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

by Philip Shenon

  Toward the end of his life, Phillips appeared ready to capitalize on the conspiracy theories about Oswald. He seemed to want to tantalize others about the possibility that the CIA had been lying about Oswald and that the agency actually bore some responsibility for Kennedy’s death. When he died in 1988, Phillips left behind a typewritten, eight-page outline for a novel that would be a fictionalized account of his work in Mexico. The outline referred to characters based on himself and on Winston Scott, identified in the novel as Willard Bell, as well as on a conspiracy theorist resembling Mark Lane. Oswald was identified by his actual name, as was former director of Central Intelligence—and Warren Commission member—Allen Dulles.

  The outline included a passage in which the character based on Phillips told his son:

  I was one of the two case officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald. After working to establish his Marxist bona fides, we gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba. I helped him when he came to Mexico City to obtain a visa, and when he returned to Dallas to wait for it, I saw him twice there. We rehearsed the plan many times: In Havana, Oswald was to assassinate Castro with a sniper’s rifle from the upper floor window of a building on the route where Castro often drove in an open jeep. Whether Oswald was a double-agent or a psycho I’m not sure, and I don’t know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the President’s assassination but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt. Allen Dulles gave the other CIA agent and me $800,000 in cash to finance the operation and set up Oswald for life after Castro’s death. When the scheme went so horribly awry, Dulles told us to keep the money—he feared that an effort to give it to the Agency’s operational funds would cause problems.

  You can imagine how this sad history has troubled me. Many times I have thought of revealing the truth, but somehow couldn’t. Perhaps you, reading this, will decide it’s time for the truth.

  43

  OFF THE COAST OF CUBA

  SUMMER 1964

  William Coleman wrote nothing down about the riskiest assignment he undertook in a long career in the law and public service. He said he was told he should not say anything—ever—about the assignment, other than to brief Chief Justice Warren, Lee Rankin, and possibly President Johnson about the results. No paperwork was retained in the commission’s files, at least not in the files released to the National Archives.

  The mission that summer began on Florida’s Atlantic coast, where Coleman said he had been flown from Washington. Once there, he was transferred to a U.S. government boat—“I don’t know if it was a CIA boat or a Navy boat”—for the trip to the waters off Cuba. About twenty miles from the coast, he said, the boat stopped when it caught sight of a yacht—Fidel Castro’s. On the boat was Castro himself. He was waiting there to answer the question that Coleman had been dispatched to ask: Had the Cuban leader ordered President Kennedy’s assassination?

  Coleman had been selected for the assignment, he thought, because he was the senior lawyer on the “conspiracy” team and, more important, because it was known on the commission that he had met Castro before. They had first been introduced in the 1940s or 1950s in Harlem, when Castro was in New York on one of several visits he paid to the United States before he came to power. Whatever his later complaints about the capitalist decadence that the city might represent, Castro said he loved New York. He had spent much of his honeymoon in the city in 1948 and returned several times over the next decade. Like Coleman, the future Cuban leader was partial to the late-night music and dance clubs of Harlem.

  As a black man, Coleman was not allowed into the nightclubs of midtown Manhattan in that era, so he, like his friends, would wait until one a.m. or so, when some of the most popular black entertainers of the time would finish their evening performances in midtown and head uptown to Harlem to entertain black audiences. The singer Lena Horne became a good friend of Coleman’s. It was a magical time, he said. “Lena and all these talented people, they would come up to Harlem and the clubs, and you would have them all in same room together,” Coleman said. “You would give your right arm to be in there at 4 o’clock the morning.” It was in those clubs up along 125th Street where Coleman, a lifelong Republican, made a friend of Nelson Rockefeller, the future GOP governor of New York State and a fellow jazz-lover.

  Coleman remembered that he had been impressed by Castro, who spoke some English. “I never thought he’d be the head of that country,” Coleman said. “But he was an impressive guy. He had legal training. He was a very attractive guy, smart.”

