A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (68 page)

Especially during those late-night hours, he and the other lawyers were thankful for the commission’s increasingly loose rules for handling classified documents. “We could just pile things on tables,” Goldberg said. “I thought it was great.” FBI agents who visited the offices in mid-September reported back to headquarters that they found “a complete lack of organization insofar as records are concerned,” with “no document control whatsoever and no accountability for such documents, classified or not.” The commission’s two Xerox photocopiers “are used constantly by any member of the staff or any employee” to copy files, including many stamped
TOP SECRET
.

Goldberg took on several writing assignments. He wrote the special chapter that listed—and rebutted—every major rumor and conspiracy theory. He divided the rumors into ten categories, ranging from the source of the bullets that struck the motorcade to the events at the scene of Officer Tippit’s murder, and the many allegations about ties between Oswald and Ruby. He whittled down the list to 122 “speculations and rumors,” and then answered each one with the “commission finding” that spelled out the truth, as determined by the investigation. In his introduction to the chapter, he noted that every major assassination had produced conspiracy theories and that they began to circulate almost instantly. “The rumors and theories about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that are still being publicized were for the most part bruited within months of his death.”

As part of his research, Goldberg tried to read every one of the hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles that suggested an alternative explanation for Kennedy’s murder. “There was so much literature,” he recalled. “There was an underground network operating already—all kinds of allegations, speculations, rumors.” He was outraged after reading the first of the major conspiracy books—
Who Killed Kennedy?
by Thomas Buchanan, the expatriate American writer for
L’Express
. The book, released in the United States by the publishing house G. P. Putnam’s Sons, alleged that there had been at least two gunmen in Dealey Plaza. Buchanan hinted that the conspiracy was underwritten by right-wing Texas businessmen. “I thought it was nonsense, the way most of those books were,” Goldberg said. He was offended by the way so many supposedly legitimate scholars and journalists did not trouble themselves to research the basic facts of the assassination before rushing garbled conspiracy tales into print. “It was a good money-making thing for a lot of people,” Goldberg said. The conspiracy theorists “were, in the main, either ignorant, crazy or dishonest.” Goldberg believed that Buchanan, Mark Lane, and others were preying on the confusion of millions of Americans who found it difficult to accept that the most powerful man in the world could be brought down by “such a pathetic little man” as Lee Harvey Oswald. “They’d be much more comfortable knowing it was the result of some conspiracy, that some major figures were involved,” Goldberg said. “How could this pipsqueak do all this?”

He was proud that his own detective work put to rest one specific, well-publicized set of rumors. For months, Lane and others raised an alarm about the disappearance of a Texas man named Darryl Click who had been identified as the cabdriver who drove Oswald back to his rooming house after the assassination. The
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, and other newspapers had published a transcript of a news conference on November 24 at which Dallas district attorney Henry Wade had referred to the taxi ride and seemed to identify Click by name. But Lane and others could find no record of Click in phone books or other public records. The confusion about Click and his whereabouts was “seized on by all the conspiratorial people,” Goldberg recalled. “There were hints of a dark mystery.” To try to resolve it, Goldberg obtained a tape recording of Wade’s news conference. “I listened to it over and over again,” he said. “I went thru it 75 times.” And he found the error. It had been made by the transcriptionist, who had obviously been baffled by Wade’s deep Texas drawl. The transcript published in the
Times
and elsewhere quoted Wade as saying that Oswald “caught a taxicab driver, a Darryl Click,” and was driven to his rooming house. Wade had actually said that Oswald “caught a taxi to Oak Cliff” and then went home. The rooming house was in the city’s Oak Cliff neighborhood. To an ear unaccustomed to a Texas accent, “Oak Cliff” sounded like “Darryl Click.” There was no Darryl Click.

