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

by Philip Shenon

  “Did it occur to you that he was a potentially dangerous person?” Senator Cooper asked.

  “No sir,” Hosty replied. “Prior to the assassination of the president of the United States, I had no information indicating violence on the part of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  He had expected tough questions about Aynesworth’s article, but he was relieved that the commission seemed just as skeptical about the story as he was. That was confirmed, Hosty said, when Warren asked to take the conversation off the record, so that the court reporter would not take down what was being said. The commissioners, Hosty said, told him they were “disgusted” with the Dallas police; they suggested that they, too, believed Revill’s memo was a phony, written months after the assassination to create a paper trail that would allow the police to make a scapegoat of the FBI.

  Hosty was relieved, too, at the questions that were not being asked. He faced no questions about the handwritten note that Oswald had delivered to the FBI field office in early November—the note that Hosty had torn up and flushed down a toilet. Maybe, he hoped, that meant the commission had never learned about the note’s existence and its destruction. Stern did ask if Hosty had retained any of his own notes from the day of the assassination. Hosty replied that he, like most agents, routinely threw away handwritten notes after using them to prepare typewritten reports. He had kept no notes of his own about Oswald, he said.*

  The questioning ended at five ten p.m. Hosty left the commission’s offices thinking his testimony had gone well, or at least as well as he could have hoped. It was a warm spring day, and he took a walk down Capitol Hill and along the National Mall to FBI headquarters at Ninth and Pennsylvania. “Feeling better and glad this was over, my step became a little lighter, and I enjoyed the green grass and beautiful blooming trees on the Mall.”

  * * *

  It was something less than an open-door policy, but all FBI agents knew they could request a private meeting with Hoover when they visited Washington. The FBI director sometimes granted the request, sometimes not. Hoover said he found the meetings a useful way of bolstering agent morale and gathering information that might not otherwise reach him.

  Hosty had requested a meeting with Hoover while he was in the capital, and he took it as a good sign that Hoover agreed.

  At about two p.m. on Wednesday, May 6, he found himself standing in Hoover’s office, facing “the Old Man” himself. “Hoover had his head buried in foot-high stacks of paperwork,” Hosty said. “Next to this desk was a single chair, which he waved for me to take when he looked up and saw me. I sunk into the low chair, descending significantly lower than Hoover. I am sure this was the desired effect.”

  Hoover put down his pen and swiveled in his chair toward him. As Hosty recalled it, “I just burst out with the only thing I wanted to say: ‘Mr. Hoover, I just wanted to thank you in person for really standing by and publicly defending me on the Revill memo a couple of weeks ago.’”

  “Oh, that was nothing,” Hoover said, smiling.

  Hosty had no chance to say much more, he remembered. Hoover took over the conversation, launching into a monologue that lasted several minutes in which he described his lunch that day at the White House with President Johnson, who had just decided to waive the mandatory retirement age for Hoover. “The president told me that the country just couldn’t get along with me,” Hoover said, obviously delighted. He went on to talk about his close friendship with Johnson and his loathing for Robert Kennedy. The attorney general, he said, “disgusted him.”

  He then referred to Chief Justice Warren and the commission. “He told me that the FBI had a source on the commission,” Hosty recalled. “Hoover’s information, which he considered reliable, was that the commission would clear the FBI of any mishandling of the Oswald case by a 5-to-2 margin.” According to Hoover, only Warren and McCloy would vote against the FBI. “Hoover told me how Warren detested him,” Hosty said.

