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

by Philip Shenon

  Manchester requested an early meeting with Mrs. Kennedy, in preparation for the extensive interviews she would give him later. But Robert Kennedy said the preliminary meeting was not necessary. She would be ready to talk to him—in detail—within a few weeks.

  Manchester also scheduled an early interview with the chief justice. The writer said he wanted to assure Warren that he did not want to interfere with the commission’s work, even though Manchester intended to pursue what was in many ways a parallel investigation. Knowing that Manchester was operating with the full endorsement of the Kennedy family, Warren was eager to help. He was so enthusiastic, in fact, that he initially agreed to Manchester’s request for access to the commission’s supposedly top-secret investigative reports. A few days later, Rankin quietly talked to Manchester and urged him to withdraw the request, saying it could complicate the commission’s work. Graciously, it appeared, Manchester did so.

  19

  THE OFFICES OF SENATOR RICHARD RUSSELL

  THE UNITED STATES SENATE

  WASHINGTON, DC

  FEBRUARY 1964

  For weeks, Senator Richard Russell had gritted his teeth and tried to work with the chief justice, and it had not been easy. To his fiercely segregationist constituents back in Georgia, it was awkward to explain how he could serve on a commission led by Earl Warren. How could he even be in the same room with a man so many of Russell’s fellow white Georgians believed was determined to destroy their way of life?

  Russell’s estimation of Warren as chief justice had not improved, he assured friends. Away from the commission, Russell continued to dismiss the court under Warren’s leadership as the “so-called Supreme Court.” He reminded his colleagues that he had not volunteered to serve on the commission; he had been ordered by President Johnson to join the investigation, a duty he could not shirk.

  Russell was polite and deferential to Warren in the commission’s early meetings, and the other commissioners thought he offered wise advice to the chief justice, especially over the struggles with Hoover and the FBI. Russell had mostly kept his silence about some of the commission’s management decisions, including the hiring of what he considered radical young northern lawyers. “For some reason, Warren is stacking his staff with extreme liberals,” Russell wrote to himself in his diary in January. He also noted that he had not been consulted before the commission hired that “negro lawyer” from Philadelphia, William Coleman.

  By midwinter, Russell was exhausted, and the commission was only part of the reason why. As he had predicted to President Johnson, he was overwhelmed by his Senate duties in 1964—mostly because of Johnson. Russell was leading the effort in Congress to block far-reaching civil rights legislation that Johnson, eager to establish an early legacy on civil rights, had championed from his first days in the White House as a fitting tribute to Kennedy. On February 10, the House passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark bill that outlined most forms of discrimination based on race, religion, or gender. The bill then headed to the Senate, where Russell would try—and ultimately fail—to stop it. (It was a tribute to the intense personal ties between Johnson and Russell that the friendship survived mostly intact.)

  Finally, in late February, it all became too much, and Russell decided he had to quit. He began to draft a letter of resignation. The final straw, he said, was the commission’s failure to keep him informed about the schedule for testimony from Robert Oswald, Lee Oswald’s brother. Russell had missed the first two days of Oswald’s testimony, on Thursday, February 20, and Friday, February 21. But he woke up on Saturday to read in the newspaper that the testimony would continue that morning in an unusual weekend session. His Senate staff had not been notified about the meeting, but Russell assumed reporters would not get such a basic fact wrong. He dressed himself and went to his Senate office, a few minutes’ walk from the commission’s offices, and had an aide call over to determine when the testimony would start. The puzzled staffer reported back to Russell that the commission’s offices were closed—no one was picking up the phone. Russell went home, annoyed that he had interrupted his weekend for no good reason.

  He was furious, then, when he learned that Oswald’s testimony had in fact continued Saturday but that, because it was a weekend, no receptionist had been on duty to answer the phones.

  In his resignation letter to the president, Russell cited the incident: “I do not think it reasonable to expect anyone to serve on any commission that does not notify all its members definitely as to the time of the meetings and as to the identity of the witness that will appear.” He continued: “Since I cannot possibly attend a majority of the sessions of the commission and discharge my legislative duties, I feel constrained to request you to accept my resignation and relieve me of the assignment. Please be assured of my desire to serve you, your administration and our country in every possible way.”

