A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination

by Philip Shenon

  Hosty picked up the note and left Shanklin’s office, walking a few feet down the hallway to the men’s room. He entered one of the stalls and closed the door. He began to tear up the note, dropping the pieces into the white porcelain toilet bowl. When he was done, he pulled the heavy wooden handle on the metal chain to flush the toilet. He waited a moment and pulled the chain again. He said later he wanted to make certain every scrap of paper was gone.

  2

  THE JUSTICES’ CONFERENCE ROOM

  THE SUPREME COURT

  WASHINGTON, DC

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

  The knock on the heavy oak door to the conference room was unexpected. It was rare for the justices of the United States Supreme Court ever to be interrupted during their weekly Friday conference. By tradition, the court’s staff could interrupt the justices only in an emergency, or something close to it, and information could be passed to the justices in the conference room only in the form of a note handed through the door.

  Chief Justice Earl Warren, then in his eleventh year on the court, had come to see the value of this and so many other seemingly arcane traditions, if only because they imposed a polite order on a group of nine strong-willed men—some of whom disliked one another to the point of hatred—who had agreed to spend the rest of their working lives in this place.

  On Friday, November 22, 1963, shortly after one thirty p.m., the justices heard a knock. By tradition, the door was answered by the court’s most junior member, and so Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg, who had joined the court a year earlier, stood up silently, went to the door, and opened it. He took the one-page note, shut the door, and handed it to the chief justice. Warren read the typewritten message from his personal secretary, Margaret McHugh, in silence. Then he stood and read it out loud to the others:

  “The President was shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. It is not known how badly he is injured.”

  The members of the court, Warren later recalled, were “shocked beyond words” and adjourned to their own offices. “There was little said, but I believe each of us, stunned by the news, repaired to a place where he could receive radio reports of the tragedy.” (Actually, some of the justices and their staffs gathered in the chambers of Justice William Brennan, who had a television set and was watching Walter Cronkite’s coverage on CBS.) Warren went to his chambers, where he listened to the radio “until all hope was lost,” he remembered. “In perhaps half or three-quarters of an hour, the news came that the president was dead—it was almost unbelievable.”

  Warren and the other justices had special cause to be shocked: only thirty-six hours earlier, they had been the guests of the president and Mrs. Kennedy at a reception in the First Family’s private living quarters on the second floor of the White House. “We could not forget how friendly and happy the occasion was,” Warren said. “It was a delightful occasion.” He recalled how the justices had engaged in a lively conversation about Kennedy’s imminent trip to Texas, which was scheduled to begin the next morning.

  The two-day, five-city fund-raising trip was the talk of much of official Washington because, to many, it seemed politically risky. The president had been warned that he might face protests from right-wing demonstrators, especially in conservative Dallas. “The Big D,” as the city’s boosters liked to call it, was home to several far-right extremist groups and had a reputation for discourteous, even disgraceful, treatment of prominent political visitors. Only a month earlier, Kennedy’s UN ambassador, former senator Adlai Stevenson, had been heckled outside his Dallas hotel by anti-UN protesters, including a scowling Texas homemaker who hit him over the head with a cardboard placard that read: DOWN WITH THE UN. During the 1960 campaign, then Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Kennedy’s vice presidential candidate, and his wife, Lady Bird, were swarmed by dozens of screeching anti-Kennedy protesters as they tried to cross the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas to reach the hotel’s ballroom for a luncheon rally. One protester carried a defaced copy of a Johnson campaign poster with the words SMILING JUDAS scrawled across it, while another spat on Mrs. Johnson. She described the nearly thirty minutes it took to cross the lobby as among the most frightening of her life.

  At the White House reception, Warren recalled, “we jokingly admonished the President to be careful ‘down there with those wild Texans’—of course, the thought of a real disturbance of any kind was far from our minds.”

  * * *

  After receiving confirmation of the president’s death, Supreme Court colleagues remembered how tears welled up in the eyes of the chief justice and how he remained close to tears for days. It was no secret around the court that Warren adored John Kennedy, even though that opened him up to charges of partisanship by the president’s Republican opponents. Warren’s affection was almost paternal, he admitted. The assassination was “like losing one of my own sons,” he said. “The days and nights following were more like a nightmare than anything I had ever lived through.”

  A generation separated the president and the chief justice. Kennedy died at the age of forty-six; on the day of the assassination, Warren was seventy-two. In the younger man, Warren had seen the farsighted, progressive leadership—on issues of social justice, especially—that he had hoped to bring to the White House himself when he ran for president in 1952. Warren had been the wildly popular governor of California from 1943 until 1953, and, although he was a lifelong member of the Republican Party, his popularity in his home state had always stretched across party lines. He took pride in the fact that his landslides in three gubernatorial elections had included the votes of a huge share, if not most, of the state’s Democrats.

  As governor, he pursued policies that outraged many conservative, antitax Republicans. Warren was responsible for massive investments in higher education and transportation, and he raised gasoline taxes by more than $1 billion over ten years—an almost unheard-of sum at the time for a state government—to pay for construction of California’s futuristic highways, which became the model for a national system. After World War II, he created statewide New Deal–like public works projects to address unemployment, especially among veterans. His attempt to establish universal health care for Californians was foiled by an aggressive lobbying campaign by the California Medical Association, which labeled the plan “socialized medicine.”