  * * *

  Whatever his apparent self-confidence in front of a rank-and-file agent like Hosty, Hoover was actually in something like a panic that spring. He was convinced the Warren Commission and its staff were feeding stories to reporters in Washington, Dallas, and elsewhere that were designed to undermine his legacy—even to threaten the bureau’s very survival. At the commission’s insistence, Hoover had been reduced to answering to the reports of scandal-mongering tabloids. On May 5, Rankin wrote to Hoover to demand the FBI’s detailed response to a front-page story in the National Enquirer—the sensationalist weekly tabloid that billed itself as “The World’s Liveliest Newspaper” and was best known for stories focused on sex and violence—that alleged the FBI had covered up evidence that Oswald and Ruby had known each other. The article claimed that the Justice Department had pressured the Dallas police to hold off arresting both Oswald and Ruby earlier in 1963 for their involvement in a supposed plot to kill General Walker. As a result of the article, FBI agents were ordered to interview the police chief in Dallas, Jesse Curry, who insisted that the Enquirer story was a fabrication and that the Dallas police had never heard of Oswald until the day of his arrest. On May 8, Hoover wrote back to Rankin to say there was no truth to the tabloid’s article.

  On Thursday, May 14, Hoover was himself called to testify before the commission. It appeared to be another sign of the ill will between Hoover and Warren that the chief justice offered no words of welcome or support to Hoover, usually treated with such deference before every other audience in Washington. After swearing Hoover in at nine fifteen, Warren got straight to business, outlining what the commission wanted from the FBI director: Hoover’s unqualified statement, under oath, that the FBI was not hiding evidence about Oswald.

  “Mr. Hoover will be asked to testify in regard to whether Lee H. Oswald was ever an agent, directly or indirectly, or an informer or acting on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in any capacity at any time, and whether he knows of any credible evidence of any conspiracy, either domestic or foreign, involved in the assassination of President Kennedy,” Warren said. Hoover would not be above questions about even the most outrageous allegations in a gossip magazine. The commission, Warren said, wanted to know what Hoover “has to say about the article in the National Enquirer.”

  Rankin led the questioning, and Hoover provided, as promised, a flat denial that the FBI had ever had any sort of relationship with Oswald. “I can most emphatically say that at no time was he ever an employee of the bureau in any capacity, either as an agent or as a special employee, or as an informant.” As for the possibility of a conspiracy: “I have been unable to find any scintilla of evidence showing any foreign conspiracy or any domestic conspiracy that culminated in the assassination of President Kennedy.” Hoover testified that he believed that Oswald killed President Kennedy and that he did it alone. It was true that the FBI had Oswald under surveillance at the time of the assassination, Hoover said, but the bureau had no indication that he was violent. “There was nothing up to the time of the assassination that gave any indication that this man was a dangerous character who might do harm to the president.” The National Enquirer article, he said, was an “absolute lie.”

  That same day, immediately after Hoover’s testimony, Director of Central Intelligence John McCone and his deputy, Richard Helms, walked into the witness room to give their testimony. Like Hoover, they insisted under oath that they had no evidence that Oswald had ever been any sort of government agent or that he had been part of any conspiracy to kill the president. They said that Oswald’s trip to Mexico had been thoroughly investigated by the CIA and that the investigation had turned up nothing to indicate that Oswald had accomplices there or anywhere else.

  * * *

  In Dallas, Hugh Aynesworth had another big scoop in June. From sources he did not identify, he had obtained a copy of the “Historic Diary,” Oswald’s handwritten account of his aborted defection.

  Marina Oswald said that much of the melodramatic “Diary,” which was so full of misspellings and grammat
ical errors that it suggested to the commission’s staff that Oswald was dyslexic, was actually written after they left the Soviet Union. It depicted Oswald’s disenchantment and eventual despair with life in Russia; he described his suicide attempt in the Moscow hotel room, as well as his failed effort to court another Russian woman, Ella German, before settling for Marina. “I married Marina to hurt Ella,” he wrote.

