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

by Philip Shenon

  For the commission, there were now “The Two Silvias,” as they became known around the offices. There was Silvia Odio in Dallas, and there was Silvia Duran in Mexico City. The fact that both Silvias were exotic, strikingly attractive young Latin women was not lost on Slawson and his male colleagues.

  At first, Slawson could do little to pursue Silvia Odio’s allegations on his own; he could only hope that the FBI would continue to press the investigation in Dallas, especially by establishing the identity of the two Latino men who were reported to be traveling with Oswald. Slawson said years later that he never focused on Hosty’s continued involvement in the investigation and how that might have been a conflict of interest. He said he did not recall ever noticing Hosty’s name on the paperwork about Odio. Slawson and the rest of the commission’s staff were ignorant of Hoover’s move to discipline Hosty and several other FBI employees over their failures before the assassination.

  There was more that Slawson could do to follow up on Silvia Duran. He had seen her early on as a key witness in his part of the investigation—“perhaps the essential witness”—given her repeated interactions with Oswald in Mexico. As Helms had recommended, Slawson and Coleman planned to go to Mexico that spring; during the visit, they could press for an interview with Duran. Slawson read the full CIA reports about her, and he was aware of the rumors that she was an intelligence operative—possibly for the Mexican government, possibly even for the United States.

  Slawson said he was never told directly why CIA and FBI officials in Mexico City made no request to interrogate Duran themselves, leaving her to be questioned instead by the Dirección Federal de Seguridad, or DFS, the brutal Mexican spy agency. It complicated his investigation, since the Mexicans had not provided the United States any sort of transcript of Duran’s interrogation. Instead, the Mexicans offered only a summary of what they said she had told them. For Slawson, the summary raised as many questions as it answered.

  * * *

  When it came to imagining conspiracy theories about the assassination, Slawson knew he was “an amateur,” he joked later. Spinning those theories was becoming a business, in fact, and a lucrative one. Marguerite Oswald and Mark Lane were in the midst of their national speaking tour that spring, raising money as they went, and Lane planned to travel across Europe to spread his message of Oswald’s innocence. Like his colleagues, Slawson said he never troubled himself with Lane. “He was lying so blatantly, I couldn’t imagine anyone taking him seriously.”

  In Europe, Lane would find a rapt audience for conspiracy theories, even more so than in the United States. The popular French newsmagazine L’Express had begun running a series of articles by an American expatriate journalist, Thomas Buchanan, who suggested—on the basis of what was later found to be confused, scant evidence—that Kennedy had been murdered in a conspiracy by right-wing Texas industrialists and oilmen. Over time, Buchanan would claim that Oswald and Ruby had known each other and that Ruby had loaned Oswald the money he needed to pay back the State Department for his travel costs to return to the United States in 1962. By late winter, Buchanan was writing a book titled Who Killed Kennedy? and he had lined up publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.

  In the United States, a more serious writer, Harold Feldman of the Nation, continued to suggest that Oswald might have been an FBI informant. In February, Redlich prepared a detailed memo suggesting that Feldman’s reporting was “sufficiently accurate to warrant consideration.” Redlich, who had written for the Nation himself, felt the magazine raised valid questions about the seeming ease with which Oswald had received a new passport when he returned to the United States after his failed defection to the Soviet Union, a fact that might suggest some secret, long-standing tie between Oswald and the State Department or the CIA. “In general, it is wise to study articles such as this one rather than dismiss them because of their inevitable factual inaccuracies,” Redlich wrote. “They may contain the germ of an idea which we might otherwise overlook.”

  * * *

  Redlich would soon find himself the target of conspiracy theories. On February 12, Tocsin, a small, right-wing newsletter based in Oakland, California (“The West’s Leading Anti-Communist Weekly”), published a front-page article about Redlich’s work on the commission. The headline: “Red-Fronter on Death Probe.” The article began: “A prominent member of a Communist front is a member of the staff of the Warren Commission investigating the slaying of President Kennedy. He is Norman Redlich, a professor at New York University Law School.” The article suggested that Redlich was a leftist plant, noting his past membership in the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, a New York–based lawyers’ group that had been labeled a Communist front by the FBI. The committee was organized in the early 1950s to defend people targeted as Communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  Within days, Congressman John F. Baldwin, a Northern California Republican, forwarded a copy of the Tocsin article to Gerald Ford, his GOP colleague in the House. “I am quite concerned about this article about a man who has been employed as assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, of which you are a member,” Baldwin wrote in a scolding letter on February 12. “You may possibly want to do something about this.”

  The next day, an agitated Ford replied to Baldwin: “I share your concern about the allegations.… We are having this matter investigated.” He noted to his colleague that when the commission was formed, “I insisted, among other things, that no member of the staff have any past association with extremist groups of any kind.” If Ford was angry, he felt he had good reason to be; despite his insistence that the commission’s staff members have no extreme political ties, left or right, Redlich had been hired anyway. Now, Ford could see, he risked being embarrassed over this among his own conservative colleagues in Congress.

