A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (70 page)

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Russell’s last-minute trip to Dallas had not ended his suspicion of a conspiracy. Nor had the trip ended his skepticism about the single-bullet theory. He respected Governor Connally, and if Connally believed he had been hit by a separate bullet, Russell was not going to doubt him. So after returning to Washington, he knew he faced a dilemma as the commission prepared to meet to approve a final report. He needed to ask himself if he could put his name to conclusions that he could not accept. In mid-September, he called in a secretary and began dictating his formal dissent—a document that would remain secret in his Senate files until years after his death.

He began by rejecting the single-bullet theory: “I do not share the finding of the Commission as to the probability that both President Kennedy and Governor Connally were struck by the same bullet.… . Reviewing the Zapruder film several times adds to my conviction that the bullet that passed through Governor Connally’s body was not the same bullet as that which passed through the President’s back and neck.”

He then moved on to questions about whether Oswald acted alone: “While I join with my colleagues in the finding that there is no clear and definite evidence connecting any person or group in a conspiracy with Oswald to assassinate the President, there are some aspects of this case that I cannot decide with absolute certainty.” He said he was still alarmed by reports about Oswald’s association with the Cuban students in Minsk and by the lack of a “detailed account of all of Oswald’s movements, contacts and associations on his secret visit to Mexico.” He wrote that he could not share “in a categorical finding that Oswald planned and perpetrated the assassination without the knowledge, encouragement or assistance of another person.”

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In the final days of editing the report, the staff at last heard back from the FBI about Silvia Odio and her claim of meeting Oswald on her doorstep in Dallas. The bureau said it had new information to prove that the young Cuban woman was wrong. FBI agents had finally identified the three men who were seen at Odio’s door—and Oswald was not among them. The news arrived on September 21 in a letter from J. Edgar Hoover. According to Hoover, the bureau had tracked down a thirty-four-year-old Cuban-American truck driver named Loran Eugene Hall who claimed he was one of the anti-Castro militants who went to see Odio. Hall identified himself as a professional mercenary who turned against Castro after serving in his guerrilla army.

In September 1963, Hall said, he had been traveling in Dallas with two fellow anti-Castro guerrillas—Lawrence Howard, who was Mexican-American, and William Seymour, who was not a Latino and spoke only a few words of Spanish—to raise money for the cause, and they had gone to the home of a woman he believed was Odio. Hall thought she might have mistaken Seymour for Oswald.

Hoover acknowledged that the investigation was ongoing and that FBI agents were still searching for Howard and Seymour. Still, there was a sense of relief at the commission about the last-minute news from the FBI. Now the final report could rule out what had previously seemed to be the strongest testimony from any witness suggesting that Oswald might have had coconspirators.

David Slawson, who had pressed so vigorously to pursue Odio’s claims, could not recall years later if he had read Hoover’s letter, nor did he remember the details of how the bureau had apparently resolved Odio’s claims. Like his colleagues, Slawson was simply too busy with the task of completing his part of the report. There was no discussion, or at least none that Slawson could recall, about having someone from the commission interview Hall; there was no time for it. “We could only assume that the FBI had it right.”

With Hoover’s letter in hand, the portions of the report that dealt with Odio were hurriedly rewritten to explain—and rebut—what she had claimed. In the report, the commission saluted itself for pushing the FBI to revisit Odio’s story: “In spite of the fact that it appeared almost certain that Oswald could not have been in Dallas at the time Mrs. Odio thought he was, the Commission requested the FBI to conduct further investigation to determine the validity of Mrs. Odio’s testimony.” The report noted the FBI’s success in tracking down Loran Hall and how it was Hall and his two companions who had appeared at Odio’s door. “While the FBI had not yet completed its investigation into this matter at the time the report went to press, the Commission has concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was not at Mrs. Odio’s apartment in September of 1963.”