  Now, all these years later, Castro was the feared dictator of Communist Cuba, the man who had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war two years earlier, and who John Kennedy had so desperately wanted to oust from power. Coleman considered it “irony upon irony” that he had been selected to undertake a secret mission to see his old acquaintance from the jazz clubs of Harlem and ask if he had killed the president.

  * * *

  As it was explained to Coleman, Castro had sent word to Washington that he wanted to offer testimony to the commission—to convince the investigation that he had nothing to do with Kennedy’s murder. “Castro indicated he wanted to see somebody, and I was the guy to do it,” Coleman said.

  Years later, Coleman said he remembered discussing the mission only with Rankin and possibly with Warren. “I’m pretty sure I talked to the Chief Justice about it,” he said. “The whole thing was hush-hush.” He was told to say nothing about the assignment to Slawson, his junior partner. There was good reason for the secrecy, he recalled; if his meeting was mishandled or became public, it could create a scandal, or worse. “If I screwed up, if I said the wrong thing,” Castro might seize on it as an official exoneration in Kennedy’s killing. “The next day, he could have a press conference and say, ‘Even Mr. Coleman said I didn’t do it.’”*

  Still, Coleman recalled, he felt the mission was worth the risk: “I decided we had to do it.”

  * * *

  Coleman’s ability to keep the trip secret from most of his colleagues for decades was entirely in character. William Thaddeus Coleman Jr., born and raised in Philadelphia, prided himself on being a “Philadelphia Lawyer,” a term once widely used around the country to describe an especially capable, discreet lawyer—a lawyer’s lawyer. That the forty-three-year-old Coleman had risen so far in the profession by 1964 against such long odds was a tribute to just how talented he was. Only a dozen years earlier, despite graduating at the top of his law school class at Harvard and having worked as a Supreme Court clerk to the legendary Felix Frankfurter, he could not find a job at any firm in his hometown. He made it a point rarely to complain to other lawyers about the discrimination he had faced in his career; instead he spoke proudly about all that he had accomplished despite his skin color. His inability to find a job in Philadelphia early in his career was the one instance of ugly, obvious racism that did gnaw at him. “That really bothered me.”

  He finally found a job in 1949 at a fast-growing New York firm, Paul Weiss, where he became the first black associate in the firm’s history—and one of the first black associates at any sizable firm in the country. Although he worked in New York, he remained devoted to Philadelphia and made his home there, requiring him to commute two and a half hours each day, each way, by train to and from Manhattan. For years, his alarm went off at five fifty every weekday morning, and he would not return home for dinner until eight thirty p.m., at the earliest. At Paul Weiss, Coleman began to earn his place in the history of the civil rights movement. In 1949, he was asked by Thurgood Marshall—then chief counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and later a justice of the Supreme Court—to become involved in court challenges to end segregation of the nation’s public schools. Before long, Coleman was asked to help write briefs to be presented to the court on behalf of black families in Kansas who were seeking to desegregate the public schools of Topeka, the case that became Brown v. Board of Education. When
it came time for Marshall to argue the case in front of the Supreme Court in December 1953, he invited Coleman, then thirty-three, to sit next to him at the counsel’s table.

  In 1952, Coleman finally realized his dream of going to work for a large Philadelphia law firm. His hiring as an associate by the firm of Dilworth, Paxson, Kalish & Green led a group of white secretaries to threaten to resign at the thought of working with a black man. As Coleman recalled it, the firm’s senior partner ended the protest by telling the secretaries that they could leave if they wanted, because “we can find someone almost as good to replace you.” Coleman, he said, could not be easily replaced. “Once you get to know him, you’ll find he’s a decent human being.” The secretaries stayed.

