A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (72 page)

None of the commissioners reported any serious debate at the meeting about the harshness of the wording of the report’s criticism of the FBI and the Secret Service. The agencies would be castigated for their failure to share information about possible threats to the president; in particular, the bureau’s Dallas office and FBI agent James Hosty would be singled out for having failed to share Oswald’s name with the Secret Service ahead of Kennedy’s visit. “The FBI took an unduly restrictive view of its role in preventive intelligence work prior to the assassination,” the report concluded. “A more carefully coordinated treatment of the Oswald case by the FBI might well have resulted in bringing Oswald’s activities to the attention of the Secret Service.”

The Secret Service was more harshly criticized, with the commission calling for the agency to “completely overhaul” the way it gathered information about potential threats to the president. The report called on President Johnson to set up a cabinet-level committee to monitor the performance of the Secret Service. As Warren had insisted, the report recounted how agents in the Dallas motorcade had gone out drinking the night before the assassination; the report seemed to suggest, but did not say explicitly, that the agents could have saved the president’s life: “It is conceivable that those men who had little sleep, and who had consumed alcoholic beverages, even in limited quantities, might have been more alert.”

Despite his outspoken support for Hoover, Ford said later that he did not seek to soften the report’s criticism of the FBI; he thought Hoover would be comforted to see that the Secret Service was the far bigger target. From his reading of the findings, Ford said, “roughly 80 percent of our criticism” was directed at the Secret Service. “We found fault with the FBI only to a minor degree.”

Nor was there any debate, the commissioners recalled, about the report’s harsh criticism of municipal law-enforcement officials in Dallas, especially the city’s police department and the incompetence that had allowed Oswald to be murdered on live national television. As Russell said later, apparently facetiously, “It appeared to me that the Dallas police department was determined to let Oswald be executed without a trial.”

One prominent federal agency escaped criticism: the CIA. The report did not say it directly, but the commission seemed to accept the spy agency’s assessment that it had performed competently in its occasional surveillance of Oswald over the years, including in Mexico City. The CIA appeared to come out of the investigation with the respect of most of the commissioners, as well as of the staff, if only because the agency—in such sharp contrast to the FBI—had appeared willing to cooperate.

The only official record of the commission’s last executive session was a drily written, seven-page summary that said nothing about the heated debates later described by Russell and Ford. In purporting to explain what had happened in the meeting, the summary was fundamentally dishonest. The typewritten document—its author is not identified—made no mention of the dispute over the single-bullet theory, nor did it describe the debate that led the commission to leave open the possibility of a conspiracy. The summary made no reference at all to Russell’s threats of a dissent. The record would only show that the final report was approved and that it was approved unanimously.

54

THE OVAL OFFICE

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1964

President Johnson wanted to talk to his old friend Richard Russell, and he had the White House switchboard track Russell down at his home in Georgia, where the senator had gone for the weekend. The final meeting of the Warren Commission to approve its report had taken place earlier in the day, and Russell—exhausted, he said—fled Washington within hours.

If Johnson was even aware of the commission’s meeting that day, it was not clear from the recording that was made of the phone call. He seemed far more eager to talk with Russell in his old mentor’s role as chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Johnson had been consumed with reports throughout the day of a clash in the South China Sea between a pair of American destroyers and four North Vietnamese patrol boats. Just a month earlier, a skirmish between American and North Vietnamese warships in the Gulf of Tonkin had led Johnson to order bombing raids on North Vietnamese military compounds and prompted Congress to pass the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting Johnson broad powers to respond to threats from the Communist North. The resolution would eventually enable Johnson to order the first large deployments of American troops to Vietnam.

By day’s end Friday, Johnson was relieved by news that the initial reports of the clash with the North Vietnamese that morning were overstated. Still, with the presidential election six weeks away and Vietnam a potential flashpoint in the campaign, Johnson wanted to discuss the situation in Southeast Asia—and its political implications—with Russell, whose support he would want for any move to escalate the fight in Vietnam.

Johnson reached Russell just before eight p.m.