  Two weeks after Aynesworth’s scoop in the Morning News, the entire diary was published by Life magazine. David Slawson, who was responsible for analyzing the journal for the commission, said he was horrified by the leaks. He was convinced they would endanger the lives of several Russians named in the diary who had assisted Oswald in ways that the Soviet government might consider treasonous. Slawson worried, in particular, about a Russian woman, a government tour guide, who met Oswald shortly after his arrival in Moscow and who may have tried to warn him of the bleak future he faced in Russia. Official tour guides “are normally under the control of the KGB,” Slawson knew. Her warning came in the form of a gift to Oswald—a copy of the Dostoyevsky novel The Idiot. (Oswald referred to it in his diary as “IDEOT by Dostoevski.”) The book, Slawson felt, was a “disguised warning that he was a fool and ought to turn back.” The guide, he feared, may have committed “a serious offense, similar to an FBI agent here secretly warning a Russian defector to go back to Russia.” Slawson also worried about the family of Alexander Ziger, who had befriended Oswald in Minsk; Ziger, too, had warned Oswald to return to the United States. “We have been informed that the Zigers for many years have been trying to escape from Russia” and that “they are probably more than usually susceptible to persecution” because they were Jews, Slawson wrote.

  He had originally planned to cite only edited excerpts of the diary in the commission’s final report, to prevent the names of Oswald’s Russian contacts from being revealed. After the leaks, however, he felt the commission needed to “print the entire diary without any deletions whatsoever,” if it printed any of it. If the commission published only excerpts, it would draw attention to the portions of the diary that had not been published; it would be easy enough for the KGB to cross-check the commission’s report against what had appeared in the Dallas paper and Life to see what was missing.

  The Dallas police and the FBI tried to determine who had leaked the diary. Marina Oswald was an obvious suspect, given her eagerness to sell other information, but she denied it. Life insisted that she was not its source, although the magazine reported that it had printed the diary “with her full permission” and had changed some names at her request “to prevent reprisals against Oswald’s acquaintances.”

  Later that summer, a Dallas police detective, H. M. Hart, reported to his superiors that he identified a suspect in the leaks: Congressman Gerald Ford. In a July 8 memo, Hart wrote that a “confidential informant” had reported that Ford, who had access to the diary through the commission’s files, sold a copy to the Morning News and that he had also offered it to both Life and Newsweek. Executives of the news organizations then paid $16,000 to Marina Oswald “for the world copyright of the diary,” Hart wrote. Ford would insist that he had nothing to do with the leaks, and FBI investigators would later say that they determined that the source of the leaks was a supervisor in the Dallas police department. Still, Ford was so alarmed by the rumors that he requested that the FBI take a formal statement from him denying that he had sold information to news organizations from out of the commission’s files. The statement was drawn up by FBI assistant director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, Ford’s long-standing contact at the bureau, during a meeting with Ford in his congressional office. Ford “desired to unequivocally state, and to furnish a signed statement if necessary, that he did not leak the information in question,” DeLoach reported.

  The truth, told years later, was that Ford had nothing to do with the leak. Hugh Aynesworth, the Dallas reporter, would eventually acknowledge that he had sold the diary to Life that summer, for $2,500. The sale was approved by his editor at the Morning News, with an understanding that the money would be paid to the reporter’s wife, allowing Aynesworth to argue that—technically, at least—he had not taken money from Life, which might have been a violation of the newspaper’s internal rules for its employees. Aynesworth said that Life had promised him that the Morning News would be credited in the magazine with the scoop, a promise that the magazine did not keep. Although he would never confirm or deny reports that he had obtained the diary from Marina Oswald, Aynesworth acknowledged that he arranged to have Life pay her a fee of $20,000 since “if anybody actually owned the diary, I believed it was probably Marina.”*

  38

  THE TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  SUNDAY, MAY 24, 1964

  Each week brought some new, exasperating decision by the chief justice, or so it seemed to Arlen Specter. Throughout the spring, Specter and others on the staff pushed to conduct on-site tests in Dallas, including a full reconstruction of the scene in Dealey Plaza. The staff lawyers proposed to capture the scene just as Oswald would have seen it out the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald’s rifle would be taken back to the building, and a camera would be attached to the top of it, allowing a photographer to capture the images as a limousine resembling Kennedy’s was driven slowly past. Men of a similar size to Kennedy and Connally would be placed in the limousine, lined up as in the Zapruder film. It would be a valuable way of testing the theory that a single bullet fired from the sixth floor could have passed through the bodies of both victims.