In preparing the “rumors” appendix, Goldberg made use of the final report of staff lawyer Richard Mosk and IRS supervisor Philip Barson, an accountant who had been loaned to the commission to complete the investigation of whether Oswald had income from unexplained sources, possibly from coconspirators. Goldberg was impressed. In their report in July, Mosk and Barson had been able to account—almost to the penny—for the money that went in and came out of Oswald’s pockets in the final weeks of his life, beginning on September 25, the day he reportedly left New Orleans for Mexico. His income, including salary and unemployment insurance, totaled $3,665.89, while his expenses, including the cost of the Mexico trip, totaled $3,497.79. It was a difference of $168, and that money was apparently accounted for, since Oswald left the $170 in cash for Marina in a drawer in the bedroom dresser.

*

After figuring that he had spent almost every waking hour of his life since January thinking about the troubled life of Jack Ruby, Burt Griffin was finally willing to accept the conclusion that the commission seemed likely to adopt—that Ruby had not been part of any conspiracy in the killing of Oswald. He bristled, though, at the early draft chapters that focused on Ruby. He thought they went too far in suggesting that the commission had answered every significant question about Ruby’s past. “I think it is a mistake for the Commission to make any statement which indicates that its investigation in that regard has been exhaustive,” Griffin wrote to Willens on August 14.

That month, Griffin and the other lawyers who remained in Washington were asked to take on the additional duty of reading through the draft chapters that they had not written, acting as editors and fact-checkers on one another’s work. Characteristically, no one approached the job more eagerly—and at times, aggressively—than Liebeler. He became, in many ways, the commission’s principal in-house contrarian. As Griffin described it, Liebeler was “the cross-examiner who was looking for the weaknesses” that the commission’s critics would otherwise find. “He wanted the report to be so well written and the evidence to be so accurate that a lawyer on the other side could not say that the commission staff had done an inadequate job or had drawn unwarranted conclusions.”

Griffin and his colleagues said they had no inkling of it at the time, but by establishing himself as their chief internal critic, Liebeler was about to create an angrily worded paper trail that conspiracy theorists would cite decades later in order to argue that the commission—and Liebeler himself—had been part of an monstrous cover-up.

52

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

AUGUST 1964

Norman Redlich’s energy was almost superhuman. He existed on little sleep, often less than four hours a night, and could wolf down a meal at his desk in the few minutes it took for one of the secretaries to change a typewriter ribbon. He was honored to have the job of the principal writer and editor of the report. The document was likely to be read and studied centuries into the future—by his grandchildren and their children “and on and on,” he told his family. More than anything else he might do in a long career, Redlich—thirty-eight years old and younger than most of his colleagues on the faculty back at NYU law school—understood that this might be what he would be remembered for.

His wife, Evelyn, recalled that, reasonably early in the investigation, her husband had become convinced that Oswald had acted alone. “Norman never entertained any conspiracy notions,” she said. “None.” And so it was that much easier for Redlich to do what Warren wanted him to do that summer: complete the report as quickly as possible and put to rest the swirling rumors about the assassination.

The pressure to finish was not only coming from Warren. Although the chief justice insisted that President Johnson had imposed no deadlines, the commission’s lawyers heard differently. Repeatedly that summer, word reached them that the president, through his top aides, was demanding that the report be completed before the end of August, when the Democratic National Convention would be held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Johnson would receive his party’s nomination to run for a full four-year term as president; his Republican challenger in November would be Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator. Johnson, the lawyers were told, did not want to be blindsided by anything in the report before the campaign. “Every once in a while, someone would say to us, ‘Johnson just sent over a message,’” Lloyd Weinreb remembered. “And the message is, ‘Where’s the fucking report?’”

The staff felt the pressure. Weinreb said an aunt, visiting Washington and seeing how exhausted he was, demanded that he take a weekend off with his wife. “She said, ‘Lloyd, you’ve simply got to go away,’” he said. “She gave us some money to do it.” He planned a single Sunday night away in the nearby seaport of Annapolis, Maryland. “So midday on Sunday we drove to Annapolis to a motel and we were going to stay for the night,” he said. But almost as soon as they arrived, the phone rang. “We got a call from Lee Rankin saying that we had better come back to Washington.” There was no time for even a single night away; the couple returned home immediately. “I was pissed,” Weinreb said. He was blessed, he said, with a spouse who was slow to anger. “My wife is a very agreeable person.”