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Although the commission was about to close its doors and could no longer monitor the FBI investigation in Dallas, the bureau did continue to pursue the Odio inquiry, and the account it had provided to the commission fell apart almost instantly. Over time, Loran Hall would change his story more than once, eventually insisting—under oath to congressional investigators—that the FBI had misrepresented him and that he had never visited Odio’s apartment. He thought the FBI agents who had initially interviewed him might have concocted a false story to appease the commission. Seymour and Howard were also located; both insisted that they did not know Odio and had never been to her apartment. There was evidence to support their denials. The FBI was able to confirm that Seymour had been working in Florida on the night that he was supposedly in Texas.

FBI agents in Dallas paid another visit to Odio on October 1, a week after the commission’s report was issued, and showed her photographs of Hall, Howard, and Seymour. She recognized none of them, and she insisted again—as she would insist for decades to come—that it was Lee Harvey Oswald she had seen at the door of her Dallas home in September 1963.

53

THE OFFICES OF REPRESENTATIVE GERALD R. FORD

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

WASHINGTON, DC

SEPTEMBER 1964

Gerald Ford’s book project was becoming harder to keep a secret. A fast-growing circle of editors in the publishing industry in New York were aware of his plans to write a book that would be an inside account of the investigation, with publication soon after the commission’s report was made public. Ford and his friend and coauthor, Jack Stiles, had lined up the William Morris talent agency to negotiate a deal with the publishing house Simon and Schuster.

The final contract called for Ford to be paid an advance of $10,000, and up to 15 percent of the retail price on each book sold after the advance was recouped; a contract for the paperback rights to the book would be negotiated later. The advance alone was equivalent to nearly half of Ford’s $22,500 annual salary in the House.
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The book, which would center on Oswald’s life story and his possible motives for assassinating Kennedy, was given the title
Portrait of the Assassin
, although Ford had initially suggested
Kennedy’s Killer
. Ford had been introduced to the publisher by the editor of
Life
magazine, Edward K. Thompson, who wanted to publish an excerpt of the book in conjunction with the release of the commission’s final report.

Simon and Schuster decided to go ahead with the book despite internal qualms, both about the quality of the sample chapters they were reading—“effortful, awkward suspense writing,” one editor said—and the propriety of Ford taking on the project at all. “I am still disturbed by the idea of one member of this august body writing a one-man ‘behind-the-scenes story,’” another editor wrote.

Ford had worked throughout the summer to keep
Life
and Simon and Schuster interested in the project, even inviting editors from the magazine and the publishing house to come down to Washington to read through internal commission documents stored in his office. He made the offer even at a time when he knew he was facing questions from the FBI about whether he had leaked Oswald’s “Historic Diary” to
Life
. “Got Jerry Ford on the telephone,” Thompson, the magazine editor, wrote on July 8 to an executive at Simon and Schuster. “He suggested that someone might want to see some of the basic documents in his Washington office … and if you think that ought to be done, let me know.” Thompson put his own journalistic curiosity aside and passed up the offer to see the secret files. He had reminded Ford, he wrote, that documents by themselves would not sell books. Readers would instead want to read Ford’s “personal contribution”—his private thoughts about the investigation and about Oswald. “I didn’t see much purpose to be served by going over the documents, which so far are strictly from the commission.”

In the face of later criticism that he was trying to profit off the assassination, he insisted that the book was a valuable contribution to the historical record. Ford also saw nothing wrong, he said, with his decision to allow Stiles and his other informal advisers—including John Ray, the retired congressman, and Francis Fallon, the Harvard Law student—to review classified documents. “They made a good team,” he said of his circle of advisers. “Jack was a writer, John a lawyer. They prepared questions for me to ask at commission hearings, they analyzed the transcripts, looking for discrepancies.” Without them, he said, he might have fallen far behind on his work for the commission.

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The year had proved unusually busy anyway for Ford. He was always swamped with work as a result of his membership on the House Appropriations Committee, and in 1964 he was drawn deeply into national politics. That summer, it was widely reported that he was on the short list of vice presidential candidates being considered by Barry Goldwater. Fallon, who turned twenty-three that year, came away impressed with Ford’s commitment to the investigation, despite his heavy duties in Congress. He thought Ford’s only failing as a commissioner was his tendency to assume the best about the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover.

