A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (61 page)

Among the lawyers, the broad outlines of the report had been known for weeks: the commission would conclude that Oswald had assassinated President Kennedy and probably acted alone. The principal debate was over how forcefully to state those conclusions and whether the commission should acknowledge that there was evidence that was inconclusive about Oswald’s guilt. The lawyers would have to decide, for example, how and whether to mention testimony from witnesses at Dealey Plaza who were convinced that bullets had been fired at Kennedy’s limousine from the front instead from the Texas School Book Depository to the rear.

For the first time, Rankin began to worry seriously about the budget and how the commission would pay for the publication of what was likely to be a mammoth final report, accompanied by several additional volumes of witness testimony. For the first several months of the investigation, President Johnson had been true to his word: the White House had provided whatever money and other resources the commission needed. Tens of thousands of dollars would be transferred to the commission’s bank accounts on the basis of little more than a brief phone call to the White House from one of Rankin’s secretaries. “We received any money we needed, and we were never at any time told that we were to limit ourselves,” Rankin recalled with gratitude.

But after meeting with the Government Printing Office that spring, Rankin was startled by the estimate of the cost of publishing the full report and the additional volumes: at least $1 million. “When I told the Chief Justice that, he was very much shocked,” Rankin said.

“My, we can’t spend money like that,” the notoriously frugal Warren said.

Rankin reminded Warren of the commission’s vow of transparency. It was important, Rankin said, for the commission to publish not only its final report, but as much of the testimony and evidence as possible.

“Well, that is up to Congress,” Warren replied, refusing to approve the budget by himself. “I don’t know whether they will approve anything like that or spend the money.” He directed Rankin to talk to the four members of Congress on the commission and ask if they could convince their colleagues in the House and Senate to approve the expenditure.

Rankin began with Russell, who, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, oversaw billions of dollars a year of federal spending on military programs.

“How much is it going to cost?” Russell asked.

Rankin told him $1 million.

Russell promised to come up with the money. “You go right ahead,” he told Rankin. “We will get that money for you.” To a senator who oversaw the budget of the Defense Department, $1 million was barely a rounding error.

Rankin asked Russell if he needed to consult separately with the other lawmakers: Boggs, Ford, and Cooper. “I will talk to them,” Russell said. “We will get the money.”

*

Rankin was also anxious that spring about all the empty desks in the commission’s offices. David Belin had returned home to Iowa in late May, and Leon Hubert was gone days after that. Arlen Specter would stop working full-time in Washington in June, after finishing his draft chapter. Among the junior lawyers who had been there from the start, only Griffin, Liebeler, and Slawson would still be at their desks most days that summer, along with a dozen or so secretaries and other clerical workers. If the final report was ever going to get done, Rankin knew, he needed to hire more lawyers, and fast. Warren agreed to dispatch several Supreme Court clerks to help out, and to begin the process of double-checking information and preparing footnotes for the report. Justice Arthur Goldberg allowed one of his clerks, twenty-five-year-old Harvard Law School graduate Stephen G. Breyer, to join the commission’s staff temporarily.
^*

Rankin wanted a new, full-time assistant, given how busy he assumed Redlich and Willens would be with the actual writing of the report. On May 12, his twenty-fourth birthday, Columbia Law School student Murray Laulicht got a phone call in New York, asking him to report to Washington immediately for a job interview. Laulicht, a third-year student who was just about to graduate, first in his class, was free to go, he remembered; that same day he had taken his last law-school exam—on trusts and estates. He was in Rankin’s office the next morning and was offered a job on the spot. “Rankin wanted me to start that day,” he said, recalling his shock at the abruptness of the offer. He “begged” Rankin for an additional few days. “I didn’t bring any clothes,” he remembered telling Rankin. “I promise you the night I graduate from law school, I will come down here.”

They compromised. Laulicht agreed to start work on June 4, the day after he was handed his diploma. “So literally the night I graduated from Columbia, I went back down there” to Washington. His new colleagues welcomed Laulicht; he brought fresh eyes to the evidence about the assassination they had been analyzing for months. And what he told them was reassuring. After reviewing several draft chapters of the report, he sensed the commission was right to conclude that Oswald acted alone. He listened to the debates about the single-bullet theory, and the theory sounded logical to him.

