A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (75 page)

Inquest
turned out to be a fierce attack on the Warren Commission, alleging that it had ignored evidence that pointed to a second gunman in Dealey Plaza. In his most alarming charge, Epstein suggested that Kennedy’s autopsy report had been altered to fit the single-bullet theory and that the theory itself might be fiction. His allegations centered on the discrepancies between the autopsy report and a pair of FBI memos, prepared within weeks of the assassination, about what had happened to the first bullet to hit the president; it was the bullet that the commission’s staff was certain had also struck Connally. The FBI memos stated that the bullet penetrated only a short distance into the president’s body from behind, possibly before falling out. The commission’s lawyers, especially Arlen Specter, had been convinced early on in their investigation that the FBI memos were wrong and reflected the initial confusion among the pathologists at Bethesda Naval Hospital about the bullet’s path; two FBI agents who witnessed the autopsy had taken down the doctor’s faulty speculation as fact. To Epstein, however, the differences between the FBI memos and the autopsy report were possible evidence of a cover-up. If the FBI reports were right, the bullet could not have hit Connally.

Epstein said he found other gaps in the commission’s investigation; he identified seemingly important witnesses who were never questioned by the commission. And he seemed to have the best possible evidence to back up his attacks—previously unpublished commission records, especially Liebeler’s detailed, harshly critical internal memos.

The book was a sensation, prompting respectful news articles, as well as glowing reviews, in major newspapers and magazines. In his introduction, Rovere praised Epstein as a “brilliant young academician” who had proved that the Warren Commission investigation “fell far short of being exhaustive” and that evidence supposedly showing Oswald to be the sole gunman was “highly vulnerable.”
Inquest
would be remembered as the book that gave credibility to the conspiracy-theory movement. Under the headline “Pandora’s Box,” Eliot Fremont-Smith, a critic for the
New York Times
, described it as “the first book to throw open to serious question, in the minds of thinking people, the findings of the Warren Commission.” For the paperback edition of
Inquest
, the cover was redesigned to make it more eye-catching, with a silhouette of a man with a rifle standing behind a photograph of Oswald beneath the words, in red: “Is one of the murderers of John F. Kennedy still on the loose?”

Liebeler’s obvious cooperation with Epstein infuriated some of his former colleagues; it was now one of their own, they thought, who was fueling the conspiracy movement. Albert Jenner, who already loathed Liebeler from their time together on the commission, wrote to David Belin that he “glanced through those portions of Epstein’s odious screed in which Herr Liebeler is copiously quoted” and could see that “Jim is still a frustrated, envious, inferiority-complex plagued man,” and went on: “I might forgive him this if he had exhibited good taste.” He thought that “Epstein and his Harvard Ph.D. supervisors should be, but very likely are not, thoroughly ashamed.” (Epstein had gone on to a doctoral program at Harvard.) Norman Redlich wrote to Epstein’s thesis adviser at Cornell to protest the book, which he described as a “wholly specious work.” He said he had been wildly misquoted. “Frankly,” he wrote, “I am appalled by the inaccuracies of the book and the statements which he had attributed to me which I never made.” Belin said he had sensed, during the investigation, that Liebeler would do something like this. “When I left Washington, I was sure on the basis of conversations I had with Jim Liebeler that he was going to talk to someone,” Belin said later. “The fact that he did and the fact that he tried to make himself out as the real hero of the investigation is not surprising.” In the months after publication of
Inquest
, Liebeler tried, futilely, it seemed, to distance himself from the book, insisting in letters to friends that he did not question the commission’s central findings. He described Epstein’s book as a “shallow, superficial and poorly thought-through piece of work.”

The damage, however, was done. In late July, Richard Goodwin, a former Kennedy speechwriter, became the first member of the slain president’s senior staff at the White House to call for an official reexamination of the findings of the Warren Commission. “
Inquest
,” Goodwin said, “not only raises questions but demands explorations and answers.”

At the Supreme Court, Warren refused to be drawn into any new debate, telling the court’s press office to make no comment to reporters about the book. Still, the questions came at the chief justice—to his face. He appeared startled in late June 1966 when, minutes after stepping off a plane in Israel, where he had gone to participate in the dedication of a memorial to President Kennedy, he was confronted by a reporter with questions about
Inquest
. “I would not care to comment,” Warren said. “We wrote our report—it was the best we could do after 10 months of intensive research.… It was unanimous.”

