Reclaiming History (83 page)

In July 1964, Specter said he traveled “to the West Coast to track down some matters relating to Ruby on some individuals we hadn’t been able to locate earlier.”
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Some members of the staff even traveled outside the United States. On April 8, 1964, Assistant Counsels William Coleman Jr., W. David Slawson, and Howard P. Willens flew to Mexico City, where for seven days they investigated Oswald’s stay in Mexico City, being briefed by and asking questions of not just the Mexico City station of the CIA, but the FBI office in Mexico City and the Mexican federal authorities who conducted their own investigation of the case. When the Mexico City daily
La Prensa
reported on April 9 that “three investigators of Kennedy case” had come to Mexico City, they weren’t referring to the FBI, but to Warren Commission assistant counsels.
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Although the assistant counsels did most of the field and grunt work, Commission member John McCloy would later say that the Commission members themselves dug in. “We went [over to] Dealey Plaza,” McCloy said, and walked it “foot by foot. We…visited…the boarding house that Oswald had lived in; retraced, step by step, [Oswald’s] movements from the School Book Depository to the point at which he was apprehended in the theater. We chased ourselves up and down the [Book Depository] stairs, and timed ourselves. I sat in the window and held the very rifle…and sighted down across it [and] snapped the trigger many times…We had a car moving at the alleged rate. Well, I can go on. But I’m trying to give you the…fact that we did, assiduously, follow [the] evidence, and work out as best we could our own judgments in relation to it.”
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Indeed, the chief justice himself went up to the sniper’s nest, and with a stopwatch, per Arlen Specter, who was present, “made the long walk…from the window…down one corridor and up another and over to the dimly lighted steps where he descended four flights to the second floor to see if he could get to the Coke machine within the time” Oswald had available to meet Officer Marrion Baker, “and he made it.”
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And at one point, all seven commissioners traveled to Dallas and, among other things, stood on the fifth floor of the Book Depository Building where the three young black men were at the time of the assassination, and conducted a test wherein a cartridge shell was dropped to the floor directly above them and “
all
the commissioners heard a sound which they…concluded…was the sound of a shell which had fallen to the floor.”
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In addition to taking testimony and personally interviewing witnesses, the Warren Commission double-checked the FBI’s scientific work, as assistant Warren Commission counsel Wesley J. Liebeler pointed out in his testimony before the HSCA: “The work the FBI did on the physical evidence, the ballistics work, the fingerprint work, the hair and fibers work, that sort of thing, in many, if not in all cases, was checked by independent criminal laboratories.”
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Just two examples: Warren Commission assistant counsel Melvin A. Eisenberg sent a latent right index fingerprint and latent left and right palm prints found on book cartons in the sixth-floor sniper’s nest to New York City Police Department detective Arthur Mandella, a fingerprint expert in the department’s Bureau of Criminal Identification, and Mandella, after comparing the latent prints with finger and palm print exemplars of Oswald, concluded that the latent prints belonged to Oswald, the same conclusion reached by the FBI’s fingerprint expert, Sebastian Latona.
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And in addition to FBI firearms expert Robert Frazier, the Warren Commission employed Joseph D. Nicol, a firearms expert who was the superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation for the state of Illinois, to examine the bullet fragments found at the assassination scene and the whole bullet found at Parkland Hospital to see if they matched up with bullets test-fired from Oswald’s Carcano rifle. Nicol’s conclusion, the same as Frazier’s, was that they did.
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In fact, in some very important areas, the FBI did no work at all. For example, the Commission’s wound ballistics experiments, conducted to determine critical issues like whether the bullet that struck Kennedy in his upper right back could have physically been the same one that caused all of Governor Connally’s injuries, were handled by the Wound Ballistics Branch of the U.S. Army Chemical Research and Development Laboratories at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.
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And who conducted the all-important tests to determine if Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was a sufficiently accurate weapon to have accomplished what the Warren Commission believed Oswald accomplished on the day of the assassination? Not the FBI, but the Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch of the Department of the Army.