  Ford decided to do some digging of his own. He contacted the House Un-American Activities Committee, then led by Congressman Edwin Willis, a staunchly conservative Louisiana Democrat, and asked for a full report on Redlich. Ford was sent a two-page memo that listed Redlich’s ties to civil liberties and civil rights groups that the committee considered subversive. It was no surprise that Redlich had earned the wrath of the Un-American Activities Committee since he had appeared at several rallies in New York to denounce the committee and its work.

  * * *

  The discoveries about Redlich were the latest frustration for Ford in dealing with the chief justice and the commission. Just days earlier, he had been forced to respond to a furor sparked by Warren’s baffling public comments on the first day of Marina Oswald’s testimony. Asked by reporters gathered at the VFW building if the commission would make public the information she and other witnesses revealed, the chief justice replied: “Yes, there will come a time.… but it might not be in your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security. This would be preserved but not made public.” He was quoted separately by the Associated Press as saying that if Mrs. Oswald’s testimony revealed national-security secrets, they might have to be suppressed for decades—“and I say that seriously.”

  His remarks produced an uproar, since they seemed to support the arguments of conspiracy theorists that the commission intended to hold back the full truth about the assassination. The alarm spread to the commission’s staff, with several of the young lawyers wondering what the chief justice was talking about. Arlen Specter said he knew, the minute he heard about Warren’s comments, that the chief justice had “seriously damaged the commission’s reputation” and threatened “to cast a pall on everything the commission did.” From what he now knew about Warren, Specter thought he understood what had happened: the chief justice had become flummoxed by the reporters’ questions and blurted out something he did not mean, to stop the journalists from pressing him further. This was Warren’s “spontaneous way of avoiding the questions,” Specter recalled. The chief justice was not “a man who could think quickly on his feet.”

&
nbsp; The blunder resulted in angry editorials in conservative newspapers that had been hostile to Warren for years. The Columbus Enquirer of Columbus, Georgia, said the chief justice had “injected a new sinister note” into the investigation. “Warren’s remarks could undermine public confidence,” the paper said in an editorial, calling on the commission to “issue an immediate statement on what he meant.” The chief justice was denounced on the House floor by Representative August Johansen, a Michigan Republican whose congressional district was near Ford’s. He charged that Warren’s comments “struck at the very heart of the all-important factor of public confidence” in the investigation.

  In a letter sent to angered constituents, Ford wrote that he, too, was startled by what Warren had said—and that the chief justice was simply wrong. “I can assure you as one member of the commission that all information relative to the solemn responsibility of the commission will be made public at the time the report is published.”

  Friends of Warren’s began to worry that he had done serious damage to the investigation. A senior editor at Newsweek magazine, Lester Bernstein, was so alarmed by the gaff that he asked Katherine Graham, the president of the Washington Post Company, the magazine’s owner, to forward a letter to him at the Supreme Court. He knew she was a good friend of the chief justice’s. In a tone that might be read as condescending, Bernstein urged Warren to stop talking to reporters entirely. “It seems to me that you are courting an undesirable—and unnecessary—impression by publicly discussing the investigation, however guardedly, while it is in progress,” he wrote. “To deal casually on a day-to-day basis with reporters invites risks of misquotation, misunderstanding and sensational exploitation, all of which, I believe, played a part in the recent clamor of whether or not you said that some evidence in the case would be withheld ‘in our lifetimes.’” He urged Warren to hire an experienced public spokesman.

  In a separate letter to Warren that began “Dear Chief,” Mrs. Graham did not disagree with her editor’s judgments. “I think him very intelligent and he was worried,” she wrote of Bernstein. “I apologize, as he does, for burdening you further. This was something he felt he must say.”

  Warren wrote back to Graham, telling her Bernstein’s suggestions were “quite appropriate.” To Bernstein, he admitted in a letter that “you were as right as anyone could be” and that he had decided to change “my relationship with the press, which has been a delicate one at best. The commission was really between the devil and the deep blue sea. We desired no publicity whatsoever, but for a time, the pressure was almost hysterical.” He said that his words had been misunderstood, although he was not specific how. “I was quoted as saying that some of the testimony would not be released in our lifetime. I assure you that nothing is further from our desires or intentions.”

  * * *

  There were, in fact, secrets that Warren intended to keep—possibly forever, certainly while the commission’s investigation was under way. Many of them involved the private life of Marina Oswald.

  On Monday, February 17, Hoover sent a classified letter to Rankin with a bizarre—and, it was quickly determined, incorrect—report that the young widow might have been raped while she was in Washington to testify to the commission. The FBI had learned from a “confidential informant” that she might have been “subjected to sexual intercourse by force” by her business manager, James Martin, in her room at the Willard Hotel, Hoover wrote. The story had apparently originated with her brother-in-law, Robert, who had heard it from Marina herself after she returned to Dallas.