In August,
Rush to Judgment
was released. Lane’s book did not receive the overwhelming critical praise that Epstein had enjoyed; Lane was just too controversial, and too many reporters said they had learned from experience not to trust what he said. But there was praise. The
Houston Post
described it as “a compelling, powerful and patriotically impassioned plea in behalf of the unvarnished truth.” The
New York Times Times
said that while the book suffered from “bias and shrillness,” it was “an eloquent summary of the defense.” And the book became a massive bestseller, much larger than
Inquest
, and rose to number one on the
New York Times
nonfiction bestseller list. It would remain on the list for twenty-six weeks.
^*

*

After the commission, David Slawson had returned to work at his law firm in Denver, but he stayed only briefly in Colorado before turning around and heading back to Washington. Like Liebeler, who would remain a lifelong friend, Slawson decided that he did not want to spend the rest of his career behind a desk at a law firm. He, too, wanted a career in teaching. He decided to begin applying for faculty jobs at major law schools while taking another brief detour into public service. In the summer of 1965, he was delighted with an offer to join the staff of the Justice Department’s elite Office of Legal Counsel in Washington.

Slawson felt some regret that he had missed the chance to work at the department under Robert Kennedy, who had since been elected to the Senate; the Kennedy years at the department had obviously been a thrilling time. Slawson was also disappointed that he had so little chance to resume contact with a treasured old friend from Denver who now worked for Kennedy—Joseph Dolan. “I just loved Joe,” Slawson said. “A wonderful guy, with a big Irish sense of humor.”

Slawson and Dolan had both been active in Democratic politics in Colorado. They met when they worked together in John Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign; they were introduced by Kennedy’s campaign manager in the state, Byron “Whizzer” White, Slawson’s mentor at his law firm. After Kennedy’s victory, White and Dolan both left for jobs at the Justice Department in Washington. White had first worked as deputy attorney general under Robert Kennedy, and was then nominated to the Supreme Court. Dolan had emerged as one of Robert Kennedy’s “Irish mafia” of trusted aides in the attorney general’s office, and he then followed Kennedy to Capitol Hill, where he ran Kennedy’s Senate staff.

In his first months at the Justice Department, Slawson usually faced a sea of anonymous faces on the side streets of Pennsylvania Avenue when he left work for the day. As efficient as ever, he could usually get all of his work done by five p.m. and join the crush of federal workers heading home in the afternoon rush. So it was a happy surprise for Slawson when he left the office one afternoon and saw a face he instantly recognized.

It was Dolan, standing off in the distance on the sidewalk. He quickly began walking toward Slawson, his arm outstretched.

“Joe? Here? What’s he doing here?” Slawson thought to himself.

He said he realized almost instantly that this encounter was no coincidence; Dolan was not the sort of person you found loitering on a sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon, at least not anymore. Dolan, it seemed, had been standing there, waiting for Slawson to exit the building.

That this was no coincidence was reflected on Dolan’s face. If this had been a surprise, he would have been all smiles. Instead, as he walked toward Slawson, “he was somber, purposeful.”

“Dave, great to see you,” Dolan said. “Have you got a minute? Can we talk?”

“Of course,” Slawson replied.

“The senator has sent me over to ask a few questions.”

“Sure, Joe, sure,” said Slawson, trying to imagine what Kennedy might want to know from him and why the senator might want the information gathered in this cloak-and-dagger fashion—near a busy street at rush hour, with no formal record that the conversation had ever occurred.

Dolan got straight to the point. “Dave, it’s about his brother’s assassination. It’s about the Warren Commission.”

Slawson said he was taken aback.

“Dave, this needs to remain between us, but the senator is still concerned about a conspiracy. I’ve told the senator about your duties on the commission—that you investigated the whole conspiracy question. And he wants me to ask you: Are you sure the Warren Commission got it right? Are you sure that Oswald acted alone?”

Slawson tried to imagine what had prompted this. Kennedy had insisted publicly, more than once, that he believed the commission’s findings. Had Kennedy learned something that had changed his mind?

“Joe, I still think we got it right,” Slawson told Dolan. “I think Oswald did it alone.”

As they stood there, the afternoon traffic whizzing by, Slawson offered a shorthand version of how he and the commission concluded there had been no conspiracy.

