A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (69 page)

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On Friday, September 4, as Liebeler was preparing to leave Washington to spend Labor Day weekend at his country home in Vermont, he was given galley proofs of Redlich’s edited version of Chapter 4—the chapter that focused on evidence establishing that Oswald was the assassin. There would be little time for Liebeler to enjoy the holiday because, as he read, he became more and more agitated over what Redlich had done—or more precisely, what Redlich had allowed to remain in the chapter from earlier drafts.

Liebeler was troubled, first, by the many factual errors, large and small, that he detected. He thought some of the mistakes were understandable given the large number of people involved in “an extremely painful process” of writing and editing. He was more upset, he recalled, about the overall tone of the report and the way it was still being “overwritten” to suggest that Oswald was so clearly guilty that there was no need to trouble readers with facts that might contradict that conclusion. “It made statements that could not really be supported,” Liebeler said. There was a tendency “to downplay or not give equal emphasis to contrary evidence.”

Liebeler decided to do something dramatic to protest. And so he sat down at a typewriter he kept in the Vermont house and batted out a twenty-six-page memo, finally totaling more than sixty-seven hundred words, that deconstructed the chapter, paragraph by paragraph. He pointed to dozens of instances of what he described as errors or exaggerations. The memo was, in its own way, a masterwork, proof of Liebeler’s keen intelligence and his phenomenal memory; he could recall even the tiniest details of the evidence and witness testimony and match them up against what he was reading in the draft.

In perhaps the most contentious part of the memo, Liebeler said he disagreed fiercely with Redlich and other staff members who believed that Oswald’s weapons training in the marines meant that he had an easy shot in Dealey Plaza. Liebeler felt that the report needed to point out that Oswald had been mocked at times by fellow marines during target practice and that he barely passed at least one marksmanship test. The evidence, he said, tended “to indicate that Oswald was not a good shot and that he was not interested in his rifle while in the Marine Corps,” yet that conflicting evidence was missing from the draft. “To put it bluntly, that sort of selection from the record could seriously affect the integrity and credibility of the entire report.” He continued: “The most honest and the most sensible thing to do given the present state of the record on Oswald’s rifle capability would be to write a very short section indicating that there is testimony on both sides of several issues. The commission could then conclude that the best evidence that Oswald could fire his rifle as fast as he did and hit the target is the fact that he did so. It may have been pure luck. It probably was to a very great extent. But it happened.”

When he returned from Vermont that weekend, Liebeler placed the memo on Redlich’s desk. Initially he heard back nothing. “There was really no response to it for a considerable period of time,” Liebeler recalled.

Then, several days later, new page proofs for the chapter arrived in the commission’s offices, and Liebeler began to read to see what, if anything, had changed as a result of his memo. The answer, he recalled, was almost nothing; his most serious complaints had been ignored. He marched into Rankin’s office to protest. Seeing how angry Liebeler was, Rankin agreed to review the chapter with him—that minute. He asked Liebeler to get a copy of his memo and a set of the galleys and come back to his office. “We sat down, the two of us, and started going through the chapter,” Liebeler said. Willens joined them, but apparently not before calling Redlich, who was home in Manhattan that day and at his desk at NYU. Realizing that his editing was being undone, Redlich dashed to LaGuardia Airport to catch a flight to Washington. He was in the commission’s offices that same afternoon. The four of them then “spent the rest of that day and long into the night going over this memorandum and the page proofs, and my recollection is that we considered and discussed all the issues,” Liebeler recalled. He got some, but far from all, of the changes he requested. Over the next two weeks, he bombarded Rankin and the others with more memos, totaling an additional eight thousand words.

Liebeler knew his voluminous memos that summer had created a permanent record of how strongly he had fought, over what he considered matters of principle, in the writing of the report, so at some point, he decided to keep copies of his memos for himself. He began to slip the copies out of the commission’s offices, putting them in his attaché case, and then filing them away at home, initially at his apartment in Washington. If there ever came a time when the commission’s legacy was under attack and he needed to defend his own reputation, Liebeler would have all of his memos and files available; he could make them all public.

