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

by Philip Shenon

  He invited no more argument. “He just gave us his opinion, and that was that,” Slawson recalled. On the Supreme Court, the chief justice might have a reputation as a champion of the rights of the political left, including Communists, but in this case, “he accepted the stereotype of a Communist as someone close to evil,” a category in which he apparently placed Silvia Duran.

  Slawson walked out of Warren’s office feeling defeated. He remembered turning to Willens and saying, “Jesus, that is a big disappointment and a big mistake.” But short of resigning from the staff, which he never seriously considered, Slawson concluded there was nothing more he could do.

  Decades later, Slawson said he remained mystified by the chief justice’s decision on Duran: “It’s crazy we didn’t talk to her.” He came to wonder if the decision was a political calculation; Warren might have worried that the commission’s right-wing critics would criticize him for giving credibility to an alleged Communist. More troubling, Slawson said, was the possibility that Warren had been secretly pressured to leave Duran alone. In light of what he later learned about the CIA, Slawson suspected—but could not prove—that Warren had been asked by the spy agency not to interview Duran. Slawson believed Rocca was sincere in offering to help bring Duran to Washington. But he wondered if others, much higher in the agency, were frightened of what she might reveal about Oswald or about American intelligence operations in Mexico City.

  Warren, he later learned, had given in to pressure from the CIA about another possible foreign witness, Yuri Nosenko, the Russian defector. In June, Warren met privately with Richard Helms to hear the CIA’s plea that the commission drop any reference to Nosenko in its final report. Helms “took me aside and told me that the CIA had finally decided that the defector was a phony,” Warren remembered. And the chief justice agreed to the request, even though the commission had never been given a chance to interview Nosenko or even to submit written questions to him through his CIA handlers. “I was adamant that we should not in any way base our findings on the testimony of a Russian defector,” Warren said later. Nosenko, like Duran, could not be trusted to tell the truth.

  * * *

  As the commission began to consider how to organize and write its report, Willens sent out memos to the staff listing the “loose ends” of the investigations, many of which involved Slawson and questions about a possible foreign conspiracy. That was no criticism of the quality of Slawson’s work, he said. It reflected, instead, the mammoth task of trying to prove or disprove a conspiracy with evidence that often seemed vague or conflicting.

  Although the evidence clearly pointed away from any involvement by the Kremlin, Slawson decided in April to ask the FBI and CIA to gather more information about Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union, including evidence that might substantiate his claim in his “Historic Diary” that he attempted suicide shortly after he arrived there in October 1959. Oswald wrote that he tried to end his life after Soviet officials initially refused to allow him to stay in the country. “I decide to end it,” he wrote in the entry for October 21. “Soak wrist in cold water to numb the pain. Then slash my left wrist. Then plunge wrist into bathtub of hot water.” He was discovered by a Russian tourist guide an hour later and taken to the hospital “where five stitches are put in my wrist.”

  Slawson felt the commission could not ignore the possibility that Oswald was lying and that the suicide attempt had been concocted as part of a KGB cover story—possibly to allow him to disappear from the streets of Moscow for a time to receive training as a spy. Oswald’s autopsy report showed there was a scar on his left wrist, but Slawson wanted to be sure it was deep and dramatic enough to suggest an actual suicide attempt. Specter was responsible for the medical evidence, so Slawson wrote him a memo, asking that he question Dallas pathologists about the scar: “If the suicide incident is a fabrication, the time supposedly spent by Oswald in recovering from the suicide in a Moscow hospital could have been spent by him in Russian secret police custody being coached, brainwashed, etc.” Slawson knew the CIA was so interested in verifying Oswald’s account of the suicide attempt that it had considered exhuming his body to inspect the scar. The FBI opposed the proposal and the CIA dropped the idea, fearing it might inspire even more wild conspiracy theories.

  Mexico City was never far from Slawson’s thoughts that spring. After his trip there in April, he drafted a letter to the FBI listing dozens of new questions that the commission wanted answered in Mexico. He asked the FBI to prepare itemized estimates of how much money Oswald might have spent in Mexico City, down to the cost of purchasing six picture postcards of the kind found in his possession after the assassination. Since Oswald had reportedly attended a bullfight, Slawson wanted the FBI to establish “the cost of a ticket of the bullfight for the section in which Oswald probably sat.” The idea, Slawson said, was to determine if Oswald would have needed to accept money from someone to cover his travel costs.