As the summer wore on, Fallon urged Ford to press the commission to keep looking for evidence of a conspiracy. In a memo on July 31, he told Ford he was worried that the report was being written to gloss over evidence suggesting that Oswald had been trained for espionage in the Soviet Union. “Don’t allow a whitewash job,” Fallon told Ford. “In too many areas, we just don’t have enough information. Try to get more info if possible. Be sure you see sources for statements attributed to ‘confidential sources.’” Ford’s friend Stiles expressed even stronger suspicions. On September 4, with the investigation nearly at an end, he urged Ford to consider again the possibility that Oswald had been someone’s spy. “Do we have any real proof that Oswald was not an agent? We have no proof that he was, but it is a different matter to totally close the door on the subject.”

Ford was closing no doors prematurely, he insisted. He said later he carefully weighed all of the conspiracy theories, including some that had not been widely shared with the public. In May, a reporter for the
Detroit Free Press
, the largest morning newspaper in Ford’s home state, contacted him to ask what he made of rumors that Oswald had been part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that was launched in New Orleans when he lived there in 1963. The rumors were complicated to follow and they had elements of the salacious, which explained why many reporters outside Louisiana had declined to pursue them.

The rumors focused on a New Orleans man who was involved in right-wing groups seeking Castro’s overthrow: a former Eastern Airlines pilot named David Ferrie, who had been questioned by both New Orleans police and the FBI shortly after the assassination. As a teenager, Oswald had belonged to a Louisiana squadron of the Civil Air Patrol, or CAP—a volunteer group sponsored by the United States Air Force to encourage aviation enthusiasts. Records showed that Oswald had been a member of the local squadron at a time when Ferrie was helping run it; Ferrie would adamantly deny knowing Oswald, although a photograph would emerge years later that seemed to show them together at a CAP meeting.

Ford scribbled down notes to himself as he heard the increasingly bizarre story about Ferrie (he misspelled the name as “Ferry”), who had been dismissed by the airline “for homosexual activity” involving teenage boys and who—the reporter said—“wears a wig and false eyebrows.” (Ferrie suffered from alopecia, an ailment that causes the loss of body hair.) According to the Detroit reporter, Ferrie was also tied to organized crime figures; he worked as a part-time investigator for a New Orleans lawyer who represented local mob chief Carlos Marcello, and it was rumored that he had flown Marcello back into the United States after a Justice Department attempt to deport him during the Kennedy administration.

“Probably knew O in CAP,” Ford wrote in his notes, referring to Oswald and the Civil Air Patrol. “Lee Harvey Oswald—Homosexual?” He tried to imagine how these details might come together: if Oswald was tied to Ferrie, possibily through a shared sexual orientation or through Cuban exile groups, could that mean that he was also tied to a Mafia boss who might have wanted revenge against Kennedy?

On the commission’s staff, the investigation of the rumors about Ferrie—and about the possibility of other ties among Oswald and organized-crime figures in New Orleans—was assigned to Wesley Liebeler. During his New Orleans trip in July, Liebeler found nothing to support the idea of any larger conspiracy involving Ferrie or the Mafia. As a result, there was no mention of the rumors about Ferrie at all in the commission’s final report. “The FBI did a very substantial piece of work on Ferrie,” Liebeler said later. “It just did not lead anywhere.”
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By the end of the investigation, Ford said he had come to accept that conspiracy theories about the assassination were unavoidable given “the complexity of events, the freakish coincidences of facts” that the commission was uncovering. “In retrospect, the unbelievable coincidences that took place couldn’t happen—and yet they did.” In conversations with Stiles, Ford tried to talk through all of the possible conspiracies. They found useful ways of framing the discussion, especially after they realized that most conspiracy theories required that Oswald be a “plant” at the Texas School Book Depository. Could that be true? They reviewed the facts of how he had gotten the job in October—how at Marina Oswald’s urging, Ruth Paine had phoned a supervisor at the book depository, who agreed to meet with Oswald and then hired him. The book depository had two warehouses in Dallas. Unless the supervisor was somehow in on the conspiracy, it was only chance that led him to assign Oswald to the building that overlooked Dealey Plaza.