A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (71 page)

Ford found another effective way to frame the debate—by analyzing calendars for the final months of 1963. If Oswald and his coconspirators had somehow arranged for him to get a job at the book depository, they would have needed to know that Kennedy’s motorcade would pass in front of the building. Ford reviewed the chronology of Kennedy’s Texas trip and how it had been organized by the White House. The timelines showed that Kennedy’s plans to visit Texas on November 21 and 22 had been known publicly since late September. But the inclusion of Dallas in the itinerary was not confirmed until November 9—three weeks after Oswald had been hired at the book depository. And it was not until November 19, only three days before Kennedy’s arrival, that the motorcade route past the book depository was made public. It was “sheer coincidence” that put Oswald in a building where he would have a clear shot at the president, Ford could see. “Fate put him in the right place at the right time to play his black role.”

Similarly, Ford felt that the timeline of the events of Sunday, November 24, the day Oswald was killed, proved that Ruby had not been part of a conspiracy. It was “pure happenstance” that had given Ruby the time he needed to get to the basement of police headquarters to gun down Oswald. The transfer of Oswald to the county jail had been held up at the last minute at the request of a federal postal inspector who wanted the chance to ask a few questions of the accused assassin; the inspector had been at Sunday church services and could not get there earlier. That brief delay gave Ruby—who had been across the street at a Western Union office, wiring $25 to one of his strippers—the time he needed. If Oswald’s transfer had been moved up just two or three minutes, Ruby would have arrived too late.

*

Ford was frustrated by the commission’s failure to reach a judgment about Oswald’s motives. In his book with Stiles and in his later comments on the assassination, he offered his best guess about what drove Oswald to kill President Kennedy, and it would prove to be the most detailed, and in many ways the most thoughtful, explanation offered by any of the commissioners.

In Ford’s view, many of the answers could be found in Oswald’s “Historic Diary.” Oswald was not motivated principally by politics in anything he did, Ford thought. His “so-called Marxism” was “a mishmash of revolutionary dialectics and dreams of a better society he could not put his finger on.” Instead, Ford believed, Oswald was motivated by a desperate craving for attention and a childlike stubbornness that blocked his ability to call off an act to which he had committed himself. Ford was the father of four young children, three of them boys, and he thought he knew enough about child psychology to sense that Oswald had not outgrown the impulses of a juvenile. The “Historic Diary” was a “vivid self-portrait of a young man, who, when he couldn’t have his own way, resorted to melodramatic and rash actions to call attention to himself,” he wrote. “When thwarted by circumstances, an ordinary person might beat his fists on the table or, better yet, learn a lesson. But not Lee Harvey Oswald.… He was like a child who, failing to gain the attention he wants, finds that smashing a toy or making a mess is the easiest way to obtain recognition.”

Ford thought something else had motivated Oswald, although he did not put it in his book or say it publicly. It involved Oswald’s sexuality. The commission had heard from witnesses, several times, about the Oswalds’ sexual problems. Ford guessed that Oswald was impotent and that Marina’s mocking of his sexual performance had left him so humiliated that he set out to prove his masculinity with a rifle. “I have a feeling, and I think others shared it, that he, Oswald, was being prodded by his wife on his impotence,” Ford said in a 2003 interview published after his death. “He had to do something to display his bravado.”

*

As Ford and his advisers read through draft chapters of the report, they pulled together long lists of editing suggestions that Ford then submitted to the commission. His editing changes were easy to track, since he submitted them—for each draft chapter—in a letter on House stationery addressed to Rankin. Many of his suggestions were welcome, since he often caught errors, reflecting the close reading that his advisers had given the drafts. On September 2, he wrote Rankin to insist that the commission correct a statement suggesting that Oswald rarely drank alcohol, an assertion that would undermine possibly credible witnesses who had claimed to see him in bars in New Orleans and Dallas. “The record is clear that he drank liquor, sometimes to excess, while he was in Russia, and also in New Orleans in 1963.” As Ford had recommended, the passage was deleted.

He urged another change that would later become controversial, asking that a key sentence about the medical evidence be rewritten to clarify the location of the entrance wound on Kennedy’s body from the first bullet to hit him—the one that had apparently also hit Connally. The draft had originally said that “a bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder and to the right of the spine.” On his copy, Ford crossed out those words and changed them to: “A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.” The change was made. Ford explained years later that he was only trying to clarify the wound’s location. “To any reasonable person, ‘above the shoulder and to the right’ sounds very high and way off to the side—and that’s the way it sounded to me.” Conspiracy theorists would later claim that Ford was instead trying to deceive readers about the bullet’s trajectory in an effort to bolster the single-bullet theory. In fact, Ford’s change appeared to reflect the commission’s continuing confusion about exactly where the bullets had landed.

Decades later, a congressionally authorized review by a team of independent medical experts determined that the navy pathologists who conducted the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital had made astonishing errors, including misstating the location of both entrance wounds in Kennedy’s body. When outside pathologists were finally shown the autopsy photos, they concluded that the first shot struck lower in the back than the autopsy report suggested and that the entrance wound in the head was a full four inches higher.

*

Warren said it was alarming for him to look at the calendar in September and realize how few days remained until the first Monday in October—that year, Monday, October 5—and the start of a new term for the Supreme Court. He and Rankin announced a schedule for the completion of the commission’s work. The final executive session was set for Friday, September 18, at ten a.m., in the hearing room at the VFW building, with the full day set aside for the commissioners to debate and approve the report. The final edited galleys would then be transferred to the Government Printing Office, with a copy of the bound report ready to be hand-delivered to President Johnson the following Thursday, September 24, at the White House.