  Rankin reacted instantly, calling a meeting that day with Secret Service inspector Thomas Kelley, who was serving as the agency’s liaison to the commission. The implications for the Secret Service were dire, since Mrs. Oswald had been under its protection in Washington. How could she have been sexually assaulted with its agents outside her hotel room door?

  Rankin told Kelley that the Secret Service needed to determine immediately whether there was any hint of truth in this. Kelley was shocked, too, and “stated categorically that he had no knowledge” of anything like it, Rankin recalled. As Rankin watched, Kelley picked up the phone and called the Secret Service’s field office in Dallas and ordered that an agent drive out to Martin’s home that instant to see if Marina Oswald was still there.

  The answer from Dallas came back quickly: Marina had left the Martin house and moved in with Robert Oswald. Two days later, FBI agents in Dallas interviewed her, and she insisted there had been no rape. Instead, she said, she had consummated, once and only once, a weeks-long romance with Martin. It occurred on Friday, February 7, in her hotel room, after she dismissed her Secret Service detail for the night. Martin, she said, had then slipped into her room. “I took a bath and was partly dressed when I reentered the bedroom. Jim finished undressing me, and thereafter we had sexual intercourse. It was with my consent, and I did not resist.” She said she had told Martin in Washington that while she would continue to refuse his proposal of marriage, she would be his mistress, even as she continued to live with Martin and his wife in their family home.

  Marina and Martin returned to Dallas—and to Martin’s home—that weekend. On Sunday, during a visit to her husband’s grave, Marina told Robert about her sexual encounter with Martin. Appalled, her brother-in-law insisted that she break off her business relationship with Martin immediately and move in with him, and she agreed. She then went a step further and insisted that Martin’s wife be informed of everything that had happened. “His wife should know the whole truth,” she decided. She telephoned Mrs. Martin that night; with Martin listening in on an extension, Marina told Martin that she was “ending his services as my business manager and my lover.”

  Her account to the FBI was relayed back to the Warren Commission, where Rankin was alarmed that the young widow—whose credibility seemed so essential to the case the commission was making against her husband—might now be the subject of scandal. He knew the story, if it ever became public, could easily demolish the commission’s portrayal of her as the guileless, shattered woman who had bravely identified her husband as the president’s killer. Now she might be portrayed instead as a conniving home-wrecker.

  Marina’s morals, and her truthfulness, were about to come under even closer, more substantive scrutiny. Robert Oswald was the next witness scheduled to testify before the commission in Washington and, in advance of his appearance, he had provided the panel with a copy of a handwritten diary he had kept since the assassination. The diary contained an alarming entry from a month earlier—Sunday, January 12. On that day, Robert wrote, he and Marina planned to visit Lee’s gravesite, and he went to James Martin’s home to pick her up. Before the drive, he said, Martin pulled Robert aside to reveal something Marina had just told him—that her husband had plotted to kill former vice president Richard Nixon when Nixon visited Texas sometime in 1963. In the car, Robert asked Marina about the Nixon story and she confirmed it.

  To several of the commissioners, the disclosure was a shocking new blow to Marina’s credibility. She had told no one else about a plot to kill Nixon; certainly she had not mentioned it in her appearance before them in early February.

  * * *

  Ford was dumbfounded when he heard about the Nixon plot. “Could it be possible that Marina had simply forgotten this incident?” he asked himself. Or could she have some sinister reason to keep this secret? “The many-sided Marina now had another side,” he said.

  During his testimony to the commission, Robert Oswald was composed and to the point. He impressed the commissioners with his intelligence. “Here was a young man, conservatively dressed, soft-spoken, conscientiously trying to recall incidents of his family’s history of many years ago,” Ford recalled. “I wondered whether I could have been as precise if asked similar questions concerning my own family.”

  Robert testified that he had reluctantly come to the conclusion that his brother had killed the president and that he had done it alone. He believed Lee had the s
kills with a rifle to kill Kennedy, especially since the president’s motorcade passed slowly in front of the Texas School Book Depository. Like his brother, Robert had served in the Marine Corps, and he knew that Lee had been rated as a competent marksman by his military trainers. Both brothers liked to hunt, and Robert said that Lee had told him about bird-hunting trips he had taken while living in Russia.

  He was asked in detail about the Nixon threat, and repeated what he had written in his diary. He recalled how Marina had told him on the day of the graveyard visit that “Lee was going to shoot Mr. Richard M. Nixon” when Nixon was in Dallas one day in 1963 and that she had “locked him in the bathroom all day” to stop him. Robert had no explanation for why she had failed to share the story with the commission.

  * * *

  Despite the weeks of tension between Rankin and Hoover, the two men now shared a common concern—about Marina Oswald and her secrets.

  On February 24, Rankin called Hoover to discuss the new revelations about Oswald’s widow. Rankin said he was worried both about the disclosure of her illicit relationship with Martin and about whether her continued dishonesty—he was apparently referring to the belated discovery of the Nixon plot—meant she might still try to flee the country. He said he wanted the FBI to place her under aggressive, round-the-clock surveillance.