  To Specter’s astonishment, though, Warren did not want any on-site tests at all; he did not feel they were necessary. “Warren was dead-set against it,” Specter said. “He thought staff was making too big a deal of it.” He recalled Warren saying, “We know what’s happened. We’ve got the FBI report.” Through Rankin, the staff pressed Warren to reconsider. And possibly sensing a rebellion led by Specter, the chief justice yielded.

  The reconstruction, which was conducted with the help of the FBI, was set for the early morning of Sunday, May 24. Sunday was chosen in the hope of avoiding traffic disruptions downtown. Warren did not plan to be there himself; he would hold off going to Dallas until June, when he planned to take testimony from Jack Ruby.

  The reconstruction went well, and Specter said he was even more confident about the single-bullet theory as a result. The FBI had done what the commission had requested. The camera attached to Oswald’s rifle offered the images that Specter had hoped for, including a clear picture of how a single bullet fired from the sixth floor would have passed through Kennedy’s neck before hitting Connally. Zapruder’s camera, and two other home-movie cameras that had captured the scenes of the assassination in Dealey Plaza, were also brought to Dallas for the reconstruction, and the FBI was able to replicate the images from those cameras, as well.

  * * *

  Specter got other welcome news. New ballistics tests supported the single-bullet theory; they showed that the metal fragments in Connally’s wrist were so tiny that they could have come from the same bullet that passed through the president’s neck. The Parkland bullet would have weighed 160 or 161 grains before firing; it now weighed 158.6 grains. X-rays of Connally’s wrist showed that the fragments left in his body probably weighed much less than the difference.

  The trajectory of bullets fired from Oswald’s rifle, and the damage they could do to flesh, were tested independently by both the FBI and the military. The army’s Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, a high-security Defense Department research center outside Washington, used Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle for a series of tests beginning in April. Army scientists were asked if they could confirm that the rifle could have produced the wounds suffered by Kennedy and Connally. The test results, described in an army report, made for grim reading. In trying to replicate the effect of bullets when they struck the two bodies, the scientists fired the rifle into a series of different targets, including gelatin-fill
ed human skulls and the arms of human cadavers. Thirteen heavily anesthetized goats were also used as targets to re-create the wounds to Connally’s chest; the goats were covered in layers of cloth resembling the suit jacket, shirt, and undershirt that the governor had been wearing. Animal lovers on the commission’s staff cringed at the army photos of the tests, including one of the live goats strapped in place, waiting to be shot.

  The army tests also largely supported the single-bullet theory. “The results indicated that the wounds sustained by the President and Governor Connally, including the massive head wound of the president, could be produced” by Oswald’s rifle and the sort of bullets he used, the report stated. “The bullet that wounded the president in the neck had enough remaining velocity to account for all of the governor’s wounds.” In support of the single-bullet theory, the report raised an obvious question: Where did the bullet that hit Kennedy in the neck go—if not into Connally’s back? There was no other sign of it in the limousine. If the bullet had struck something else in the vehicle, the report said, “the damage would have been very evident and much greater than the slight damage that was found on the windshield.”

  Like his colleagues and many of the doctors and scientists he interviewed, Specter said he had stopped being troubled by a disturbing phenomenon seen in the Zapruder film: the way the president’s head snapped backward when he was hit by the second shot, as if the bullet had come from the front, not the rear. Doctors and ballistics experts explained to the commission’s investigators that it was often difficult to guess how flesh reacted to a bullet strike; the wound could cause spasms of the nervous system that moved the body in unusual ways. The movements could seem to a layman to defy physics, they said. It was a grisly thought, Specter admitted, but he compared what he saw in the Zapruder film to what he had seen as a child back in Wichita, when his father killed a chicken for the family meal. After the bird’s head was cut off, its body would continue to move uncontrollably, Specter recalled. “Just instinctively, I analogized it to the chicken,” he said. “It’s just spasms, just nerves.”