  * * *

  Years later, Coleman said he had forgotten many of the details of his trip to meet Castro’s yacht—whether the American captain and the sailors were armed, for example—but he did remember stepping onto the Cuban’s boat and catching his first glimpse in years of the bearded Castro. The Cuban leader recognized Coleman at once and greeted him as a friend. “He certainly knew I’d met him up in New York.… It was a pretty animated conversation.”

  The meeting lasted for about three hours, with Coleman pressing Castro on every possible scenario in which the Cuban government might have been involved in Kennedy’s assassination, even indirectly. Castro denied any Cuban tie to the president’s murder. In fact, Coleman recalled, “he said he admired President Kennedy.” Despite the Bay of Pigs invasion and all of the Kennedy administration’s other efforts to force him from power, even to kill him, Castro insisted that he “still didn’t think ill” of Kennedy.

  Ever the careful lawyer, Coleman did not accept Castro’s denials as the truth, and he said he left the meeting unsure of anything. On returning to Washington, all he could offer Rankin and Warren was his judgment that he had heard nothing that undermined Castro’s declaration of his innocence in Kennedy’s death. “I’m not saying he didn’t do it,” Coleman said. “But I came back and I said that I hadn’t found out anything that would cause me to think there’s proof he did do it.”

  * * *

  Earl Warren insisted to his colleagues on the commission that he never leaked information about the investigation. By late spring, however, somebody was leaking, and in detail, about the likelihood that the commission would conclude that Oswald had acted alone. The leaks first went to Anthony Lewis, the Supreme Court correspondent of the New York Times, who was close to Warren and Rankin from his years of covering them at the court. In 1963, Lewis won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the court; in June 1964, his book Gideon’s Trumpet, a history of the landmark Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright, was published. The book was effusive in its praise of the chief justice and Rankin for their roles in the case, in which the Warren Court ruled that indigent criminal defendants had to be provided with free lawyers.

  Within days of the book’s publication, the Times carried a front-page story by Lewis about the Warren Commission, with the headline: PANEL TO REJECT THEORIES OF PLOT IN KENNEDY DEATH. The article said the commission’s final report, still months from completion, was expected “to support the original belief of law-enforcement authorities in this country that the president was killed by one man acting alone, Lee H. Oswald.” Much of the story was written without attribution, as if the information was unquestioned fact. Lewis reported that “a spokesman for the commission,” unnamed in the article, confirmed that the commission would debunk the many conspiracy theories about the assassination, especially those being spread by Mark Lane. Although it was impossible to identify the “spokesman” with certainty, Rankin’s personal calendars show he met with Lewis in the commission’s offices for nearly forty minutes, three days before the article appeared. Similar leaked articles quickly appeared in other newspapers.

  The stories outraged Ford. He saw the leaks as an effort by someone within the commission to manipulate the outcome of the investigation before all the facts were in. It had become a constant complaint among Ford’s behind-the-scenes advisers, who worried that the commission—Warren, in particular—was still ignoring evidence that might point to a Communist conspiracy. Ford requested an urgent meeting to make his protests known, and Warren scheduled it for Thursday, June 4. The leaks were the only item on the agenda. Warren, Dulles, and McCloy attended the meeting, along with Ford.

  Warren immediately turned the meeting over to Ford, who warned somberly that there appeared to be a mole among them. “In my judgment, somebody somewhere is planting or leaking these stories,” he said, adding that he thought he knew who the leaker was. “I have some personal conclusions, but I cannot prove them, so I don’t want to make any allegations.” He said the leaks were designed to prejudge the commission’s findings. “They are creating an atmosphere throughout the country that will, I think, create a predetermined public opinion of what we may or may not have come to,” he said. “I don’t like being quoted when I have not made any final judgment.”

  Warren tried to reassure Ford. “As far as I am concerned, I share your feelings exactly,” he said. “I am inclined to think that most of this comes from thin air and from speculation. I have no knowledge of anybody talking to anybody.” Ford urged that the commission release a public statement denying it had reached any conclusions. Warren and the others quickly agreed. A brief statement went out to reporters the next day, saying that the commission was nearing the end of its investigation but “is giving thought to the content and form of the report” and had reached no findings.