  After finishing the letter, Russell let his temper cool, and he decided not to send it, at least not right away. He kept a draft in his files.

  Word of his anger reached the chief justice, who had been worried for weeks about Russell and his increasing absence from the commission’s meetings. Russell had been absent for most of the testimony of Marina and Marguerite Oswald, and now he had missed all of Robert Oswald’s. “The only person who did not come regularly was Dick Russell,” Warren said later. “I was disturbed about it.” He was even more disturbed, however, about the possibility that Russell would try to find an excuse to leave the investigation entirely. If Russell stepped down, “it might appear there was disharmony on the commission.”

  Warren dispatched Rankin to see Russell in his Senate office and convince him to stay, and Rankin listened to Russell’s long list of complaints. “He was completely frank,” Rankin recalled. Russell said he was so overtaxed in his Senate duties that he barely had time to read the transcripts of the commission’s hearings late at night before he went to bed, let alone attend the hearings.

  He assured Rankin that he did not intend to embarrass the commission with his resignation. He planned to issue a statement in which he made it clear that he was not leaving because of any differences over Warren’s leadership or the direction of the investigation, but simply because he did not have the time.

  Rankin reasoned with him: “I told him about the problem that if he should leave the commission, how it might be misunderstood by the country and by people regardless of what he said.” And he had come with an offer, approved by Warren, to hire a lawyer who would do little but help Russell keep up with the commission’s work.

  Grudgingly, Russell gave in. “Well, then I will stay on if you do that,” he told Rankin.

  Russell was invited to choose the lawyer, and he selected Alfredda Scobey, a fifty-one-year-old legal researcher on Georgia’s state court of appeals who had been recommended to him by his brother Robert, a justice on the Georgia court. Scobey was a lawyer with no law degree. She managed to pass the Georgia state bar examination without attending law school; she taught herself the law as she helped her husband study for his own bar exam. In March, Scobey moved to Washington and found herself the only woman lawyer on the commission’s staff. Her arrival meant that Russell would disappear almost entirely from the offices of the commission. She would be his eyes and ears.

  * * *

  Another proud southerner was fast becoming disgruntled with the commission that winter: Leon Hubert, the former New Orleans district attorney who was overseeing the investigation of Jack Ruby. He told his new colleagues that he could not understand why Warren and Rankin seemed so uninterested in the intriguing evidence that he and his junior colleague, Burt Griffin, kept turning up.

  Ruby’s murder trial had begun in Dallas on February 17, and it had become the embarrassing spectacle that the city had feared. Dallas and its leaders were being alternately condemned and ridiculed in the reports of the hundreds of journalists who had flooded in from around the world. Columnist Murray Kempton of the magazine the New Republic found himself feel
ing sorry for Ruby—a “pathetic” figure who seemed to be another victim of this “shabby,” violent city. “Ruby turns out to be a pallid man with a bald spot down to the back of his neck, sitting in a courtroom whose chartreuse walls turn his flesh sickly green,” Kempton wrote. “We look at him and understand the ultimate failure of Dallas: It was not merely incapable of protecting John F. Kennedy from what was done to him and of protecting Lee Oswald from what was thereafter done to him, but was not even capable of protecting Jack Ruby from what he did. He sits there, trapped.”

  The lowest moment for the city’s law-enforcement agencies came two weeks into the trial, when seven prisoners in the city jail used a dummy pistol made of soap and shoe polish to try to make their escape; at least two rushed past the courtroom where Ruby was on trial. Television cameras posted outside captured some of the scenes of the jailbreak and the panicky evacuation of the courthouse that followed. For the press corps, it was a fresh reminder of the incompetence that had permitted Ruby to saunter past dozens of police officers and kill Oswald.

