A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (8 page)

As he took the phone, Johnson could only assume that Hoover had mastered all the available information about the assassination. After all, this was the director of the FBI briefing the president of the United States about the murder—the day before—of his predecessor. In fact, the transcript of the call, published decades later, showed that Hoover’s briefing was a jumble of misinformation. As many of Hoover’s deputies knew, the FBI director was never as well informed as he pretended to be; he did not always bother to learn all the facts, since almost no one was brave enough to correct him. Hoover was so determined to present himself as all-knowing that he would often fall back on speculation or half-truths. He seemed incapable of uttering the words: “I don’t know.”

“I just wanted to let you know of a development which I think is very important in connection with this case,” Hoover began. He said that “this man in Dallas”—Oswald—had been charged overnight with the president’s murder but “the evidence that they have at the present time is not very, very strong.” He added, “The case as it stands now isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction.”

The evidence wasn’t strong? It was Hoover’s first misstatement in the conversation, seemingly an effort to convince Johnson that—whatever the truth—the local police in Dallas could not be trusted to handle the investigation without strict oversight by the FBI. As Hoover’s agents on the scene knew, the Dallas police and the FBI had already gathered overwhelming evidence of Oswald’s guilt. Oswald was in custody, and several witnesses could identify him—possibly as the man with a rifle in the window at the Texas School Book Depository, certainly at the scene of the murder of a local policeman shortly after the president’s assassination. The Italian-made rifle identified as the assassination weapon—purchased by mail order from a Chicago gun shop by “A. Hidell,” an alias frequently used by Oswald, including on his application for a Dallas post-office box—had been found in the book depository. Moreover, Oswald had been taken into custody with a pistol bought by “A. Hidell” from the same mail-order gun shop. The preliminary evidence suggested the pistol had been used to kill the policeman, J. D. Tippit. In Oswald’s wallet was a phony identification card for “A. Hidell” that bore a photo of Oswald.

Hoover told Johnson—correctly—that the mail-order rifle had been bought with a money order for $21. “It seems almost impossible to think that for $21 you could kill the president of the United States,” he said. Then he launched into a series of false statements. He told Johnson that paperwork containing the Hidell alias had been found in “the home in which he was living—his mother’s.” (Wrong: Oswald had not seen his mother in more than a year.) The rifle, Hoover said, was “found on the sixth floor in the building from which it had been fired” (correct), but that “the bullets were fired from the fifth floor” (wrong), and that “three shells were found on the fifth floor” (wrong). He also reported that after the assassination Oswald fled to a movie theater across town “where he had the gun battle with the police officer” and was captured. (Wrong: Tippit had been killed blocks away from the theater.)

Johnson asked: “Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September?”

Hoover answered with an assertion that, when revealed years later, would help launch a generation of conspiracy theories. Even though the evidence that the CIA would have passed to Hoover was incomplete and contradictory, the director told the president that someone had been impersonating Oswald in Mexico City and then suggested that Oswald might have had an accomplice. Specifically, Hoover said the Mexico trip was “one angle that’s very confusing for this reason: we have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy using Oswald’s name.” Hoover was referring to a photo taken by a CIA surveillance camera that showed a man—the CIA had said it initially thought this might be Oswald—outside the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. “That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy.” Based on what he should have known was sketchy information, Hoover was hinting to the president that there had been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that involved an Oswald double who had recently been in and out of a large Soviet embassy and dealing with Soviet agents.

*

Though Hoover had many of his facts wrong, he was right about one thing. The FBI had plenty of reason to doubt the competence of the Dallas police. The next day—Sunday, November 24—their bungling allowed Oswald to be killed as he was about to be transferred from police headquarters downtown to the county jail. The attempted transfer in the basement garage of police headquarters was witnessed by a crush of reporters, photographers, and television camera crews. Although both the FBI and the Dallas police had received telephone death threats overnight directed at Oswald, the security precautions were so inadequate that Jack Ruby was able to slip in among the reporters while carrying a .38-caliber Colt Cobra revolver. He shot Oswald from only inches away, in full view of television cameras broadcasting live.

Oswald was rushed to Parkland Hospital and wheeled into the same emergency room where President Kennedy had died two days earlier. At 1:07 p.m., Oswald was pronounced dead.

*

Among the tens of millions of Americans who witnessed Oswald’s televised execution that day was the dean of the Yale Law School, Eugene Rostow, an influential Democrat whose brother, Walt, had been Kennedy’s deputy national security adviser. Dean Rostow decided he had to act. He sensed—instantly, he said later—how Oswald’s murder would undermine public confidence in the government, possibly for generations. The public, he said, would be deprived of the “catharsis and the emotional protection” of a trial to settle questions about Oswald’s guilt and the all-important question of whether he had accomplices. Already television commentators were speculating that Oswald had been killed in order to silence him before he could expose a conspiracy.

Just before three p.m., Rostow telephoned the White House to speak with Bill Moyers; the twenty-nine-year-old Moyers, an ordained Baptist minister from Texas who had left the pulpit to go into politics, was one of Johnson’s closest aides. Rostow urged Moyers to pass word to the president of the need to set up a high-powered commission to investigate “the whole affair of the murder of the President.” In the tape-recorded conversation, Rostow referred to Oswald only as “this bastard.”

“In this situation with this bastard killed, my suggestion is that a presidential commission be appointed of very distinguished citizens in the near future, bipartisan and above politics—no Supreme Court justices, but people like Tom Dewey,” Rostow said, referring to the former Republican governor of New York. He suggested that former vice president Richard Nixon might be considered. Rostow recommended “a commission of seven or nine people—maybe Nixon, I don’t know.”

