Others had more success in picking out something significant in the newsreels from Dallas. Alfred Goldberg, the air force historian, was responsible for reviewing film of Oswald’s appearance at a late-night news conference at Dallas police headquarters on November 22, several hours after the assassination. The police wanted Oswald to make a public appearance before reporters to prove that he was not being mistreated in custody. After watching different versions of the film repeatedly, Goldberg noticed someone in the crowd of reporters and photographers who did not belong there—Jack Ruby, pretending to be a journalist. “There he was,” Goldberg remembered. “Ruby was standing right there, just a few feet from Oswald.” It was a valuable discovery, suggesting that Ruby had a chance to kill Oswald Friday night instead of waiting until Sunday; that argued against a conspiracy to silence Oswald, since the conspirators would seemingly want Oswald dead as quickly as possible, before he could spill any secrets.
Goldberg had taken on the larger assignment of gathering all of the television film from Dallas that captured images of the assassination—from the national television networks, as well as footage from their local affiliates in Texas and from independent channels. He eventually tracked down seventeen hundred pounds of film and, through his air force contacts, arranged to have it all flown to Washington aboard military planes.
* * *
Pollak was one of several young lawyers who passed in and out of the commission’s office on temporary assignment. It was his second chance to work under the chief justice. After graduating from Stanford and then earning a law degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard in 1962, Pollak was immediately hired on as one of Warren’s clerks. He shared a view that was similar to that of Sam Stern, the other former Warren clerk on the commission staff. “The Chief Justice was not an intellectual heavyweight, but he had uncanny common sense and decency,” Pollak said. Warren was eager to have the court issue rulings that reflected what was best for the country, sometimes without worrying over legal technicalities or precedent. “He’d say, ‘cut through the law.’”
Pollak joined the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in the summer of 1963. On the day of the assassination, he was in the waiting room outside the office of Assistant Attorney General Herbert “Jack” Miller, the head of the division, when the first word arrived from Dallas. Miller, he remembered, emerged from his office, shaken. “He came out the door to tell me the terrible news, ‘The President has been shot,’” Pollak recalled. “It wasn’t clear if he was dead or alive.”
Miller asked him to rush to the department’s library “to find out what federal jurisdiction we have” to prosecute a presidential assassin. Pollak was gone for about an hour—Kennedy’s death was announced while he was in the library—and he returned with what he thought was a startling discovery. “We had no jurisdiction,” Pollak remembered. “Shooting the president was not a federal crime.”
Pollak’s immediate supervisor was Deputy Assistant Attorney General Howard Willens. After Willens joined the commission’s staff, he invited Pollak to join him, an offer that Pollak turned down. Early in 1964, Willens tried again, this time offering Pollak the chance to help write the final report. This time Pollak agreed, and he shared an office with Alfred Goldberg. The next several months were, Pollak said, the most intense working experience of his life. “In my whole career, I never put in more hours—every night, every weekend.”
There were days when Californians, beginning with the chief justice, Pollak, and Joseph Ball, seemed everywhere in the commission’s offices. Richard Mosk, a Los Angeles native, had followed a year behind Pollak at both Stanford and Harvard Law School. The twenty-four-year-old Mosk knew Warren through his father, Stanley Mosk, then California’s state attorney general. The younger Mosk wrote to the chief justice to ask for a job on the commission, and he was hired in February and given the title of associate.
Richard Mosk’s first assignment was far from glamorous: he was asked to study the history of congressional subpoenas and create a subpoena form that the commission could use. The work quickly got more interesting, though, if somewhat quirkily so. In March, he was asked to determine who was behind a series of mysterious classified ads that appeared in the two major Dallas daily newspapers in the weeks before the assassination. The first, on October 15, appeared in the personal-ads section of the Morning News: “Running Man—Please call me. Please! Please! Lee.” The second was published the next day. “I want Running Man. Please call me. Lee.” Had Lee Oswald used the classifieds to make contact with a coconspirator in the assassination who had used the code name “Running Man”? After a few phone calls, Mosk was disappointed to discover that the ads were simply part of a publicity campaign for a new movie, The Running Man, starring Lee Remick. (The film also starred the British actor Laurence Harvey, and it became Hollywood legend that the film was a commercial failure because it opened at about the time of the assassination and starred someone named Lee and someone named Harvey.)
Mosk was also asked to list all of the books that Oswald had checked out of public libraries in Texas and New Orleans, to see if his reading offered any clues about a possible motive for the assassination. “He was pretty well read for an uneducated guy,” Mosk said. “I don’t think he had a high IQ, but at least he was trying to read this stuff.” The list included several biographies of world leaders, including Mao and Khrushchev, as well as Kennedy. Oswald also liked spy novels, including Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers.
One book on the list was worth special scrutiny—The Shark and the Sardines by former Guatemalan president Juan José Arévalo, an allegorical tract about the domination of Latin American nations (“the sardines”) by the United States (“the shark”). In late April, Mosk wrote a memo to David Slawson to highlight a passage of the book in which Arévalo wrote that foreign “statesmen” involved in the suppression of Latin America should be “purged, possibly by armed rebellion.” Mosk noted ties between the book’s publisher and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the pro-Castro group that Oswald had claimed to support, and that the book’s author and translator were “all intimately connected with the Castro government.” The translator, June Cobb, an American woman then living in Mexico City, was later revealed to be a paid CIA informant, and she would later figure prominently in the investigation of Oswald’s mysterious trip to Mexico.