*

Senator Richard Russell was always apologetic about how many of the commission’s meetings he missed. As he had predicted from the start, 1964 had turned out to be an awful year in his long career in the Senate. He spent most of the first six months of the year trying, and ultimately failing, to block the momentous civil rights legislation that Johnson had offered as a tribute to Kennedy, most important the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Some of Russell’s fellow segregationists had hoped his close friendship with Johnson might convince the White House to weaken the act. Russell, however, had sensed from the start that it was hopeless. He described the Senate vote on the bill on June 19 as “the final act of the longest debate and the greatest tragedy ever played out in the Senate of the United States.” It passed overwhelmingly, 73 to 27, and was signed into law by Johnson on July 2. Russell was praised by the president after the Georgian repeatedly urged fellow southerners to comply peacefully with the law. “Violence and defiance are no substitute for the campaign of reason and logic we must wage,” Russell said.

Russell’s absence from the commission meant that he had mostly forfeited his ability to control how the investigation was conducted, including how the staff was chosen and what they were assigned to do. The controversy over Norman Redlich that spring had created trouble for Russell with conservative constituents back home. Russell drafted a letter that could be sent out to Georgians who wrote in to complain. “Let me tell you again that I did not know that Redlich was working for the commission until the hearings were practically concluded,” he wrote, blaming the hiring on Lee Rankin. “When the matter was before the commission, I made it clear that had I known of his employment and background, I would have vigorously opposed his employment, and I told Mr. Rankin that I thought he had been derelict.” In May, he had complained directly to Johnson about Redlich. “I sat up last night until 11:30 readin’ the FBI reports on some son-of-a-bitch that this fellow Rankin hired over here on the Warren Commission,” he told the president in a recorded phone call. “Everybody’s raisin’ hell about him bein’ a Communist and all … a left-winger.”

But even while he participated little in the day-to-day work of the commission, Russell continued to monitor the investigation with the help of Alfredda Scobey. Every night, he insisted, he took home transcripts of the commission’s witness testimony. He read through the commission’s paperwork “until I thought my eyes were going to burn up,” he complained to an aide. And from a distance, he did not like what he was reading. He repeatedly told his Senate staff that he was disturbed by the way Warren was running the “assassination commission.” (Russell’s former press secretary, Powell Moore, said later that the senator refused to call it the Warren Commission. “Senator Russell always insisted on calling it the assassination commission.”) While the commission might be moving toward a conclusion that Oswald had acted alone, Russell was never certain of it; he said he found it hard to believe that Oswald “could have done all this by himself.” He was troubled by what he was reading about Oswald’s visit to Mexico and about his friendship while he lived in the Russian city of Minsk with a group of young Cubans.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act allowed Russell to become involved—reluctantly, he said—in the commission’s work. He announced that he wanted to see the scene of the assassination for himself and to interview Marina Oswald. He asked Rankin to organize a trip to Dallas. The other two southern lawmakers on the commission—Senator Cooper of Kentucky and Congressman Boggs of Louisiana—agreed to join him. Cooper recalled that Russell hoped he might be able to break Oswald’s widow and convince her to tell him secrets that she was still keeping from the commission. Warren, Russell complained, had treated her too gently, even after all her lies had been exposed. The chief justice “was all too grandfatherly,” he told his Senate secretary. “She should have been given something closer to a third-degree type of questioning.”

Russell’s delegation arrived in Dallas on Saturday, September 5, and toured the book depository the next day. Russell nearly created a panic on the streets outside the warehouse. The
Dallas Morning News
reported that about 150 sightseers were startled when they looked up and noticed an elderly man with a rifle standing at the window of the sixth floor, seeming to take aim at them. It was explained to them that it was Senator Russell, holding the weapon as he tried to imagine what Oswald would have seen. “Well, I just hope he’s not using real bullets,” said a woman scurrying for cover.