  Throughout the 1940s, Warren’s star kept rising; in 1948, he was selected to run for vice president on the Republican ticket with New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. After Dewey’s unexpected defeat by incumbent Harry Truman, Warren returned to California and began to consider his own run for the Oval Office. He launched a bid in 1952, only to be undermined by another prominent California Republican, Senator Richard M. Nixon, who led a revolt among the state’s GOP leaders in favor of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon’s move helped seal the nomination for Eisenhower, who went on to a decisive victory that November, with Nixon on the ticket as vice president. The relationship between Warren and Nixon remained poisonous for the rest of their lives. The chief justice was delighted by Kennedy’s election victory in 1960, not least because it meant Nixon’s defeat.

  Still, Warren had reason to be grateful to Eisenhower, who placed him on the Supreme Court. It was the fulfillment of a pledge made by Eisenhower shortly after the 1952 election, apparently as thanks to Warren for what seemed to be his full-throated public support for the Republican ticket. Eisenhower came to regret the decision; he was later widely quoted as describing Warren’s nomination to the court as the “biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.” The president was reported to be furious over the Warren Court’s far-reaching rulings in support of civil rights and civil liberties, beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, in which the court ordered the desegregation of the nation’s public schools.

  For Warren, the election of John Kennedy changed everything. The new president reached out personally to the chief justice, attempting to nurture a genuine friendship. Warren and his
wife, Nina, found themselves invited to glittery receptions and dinners at the White House, where they were introduced to Kennedy’s celebrity friends from Hollywood and Palm Beach. Raised in the gritty, sunbaked town of Bakersfield, California, Warren, the son of a railroad worker, could often seem starstruck in Kennedy’s presence.

  The president’s support went well beyond dinner invitations. He spoke out often in public to express his admiration for Warren and for the rulings of the court. The chief justice was grateful, especially given the heated, often hateful response to the court’s civil rights decisions. Warren was scorned personally by much of the country; he had grown used to the regular death threats that would arrive at the court in the mail or by phone. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination, a national campaign to bring impeachment charges against Warren had been under way for years. In Dallas, IMPEACH EARL WARREN posters and bumper stickers were a common sight on the day the president was killed there.

  * * *

  Within hours of the assassination, Warren had his staff release a public statement that reflected his assumption that the president had been killed because he, like Warren, had dared to stand up to the evils of racism and other injustice. “A good and great president has suffered martyrdom as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots,” Warren wrote. The statement was handed out to reporters before the announcement later that day of the arrest of twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, a Dallas man who worked in a schoolbook warehouse on Dealey Plaza.

  That afternoon, Warren was notified that the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was headed back to Washington aboard Air Force One; the presidential jet also bore the bronze casket containing his predecessor’s body. The White House invited the chief justice, along with congressional leaders and members of Kennedy’s cabinet, to be at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, a few miles southeast of Washington, to receive the new president. Warren was chauffeured to the base by one of his Supreme Court clerks, and the chief justice looked on somberly as the plane touched down at about six p.m. He watched as President Johnson emerged from the plane, followed by Jacqueline Kennedy, still in the pink suit from the motorcade. Warren later wrote that he found it a “heart-rending sight to see a saddened new president and the fallen president’s widow, still in the bloodstained clothes she wore after her mortally wounded husband had slumped in her lap.” He remained at the side of the plane as the casket was lowered slowly from a rear passenger door.

  The next morning, he and the other justices were invited to the White House for a private viewing of the casket in the East Room. Warren was joined by his wife, Nina, at the viewing, and afterward she stood in tears in the north portico of the White House, waiting for a car to take her home. Warren did not go home with her. From the White House, he went instead to the court, where he stayed much of the day “waiting for some information about what was to happen.” The city had effectively shut down. “The entire government plant was closed,” he wrote. “It was as though the world had stopped moving.”

  Many of the capital’s residents recalled that their mourning was mixed with fear. The Pentagon and other military installations around Washington were on high alert, out of concern that the president’s murder had been carried out by agents of the Soviet Union or Cuba—an act of war that could mean a nuclear exchange was imminent. For some in Washington, including President Johnson, the jittery, even apocalyptic feeling that weekend was similar to what they had been through only a year before, during the Cuban missile crisis.

  Much of the rest of the weekend was a blur for Warren. He remembered returning home Saturday evening to his apartment in the residential wing of the Sheraton Park Hotel, in a leafy neighborhood of northwest Washington, and watching television for hours and “listening to the wild stories and rumors which permeated the air.” Like millions of Americans, he was experiencing—for the first time—a national tragedy unfold on a flickering television screen. He found it “sickening” to sit there, numbly, and take in the black-and-white images—the repetition, over and over, of scenes from the president’s murder and of the first images of Oswald under arrest. “But there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.” At about nine that evening, the phone rang. He picked up the receiver and was startled to hear the feathery, but now intensely solemn, voice of Mrs. Kennedy, calling from the White House. She asked if he would offer a short eulogy to her husband in the Capitol rotunda the following afternoon; the casket was being moved to the rotunda for its public viewing before burial. “I was almost speechless to hear her voice personally asking me to speak at the ceremony,” Warren recalled. “I, of course, told her I would do so.”