  Slawson also had many unanswered questions about “the other Silvia”—Silvia Odio, the Dallas woman who claimed to have met Oswald in the company of anti-Castro activists. Slawson was convinced that the FBI had been too eager to dismiss her story. In a memo to his colleagues on April 6, he said his research showed that “Mrs. Odio checks out as an intelligent, stable individual.” He was increasingly convinced she was telling the truth, at least as she understood it. “There is a substantial chance that if Mrs. Odio backs down from her story, it will not be because she disbelieves it, but because she is frightened.”

  The FBI reported that it had been unable to find the two Latino men who had supposedly been seen with Oswald at Odio’s door, but that did not surprise Slawson: he suspected the pair might have gone into hiding to avoid being accused of involvement in the assassination and that they might since have tried to intimidate Odio into silence. “They could by now very easily have brought pressure or threats to bear on Mrs. Odio to keep quiet.”

  Slawson planned a visit to Dallas that spring, in part to take Odio’s testimony. In advance of the trip, his colleague Burt Griffin, already in Texas, was asked to interview witnesses who might corroborate Odio’s story, including her psychiatrist, Burton Einspruch. Griffin tracked down Einspruch at his offices at Parkland Hospital, an institution that had already figured in so much of the investigation in Dallas. “Einspruch stated that he had great faith in Miss Odio’s story of having met Lee Harvey Oswald,” Griffin reported back. The psychiatrist recalled how she told him—before the assassination—of her troubling encounter with the three strangers, including the man she now identified as Oswald. “In describing Miss Odio’s personality, Dr. Einspruch stated she is given to exaggeration but that the basic facts which she provides are true,” Griffin wrote. “Her tendency to exaggerate is an emotional type, characteristic of many Latin-American people, being one of degree rather than basic fact.”

  Odio’s claims intrigued several of the commission’s other staff lawyers. Slawson was so consumed by other work in Washington that he did not object when Jim Liebeler, who had become a close friend, volunteered to take on the assignment of interviewing Odio during a trip he had scheduled to Dallas. Liebeler had special reason to look forward to the interview: the photographs of Odio forwarded to the commission from the FBI in Dallas showed that she was, as reported, as pretty as a fashion model. While in Dallas, Liebeler was also scheduled to interview Marina Oswald, and she was lovely, too.

  34

  THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  MAY 1964

  Wesley “Jim” Liebeler was a force of nature. He was a true libertarian, ready to ignore—or better yet, outrage—anyone who tried to impose rules on him. When it came to politics, he was a conservative Republican. He was fiercely anti-Communist and talked about it, and there were rumors on the staff—apparently untrue—that he was a member of the ultraconservative John Birch Society. Rankin remembered Liebeler as an “extreme conservative in rather a hotbed of liberals on our staff, and he early on b
ecame disenchanted with some of the others.” Liebeler’s disdain was often directed at Norman Redlich, who was as liberal on political issues as Liebeler was conservative. “Mr. Redlich and I have quite profoundly different views of the world on political questions,” Liebeler said later.

  For many on the staff, Liebeler also fit the role of a charming rogue. Decades later, several would describe him as among the most memorable people they would ever meet; just the mention of his name would prompt a knowing smile. Slawson recalled him as “devil-may-care” in his attitudes toward authority, beginning with his demand that the commission’s incompetent secretaries be replaced. Griffin said that he and Liebeler “wouldn’t agree on anything” when it came to politics and that Liebeler would be vocal about their differences. “But even through all his aggressiveness, he had this tender quality to him,” Griffin said. “Even if he were saying that you were an idiot on some subject, he did it in a way that you knew he didn’t think you were an idiot.” Liebeler, he thought, “cared deeply about people.”