He was excited to be working in Washington, if also daunted—as an observant Jew—for cultural reasons. The city did not make it easy for anyone who followed a kosher diet; he recalled ordering a fruit salad at a restaurant near the commission’s office and discovering it was served with Jell-O, which was barred under Jewish dietary laws, since the gelatin was made with animal by-products. For the rest of the summer, “I ate a lot of potato chips and things like that.” In the commission’s offices, he was amazed by the discovery of a machine straight out of science fiction—“a phenomenal new technology called a Xerox machine.” He was so impressed that he urged his family back in New Jersey to invest in the company. “My mother bought some Xerox stock and she did very well with it.”

Rankin had an early assignment for Laulicht. He was asked to help Burt Griffin complete the investigation of Jack Ruby—specifically, to write Ruby’s biography, which would then be included in the report. From what he read of the evidence, Laulicht said he had no trouble believing that Ruby’s murder of Oswald was impulsive and that he had acted alone. “He was just hot-headed enough to do this.” Ruby was so obsessed with avenging Kennedy that he might be compared to a Holocaust survivor, Laulicht thought. “It’s what a survivor might do if he saw a Nazi.”

Laulicht’s knowledge of Jewish culture came in helpful in resolving a lingering mystery about Ruby. Griffin and Hubert, who were not Jewish, had been unable to understand the origins of Ruby’s childhood nickname—“Yank,” or something that sounded like that when uttered by Ruby’s Yiddish-speaking neighbors back in Chicago. Was it short for Yankee, a reference to some strong pro-American views that Ruby held as a child? No, Laulicht could see. Ruby’s real nickname was “Yunk,” a shortened version of the Yiddish translation for the name Jack—“Yunkle.” Mystery solved, Laulicht said.

*

Another late arrival to the staff, twenty-seven-year-old Lloyd Weinreb, two years out of Harvard Law School, was much less excited than Laulicht to be there. After completing a term as a Supreme Court clerk to Justice John Marshall Harlan, Weinreb had been hired that summer at the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and assigned to work for Howard Willens. Since Willens was still on assignment to the commission, he asked Weinreb to come help out on the investigation. “He asked me if I would come over there for a few weeks, which I very much did not want to do,” Weinreb remembered. But because Willens “was going to be my boss, I thought it would be injudicious to say no.”

Weinreb was alarmed from the moment he arrived in the VFW building. He could see all the empty desks, and he quickly learned from the remaining lawyers how much work remained to be done. “I remember having a sense of an office where everyone was springing for the hills,” with these few “poor suckers left behind,” he recalled. It would prove to be a “perfectly awful job,” with the staff expected to work fourteen-or fifteen-hour days, seven days a week, throughout the summer until the report was finished. He was startled to discover that the offices were not air-conditioned on weekends, despite temperatures that could sometimes reach one hundred degrees in Washington at the height of summer. “It was a lousy building,” he said. “It was miserable. I think a lot of the poor quality of the Warren reports comes from these very banal things.”

He was given the assignment of writing Oswald’s biography, which would then be published in the final report. The biography had originally been the responsibility of Albert Jenner, but Jenner had proved incapable of finishing it, given his obsession with confirming the tiniest details of Oswald’s life story. “Jenner was still tracking down utterly remote leads,” Weinreb said. “He could not let go of it.” Jenner, he said, “simply had no conception of what doing history was. His idea was that anyone mentioned anywhere—maybe a fifth cousin whom Oswald had never seen—had to be checked out.”

Weinreb had a strong sense that, by midsummer, it was Willens who was holding the investigation together, taking on responsibilities that should have been Rankin’s. “Howard was essentially in charge of the staff at that point,” he said. “Willens was a vastly more powerful person intellectually than Rankin,” he said. “Rankin seemed to be a middle-level bureaucrat.” Weinreb had no contact with Warren, which was no surprise given what he already knew of the chief justice’s “protective perimeters” in dealing with his clerks and clerical staff back at the court.

