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

by Philip Shenon

  Her husband had been taunting her for months with the possibility that she would be forced to return to Russia without him, she said. He had a “sadistic” streak and made her “write letters to the Russian embassy stating that I wanted to go back to Russia,” she said. “He liked to tease me and torment me in this way.… He made me several times write such letters.” Over her protests, he then mailed the letters. She said she had resigned herself to the possibility of a bleak return to her homeland. “I mean if my husband didn’t want me to live with him any longer and wanted me to go back, I would go back,” she said. “I didn’t have any choice.”

  * * *

  By Thursday, July 2, the date of Mark Lane’s second and final appearance before the commission, he was as well known to the American public as most of the commissioners. At the age of thirty-seven, Lane was now a celebrity, with admirers around the world eager to hear him explain how Lee Harvey Oswald had been framed and how the chief justice was covering up the truth. When the commission forced Lane to return to Washington under threat of a subpoena, he had to cut short a tour of Europe, where he was giving speeches and raising money.

  The commission’s stated reason for calling him to testify a second time was to demand that he reveal the source of some of his more shocking allegations, especially his claim of a meeting in Ruby’s Carousel Club a week before the assassination that was attended by Officer J. D. Tippit and a prominent anti-Kennedy activist. The commission’s staff had found nothing to back up the rumor, nor had any of the reporters in Dallas who had all heard it from the same drunken Texas lawyer who had been peddling the story for months. The commission was also still trying to resolve the confusion over Lane’s claim that Dallas waitress Helen Markham, one of the witnesses to Tippit’s murder, had backed away from her identification of Oswald as the killer.

  After taking his seat at the witness table, Lane wasted no time: he made it clear that he would answer none of the commission’s central questions and declared that there was no way to force him to.

  Warren appeared to struggle to contain his anger. Unless Lane offered up his sources, “we have every reason to doubt the truthfulness of what you have heretofore told us,” the chief justice told Lane, effectively accusing the young lawyer of perjury. Lane felt free to conduct his own “inquisition” into the assassination and repeat any outrageous rumor he came across, Warren said. “You have done nothing but handicap us.”

  Lane was defiant: “I have not said anything in public, Mr. Chief Justice, that I have not said first before this commission.… When I speak before an audience, I do hold myself out to be telling the truth, just as when I have testified before this commission, I have also told the truth.” With Lane, the commission would get no further.

  Chief Justice Warren delivers the commission’s report to President Johnson, September 24, 1964

  44

  THE HOME OF EARL AND NINA WARREN

  SHERATON PARK HOTEL

  WASHINGTON, DC

  JUNE 1964

  Warren’s devoted wife, Nina, worried most of all. She said that the chief justice, who had turned seventy-three in March, was working so hard that he had put his health at risk. Through the spring, the commission’s work had soaked up every free minute of his day and night away from the court. Late each evening, before sleeping, he sat up in bed and tried to make his way through a growing stack of transcripts of the testimony of recent witnesses before the commission.

  In the decade since he had arrived in Washington, Warren tried to stay in good shape. He liked to swim for exercise. Drew Pearson thought the beefy, white-haired chief justice resembled an aging but contented sea lion as he glided through the water. For most of 1964, though, Warren had to give up his late-afternoon visits to the pool at Washington’s University Club; there was simply no time. “The Warren Commission was a drag on him,” said Bart Cavanaugh, the former city manager of Sacramento, California, and one of Warren’s closest friends. “It was an awful strain.” Cavanaugh visited the Warrens in Washington that spring. “Mrs. Warren said he was awfully worn down, that he’d lost considerable weight.” She urged Cavanaugh to help take her husband’s mind off his work by getting him out of town. “Mrs. Warren said, ‘Why don’t the two of you sneak off and go to New York for the weekend?’ and we did,” Cavanaugh said. “We drove up to New York, went to the ball game.” But the next week, back in Washington, the pressure of Warren’s two full-time jobs returned.