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Indeed, Warren Commission assistant counsel David Belin even employed private investigators at various points to cross-check information and give an independent evaluation.
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As early as January 21, 1964, we see Chief Justice Earl Warren saying in a Warren Commission executive session, “One of the important things in
our investigation
is to be able to trace every dollar that we can in the possession of Oswald…because we don’t know where his money came from. There is no evidence of any affluence or anything of that kind…but we ought to know as far as we can every dollar that came into his possession and every dollar he spent, and we have taken that up with the [Department of the] Treasury and they have assigned two of their top-flight investigators to run that matter down.”
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Perhaps nothing is reflective of the Warren Commission’s independent state of mind more than General Counsel Rankin’s oral request to Director Hoover on February 24, 1964 (unquestionably, on a sensitive matter such as this, with the knowledge and consent of Earl Warren and the other Commission members), which was memorialized in an internal FBI memorandum to Hoover on February 24, 1964, asking that the FBI “set up coverage of Marina Oswald’s activities.”
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“Coverage,” of course, includes wiretaps. Per FBI agent James P. Hosty, “against the FBI’s advice” the bureau acceded to the Warren Commission’s request and sought and secured a wiretap warrant, Marina’s phone being tapped and her living quarters bugged by the FBI from February 29, 1964, to March 12, 1964. (FBI special agent Robert Gemberling, a supervisor in the Dallas FBI office at the time, testified before the HSCA that “no information gleaned from either of these [two] sources” contained anything pertinent to the assassination.)
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According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., RFK’s biographer, as attorney general, RFK “authorized…an undisclosed number [of wiretaps] in 1964 at the request of the Warren Commission.”
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In addition, and pursuant to the Warren Commission’s request, the bureau set up round-the-clock physical surveillance of Marina, and its reports back to the Warren Commission were captioned “re: FISUR [code name for physical surveillance] of Marina Oswald.”
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Very importantly (and as previously indicated) a healthy part of the FBI’s investigation was being
directed
by the Warren Commission. The FBI was constantly being besieged by the Commission with requests that the agency do all manner of things. For instance, the FBI, in a tone suggesting that the Warren Commission was being too demanding, said that just in the period between February 21 and March 5, 1964, “the General Investigative Division has a total of nine pending requests from the President’s Commission.” A few examples: “A three page request for technical and other related information concerning the rifle used in the assassination. This request is very extensive and requires the obtaining of
original
documents of numerous items, such as shipping documents, invoices, bills of lading, etc. This request also requires technical examination by our Laboratory as well as extensive work by our Dallas Office”; “[a request] that we obtain copies of Immigration and Naturalization Service records of Jack L. Ruby’s parents, Joseph and Fannie Rubenstein. Also, that we obtain all available records of toll calls made by Ruby, his three brothers and four sisters and twelve persons known to have been in contact with Ruby between September 26, 1963 and November 22, 1963”; “[a request] that this Bureau initiate a full scale background and intelligence investigation of Michael Paine and his wife, Ruth Paine…and of George and Jeanne De Mohrenschildt”; and so on.
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Examples of the Warren Commission directing the FBI in the investigation are too numerous to cite. Here are two more to illustrate just how detailed that direction was. The reenactment of the assassination was conducted by the FBI in Dallas on May 24, 1964, with the assistance of the Secret Service. But the Warren Commission staff not only requested the reenactment, but in Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin’s May 7, 1964, letter to FBI Director Hoover making the request, he instructed the FBI, in detail, as to everything that had to be done, telling Hoover where the limousine should be placed on Elm for each shot. For instance, in part II of his letter, he writes, “the third shot was fixed at a particular frame in the Zapruder film (frame 313), as well as a particular frame in the other two films (frame 24 of the Nix film and frame 42 of the Muchmore film). A car should be placed at the point which we believe to be the approximate location corresponding to these frames and then photographed from the point where the three cameramen were standing to establish the accuracy of this location. Distances should be measured from this point to the various points described in part I, and angles and distances established between this point and the assassination window to establish the view which the assassin had when he fired the third shot.” Directions like this—even the direction that all of the many points referred to in parts I and II of his letter should be “mapped on a survey” and “trigonometric readings should be taken” to determine distances and angles—run throughout the letter.