For the first time, tempers began to flare among some of the lawyers. Weinreb recalled several blowups that summer with Wesley Liebeler, especially over how the report should describe Oswald’s self-proclaimed Marxism and whether it would have motivated him to kill Kennedy. “That was a source of great controversy between us,” Weinreb remembered. “Liebeler was a right-wing guy” who argued that Oswald’s motivation “was all political, that it was something about Castro.” Weinreb was convinced Liebeler was wrong. “I didn’t think it was political, I still don’t.”

Liebeler’s battles with Redlich were far nastier. Beyond the stark differences in their political views, the two men had never gotten along, and now they argued over the writing of the report. Liebeler warned that Redlich might be so eager to finish the report and please Warren that he was maneuvering to shut down important, last-minute lines of investigation that might still point to a conspiracy. There were a number of examples, Liebeler said. Several staff members were alarmed, for instance, by the discovery that summer that the FBI had never determined the sources of fingerprints on cartons found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository; they were the cartons that Oswald had apparently stacked around his sniper’s perch. At least eleven of the fingerprints belonged to someone other than Oswald.

No matter how little time remained in the investigation, Liebeler and other staff lawyers felt that the FBI had to determine whose fingerprints they were. Redlich, however, resisted and tried to write around the issue, as if it was unimportant. Griffin joined with Liebeler in protesting to Redlich: “You can’t dismiss 11 fingerprints. You’ve got to find out whose prints those are.” It was possible that the prints would identify coconspirators in the assassination. “Hell, there could be a whole football team up there,” Griffin warned. Murray Laulicht, the new arrival on the staff, remembered that Redlich felt it was too late to worry about the prints, especially if it meant holding up the report. “What, you want to fingerprint the whole city of Dallas?” he remembered Redlich asking with annoyance.

Redlich also resisted asking the FBI about a conflict over whether Oswald’s palm print had been identified on the barrel of the rifle found at the book depository. A Dallas police fingerprint expert claimed the print appeared to be Oswald’s, while an FBI expert who inspected the rifle later found no print at all. Liebeler believed both issues—the source of the fingerprints on the cartons and the discrepancy over a print on the rifle—had to be resolved. “The record could not be left in the condition it was in,” he declared.

Rankin sided with Liebeler, and he signed letters to J. Edgar Hoover in late August pressing for answers about the prints. The responses came back in the final days of the investigation: the bureau reported that most of the previously unidentified fingerprints were those of an FBI clerk and a Dallas police officer who had handled the cartons as evidence. The FBI concluded that Oswald’s palm print had in fact been on the rifle barrel, as the Dallas police had found. The FBI expert who inspected the rifle had been unaware that the Dallas police preserved the palm print by lifting it off the barrel with a piece of adhesive tape.

*

Liebeler had a more sweeping complaint: he felt that Redlich was writing the final report like a “prosecutor’s brief,” leaving no question at all about Oswald’s guilt. Liebeler told his colleagues he agreed that Oswald was the lone assassin. Even so, he said, the report should state clearly that there was evidence that might have pointed away from Oswald if there had been a trial.

In late August, Liebeler’s frustration boiled over in conversations with Redlich and Willens in which they seemed to suggest that Liebeler was to blame if the commission had missed evidence of a domestic conspiracy. “I personally cannot be held responsible for the present condition of the work on conspiracy,” Liebeler wrote in an angry memo in late August to both of them. “I am more than willing, if able, to accept my full share of responsibility for the work of this staff. I cannot, however, leave myself in the position implied by the … oral statements made by both of you which I hope you will both admit upon reflection are false and unfair.”

With only days supposedly left in the investigation, Liebeler was astonished at how much work was left to be done. He was startled by the news in August that Marina Oswald had—she claimed—only just recalled that there were still mementoes from Oswald’s Mexico trip inside a small brown suitcase that she had kept after the assassination. The FBI, she said, had never bothered to inspect the case. It raised a new, last-minute alarm for the commission’s staff about the bureau’s basic competence; Liebeler wondered what other evidence the FBI might have missed due to the bungling or laziness of its agents. Several items were found inside the suitcase, including a bus-ticket stub from Oswald’s Mexico trip.