  His aggravation rose as each of the deadlines he set for the commission’s work slipped. He had begun to worry that he would not get any summer vacation at all that year. As of early June, only the ever-efficient Arlen Specter—operating without help or hindrance from his long-departed senior partner, Francis Adams—had finished a draft of his portion of the report, outlining the events of the day of the assassination. Most of the other teams had known for weeks that the deadlines were hopeless.

  The chief justice had stopped hiding his anger over the delays. Slawson remembered Warren’s fury when his initial June deadlines were not met. On May 29, the last Friday in May, Rankin realized that Warren would have to be told, once and for all, that the staff would fail to meet the deadline the following Monday—June 1—for completing draft chapters of the report. As Rankin prepared to go home for the weekend, he asked Willens to break the news: “You had better tell the chief it won’t be ready.” The chief justice was “furious,” Slawson recalled. Willens said he thought Warren’s anger was understandable. For most of his life, after all, the chief justice had controlled his own schedule, as well as the schedule of the people who worked for him. Now, his schedule was at the mercy of a group of young lawyers, most of whom he barely knew. He felt he was “a prisoner of the staff,” Willens said.

  Warren, who normally escaped Washington every July and August to avoid the capital’s swamp-like heat, shortened his vacation to a month. He planned to leave on July 2 to go fishing in his beloved Norway, his family’s ancestral home, and to return in early August, in time to oversee the final writing of the report. Before departing, he got around to answering some of the scolding letters he had been receiving all year from prominent lawyers around the country who wanted to tell him how wrong he had been to accept the job of running the commission. In his belated replies, Warren told his critics that they were right and that he had taken the assignment only because President Johnson insisted. “I share your view that it is not the business of members of the Court to accept outside assignments,” Warren wrote to Carl Shipley, a Washington securities lawyer. “I had expressed myself both in and out of Court circles to that effect.” In explaining why he had taken the job, Warren cited a favorite quotation from President Grover Cleveland: “Sometimes, as you know, we are faced with—as Grover Cleveland said—a condition and not a theory. In this situation, the President so impressed me with the gravity of the situation at the moment that I felt in good conscience I could not refuse.”

  The Supreme Court had just completed another eventful term, with the justices deciding several landmark cases, including New York Times v. Sullivan, a unanimous decision announced in March in which the court struck a blow for both free speech and civil rights. The ruling weakened the ability of public officials to use libel laws to punish journalists; at the time, the laws were being used to bankrupt news organizations reporting on civil rights abuses in the South. On June 22, in Escobedo v. Illinois, the court held that criminal suspects had a right to counsel during police interrogations—an extension of the protections granted to criminal defendants in the unanimous Gideon v. Wainwright decision the year before. Unlike the Sullivan and Gideon cases, Escobedo had been a close call: the ruling had a bare 5-4 majority. The one-vote margin suggested to some lawyers that Warren’s campaign to expand the rights of criminal defendants was losing momentum.

  Warren said later that he had always understood it would be difficult to achieve unanimity on the commission—to bridge differences among seven men who, in other circumstances, would agree on
almost nothing. “Politically, we had as many opposites as the number of people would permit,” he recalled. “I am sure that I was anathema to Senator Russell because of the court’s racial decisions.” He was struck by how much hostility there was between Democratic congressman Boggs and Republican congressman Ford: “They were not congenial—there was no camaraderie between them.” The chief justice had much more respect for Boggs than for Ford, even if Boggs was far less active in the investigation. “Boggs was a good commissioner,” the chief justice said. “He approached things objectively. I found him very helpful.” Boggs also had the nicer disposition, he thought. “Boggs was friendly and Ford was antagonistic.” Warren said he came to have great respect for the common sense of John McCloy, who seemed always to rise above partisanship. “He was objective and extremely helpful.” And despite Allen Dulles’s eccentricity and tendency to nap during meetings, he was “also very helpful … he was a little bit garrulous, but he worked hard and was a good member.”