  Ruby was represented by Melvin Belli, a talented, publicity-hungry lawyer from San Francisco known nationally as the “King of Torts” because of the tens of millions of dollars he had won for clients in personal-injury cases. Belli had attempted to move Ruby’s trial out of Dallas; when that was denied, he tried to turn the proceedings into a trial of the city itself. He alleged that Dallas’s “oligarchy” of oilmen and bankers had dictated that Ruby would be convicted and then sentenced to death, to exact revenge on him for having embarrassed the city by murdering Oswald. According to Belli, rampant anti-Semitism in Dallas also explained the city’s desire to punish Ruby, who had changed his name from Jacob Rubenstein and was the fifth of eight children born to Polish-Jewish émigrés in Chicago.

  Belli used an insanity defense, arguing that his client suffered from brain damage—he had a long history of violent outbursts that grew worse after he suffered a concussion in his thirties—and that the murder could not have been premeditated. The lawyer offered testimony from a clerk at the downtown office of Western Union who testified that his time stamp showed he sold Ruby a money order on Sunday, November 24, at exactly 11:17 a.m., four minutes before Oswald was murdered across the street at Dallas police headquarters. If the murder had been planned, Belli argued, Ruby would not have been in the Western Union office only moments earlier, wiring $25 to “Little Lynn,” one of his strippers, at her home in Fort Worth. And there was other evidence to suggest that Oswald’s murder was unplanned. Ruby had left his favorite dog, Sheba, in his unlocked car outside the Western Union office. His friends said it was unimaginable that Ruby would abandon the dachshund—he referred to the dog as his “wife”—to be found by strangers. Ruby’s bizarre relationship with Sheba and his other dogs would later be seen by Warren Commission investigators as evidence of serious mental illness.*

  In his closing argument, Belli portrayed his client as a loud-mouthed, but generally well-intentioned, Damon Runyon character who got a thrill from spending time among police officers and reporters. “A village idiot, a village clown,” he said of Ruby. But the defense strategy failed, and Ruby was convicted on March 14 and sentenced to death in the electric chair. Belli stood and sneered at the jurors: “May I thank this jury for a verdict that is a victory for bigotry.” He described his client as the victim of a “kangaroo court, a railroad court—and everybody knows it.”

  * * *

  Back in Washington, news of Ruby’s conviction meant that the commission’s staff could finally get to work on the ground in Dallas; as Warren had insisted, they had stayed out of Texas until then to avoid prejudicing the trial. Hubert and Griffin were among the first to travel to Dallas, where they began to interview witnesses about Ruby.

  From the FBI reports and witness statements they had been reading for weeks, the two lawyers thought that Belli was, in many ways, correct in his description of Ruby. The circumstances of Oswald’s murder suggested Ruby was anything but a cold-blooded assassin dispatched to silence Oswald—the description some conspiracy theorists had tried to apply to him. “The fact that he would go forward and shoot some guy in the basement with a whole crowd of reporters around?” Griffin said years later. “What does that say about Ruby?”

  The tumultuous lives of Ruby and Oswald had similarities, beginning with their tortured relationships with their mothers. Ruby’s mother was institutionalized repeatedly in mental hospitals during his childhood, and she and Ruby’s father were so neglectful of their children that Ruby was never sure of his exact age because his parents never bothered to record his birth date. As adults, both Ruby and Oswald had troubled dealings with women. The FBI questioned many witnesses about the possibility that Ruby—who never married and had a middle-aged male roommate in Dallas—and Oswald might have had “homosexual compulsions,” in the FBI’s terminology of the era.

  Still, Hubert and Griffin worried that there was some part of Ruby’s biography they did not fully understand—that he might in fact have been motivated by more than a sudden, uncontrollable impulse to kill Oswald. They wondered, in particular, if someone might have encouraged Ruby, possibly gangsters from his past who knew he was susceptible to impulsive acts and who wanted him to silence Oswald. Ever since his youth in rough Chicago neighborhoods, Ruby had counted criminals among his friends. As an adult, he befriended gamblers and low-level associates of Italian-American crime families, as well as the families’ corrupt allies in the labor movement, especially in Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters Union. Phone records obtained by the commission showed that Ruby had placed long-distance phone calls to a “known muscleman” for Hoffa in the weeks before Kennedy’s assassination.

