A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (66 page)

The commission’s request was passed on to the FBI’s Dallas field office, and the task of following up was handed to Special Agent James Hosty, the same agent who had investigated—and dismissed—Odio’s claims back in December. Hosty said later that he rolled his eyes at the assignment; he would be reviewing exactly the same evidence that he had gone over eight months earlier. At what point, he wondered, “would this nightmare end?” Hosty was a public figure in Dallas for all the wrong reasons that summer, he said. Anyone in the city who closely read a newspaper knew his name; all of his neighbors knew he was the beleaguered FBI agent who had investigated Oswald before the assassination and failed to see the threat he posed. Hoover and his deputies in Washington seemed determined to prove that Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy, and nothing Hosty had discovered since the assassination undermined their argument. It would take a “brave, if not foolhardy” FBI agent to dare suggest that Hoover was wrong. “How much longer do I have to hear the name Lee Harvey Oswald?” Hosty asked himself. “I was sick of this.”

*

By late summer, Hoover’s contempt for Warren and several of the other commissioners was all but total, even as he continued to fear how their final report would treat the FBI. Hoover’s internal files had become a running, venomous commentary on the commission and its work. His views were often expressed in brief notes, written in his distinctive, looping cursive, at the bottom of his deputies’ memos.

Many of his angriest comments were prompted by press coverage. From a reading of his handwritten notes, Hoover seemed to assume any article in a major newspaper or magazine that criticized the FBI for its actions before or after the assassination had been planted by the commission—in some cases, by the chief justice himself. After the magazine the
Nation
questioned that winter whether Oswald had ever been an FBI informant, Hoover wrote to aides that he wanted a thorough analysis of who was feeding information to the magazine. He guessed the chief justice: “
The Nation
is Warren’s Bible,” he wrote. When the
Dallas Times-Herald
revealed details of the commission’s investigation of whether Oswald had been prone to violence while serving in the marines, an aide to Hoover prepared a summary of the article, writing that it appeared to be based on a “leak on the part of a commission member.” At the bottom of the memo Hoover wrote: “Sounds like Warren.”

Hoover thought the commission, far from ending rumors about Oswald and a possible conspiracy to kill Kennedy, was continuing to fuel them, especially after Warren’s statement to reporters about not knowing the full truth about the assassination “in your lifetime.” “If Warren had kept his big mouth shut about this, these conjectures would not have arisen,” Hoover wrote.

He became convinced that the FBI was also the victim of the incompetence—and, he said, the venality—of the Dallas police department and the Dallas district attorney’s office. He believed the city’s law-enforcement officials were continuing to feed disparaging information about the FBI to the commission in hopes of more lenient treatment in the final report. For a time earlier that year, Hoover had quietly ordered the FBI’s Dallas field office to cut off all contact with the city’s chief homicide prosecutor, William Alexander, because Hoover believed Alexander was spreading the rumor that Oswald had been an FBI informant. He was also suspicious of Alexander’s boss, district attorney Henry Wade. “This fellow is just a low s.o.b.,” Hoover wrote of Alexander. “Instruct our Dallas office to have no contact with him and to be most circumspect with Wade.”

As the commission’s investigation began to wind down, Hoover admitted to aides that the bureau had mishandled its dealings with the commission, often creating suspicion where he believed none had been justified. After an incident in which midlevel FBI officials gave a narrow reading to a request for background information about Jack Ruby, leading to protests from the commission about why some documents had been withheld, Hoover wrote that he was “becoming more and more concerned about our failure to properly handle this matter.” He said in a later memo: “I don’t understand why we give narrow interpretations to the commission’s requests.”

In March, a top Hoover aide, William Branigan, wrote to recommend that the FBI reject the commission’s request for closer surveillance of public appearances by Mark Lane and Marguerite Oswald. He suggested the potential for a scandal if it became known that Warren’s investigation was having its critics followed. “The requests of the commission are extremely broad and, if literally interpreted, could pose a serious investigative burden on us which would also be of great potential embarrassment,” Branigan wrote. Hoover, however, was wary of turning the commission down. “I do not like this constant reluctance on our part to comply fully with the commission’s requests. I realize how impractical and absurd many of them are,” he wrote. “But it is a fact that at least Warren is hostile to the Bureau & we are furnishing him ammunition by our equivocation.”