  By late spring, Warren thought he had won over most of the commissioners to his conviction that Oswald acted alone. “The non-conspiracy theory was probably the basic decision of the case.” The most outspoken holdout, he said, was Ford, who continued to suggest the possibility that Oswald had been part of a conspiracy, probably somehow involving Cuba. “Ford wanted to go off on a tangent following a Communist plot,” Warren remembered. He also could not be sure where Russell would come out, given how little the senator had been involved in the investigation.

  * * *

  The work of drafting the report was left almost entirely to the staff, which was typical for a federal blue-ribbon commission. Warren and the commissioners decided they would weigh in after they were presented with draft chapters. As he had long planned, Redlich, now secure in his job thanks to the chief justice, assumed the role of the report’s central editor, working with Willens and Alfred Goldberg. Rankin reserved for himself the final decisions about the editing, at least until the drafts reached the commissioners. His goal, he said, was to edit the report for a uniform, sober style and to stick as much as possible to the facts of the case against Oswald, without overstating them. “I wanted everything to be as precise as possible,” he recalled. Staff members who wanted to complain about the way their chapters had been rewritten would automatically be granted an audience, Rankin announced.

  Among the lawyers, the broad outlines of the report had been known for weeks: the commission would conclude that Oswald had assassinated President Kennedy and probably acted alone. The principal debate was over how forcefully to state those conclusions and whether the commission should acknowledge that there was evidence that was inconclusive about Oswald’s guilt. The lawyers would have to decide, for example, how and whether to mention testimony from witnesses at Dealey Plaza who were convinced that bullets had been fired at Kennedy’s limousine from the front instead from the Texas School Book Depository to the rear.

  For the first time, Rankin began to worry seriously about the budget and how the commission would pay for the publication of what was likely to be a mammoth final report, accompanied by several additional volumes of witness testimony. For the first several months of the investigation, President Johnson had been true to his word: the White House had provided whatever money and other resources the commission needed. Tens of thousands of dollars would be transferred to the commission’s bank accounts on the basis of little more than a brief phone call to the White House from one of Rankin’s secretaries. “We received any money we needed, and we were never at any time told that we were to limit ourselves,” Rankin recalled with gratitude.

  But after meeting with the Government Printing Office that spring, Rankin was startled by the estimate of the cost of publishing the full report and the additional volumes: at least $1 million. “When I told the Chief Justice that, he was very much shocked,” Rankin said.

  “My, we can’t spend money like that,” the notoriously frugal Warren said.

  Rankin reminded Warren of the commission’s vow of transparency. It was important, Rankin said, for the commission to publish not only its final report, but as much of the testimony and evidence as possible.

  “Well, that is up to Congress,” Warren replied, refusing to approve the budget by himself. “I don’t know whether they will approve anything like that or spend the money.” He directed Rankin to talk to the four members of Congress on the commission and ask if they could convince their colleagues in the House and Senate to approve the expenditure.

  Rankin began with Russell, who, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, oversaw billions of dollars a year of federal spending on military programs.

  “How much is it going to cost?” Russell asked.

  Rankin told him $1 million.

  Russell promised to come up with the money. “You go right ahead,” he told Rankin. “We will get that money for you.” To a senator who oversaw the budget of the Defense Department, $1 million was barely a rounding error.

  Rankin asked Russell if he needed to consult separately with the other lawmakers: Boggs, Ford, and Cooper. “I will talk to them,” Russell said. “We will get the money.”