Mosk shared an office with another young lawyer on temporary assignment to the commission: John Hart Ely, twenty-five, who had graduated from Yale Law School the year before and had just been hired as one of Warren’s clerks on the court. Ely had agreed to work at the commission until his clerkship began. Two years earlier, he had worked as a summer associate at the elite Washington law firm of Arnold, Fortas & Porter. The firm asked him to write the first draft of a Supreme Court brief on behalf of a pro bono client, Clarence Gideon, the Florida prison inmate whose name would be memorialized in Gideon v. Wainwright, the landmark case in which the Warren court ruled that indigent criminal defendants were entitled to a free lawyer. Ely was justifiably proud of his part in the case, and he showed Mosk a copy of an issue of Time magazine that spring that noted his role in Gideon’s brief. “He flips the magazine to me, and I put my feet up on my desk” to read the story, Mosk said. That produced a mortifying moment for Mosk, since just then Lee Rankin walked through the door of their office. “It was the first time Rankin had ever walked into our office, and there I was, with my feet upon the desk, reading Time magazine.” Mosk would make a far better impression as the weeks went on.
Ely was about to have his own awkwardness with Rankin—over the discovery of a distasteful fact about Oswald’s health. Ely had been assigned to do a thorough review of Oswald’s service in the marines; he summarized what he found in a memo on April 22. He went through Oswald’s personnel files, including his medical records, and he came across information that he thought should be brought to the attention of the other lawyers, including the fact that Oswald had a Japanese girlfriend while stationed in Japan
in 1958 who was “possibly a prostitute” and that he was diagnosed that same year with gonorrhea.
Rankin, the commission’s paperwork suggests, was appalled that Ely was willing to put on paper something so vulgar—even if it was true. The seemingly prudish Rankin spoke with Ely on May 5 to make his displeasure clear; later that day, Ely offered an abject apology, insisting in a memo that he had been misunderstood and that he was not recommending any further investigation of the matters. “I mentioned Oswald’s venereal disease, just as I mentioned every other fact I had encountered,” Ely wrote. “I tried to treat it like any other event in Oswald’s life, and intended neither to suggest that it is probative of whether or not Oswald killed President Kennedy, nor to ‘smear’ Oswald.” As Rankin had insisted, the commission’s final report made no mention of Oswald’s bout with a sexually transmitted disease or of his possible romance with a prostitute.
30
THE OFFICES OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY
DALLAS, TEXAS
TUESDAY, MARCH 24, 1964
With each passing week, the commission’s contempt for the Dallas police department grew stronger. It was not just the department’s incompetence, especially when it came to the chaos that had allowed Oswald to be killed in police custody. Often it was the inability of Dallas police officers to tell the truth, even under oath.
Commission lawyer Burt Griffin was convinced, for example, that Dallas police sergeant Patrick Dean had lied repeatedly about the circumstances of Oswald’s murder. An eleven-year veteran of the force, Dean had been responsible for security in the basement of police headquarters on the morning that Ruby slipped in and gunned down Oswald. The fact that Ruby had managed to get into the supposedly secure basement was proof either that Dean and his colleagues had not done their jobs or, more alarmingly, that someone on the force had helped Ruby, maybe in the knowledge that he would kill Oswald. Griffin thought it was possible that the delusional Ruby had been encouraged to act by policemen who wanted vengeance for the damage that Oswald had done to the city’s reputation.
Dean had told a number of seemingly contradictory stories about what happened in the basement and what he heard Ruby say immediately after his arrest. By the time Dean testified as a star prosecution witness in Ruby’s murder trial in March, however, he had settled on his account, one that would help put Ruby on death row.
According to Dean’s testimony, Ruby claimed in his initial police interrogation, minutes after shooting Oswald, that he had slipped into the basement by walking down a ramp off Main Street, past an unsuspecting police guard. During the same interrogation, Dean said, Ruby made a statement that the murder was premeditated. Specifically, Dean said, Ruby blurted out that he had originally thought of killing Oswald two days earlier, when he attended the Friday night news conference at police headquarters. Prosecutors cited Dean’s testimony in convincing a jury that Oswald’s murder was two days in the planning—not the result of temporary insanity, as defense lawyers claimed—and that Ruby should die in the electric chair.
Griffin was not the only person in Dallas who believed Dean was lying. Ruby’s defense lawyers said they were convinced of it, especially since no one else could back up the policeman’s testimony. Griffin thought Dean was motivated to lie both to cover up his own “dereliction of duty” and to try to grab publicity for himself. Dean had proved himself remarkably publicity hungry. On the day of Oswald’s murder—without permission from his superiors—he had granted several interviews about what he had seen in the basement and what he knew of Ruby. Also without permission, he drove across town that afternoon to Parkland Hospital, where he managed to attach himself to Oswald’s family, even joining Oswald’s widow and mother in viewing the corpse.