  Others had less fond memories. Specter thought Liebeler was highly intelligent but also “prickly” and a “flake” who was prone to bizarre flashes of anger. He recalled going to lunch with Liebeler at The Monocle, a popular Capitol Hill restaurant near the commission’s offices, and watching, amazed, as his colleague blew up because the egg on his corned beef hash was not runny enough. “In a demanding, insulting voice, he brings over the waiter and says, ‘Goddamn it, when you cook the egg, it’s supposed to bleed onto the corned beef hash.’”

  Warren made it clear that he did not like Liebeler, several of the lawyers recalled. Months into the investigation, Liebeler did what would have been—in most major law firms or government agencies at the time—the unthinkable. He began to grow a beard. “It was a great, beautiful beard—all red,” Rankin remembered. “It irritated the chief justice.” Warren was so upset that he told Rankin to order Liebeler to shave it off. Rankin said he tried to talk Warren out of it. “I said, ‘Look, he has a right to have his hair the way he wants it, and if he wants a beard, he has a right to that.’” Specter remembered thinking how hypocritical it was for Warren—the “great egalitarian and civil libertarian”—to be angered over Liebeler’s decision to allow his whiskers to grow out. The chief justice exacted his punishment, Specter recalled, by “banishing” Liebeler for a time to a different floor of the VFW building.

  Liebeler titillated his colleagues with stories about his exploits in Washington with different women, and he enjoyed long nights of carousing and drinking, often inviting the other lawyers to join him. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was well under way, and although he had a wife back in New York, he intended to be part of it. “He was a crazy, huge womanizer,” Slawson remembered.

  “He would do anything—absolutely anything,” recalled Griffin, who happily went home to his wife each night. “I live a very puritanical life. But Liebeler, despite all of his political conservatism, was not conservative about anything else.” With alcohol, “he had no restraint,” Griffin said. His nightly exploits were no secret because “he talked about it all the time.” Other staff lawyers saw no sign that Liebeler’s nighttime activities affected his work, and he returned to the office in the morning energized by the adventures of the night before. The alcohol seemed to have no effect, perhaps because he “was a big guy, maybe 6 foot 1 or 2, weighed 200, 220 pounds,” Griffin said.

  Whatever the state of his marriage, Liebeler made clear that he was devoted to his two sons, who remained behind with their mother in New York while he worked in Washington. Over the years, his younger son, Eric, was willing to forgive his father for some of his failings because he so admired him “as a man who wanted to live every single damned day” as if it were his last. “He looked at every day as a day that he should do something interesting, something intense, something valuable.”

  Liebeler was happiest and most productive when he disappeared to the family’s seventy-two-acre summer home in Vermont, on the outskirts of the Green Mountains National Forest. In joining the commission, he asked Rankin for permission to fly to Vermont every few weeks, at the commission’s expense, to work and clear his head. Rankin agreed, apparently not realizing that Liebeler would stuff his briefcase full of classified documents to read on the trip—a fact that would later come back to haunt them both.

  * * *

  Liebeler’s senior partner on the commission’s “Oswald team,” as it became known, was Albert Jenner, the high-powered litigator from Chicago. Their relationship collapsed almost instantly. The two men came to despise each other, and they barely talked after the first few weeks. “I finally decided to do my own thing and basically went ahead and did most of the original work myself,” Liebeler said. According to Specter, the differences in personality between Jenner and Liebeler could not have been more stark. While Liebeler was a modern-day Falstaff, “Bert Jenner was known principally by his dry attitude,” Specter said, remembering staff meals at which Jenner would insist that his food have no seasoning. “He ate salad with no dressing.”

  The team’s responsibilities were eventually divided up so that the two men did not have to cross paths. Liebeler focused on questions about Oswald’s possible motive, while Jenner looked for evidence of a domestic conspiracy involving Oswald’s contacts with people inside the United States after his return from Russia in 1962.