“Well, you’re always leavin’ town,” Johnson told the senator in a joking tone. “You must not like it up here.”

“Well, you left,” Russell replied, referring to a trip that Johnson had made to the West Coast a few days earlier. “No, that dang Warren Commission business has whupped me down so.”

He explained that the commission had approved the final report that afternoon. “You know what I did? I went over, got on the plane, came home. I didn’t even have a toothbrush. I got a few little things here. I didn’t even have my antihistamine pills to take care of my emphysema.”

Johnson: “Why did you get in such a rush?”

Russell: “Well, I was just worn out, fightin’ over that damn report.”

Johnson: “Well, you oughta taken another hour and gone to get your clothes.”

“No, no,” Russell replied. “Well, they were trying to prove that same bullet that hit Kennedy first was the one that hit Connally … went through him and through his hand, his bone, into his leg and everything else.”

Johnson: “What difference does it make which bullet got Connally?”

Russell: “Well, it don’t make much difference. But they believe … the commission believes that the same bullet that hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well, I don’t believe it!”

“I don’t either,” Johnson replied, a comment that seemed to reflect his respect for Russell, not any detailed understanding of the single-bullet theory.

“And I couldn’t sign it,” Russell continued. “And I said that Governor Connally testified directly to the contrary, and I’m not gonna approve of that. So I finally made ’em say there was a difference in the Commission, in that part of ’em believed that that wasn’t so.”

Johnson wanted to know what the rest of the report would say: “What’s the net of the whole thing? What’s it say? That Oswald did it, and he did it for any reason?”

Russell: “Well, just that he was a general misanthropic fella that … had never been satisfied anywhere he was on earth, in Russia or here, and that he had a desire to get his name in history and all. I don’t think you’ll be displeased with the report. It’s too long, but…”

Johnson: “Unanimous?”

Russell: “Yes, sir.”

Johnson: “Hmmm.”

Russell: “I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they’d come round and trade me out of it by giving me a little old thread of it.” (Russell appeared to be referring to Warren’s concession to rewrite the report to leave a “thread” of doubt, both about the single-bullet theory and a possible conspiracy.) With that, the conversation moved on to the developments in Vietnam.

*

The last days before publication were a frenzy, with the remaining staff lawyers—and the team of Supreme Court clerks, called in to help—checking and double-checking the text. “I just worked like a dog the last days,” David Slawson remembered. His law firm in Denver was desperate to have him return to work on a major antitrust case—the firm’s partners had originally been assured that Slawson would return by mid-spring—and so Slawson declared that Friday, September 18, would be his last day in the office. It was the same day the commissioners approved the report.

In his final hours at his desk, Slawson began to feel ill. “I thought, ‘Oh Christ, I’m coming down with the flu,’” he said. But it was not the flu. Instead, he was exhausted to the point of collapse. “When I left on Friday night, I went to bed and … I didn’t get up until Sunday. I didn’t eat anything for two days. I just slept.” On Sunday, he felt well enough to begin the three-day drive back to Denver.

John McCloy said he was disturbed, slightly, by the hurry to complete the investigation. He thought the commission had reached the right conclusions but that the report could have been better, more clearly written. “We had no rush to judgment,” he recalled, but “there were some questions of style.… I had a feeling at the end we were rushing a little bit.” That helped explain several sloppy errors in the report, including a number of misattributed footnotes and misspelled names, and many instances in which information in one chapter was repeated, almost word for word, in another.

In preparing to close down the office, the commission determined which staff lawyers had worked the hardest—as measured by the workdays for which they had billed the commission—and who had done almost no work at all. To no one’s surprise, the records showed that Frank Adams, Specter’s long-absent partner, had worked the least—a total of 16 days, five hours. Coleman came in second, although he worked four times as many days as Adams, for a total of 64 days. Among the junior lawyers, Burt Griffin had worked the most days—225—followed by Liebeler with 219 and Slawson with 211. The senior staff lawyer with the most workdays was Lee Rankin: 308, which meant that he had, effectively, worked more than a full workday every day, including weekends, since he was hired in December. Few on the staff doubted it was true.