Warren was more determined than ever to produce a unanimous report; anything less might lead the public to conclude that the facts about the president’s murder were still uncertain or that they were being hidden. “It would have been disastrous if we hadn’t been unanimous,” he told Drew Pearson. To Pearson, he recalled again, with pride, the behind-the-scenes campaign he had mounted to achieve a unanimous decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
in 1954. He remembered the satisfaction he felt at the moment the Brown ruling was read out, by him, in the court: “When the word ‘unanimously’ was spoken, a wave of emotion swept the room,” he said. It was an “instinctive emotional manifestation that defies description.”

But to obtain a unanimous verdict in an important Supreme Court case, Warren often needed months of planning—and coaxing. In the Brown decision, he mounted what was, in effect, an aggressive lobbying campaign over several months to convince colleagues to sign on to the ruling, even appearing at one justice’s hospital bedside to press the case. To obtain unanimity on the assassination report, however, the chief justice would have only weeks, or even days. If Warren intended to adhere to the deadlines he had set, the final executive session on September 18 would be his last and only chance to convince the commissioners that they needed to speak with one voice about the president’s death.

Since the commission was no longer keeping transcripts of its deliberations, at least none that would ever be made public, there would be no way of saying with certainty how Warren achieved the unanimous report or how close he might have come to failure. Over the years, however, some of the commissioners would give accounts of what happened that day.

Russell revealed later that he had gone into the meeting ready to sign a dissent—he had already written one, after all—and he suspected other commissioners would join him in defying Warren. He had been saying for weeks that he did not believe, or at least could not support, the single-bullet theory. Yet the draft chapters he was shown before the meeting concluded that the theory had to be true. Russell felt almost as strongly, he said, that the commission had to leave open the possibility that Oswald had been part of a conspiracy. But the draft chapters, as he read them, stated flatly that Oswald had acted alone.

Russell told aides after the meeting that Warren had, at first, stubbornly refused to alter the report to raise any questions about the single-bullet theory. “Warren just wouldn’t give in,” he told his longtime Senate secretary. “He was adamant that this was the way it was gonna be.” According to Russell’s account, Warren explained the necessity for a unanimous report and then urged the commission to adopt the findings as they had been laid out by the staff: Russell recalled that Warren looked around the room at the other commissioners and declared, before inviting any discussion, “We’re all agreed and we’re going to sign the report.”

That was when Russell spoke up to correct—and to challenge—the chief justice. They were
not
in agreement. There would be a dissent, he warned, especially about the single-bullet theory. “I’ll never sign that report if this commission says categorically that the second shot passed through both” Kennedy and Connally, he declared. He was offended, he said, by the idea that the commission would challenge Connally’s certainty that he had been hit by a separate bullet. Senator Cooper spoke up to support Russell, saying he also believed Connally and would sign the dissent. Russell remembered Congressman Boggs suggested that he, too, was not fully convinced by the single-bullet theory.

On what he expected would be the final substantive day of the commission’s work, Warren was suddenly faced with a rebellion, and the possibility of a divided report. Two, and perhaps three, commissioners were prepared to dissent.

Warren said consistently in the years after the investigation that he believed, strongly, in the single-bullet theory and that he understood the argument made passionately by the staff that the theory had to be true if Oswald had acted alone. But Warren had spent most of his career not on the bench but in politics. He knew—probably as well as anyone in that room—that while compromise could be distasteful when it meant shading the truth, it could also be the price of getting something done. So he agreed to negotiate.

The result was language, approved by both Warren and Russell, that watered down the original text and left open the possibility that Connally had been hit by a separate bullet—an assertion that the commission’s staff believed simply made no sense. The awkward compromise language inserted into the report read:

Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally, there is very persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet which pierced the President’s throat also caused Governor Connally’s wounds. However, Governor Connally’s testimony and certain other factors have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability, but there is no question in the mind of any member of the Commission that all the shots which caused the President’s and Governor Connally’s wounds were fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.

Russell wanted other changes in the report. He announced that he was again prepared to dissent if the commission did not leave open the possibility of a conspiracy. He said he agreed that Oswald appeared to be the lone gunman. But he declared it wrong to suggest that there was not even a remote possibility that Oswald had coconspirators in Dallas or elsewhere. “I agree wholly with the facts before us, but we cannot say that at some point in the future there may not be some other evidence,” Russell told Warren. “We cannot categorically close the door to the facts that may arise.”

This time, Ford said, he stepped forward to support Russell, and the rewriting on this point was less tortured. Rather than make an unqualified statement that there had been no conspiracy, the report was rewritten to say that instead, the commission had found “no evidence” of a conspiracy, leaving open the possibility that the evidence might emerge someday. And with that, the chief justice had what he wanted: a unanimous report that, he hoped, would forever end the dark rumors about the assassination of a president he had so admired, even loved. Warren announced that the seven commissioners would meet again in six days’ time at the White House to present the report to President Johnson.

*

Lee Rankin came out of the meeting to explain to his deputies, Howard Willens and Norman Redlich, what had happened. Willens was appalled. By backing away from full support for the single-bullet theory, the commission was being dishonest, several staff lawyers agreed. “Rankin made an effort to explain the commission’s decision to Redlich and me, but we could not accept the excuses that he offered,” Willens recalled. The changes had obviously been made “out of deference to Connally,” not because of any commitment to the truth. The Texas governor’s mistake in insisting that he was hit by a separate bullet was understandable, but it still was a mistake. Yet the commission was now suggesting that Connally might be right, which left open—forever—the possibility of a second gunman. “The compromise was indefensible and endangered the credibility of the report,” Willens said later. “It raised more questions than it answered and gave comfort to conspiracy theorists for decades to come.”