  Hubert and Griffin were also interested in Ruby’s connections to Cuba. During his trial, Ruby confirmed that he had tried to do business there after Castro’s victory in 1959. FBI reports showed that Ruby traveled to Cuba that year and met in Havana with an associate of the Gambino crime family in Chicago; Ruby said he had hoped to sell fertilizer and jeeps on the island but that the venture “never got to first base.”

  In the opening weeks of their investigation, Hubert and Griffin put together a detailed time line of Ruby’s activities in the weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. The chart began with dates in mid-September 1963, when the White House made a final decision that Kennedy would travel to Texas. It was the logical place to start. “That’s the first moment that anybody in Dallas or anywhere else could have decided that they were going to assassinate Kennedy,” Griffin recalled. “That was the demarcation point.” The chart was divided into vertical rows, with days of the week down one side of the page, matched up against FBI documents and witness statements that had some reference to Ruby’s activities on each day.

  Hubert and Griffin also began to flesh out the rest of Ruby’s odd, complicated life dating back to his childhood. It occurred to them that they might have a much larger workload than the staff lawyers focused on the biography of Oswald, a man less than half Ruby’s age who had few real friends or associates. “Hell, there are two of us doing what eight other guys are doing on Oswald,” Griffin protested later.

  In mid-March, Hubert and Griffin put together a detailed memo that outlined all of Ruby’s ties to organized crime and to Cuba, and they analyzed how those ties might possibly be linked to the murders of Kennedy and Oswald. The memo noted how Ruby had appeared intentionally to misstate the number of times he visited Cuba. He claimed to have gone only once, in 1959, for about ten days. But immigration records showed that he had been in Havana at least one more time that same year. The FBI found evidence that he might have had contacts with Cuban exiles in the United States who, like some of Ruby’s friends in organized crime, were eager to see Castro ousted. The Communist victory in Cuba meant the end of lucrative gambling and liquor operations long controlled on the island by American mobsters.

  Hubert and Griffin were also struck that, immediately after the assassination, Ruby had publicly demonstrated a more-
than-routine knowledge of Cuban affairs. At a police news conference on the night of Kennedy’s murder, Ruby, sitting among reporters and pretending to be a reporter himself, had spoken up after Dallas district attorney Henry Wade misstated the name of the pro-Castro group that Oswald had claimed to join earlier that year. Wade described it as the “Free Cuba Committee.” Ruby corrected him, blurting out, “Henry, that’s the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” Why, Hubert and Griffin wondered, had he known that?

  They also questioned whether Ruby was telling the truth when he insisted that he had not known Oswald. There was at least one intriguing, if indirect, tie between the men. The housekeeper in the Dallas rooming house where Oswald lived at the time of the assassination, Earlene Roberts, had a sister who was close to Ruby. Roberts’s sister had been asked by Ruby in the 1950s to invest in one of his nightclubs. The sister told the FBI that she had met with Ruby as recently as November 18, four days before the assassination, to discuss a different investment.

  Hubert and Griffin were excited by the idea that there might be much more to Ruby’s story—a possible connection, even, between Ruby and Oswald before the assassination. If there had been a conspiracy to murder Kennedy, it might be unraveled by understanding Ruby, not Oswald. And yet, from the first weeks of the investigation, the two lawyers felt ignored by the commission—especially by Rankin, who had so much control over what information gathered by the staff was shared with Warren and the other commissioners. “Hubert and I were totally on the periphery,” Griffin said.

  Rankin did not invite conversation with Hubert and Griffin or praise their work. “Hubert was there every day, but Rankin ignored him,” Griffin said. “He didn’t think Rankin respected him.” While Rankin would regularly step into the offices of some of the other staff lawyers to ask for updates on their work, he “seldom came in to talk to us.” The situation was made worse by Hubert’s debilitating shyness. He seemed intimidated. He may have been a powerful figure in legal circles in Louisiana, but here in Washington he was working with young men drawn from the Ivy League and the nation’s finest law schools, and from powerful institutions like the Supreme Court and the Justice Department.