Rostow told Moyers that a commission might be the only way the public could be convinced of the truth about what had happened—what was
still
happening. “Because world opinion, and American opinion, is just now so shaken by the behavior of the Dallas police that they’re not believing anything.” Moyers agreed with Rostow, and he promised to pass the suggestion on to the president.

Johnson initially dismissed the idea of a federal commission; his instinct was to leave the investigation in the hands of state officials in Texas. (Officials at the White House and the Justice Department were startled to learn that the assassination of a president was, at the time, not a federal crime. Had Oswald lived, he would have faced prosecution under Texas state homicide laws.) As a Texan, Johnson had more confidence than his aides in the ability of law-enforcement officials in his home state to deal with the aftermath of the assassination. He told a friend that he did not like the idea of “carpetbaggers” from Washington appearing in Texas to determine who was responsible for a murder on the streets of Dallas.

It took four more days, but Johnson changed his mind. The conspiracy theories, he knew, were beginning to spread wildly. With Oswald dead, Johnson later wrote, “the outrage of a nation turned to skepticism and doubt.… The atmosphere was poisonous and had to be cleared.” In the end, the president adopted Rostow’s model for a commission, with one notable difference. The Yale dean felt strongly that Supreme Court justices should not be involved in the inquiry; it was generally accepted among legal scholars and historians of the court that its reputation had been tarnished in the past when its members became involved in outside investigations. Johnson, however, insisted otherwise. He said he considered only one candidate to lead the commission: the chief justice, Earl Warren.

“The commission had to be bipartisan, and I felt that we needed a Republican chairman whose judicial ability and fairness were unquestioned,” Johnson wrote. He barely knew Warren, but he knew the chief justice was a Republican who was respected, even beloved, by many of the president’s Democratic allies, as well as by much of the Washington press corps, and that included the powerful, ever-threatening Drew Pearson. “I was not an intimate of the Chief Justice,” Johnson wrote. “We had never spent 10 minutes alone together, but to me he was the personification of justice and fairness in this country.”

4

DALLAS POLICE HEADQUARTERS

DALLAS, TEXAS

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1963

Her youngest son was accused of killing the president of the United States, but what struck so many of the reporters and police officers who encountered Marguerite Oswald in the hours after the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald was not her shock, or her grief. It was her excitement. They remembered how energized she was to have a role in this great drama.

In those first few days, it might have been unkind for reporters in Dallas to suggest that Mrs. Oswald, a fifty-six-year-old practical nurse from neighboring Fort Worth, was actually enjoying the situation in which she found herself. Suddenly, she was a global celebrity and had the opportunity to sell her son’s story to the highest of many bidders from distant, exotic places like New York City and Europe. She did seem to have moments of true anguish: at times, often on camera, Mrs. Oswald would break into tears when questioned about her son or about her own circumstances. Lifting her thick prescription glasses to dab at her eyes, she would gently pat her head to make sure no strands had escaped from that tight bun of gray hair.

Still, if she was not actually finding pleasure in the attention, Mrs. Oswald was animated by the knowledge that people everywhere would soon know her name. They would see her picture and remember it. Like her youngest son, she had a powerful desire to make a mark on the world, to get people to stop and pay attention. “I am an important person,” she told reporters in the days after the assassination, offering not a hint of doubt about the truth of that statement. “I understand that I will go down in history, too.”

Mrs. Oswald was less eager to talk about her alienation from all three of her sons, especially Lee. In the year before he was charged with the president’s murder, Lee had cut off all contact with his mother. He had also cut off her access to June, her one-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter—Lee and Marina’s first child. It was only on the afternoon of her son’s arrest that Mrs. Oswald learned that Marina had given birth to a second daughter, Rachel. Mrs. Oswald found it cruel that she first discovered Rachel’s existence when Marina brought the one-month-old baby to Dallas police headquarters.

Lee Oswald seemed to feel that his mother had, over the years, gotten what she deserved—abandonment by children who had never had any reason to love her. Abandonment was an experience Mrs. Oswald was familiar with; it was a theme of her life. Two of her three husbands had divorced her, one on grounds of mental cruelty. The other, Lee’s father, Robert, an insurance premium collector, died of a heart attack two months before Lee’s birth in 1939. And when her sons were young, she had abandoned them for long stretches. At the age of three, Lee had joined his two older brothers in a Lutheran-run orphanage in New Orleans, the Bethlehem Children’s Home, while Mrs. Oswald sought nursing work and pursued her search for a new husband. The three boys were not actually put up for adoption—she said she intended to bring them back to live with her when money allowed—even though that might have been difficult for three-year-old Lee to understand.

In the years before the assassination, Mrs. Oswald had almost no contact with her oldest son, John Pic, Lee’s half brother, who in 1963 was stationed with the air force in San Antonio. She also had little contact with her middle son, Robert, even though he and his wife lived in nearby Denton, Texas. When Robert first encountered his mother at Dallas police headquarters in the hours after his brother’s arrest, the twenty-nine-year-old was struck by his mother’s lack of “any emotional strain at all” over the possibility that Lee had just killed the president. Her overwhelming concern, he said, was about herself.

“It seemed to me that Mother felt that now, at last, she was about to get the kind of attention she had sought all her life,” Robert recalled. “She had an extraordinary idea of her ability and her importance.” His mother “seemed to recognize immediately that she would never again be treated as an ordinary, obscure, unimportant woman.”

Even in those first hours, Robert sensed the danger that his mother posed to any effort to learn the truth about Lee’s guilt or innocence. From the start, Robert admitted to himself that there was a strong possibility that Lee was the president’s assassin. His younger brother, Robert knew, was a delusional, violent, attention-seeking man. Their mother, however, would never allow herself to be burdened with the facts about Lee. The assassination, Robert sensed, would now give her an international stage to spout—and at some point, sell—her delusional conspiracy theories about Lee and his work as a government “agent.”