*

In the final weeks of the investigation, the trio of women who, more than any other, had held the panel’s attention—Jacqueline Kennedy, Marina Oswald, and Marguerite Oswald—made contact with the commission. Mrs. Kennedy sent word through intermediaries that she wanted to take custody of her husband’s blood-soaked clothes. In their final executive session, the commissioners gave their consent, so long as she agreed to make the clothes available to later investigations “to support the work the commission has done.”

Warren said later he refused to turn over the clothing unconditionally. “Little Mrs. Kennedy asked me for the president’s clothing,” he told Drew Pearson, according to Pearson’s diary. “I suspected she wanted to destroy it, but I declined. We couldn’t be in the position of suppressing or destroying any evidence.” Ultimately, she did not take the clothes. “In the end, we sent his clothing, the X-rays and the photographs to the Justice Department with instructions that they should not be shown to the public,” Warren said. The clothes were later turned over to the National Archives for preservation in perpetuity.

Oswald’s widow and mother would also be left unsatisfied. Until the final days of the commission’s work, Marina Oswald asked for the return of all of her husband’s belongings, including both the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and Smith & Wesson pistol. The request for the weapons was denied, a decision made easier by the discovery that she was trying to sell them to collectors.

The staff lawyers said they were not surprised when a letter arrived in mid-August from a Manhattan literary agent representing Marguerite Oswald. Mrs. Oswald, the agent said, was insisting that the commission be blocked from making any use of her testimony or any of the material she had given to the investigation—“photographs, documents or any other kind of property of hers”—without her permission. The commission needed her “written consent, which you do not presently have,” the agent warned. For good measure, the agent sent copies of the letter to the White House, the Speaker of the House, and the president of the Senate; Mrs. Oswald, he made clear, wanted to put everybody in the federal government on notice of her demands. To no avail, however: the commission ignored the letter and published her testimony in full.

Like her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Oswald was busy selling off souvenirs of her son’s life. Earlier that year, she had sold
Esquire
magazine sixteen letters that her son had written to her from Russia, for a reported $4,000; the letters were published along with photos of Mrs. Oswald taken for the magazine by the celebrated photographer Diane Arbus. Mrs. Oswald also recorded a phonograph album that year in which she read from the letters.

*

On Thursday morning, September 24, Chief Justice Warren lifted the navy-blue box that contained a copy of the final report—four inches thick, 888 pages, 296,000 words—and handed it to President Johnson in the White House Cabinet Room. A swarm of reporters and photographers recorded the scene. “It’s pretty heavy,” the president said—the only words he spoke that reporters could make out clearly. The White House released a letter that day that the president had written to Warren: “The Commission, I know, has been guided by a determination to find and tell the whole truth of these terrible events.”

Warren was joined for the ceremony by the other six members of the commission. Under an agreement with the White House press corps, the report was not released to the public that day. Johnson planned to take it with him to his ranch in Johnson City, Texas, to read over the weekend. On Saturday, news organizations would be given copies with the understanding that their stories would be embargoed for release at six thirty p.m. Sunday, Eastern time. The three television networks announced plans for live programs that night to reveal the report’s conclusions. CBS News planned a two-hour special that would include interviews with many of the eyewitnesses to the murder of either President Kennedy or Officer Tippit. “We ended up with 26 witnesses, all of whom had appeared before the commission and all of whom told us the same story they told the commission,” said Leslie Midgley, the show’s producer. The
New York Times
announced plans to publish the entire report in Monday’s edition and, two days later, to publish the full report as a softcover book in conjunction with Bantam Books, with a retail price of $2. For readers in Washington who did not want to wait, the official report published by the Government Printing Office would be available for sale at eight thirty Monday morning—$3.25 for the hardcover edition, $2.50 for the softcover. The commission announced plans to release the twenty-six volumes of the appendix—containing much of the evidence of the investigation, as well as witness testimony—later that year.