Dolan listened closely and nodded in what seemed to be agreement.

“Thanks, Dave,” he said. “I’ll take this back to the senator. He’ll be glad to hear it.” The two men shook hands, and Dolan walked off, seemingly satisfied.

*

Charles Thomas and his wife, Cynthia, had come to love Mexico City, where Charles was posted in April 1964 as a political officer in the U.S. embassy. “We felt like the luckiest people in the world,” said Cynthia, who was twenty-seven when the couple arrived in Mexico as newlyweds. They had married two months earlier after a whirlwind romance that began with a chance meeting at a party thrown by a mutual friend, a Broadway costume designer, in New York; Cynthia had been working in Manhattan as a researcher for
Time
magazine and attempting to launch an acting career. After the wedding, her well-to-do parents held a candlelit reception for the couple at the Plaza hotel in New York. Their first child, Zelda, named for his late mother, was born in Mexico in 1965.

For American diplomats in the mid-1960s, Mexico City was considered an important—and pleasant—assignment. The city then had a relatively manageable population of about four million people, a figure that would explode in decades to come. The Thomases found a gracious, airy, high-ceilinged hacienda not far from the embassy. Through a friend, Guadalupe Rivera, daughter of the famed artist Diego Rivera, they hired one of the city’s best cooks—“our guests knew we served the most exquisite Mexican food in the city,” Cynthia said. Ambassador Fulton Freeman considered Thomas one of his most talented deputies, and Freeman often attended parties in the Thomas home. The ambassador was enchanted by Cynthia—“in addition to being an uncommonly attractive and accomplished actress, she is an excellent hostess” who had “opened doors for the embassy to dramatic, cultural and intellectual groups of young Mexicans where we had enjoyed few if any contacts.”

The couple made good friends at the embassy, although Cynthia found herself “a little wary” in her encounters with Win Scott; it was well known among diplomats’ families that Scott was “the CIA man” in the embassy, operating undercover as a State Department political officer. Scott could be charming, and he often praised Charles to his wife. “Charles should really be in Paris and could do a lot of good work with his extraordinary knowledge of French,” he told her at a party. But she found it disquieting when Scott asked if she could be of help gathering intelligence for him in her contacts with prominent Mexicans. She felt she was being recruited to work for the CIA. “I found it very awkward,” she said.

The Thomases were favorites among local writers and artists. “Charles was an extraordinary man,” said Elena Poniatowska, a Mexican writer of both fiction and nonfiction who would become one of her country’s most celebrated investigative journalists. “He was an intellectual. He could speak about anything.” The Thomases became especially close to another talented Mexican writer—Elena Garro. Cynthia remembered Garro as an “intelligent, charming, thoughtful woman. So full of life.”

It was at a party in December 1965 that Garro took Charles Thomas aside and told him the astonishing story about Oswald and the “twist party.” She explained how she had shared the story a year earlier with the American embassy and had heard nothing since. She offered Thomas an additional, startling bit of information that she had not told the embassy; it was about her cousin Silvia Duran. Garro said there had been a sexual relationship between Oswald and Duran and that others in Mexico City were aware of it. She had been the assassin’s “mistress.”

Thomas wondered if this could be true. He knew Garro to be unusually intelligent and well informed, but what would it mean if the man who killed Kennedy had an affair, just weeks before the assassination, with an employee of Castro’s government, at a time when Oswald was supposedly under close surveillance by the CIA in Mexico?

He recorded Garro’s account in a memo dated December 10, 1965, that was presented to Scott and others in the embassy. “She was very reluctant to discuss the matter, but finally imparted” the story, Thomas wrote. In the memo, he also noted Garro’s strange account of what had happened to her in the days after the assassination. After learning of Oswald’s arrest, she said, she immediately assumed that Cuba was involved, given what she knew about Oswald’s contacts at the Cuban embassy. Outraged, she and her daughter drove to the embassy on Saturday, the day after the president’s murder, and stood outside the compound and shouted, “Assassins,” at the Cubans inside. Later that day, she and her daughter received a visit from a friend who was an official in Mexico’s Interior Ministry. The friend, Manuel Calvillo, broke the news to them about the arrest of Silvia Duran—it had not been announced publicly—and warned them that they were in danger from “Communists.” Calvillo told them they needed to go into hiding. “He had orders to take them to a small and obscure hotel in the center of town,” Thomas wrote.