Another example: After the Commission established through its questioning of Dallas Secret Service chief Forrest Sorrels that it wouldn’t have been feasible to get to Stemmons Freeway from Main Street,
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Rankin wrote to Hoover on August 10, 1964, saying the Commission needed photographs to demonstrate that “traffic proceeding westbound on Main Street is directed to turn right on Houston Street and left onto Elm Street if it wishes to proceed north on the Stemmons Freeway. We would like to demonstrate, in short, that the motorcade was not able to proceed on Main Street and gain access to the Stemmons Freeway proceeding northbound without departing from normal traffic patterns.” Rankin asked for six photographs depicting six separate points, including one that showed “instructions which are posted on Main Street instructing westbound traffic as to how it should proceed to gain access to Stemmons Freeway,” and a photograph showing that “the barricade separating Main Street traffic from Elm Street traffic extends beyond the point where Elm Street traffic can gain access to Stemmons Freeway.”
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Moreover, the Commission relied on many other federal agencies besides the FBI for information about the assassination. For instance, the Secret Service launched an extensive investigation, conducting 1,552 interviews and submitting eight hundred reports totaling some forty-six hundred pages. When HSCA member Christopher J. Dodd, in his questioning of former Warren Commission assistant counsel Burt Griffin, stated that the Commission and its staff seemed to be limited to merely “evaluating the evidence that they [FBI] are handing you,” Griffin responded this was not so. “We did have other agencies,” he said. “We had a countercheck on them [the FBI]. We were getting to a certain extent parallel investigations from the Secret Service. We were also getting information back from the Dallas Police Department. A lot of people who were being interrogated by the FBI were being interrogated by other agencies, even the Post Office Department.” He went on to say that “in terms of the scientific information,” in addition to the FBI the Warren Commission “deliberately went to find people independent of the federal government.”
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Indeed, Warren Commission assistant counsel W. David Slawson said, “We had special people…who were investigators…assigned from the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service who were with us more or less full-time, especially the Secret Service.”
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Other agencies that participated in the investigation in a meaningful way were the Department of State, IRS, the military intelligence agencies, and the Dallas Police and Sheriff’s Departments. The Commission “directed requests to the 10 major departments of the Federal Government, 14 of its independent agencies or commissions, and 4 congressional committees for all information relating to the assassination or the background and activities of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.”
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And the Commission staff critically reviewed in detail the actions and investigative efforts of all these agencies, even calling the heads of the main agencies (i.e., J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI; John A. McCone, director of the CIA; and James J. Rowley, chief of the Secret Service) to testify under oath about the conduct of their respective agencies in the investigation.
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But above all, it was the testimony and depositions taken by the Warren Commission and its staff that give the lie to the myth that the Commission was totally dependent on the FBI. Considering that in a state or federal criminal prosecution, as opposed to a civil case, depositions by the prosecution (as well as the defense) are not allowed, the Warren Commission conducted an investigation of Kennedy’s murder far, far more independent of the FBI or local and state law enforcement than any other previous or subsequent case in American legal history.

My foregoing reference to the Warren Commission’s independent investigative efforts is not meant to depreciate the FBI’s contribution to the assassination investigation. In fact, there’s no question that the FBI was the main investigative arm of the Warren Commission
out in the field
and obviously conducted the bulk of that field investigation. A total of 169 FBI agents worked on the assassination, resulting in approximately twenty-five thousand interviews, and over twenty-three hundred reports approximately 25,400 pages.
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