Rankin would later say that much of his energy that year had to be directed to trying to salvage some sort of relationship with the bureau. Behind the scenes, the investigation was faced with repeated threats by Hoover and the bureau to shut off the FBI’s assistance. There was a showdown that spring over the commission’s decision to have outside experts review some of the physical evidence that had already been inspected by the FBI Laboratory, including the bullets and bullet fragments from Dallas. The move was seen by senior aides to Hoover as an affront to the bureau, suggesting that the commission did not trust the lab’s findings. Hoover seemed to be offended, too: “I concur it is getting to be more and more intolerable to deal with this Warren Commission.”

At one point, he appeared to authorize Assistant Director Alex Rosen to threaten to cut off the laboratory’s assistance to the commission entirely. “I pointed out to Mr. Rankin that our Laboratory was greatly burdened with a large volume of work and that if the examinations that we made were not going to be accepted, it would appear there would be no reason for our Laboratory experts to be tied up on these examinations,” Rosen wrote.

Rankin tried to make amends. He repeatedly spoke by phone with Rosen and apologized for the many “unreasonable requests” the commission had made. Rankin tried to be conciliatory, praising the FBI Laboratory and insisting that the outside experts would simply confirm the accuracy of the bureau’s findings. After more pleas from Rankin, including more statements of “my respect for the FBI and the work of its laboratory,” the bureau lifted its threat. Still, Hoover felt the dispute was a useful moment to remind his deputies to ignore any words of praise or other “sweet-talk” they heard from Rankin and his colleagues at the commission. “I place no credence in any complimentary remarks made by Warren or the commissioners,” Hoover wrote on a copy of one of Rosen’s memos. “They are looking for FBI ‘gaps’ and, having found none, they try to get ‘syrupy.’”

*

Whatever his hostility toward Warren, Hoover worked to maintain a good relationship with the commissioner who, he felt, would defend the FBI in the writing of the report: Gerald Ford. His files show that he met Ford at a party given at the home of Cartha DeLoach in April. The next day, Hoover followed up with a note to Ford: “I want to let you know how much I enjoyed talking to Mrs. Ford and you during the party at DeLoach’s home last night. Particularly, I was very pleased to discuss in this informal manner some vital matters of interest to you, as well as the FBI.” The letter did not reveal what the “vital matters” were. “It is always encouraging to know that we have alert, vigorous Congressmen, such as you, who are aware of the needs and problems confronting our country,” he continued. “Whenever you have an opportunity, I would be happy to have Mrs. Ford and you drop by FBI headquarters for a special tour of our facilities. And of course, I would like you to feel free to call on me any time our help is needed or when we can be of service.”

The bureau also kept tabs throughout the year on William Manchester, as he gathered research for his book. DeLoach asked for a background check on the writer, and the results were encouraging. As a Washington correspondent for the
Baltimore Sun
, Manchester had dealt with the bureau occasionally, and a review of FBI files showed that “our relations with him in the past have been most cordial,” DeLoach reported. That spring, Robert Kennedy asked Hoover to meet with Manchester; the request came to the FBI director through Edwin Guthman, Kennedy’s press secretary, whose office was helping schedule the author’s appointments. Hoover, who was rarely in a mood to do favors for the attorney general, initially refused to be interviewed for the book. Instead, Manchester was invited to speak with DeLoach, and Kennedy’s office organized the meeting for April 22.

While outlining his research plan for DeLoach, Manchester pressed for the chance to speak directly with Hoover; he said he wanted a full understanding of what happened in Washington in the hours after the president’s murder, including the exact sequence of phone calls between the FBI director and Robert Kennedy in which Hoover broke the news of the assassination. (Kennedy had already told Manchester how appalled he had been at Hoover’s cold, almost robotic tone during the calls.) Manchester signaled to DeLoach that Hoover took a risk if he chose not to tell his side of the story because the other side of the story—as told by Kennedy—might be very unflattering. The writer made clear how much he already knew. According to DeLoach, Manchester said that he had “visited the Attorney General’s home and the swimming pool where the Attorney General had been standing at the time the Director had called him.”