That afternoon, the delegation went to a nearby military base to meet Marina Oswald. Russell arrived with a long, handwritten list of questions. The session lasted more than four hours, with the congressmen learning almost nothing that had not been revealed before. Russell focused his questions on the relationship between Mrs. Oswald and her husband; he goaded her, suggesting that Oswald had actually been a “very devoted husband” who had been entitled to her loyalty.

“No,” Mrs. Oswald replied. “He was not a good husband.”

Russell reminded her that she had testified that Oswald had helped her with the housework and was good with his daughters.

“Well, I also testified to the fact that he beat me on many occasions,” she replied. “He was not good when he beat me.”

Russell: “He beat you on many occasions?”

Marina: “Many.”

Russell pressed her on aspects of her life in Russia before meeting Oswald, including her ties there to the Communist Party and about an uncle who worked for the Russian interior ministry. She could see where the questions were heading; he seemed to be suggesting that she was herself some sort of spy. “I want to assure the commission that I was never given any assignment by the Soviet government,” she declared.

The only surprising development in her testimony came when Mrs. Oswald volunteered her new theory that her husband had not intended to kill the president but had instead aimed his rifle at Governor Connally. The governor was the target, she said, because he, as navy secretary, had refused to intervene to overturn her husband’s less-than-honorable discharge from the Marine Corps.

Russell doubted she was right: “I think that you have your evidence terribly confused.”

Mrs. Oswald readily acknowledged that it was only speculation. “I have no facts whatsoever,” she said.

Her appearance that day reflected a seemingly newfound confidence. At her earlier appearances before the commission, she had always brought a lawyer along. This time she did not. “The attorney costs me too much,” she said.

During the questioning, Russell, like Warren before him, seemed to soften in the presence of the pretty young widow. He said he was glad that she was writing her memoirs and had found so many other ways to sell her story to newspapers and magazines, since it offered her a way to support herself and her daughters. “I was hoping that you had found some means of commercializing on it either to the moving picture people or to the publishing world.”

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On matters of national security, Russell was almost certainly the best-informed man in Congress, and it had been that way for years. In 1965, he would mark his tenth year as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In that job, he was privy to the most highly classified national-security information gathered at both the Pentagon and the CIA; at the time, the budgets of both agencies came under his oversight.

After Fidel Castro came to power in Havana in 1959, Russell would have known many secrets about Cuba, especially. He knew how the Kennedy administration had struggled since its first days in power to oust the Cuban government. That appeared to explain why, in his conversations with President Johnson and others after the assassination, Russell sensed, almost immediately, that Castro might have been involved, and if not Castro personally, some element of the Cuban government that believed it was operating on his behalf. He offered no similar dark suspicions about Soviet leaders.

Russell also sensed that, whatever the truth about the assassination, the CIA and the FBI were not necessarily eager to find it, if only to protect themselves from the discovery that there had been a conspiracy that the two agencies should have been able to disrupt. In his office files, Russell kept a small, ominous note that he had written to himself after the first meeting of the commission back in December. “Something strange is happening,” he wrote, referring to the investigation by the CIA and FBI of Oswald’s visit to Mexico. The investigation was only just getting under way, yet there already seemed to be a rush to demonstrate that Oswald was the lone assassin, whatever the evidence—to show that Oswald was the “only one ever considered” as the assassin, Russell wrote. “This to me is an untenable position.”

He knew that the CIA and the FBI had insisted from the start that they could find no evidence of a foreign plot. But through long experience, he also knew that the agencies were capable of lying—or so muddying the facts that no one would ever be able to figure out the truth. Also alarming to Russell was the possibility that Warren was being privately briefed—by the CIA? the White House? the president himself?—regarding sensitive elements of the investigation. At that first December meeting, he wrote, the chief justice seemed to know more about the possibility of Cuban involvement than he was telling. Warren appeared to know, for example, about the unconfirmed report from the CIA that Oswald might have received thousands of dollars at the Cuban embassy in Mexico. It surprised Russell that Warren had already been told that. The chief justice “knew all I did and more about [the] CIA.”