Griffin thought it was possible that Dean had actually seen Ruby walk down the ramp and had done nothing to stop him. The police officer had been friendly with Ruby for years and was an occasional patron at the Carousel Club; Dean might have assumed that Ruby simply wanted the thrill of being a witness to a moment of history when Oswald appeared in front of the cameras again. Griffin could understand why Dean would lie if he had let Ruby into the basement; he would want to save his job. “If somebody in the police department had either let him come in or was aware that he would come in, that guy is out of a job, and the Police Department is totally discredited,” Griffin said later.
As for Dean’s claim that Ruby had acknowledged that the murder was premeditated, Griffin believed it was probably motivated by the policeman’s desire to help local prosecutors win an all-important conviction. That lie, Griffin said, would have been even more “reprehensible” since it was the reason Ruby faced execution.
* * *
When Griffin took Dean’s testimony in Dallas in late March, he wanted to confront him with what he thought were his lies. At the end of about two hours of questioning, he announced to Dean that he would like to continue the conversation “off the record” with the court reporter out of the room. The unsuspecting Dean agreed.
“I told Dean that he was not telling the truth,” Griffin recalled. “I told him the two particular points in his testimony that I believed to be untrustworthy: that Ruby told him on November 24 that he had entered the basement through the Main Street Ramp and that he thought of killing Oswald on the night of Nov. 22.”
Dean said he was shocked at the accusation of perjury. “I can’t imagine what you’re getting at,” he said. “I quoted Ruby just about verbatim.… These were the facts and I couldn’t change them.”
Griffin tried to ease the blow, he said. “I took considerable pains to explain to Dean that I felt that I understood why he was coloring his testimony and that I believed him to be a basically honest and truthful person. I don’t recall ever using the word perjury.… I most certainly did not tell him that he was going to be prosecuted for anything.” He advised Dean to consider hiring a lawyer if he needed to make a “substantial amendment” to his testimony.
Dean insisted again he was telling the truth, and Griffin went back on the record without getting the confession he had hoped for. He tried to end Dean’s testimony on a friendly note. The court reporter returned to the room and Griffin, speaking for the record, said: “I appreciate very much the assistance that Sergeant Dean has given us here this evening, and I hope, and I am sure, that if anything further comes to light which he thinks would be of value to the commission, that he will come forward with it voluntarily.”
The confrontation with Dean quickly “blew up in my face,” Griffin acknowledged later. The police sergeant walked out of the witness room and contacted Dallas district attorney Henry Wade, the prosecutor who had won Ruby’s conviction. Dean warned that the Warren Commission seemed to be out to undermine his testimony and therefore reverse the conviction. Wade immediately contacted Rankin in Washington to protest.
Dean said later he understood that Wade also telephoned President Johnson, an old Texas friend of the district attorney’s, to complain about the commission’s tactics, and specifically about Griffin. The story leaked to the Dallas newspapers, which reported that Griffin was being “recalled” to Washington.
Griffin might have predicted what would happen next, given his belief that the Ruby investigation had always been treated as a stepchild of the commission’s work. When he learned of the flap in Dallas, Chief Justice Warren sided with Sergeant Dean, not with Griffin. Whatever Warren’s view of Dean’s truthfulness, he did not want the commission caught up in a nasty public fight with officials in Dallas. In early June, Dean was invited to Washington to testify, and he received an apology directly from the chief justice. “No member of our staff has a right to tell any witness that he is lying or that he is testifying falsely,” Warren said. “That is not his business.”
* * *
The confrontation over Dean came at an already difficult moment for Griffin and Hubert, who were beginning to wonder if they could ever finish their part of the investigation. From the evidence they had gathered, it was impossible t
o rule out the possibility that—somehow, someway—Ruby had in fact been part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy or Oswald, or both. Ruby had undeniable, if indirect, ties to mobsters who might have had reason to want to see the president dead because of the Justice Department’s war on organized crime. “There were lots and lots of associations that he had with underworld types,” Griffin said. And there was a Cuba connection. Over the years, Ruby had wanted to be part of those seemingly shady business deals in Cuba that might have put him in touch with Cubans—both supporters and opponents of Fidel Castro—who might be implicated in the president’s assassination.
By late winter, Warren had abandoned any hope of meeting his original deadline of June 1 to finish the investigation. The commission’s lawyers were then facing a new deadline of June 15 to prepare drafts of their contributions to the final report. But for Griffin and Hubert, that deadline was still wildly optimistic. In March, they sent a memo to Rankin to remind him how much of their basic detective work was not finished. There had still been no effort to check out all of the names, telephone numbers, and addresses found in Ruby’s belongings, nor had anyone conducted a thorough analysis of the records of phone calls that Ruby and some of his associates had made in the days before Oswald’s murder.
Immediately after a staff meeting on Friday, April 3, the two lawyers met with Rankin and asked for help. They estimated they would need three extra investigators, working with them for at least a month, to get their work done. The response they got was, in their view, insulting. Rankin told them that Warren’s bodyguard might be able to help them; no one else was available.
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Page 33