  Back in Chicago, Jenner was a much-admired figure. He was one of the nation’s best-paid lawyers—he would be one of the first in the country to bill corporate clients $100 an hour—and clients did not quibble over the fees because of his success in the courtroom. He was also celebrated by civil liberties and civil rights groups for his commitment at the firm to offering free legal counsel to the poor and for championing pro bono appeals for death-row inmates. At the commission, he earned a reputation for hard work. Unlike other senior lawyers on the staff, Jenner spent most of his time in Washington until the investigation was over. Still, he baffled some of his new colleagues with his work habits and his obsession for detail. Alfred Goldberg recalled reading a draft report on Oswald written by Jenner that, at 120 pages, had almost twelve hundred footnotes, including one especially pointless footnote in which Jenner identified the exact geographical location of the Soviet city of Minsk, where Oswald had lived. Specter remembered a second “worthless” twenty-page report about Oswald that Jenner had written. “The word was that it was read and thrown in the waste basket.”

  Jenner fit a mold that some of the young lawyers had encountered at their own firms. He was a high-paid litigator who knew how to win over a jury and impress a judge but who left the task of gathering evidence, and making sense of it, to junior associates. Certainly Jenner seemed to have no ability to organize his thoughts on paper. “Jenner was a pain in the ass,” Slawson remembered. “Everybody rolled their eyes.” Like other lawyers on the commission, Slawson wondered if Jenner suffered from a learning disability because, rather than read transcripts of witness interviews, “he had his secretary read them out to him,” hour after hour.

  * * *

  Liebeler and Jenner were both invited to call on the research services of John Hart Ely, the young lawyer who was about to go to work at the Supreme Court as one of Warren’s clerks. Ely took on several research projects for Liebeler and Jenner, including a survey of every home where Oswald had lived through his childhood and teenage years, beginning with the New Orleans orphanage where his mother placed him in 1942 at the age of three. It was notable, Ely thought, that Mrs. Oswald had dropped her son at the orphanage on the day after Christmas. If there was any doubt that Oswald was entitled to feelings of rootlessness, it was dispelled by Ely’s six-page memo, which listed seventeen different homes, in four different states, in places as far afield as Covington, Louisiana, and the Bronx, New York, in which Oswald had lived with his mother. Often, Oswald and his brothers would stay in a house, and a school, for only a few weeks before their mother would move them, often on a whim about where a be
tter life might be found.

  Ely was next asked to take on a detailed reconstruction of Oswald’s military career, which began on October 24, 1956, six days after Oswald’s seventeenth birthday, when he enlisted in the marines. Ely went through the records of Oswald’s training in boot camp, including his three-week instruction in the use of an M-1, the military’s standard rifle. When Oswald was finally tested on his weapons skills in December 1956, he ranked as a “sharpshooter,” the middle of the three rankings used in the Marine Corps. (The highest ranking was “expert” and the lowest passable ranking was “marksman.”)

  Ely interviewed many of Oswald’s colleagues from the marines and got a consistent view of Oswald as withdrawn and antisocial—“loner” and “nonentity” were common descriptions. When drawn into conversations with other marines, Oswald readily acknowledged that he was a Marxist and hoped to visit the Soviet Union and perhaps live there. A fellow marine recalled that Oswald, who was studying the Russian language, “played records of Russian songs so loud that one could hear them outside the barracks.” Another said Oswald referred to other marines as “comrades” and that he used the Russian words for yes and no—“da” and “nyet”—in regular conversation. As a result, some of the marines began to refer to Oswald, to his face, as “Oswaldovitch.” One former marine recalled that Oswald had talked of wanting “to go to Cuba to train Castro’s troops.”

  Ely heard differing recollections of Oswald’s life away from the barracks. There were conflicting reports about his drinking habits—some recalled Oswald getting drunk, while others recalled no drinking at all—and his attitude toward women. There were persistent rumors that Oswald was homosexual, mostly because he was so rarely seen in the company of women off base. Other sorts of rumors, involving firearms and violence, stuck to him. He was court-martialed after he injured himself with an unregistered .22-caliber pistol that he had purchased privately; the pistol fell out of his locker and discharged, wounding him above the left elbow. He was court-martialed again as a result of a fight with one of his sergeants. Ely also reported allegations, never substantiated, that Oswald was involved in the death of another marine, Private Martin Schrand, who was killed by a shot from his own weapon in January 1958, when both men were stationed in the Philippines.