  He grabbed a yellow legal pad and tried to draft a tribute to the slain president, but he quickly gave up. He was too tired and overwhelmed to write anything of value. “It was simply impossible for me to put thoughts on paper,” he said. He went to bed around midnight, hoping to find inspiration in the morning. He rose before seven a.m. and went back to work, worried that he would not finish the tribute in time. The ceremony was scheduled to start at one p.m. At about eleven twenty, he was still writing when his daughter Dorothy rushed into the room where he was working.

  “Daddy, they just killed Oswald!”

  Warren was annoyed at the interruption. “Oh, Dorothy, don’t pay any attention to all those wild rumors or they will drive you to distraction.”

  “But Daddy,” she said, “I saw them do it.”

  Warren rushed to the television set and watched a replay of footage of the handcuffed Oswald, surrounded by police officers as he was being marched to a squad car, being shot by Dallas nightclub impresario Jack Ruby. It was not clear if Oswald would survive his injuries.

  Despite this new shock, Warren forced himself back to his legal pad. He had less than an hour to finish the eulogy and have Nina type it up before they hurried out the door for the drive across town to Capitol Hill. With the help of policemen who recognized the chief justice and cleared the crowded city streets, the Warrens managed to arrive at the Capitol in time. The chief justice was one of three speakers at the ceremony; the others were chosen to represent the two houses of Congress: House Speaker John W. McCormack of Massachusetts and Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, both Democrats.

  All three eulogies were short. Warren’s was by far the most pointedly worded and, it seemed, personally felt.

  “John Fitzgerald Kennedy—a good and great President, the friend to all people of good will; a believer in the dignity and equality of all human beings; a fighter for justice; an apostle of peace—has been snatched from our midst by the bullet of an assassin,” he began. “What moved some misguided wretch to do this horrible deed may never be known to us, but we do know that such acts are commonly stimulated by forces of hatred and malevolence such as today are eating their way into the bloodstream of American life. What a price we pay for this fanaticism!

  “If we really love this country; if we truly love justice and mercy; if we fervently want to make this nation better for those who are to follow us, we can at least abjure the hatred that consumes people,” he continued. “Is it too much to hope that the martyrdom of our beloved President might even soften the hearts of those who would themselves recoil from assassination, but who do not shrink from spreading the venom which kindles thoughts of it in others?”

  Warren was proud of the eulogy, publishing it in full in his memoirs, but his effusive, unqualified praise for Kennedy struck some listeners as inappropriate for a chief justice, given his responsibility to rise above partisanship. Would he have offered similar praise in a eulogy for Eisenhower? Almost certainly not.

  * * *

  Robert Kennedy told friends later that he did not like the tone of Warren’s remarks. “I thought it was inappropriate to talk about hate,” he said. Others in Washington were even more offended. Warren’s words denouncing “the forces of hatred” and their “venom” were instantly seen by many prominent Kennedy
critics in Congress, particularly southern segregationists who had opposed the president on civil rights legislation, as an attack on them. They were all the more outraged after it become clear that Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of political forces that had nothing to do with them. If the early news reports were right, Oswald was a Marxist who had once tried to defect to Russia and openly admired Fidel Castro.

  Senator Richard Brevard Russell Jr., the Georgia Democrat who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee and widely seen as the most powerful man in the Senate, told colleagues that he seethed when he heard Warren’s eulogy. Russell, almost certainly the most brilliant legislative tactician of his generation, was a staunch segregationist. Most days, he memorialized his thoughts with jottings on a pad of tiny pink notepaper that he kept in his suit pocket; the pads were later gathered up by his secretary and filed away. In a handwritten note to himself about the eulogy, Russell described it as “Warren’s blanket indictment of the South.”

  Russell could grow furious simply at the mention of Warren’s name. That had been true since 1954 and Brown v. Board of Education, which Russell saw as the start of a campaign by the Supreme Court to undermine what he had always called the “Southern way of life.” Russell felt very differently about the fallen president. Whatever their differences over civil rights, he had always liked Kennedy. On the afternoon of the assassination, reporters recalled seeing Russell in a lobby off the Senate floor, hunched over a cabinet that contained the “tickers” that printed out the news reports of the Associated Press and United Press International. He was reading the bulletins from Dallas aloud to his colleagues as tears streamed down his face.

  If the sixty-six-year-old Russell could find anything of comfort that day, it was that he knew—and loved—the man who would now occupy the Oval Office. Lyndon Johnson was arguably his closest friend; the new president had been Russell’s most devoted protégé in their years together in the Senate. Johnson called Russell “the Old Master” and treated him like a beloved uncle. He owed the Georgian much of his success in Congress and, as Senate majority leader, he had sometimes stood with Russell in opposing major civil rights bills.