elsewhere had since “run its course,” as Rusk put it, without proof of Cuban involvement.

Ford pressed his criticism that the department had been too quick to make public statements immediately after the assassination that seemed to rule out a foreign conspiracy. Rusk defended the statements: “We did not then have evidence of that sort, nor do we now, and the implications of suggesting evidence in the absence of evidence would have been enormous.”

Ford: “I don’t understand that.”

Rusk: “Well, for us to leave the impression that we had evidence that we could not describe or discuss, when in fact we didn’t have the evidence on a matter of such overriding importance, could have created a very dangerous situation in terms of—”

Ford interrupted: “Wouldn’t it have been just as effective to say ‘no comment’?”

Rusk: “Well, unfortunately, under the practices of the press, no comment would have been taken to confirm that there was evidence.”

For the questioning of Rusk, Ford was, as usual, well briefed, and he decided to quiz Rusk on whether the secretary of state had ever bothered to acquaint himself with evidence that might still point to a Communist conspiracy. He asked Rusk if he had been aware of news reports that Castro, just weeks before the assassination, had warned publicly that he would retaliate with violence against American leaders who had targeted the Cuban dictator and his colleagues for assassination.

Rusk said he recalled reading nothing, before or after the president’s murder, about Castro’s threats.

*

After Rusk’s testimony, Ford was convinced that the State Department should not “get off scot-free” in the commission’s final report. Two days later, he telephoned Rankin to make the point. Rankin was out of the office, so Ford instead talked to Slawson, who was then drawing up lists of questions for others from the department. “We cannot afford to be light or easy on the witnesses,” Ford told him. “The burden to prove that they acted properly is on them. We should make it as tough as possible for them. Our proper role is the ‘devil’s advocate.’”

Ford asked Slawson what he thought of the State Department’s contacts with Oswald over the years and whether the department could have done more to stop him from getting his chance to kill the president. Slawson said he could not see how the department bore any responsibility for the assassination. The decision to allow Oswald to return to the United States “seemed to have been correct”; other Americans who had defected behind the Iron Curtain and then changed their minds had been treated much the same way, Slawson said.