Weinreb did find the job of writing the biography interesting. He said he first went in search of all of the background reports on Oswald’s life, including the top secret files from the CIA about his time in Russia. It was the first time Weinreb had seen classified national-security documents. “I remember having a sense of wow, this is cloak and dagger stuff.” Most of the biographical material on Oswald was found in large files—four or five inches thick—that had been compiled from FBI and CIA reports. As he started to page through them, though, Weinberg detected a problem. Much of the paperwork he expected to find was missing, apparently taken by other staff members while writing their own parts of the report. “There was absolutely no order to the evidence,” he said. Some staff lawyers appeared to be hoarding files for fear they might otherwise disappear into someone else’s desk. “You literally walked around the halls to see if you could get a hold of something and then you hid it in your bottom drawer to maintain possession. You put it in your bottom drawer because you didn’t want anybody else to take it.”

Weinreb did not agonize over the actual writing of the biography; he had been known to his fellow Supreme Court clerks as an elegant, and quick, writer. He prided himself on not needing to rewrite his work; his first draft was usually his final draft. And he did not agonize, he said, over the question of whether Oswald had killed the president and whether Oswald had been part of a conspiracy. From all that he could see in the commission’s files, Oswald appeared to be the lone assassin. Weinreb could understand why the conspiracy theories had developed, but the evidence against Oswald was overwhelming, he said. “It would have taken a lot to make me think otherwise.”

*

Richard Mosk began making plans to leave the commission’s staff in mid-August; he had been called back to duty by the air national guard. Before departing, he completed a detailed study of Oswald’s marksmanship skills. He did not have trouble believing that Oswald had the ability to fire the shots that killed Kennedy and hit Connally. The Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was “a very accurate weapon,” Mosk wrote.

Mosk reviewed the testimony taken from four expert marksmen, including that of Major Eugene Anderson, assistant head of the Marksmanship Branch of the U.S. Marine Corps. He testified that the shots that struck Kennedy’s neck and head were not “particularly difficult,” especially given how slowly the president’s motorcade was moving. An FBI firearms specialist, Robert Frazier, told the commission that Oswald would “not have any difficult hitting” his targets, especially since his rifle had been equipped with a telescopic sight. “I mean it requires no training at all to shoot a weapon with a telescopic sight,” Frazier said. A gunman would simply “put the crosshairs on the target” and pull the trigger. “That is all that is necessary.”

45

THE HOME OF SILVIA ODIO

DALLAS, TEXAS

JULY 1964

That summer, Silvia Odio was trying to get on with her life. The twenty-seven-year-old Cuban refugee said she had mostly kept quiet about what had happened back in December, when two FBI agents showed up unannounced at the offices of the chemical company where she worked. They wanted her to tell them the story that she had told a few friends, about how Oswald and two young Latino men had appeared on the doorstep of her Dallas apartment before the assassination. Odio had been alarmed by the way the FBI agents had contacted her—by sending agents to her office instead of her home—and the visit had upset her boss. “It brought a lot of problems in my work,” she said later. “You know how people were afraid at the time. My company, some officials of it, were quite concerned that the FBI should have come to see me.” And after the December interview, she said she heard nothing from the FBI. For the bureau then to completely dismiss her story—the one also told by her teenage sister, Annie—was perplexing and insulting.

In June, however, she learned that the Warren Commission might be taking her account more seriously. Wesley Liebeler called from Washington and asked if she would be available to give sworn testimony when he visited Dallas later that summer. She agreed, although she told him she continued to worry that her story, if it became public, might somehow endanger her parents, who remained in custody in Cuba as political prisoners. Her father, Amador, had been a prominent businessman there in the 1950s—he was described by
Time
as his country’s “transport tycoon”—and become an outspoken opponent of Castro. He had been a leader of a relatively moderate anti-Castro group known as JURE, or Junta Revolucionaria Cubana. In exile, Silvia remained a member of JURE.