  * * *

  One more round of witnesses would be called to testify in Washington before the investigation ended. Some who had already appeared needed to be called back after it became clear that their credibility was in doubt. Few faced more doubts about their truthfulness than Marina Oswald and Mark Lane; both were recalled to explain gaps in their earlier sworn appearances.

  In the four months since she had first testified, the perception of Marina’s honesty and her larger character had shifted dramatically among the commissioners, and for the worse. Since her appearance in February, the commission had heard the many unflattering reports about her seemingly carefree romantic life and her hard drinking. (The FBI had continued to bug her house, including her bedroom.) “She became a chain-smoker and a drinker of straight vodka,” William Manchester would later write in his book. The commissioners had more substantive concerns about whether she had perjured herself in her earlier testimony, especially in her denial that she had known in advance about her husband’s plans to kill the president. That denial was now in question with the discovery that she had told both her business manager and her brother-in-law—but not the commission—about her husband’s plot to kill Nixon. Staff lawyers on the commission now suspected that if Oswald had told his wife about his plans to kill Nixon and Walker, he would also have told her about his plan to kill Kennedy.

  * * *

  Marina Oswald returned to the commission’s offices on Thursday, June 11. This time, there was no statement from Warren to welcome her or to express gratitude for her testimony. There was no grandfatherly concern for her welfare and that of her children. The questioning, led by Rankin, often bordered on hostile.

  Rankin: “Mrs. Oswald, we would like to have you tell about the incident in regard to Mr. Nixon.”

  Marina seemed to understand how much trouble she was in. “I am very sorry I didn’t mention this before,” she began, speaking through a Russian translator. “I had forgotten entirely about the incident with Vice President Nixon when I was here the first time. I wasn’t trying to deceive you.”

  Ford pressed her: “Can you tell us why you didn’t mention this incident?”

  Marina: “I was very tired and felt that I had told everything.”

  She then offered what she said was the full story about the Nixon threat—how in mid-April 1963, several days after her husband’s assassination attempt on Walker, Oswald told her that he was about to go to the street in
search of Richard Nixon. Oswald, she said, claimed that Nixon was visiting Dallas that day. He grabbed the pistol he kept in the house and said, “I will go out and have a look and perhaps I won’t use my gun. But if there is a convenient opportunity, perhaps I will.” She said she was terrified by the threat and attempted to lock her husband in the bathroom to prevent him from leaving. “We actually struggled for several minutes and then he quieted down,” she said. “I remember that I told him that if he goes out, it would be better for him to kill me.”

  Even as she tried to explain away the gaps in her earlier testimony, Marina was creating new confusion, especially since the commission’s staff determined that Nixon did not visit Dallas in April 1963. Some of the commissioners questioned whether she was confusing former vice president Nixon with then vice president Lyndon Johnson, who had been in Dallas that month. She was certain she was not confused, however. “I remember distinctly the name Nixon,” she said. “I never heard of Johnson before he became president.”

  Allen Dulles put the question to her: If her husband had tried to kill Walker and threatened to kill Nixon, “didn’t it occur to you then that there was danger that he would use these weapons against someone else? He never made any statement against President Kennedy?”

  “Never,” she replied. “He always had a favorable feeling about President Kennedy.”

  She made a new plea for the commission’s sympathy. She tried to explain away her failure to warn the police—or anyone else—that her husband was capable of political violence. She had remained silent, she said, because she had been terrified that her husband might someday be arrested and jailed, abandoning her in a country in which she had no family and few friends. She wanted to remain in the United States and worried that she might be deported to Russia if she turned her husband in. “Lee was the only person who was supporting me,” she said. “I didn’t have any friends, I didn’t speak any English and I couldn’t work and I didn’t know what would happen if they locked him up.”