*

Hoover gave in and agreed to the interview, setting aside an hour for Manchester in early June. As expected, much of the interview focused on Hoover’s telephone calls with Robert Kennedy on the day of the assassination. Hoover portrayed his tone in those calls as professional, not cold, and he appeared to suggest that it was Kennedy who had drawn the initial conversations to an end, not him. After telling Kennedy in the first call that his brother had been shot and was being rushed to a hospital, Hoover recalled, “the Attorney General had been quiet for a few moments and had then requested” that the FBI “keep him informed of any further facts” before ending the call. The attorney general, he said, was “not the explosive type” and seemed reasonably calm during the call, given the circumstances.

Hoover offered Manchester his long-standing defense of the FBI’s failure to alert the Secret Service to Oswald’s presence in Dallas—“we did have some information regarding Oswald; however, it was quite flimsy in nature”—while repeating his attack on the competence of the Dallas police. “If the FBI had taken custody of Lee Harvey Oswald … he never would have been killed by Jack Ruby,” he said. “All of this could have been avoided had the Dallas police taken proper action.”

The interview ended with what Hoover and his deputies might have seen as an odd question from Manchester: Why had Hoover not attended the president’s funeral services or burial, which were conducted only a few minutes’ drive from FBI headquarters in downtown Washington? It would have been impossible, Hoover replied; there was too much work to be done, both in managing the investigation in Dallas and Mexico City—“leads had spread to Mexico”—and in overseeing the security arrangements for the many foreign dignitaries who traveled to Washington that weekend for the funeral ceremonies. As Hoover explained it, he had “been at his desk constantly.”

51

ONE CHASE MANHATTAN PLAZA

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 1964

For much of the summer, John McCloy, like most of the commissioners, dealt with the investigation from a distance. He worked from his luxurious offices in One Chase Manhattan Plaza, the sixty-story white-steel skyscraper in lower Manhattan that was home both to Chase Manhattan Bank, which he had run as chairman from 1953 to 1960, and the white-shoe law firm that bore his name, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. His name was so synonymous with the bank and the law firm that there was no suite or floor number on his office stationery; it was unnecessary. There were hundreds of offices and thousands of workers in the building, but a letter addressed simply to John McCloy, One Chase Manhattan Plaza, New York, would reach him.

After reading through some of the draft chapters sent up from Washington, McCloy decided that the commission should just admit it: Oswald might have been trained by the KGB to spy. That did not mean there was a Russian conspiracy to kill Kennedy—not at all. McCloy had told the other commissioners he agreed that Oswald had been the lone gunman and that it was hard to imagine that the Soviet Union had anything to do with the assassination. But it was possible that the Russians might at some point have considered using Oswald as a “sleeper” agent who, after returning to the United States, would lie in wait, maybe for years, to carry out an operation on Moscow’s behalf. The fact that Oswald seemed to know some spycraft—using false names to open post-office boxes, for example—suggested that he might have undergone KGB training. The commission’s report would only be stronger, McCloy said, if it acknowledged that there were still many mysteries about Oswald’s past.

On July 21, McCloy dictated a letter for Lee Rankin and asked his secretary to mark it
PERSONAL.
He wrote to praise the latest draft of the chapter in which the commission addressed—and ruled out—the possibility of a foreign conspiracy. “I think this draft is much better than the earlier one,” McCloy told Rankin. But he had a suggestion. “Somewhere,” he wrote, “I feel there should be added something like this”:

The Commission has noted that Oswald did exhibit some tendency toward the use of undercover practices which raises a suspicion that he did receive some rudimentary instruction in undercover activities.… It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Soviet authorities may have considered using him as a sort of “sleeper” in the United States, on whom they might call at some future time, but our more considered view is that even in this capacity they would have had serious doubts regarding his reliability.