  * * *

  Rankin was also anxious that spring about all the empty desks in the commission’s offices. David Belin had returned home to Iowa in late May, and Leon Hubert was gone days after that. Arlen Specter would stop working full-time in Washington in June, after finishing his draft chapter. Among the junior lawyers who had been there from the start, only Griffin, Liebeler, and Slawson would still be at their desks most days that summer, along with a dozen or so secretaries and other clerical workers. If the final report was ever going to get done, Rankin knew, he needed to hire more lawyers, and fast. Warren agreed to dispatch several Supreme Court clerks to help out, and to begin the process of double-checking information and preparing footnotes for the report. Justice Arthur Goldberg allowed one of his clerks, twenty-five-year-old Harvard Law School graduate Stephen G. Breyer, to join the commission’s staff temporarily.*

  Rankin wanted a new, full-time assistant, given how busy he assumed Redlich and Willens would be with the actual writing of the report. On May 12, his twenty-fourth birthday, Columbia Law School student Murray Laulicht got a phone call in New York, asking him to report to Washington immediately for a job interview. Laulicht, a third-year student who was just about to graduate, first in his class, was free to go, he remembered; that same day he had taken his last law-school exam—on trusts and estates. He was in Rankin’s office the next morning and was offered a job on the spot. “Rankin wanted me to start that day,” he said, recalling his shock at the abruptness of the offer. He “begged” Rankin for an additional few days. “I didn’t bring any clothes,” he remembered telling Rankin. “I promise you the night I graduate from law school, I will come down here.”

  They compromised. Laulicht agreed to start work on June 4, the day after he was handed his diploma. “So literally the night I graduated from Columbia, I went back down there” to Washington. His new colleagues welcomed Laulicht; he brought fresh eyes to the evidence about the assassination they had been analyzing for months. And what he told them was reassuring. After reviewing several draft chapters of the report, he sensed the commission was right to conclude that Oswald acted alone. He listened to the debates about the single-bullet theory, and the theory sounded logical to him.

  He was excited to be working in Washington, if also daunted—as an observant Jew—for cultural reasons. The city did not make it easy for anyone who followed a kosher diet; he recalled ordering a fruit salad at a restaurant near the commission’s office and discovering it was served with Jell-O, which was barred under Jewish dietary laws, since the gelatin was made with animal by-products. For the rest of the summer, “I ate a lot of potato chips and things like that.” In the commission’s offices, he was amazed by the discovery of a machine straight out of science fiction—“a phenomenal new technology called a Xerox machine.” He was so impressed that he urge
d his family back in New Jersey to invest in the company. “My mother bought some Xerox stock and she did very well with it.”

  Rankin had an early assignment for Laulicht. He was asked to help Burt Griffin complete the investigation of Jack Ruby—specifically, to write Ruby’s biography, which would then be included in the report. From what he read of the evidence, Laulicht said he had no trouble believing that Ruby’s murder of Oswald was impulsive and that he had acted alone. “He was just hot-headed enough to do this.” Ruby was so obsessed with avenging Kennedy that he might be compared to a Holocaust survivor, Laulicht thought. “It’s what a survivor might do if he saw a Nazi.”

  Laulicht’s knowledge of Jewish culture came in helpful in resolving a lingering mystery about Ruby. Griffin and Hubert, who were not Jewish, had been unable to understand the origins of Ruby’s childhood nickname—“Yank,” or something that sounded like that when uttered by Ruby’s Yiddish-speaking neighbors back in Chicago. Was it short for Yankee, a reference to some strong pro-American views that Ruby held as a child? No, Laulicht could see. Ruby’s real nickname was “Yunk,” a shortened version of the Yiddish translation for the name Jack—“Yunkle.” Mystery solved, Laulicht said.

  * * *

  Another late arrival to the staff, twenty-seven-year-old Lloyd Weinreb, two years out of Harvard Law School, was much less excited than Laulicht to be there. After completing a term as a Supreme Court clerk to Justice John Marshall Harlan, Weinreb had been hired that summer at the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and assigned to work for Howard Willens. Since Willens was still on assignment to the commission, he asked Weinreb to come help out on the investigation. “He asked me if I would come over there for a few weeks, which I very much did not want to do,” Weinreb remembered. But because Willens “was going to be my boss, I thought it would be injudicious to say no.”