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

by Philip Shenon

  He would be far more anxious, his colleagues said, about how the commission intended to rewrite, or even to scrap, his draft chapter about Oswald’s motives in killing the president. He had slaved over the draft for weeks, and now—largely at Redlich’s insistence, he thought—most of his hard work would be edited out of the final report. Redlich and Rankin agreed that Liebeler’s draft amounted to an effort to psychoanalyze a dead man and that it would be impossible for the commission to conclude, as Liebeler had, that Oswald’s Marxism and support for Castro might have had something to do with his decision to assassinate Kennedy. Rankin thought that Oswald’s quest for fame—not his Marxism—was a much more likely explanation of his motives, a view shared by some of the commissioners. Rankin worried that Liebeler’s suggestion that Oswald’s pro-Castro views led him to kill Kennedy might be seized on by conservative lawmakers who wanted to blame Cuba for the assassination.

  Liebeler’s draft was circulated among some of the commissioners. Ford passed his copy to Francis Fallon, the young Harvard Law School student from Michigan who was reviewing commission documents at Ford’s request. In late July, Fallon returned Liebeler’s draft with a note suggesting that Ford not bother to read it. The draft “is very poorly done and … is being completely rewritten.”

  * * *

  Liebeler’s summer trip to New Orleans and Dallas gave him a chance to turn his mind to something other than his internal struggles on the commission. After completing his interviews in New Orleans, he flew to Texas, where he would meet with Silvia Odio and Marina Oswald. He dedicated most of the day on July 22, a Wednesday, to take Odio’s testimony in the offices of the United States attorney. He set aside Friday for testimony from Marina, who would be asked follow-up questions about the Walker shooting and about her life with her husband in New Orleans.

  Odio said she was nervous about her session, which began at nine a.m., and she made sure to be on time. She turned heads as she walked into the building. She was as lovely as the photographs that Liebeler had seen back in Washington suggested.

  “We want to ask you some questions about the possibility that you saw Lee Harvey Oswald,” Liebeler began.

  Odio: “Before you start, let me give you a letter of my father’s which he wrote me from prison. You can have it.”

  She handed him a one-page handwritten letter, dated December 25 and written in Spanish, that her father had sent jointly to Silvia and his other nine children to wish them a Merry Christmas. Castro’s government mostly barred political prisoners from sending out mail, apart from a single letter to family to mark the holidays.

  The letter was significant, she explained, because in it, her father replied to a question she had asked him in a letter that she had sent to him in October—a month before the Kennedy assassination. In her letter, she had mentioned the strange encounter on her doorstep with the American man she now believed to be Oswald and with his two Latino companions. She asked her father if it was true that he knew the three men. Writing back, her father replied that he did not know them and that she should be cautious. “Tell me who this is who says he is my friend,” he wrote. “Be careful.” His reply lent credibility to her account since it seemed to provide additional proof that the encounter at Odio’s apartment, or something like it, had indeed happened.

  In hours of testimony, Odio came off as an intelligent, sophisticated woman who believed that what she was saying was true. “Odio might be right,” Liebeler said to himself, wondering why the FBI had been so insistent that she was mistaken. The bureau had dismissed her story because it believed that Oswald was in Mexico at the time Odio placed him at her apartment. After dealing with the FBI for months, though, Liebeler knew better than to accept anything its agents said at face value. He wondered if the bureau had misread the calendar or misunderstood Oswald’s itinerary to and from Mexico. When he got back to Washington, he decided, he would ask Rankin’s permission to press the FBI to look again at the time line of Oswald’s travels. He would also ask that the FBI begin to search in earnest for “Leopoldo” and the other Latin man.

  * * *

  What happened in Dallas on the evening of Odio’s testimony would remain her secret for years, she said. She chose not to tell anyone because it might mean a scandal that could damage her and her family, pitting her word against Liebeler’s.

  Liebeler, she said, tried to seduce her.

  The trouble began immediately after she finished her testimony, when Liebeler asked her out to dinner. “That surprised me, but I was afraid, and I went.” They ate at the Sheraton hotel in downtown Dallas, where Liebeler was staying, and were joined at the table by a man she remembered as one of Marina Oswald’s lawyers; years later, she could not recall his name.

  “There was a kind of double-talk at the table between the lawyer and him,” Odio recalled. “I wasn’t sure they wanted me to hear the conversation.” Soon, however, the conversation became bizarrely confrontational, with Liebeler turning to Odio and demanding to know if she had lied in her testimony. He suggested that she was hiding information, perhaps about her involvement in other anti-Castro groups. “I wasn’t hiding anything,” she said. It seemed to her that Liebeler was engaged in “a little game” to test her credibility. Liebeler “kept threatening me with a lie-detector test.”

  The three were drinking, she said. Liebeler seemed to hope that “maybe if I had a few drinks and the conversation became very casual, I would go ahead and volunteer information he thought I was hiding.” Odio was thankful, she said, that she had limited herself to a single drink—a Bloody Mary. She recalled being relieved at the thought that, “My God, I’m not that drunk.” She also remembered thinking: “Silvia, the time has come for you to keep quiet. They don’t want to know the truth.”

  Liebeler kept pressing her, trying to bait her with what seemed to be outrageous statements about the commission’s investigation. She remembered him telling the other man, “If we do find out that this is a conspiracy, you know that we are under orders from Chief Justice Warren to cover this thing up.” (Years later, Odio was asked by a congressional investigator if Liebeler had used those exact words. “Yes, sir, I could swear on that.”)

  After the dinner, the other lawyer went home, and Liebeler asked her to join him in his hotel room to review some photographs related to the investigation. “He invited me to his room upstairs,” she said, acknowledging that she had not been naive about this; she suspected that Liebeler’s invitation had nothing to do with the commission’s work and that he was trying to seduce her.

  “I did go,” she said. “I went to his room. I wanted to see how far a government investigator would go and what they were trying to do to a witness.” When they were in the room, “he made advances,” she said. “Of course nothing happened because I was in my right senses.… I told him he was crazy.”

  She said Liebeler tried to flatter her, telling her that his colleagues in Washington were jealous. “He mentioned that they had seen my picture and that they had even joked about it at the Warren Commission—saying like what a pretty girl you are going to see, Jim, and things like that.”

  Odio said she was shocked to find herself, supposedly a significant witness in the investigation of the president’s murder, turned into the sexual target of one of the investigators. “I was expecting the highest respect,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting any jokes in the investigation of the assassination of a president.” To Liebeler, she said, “it was a game.… I was being used in this game.”

  * * *

  When Liebeler returned to Washington, he said nothing to the other lawyers about an awkward encounter with Odio. He did, however, make an odd boast about what had happened when he met with Marina Oswald in Dallas on July 24, two days after Odio’s testimony.

  He announced that he had tried—and failed—to seduce Oswald’s widow. He “had a smile on his face” as he described the encounter, said Slawson, who recalled that he and his colleagues had no doubt of the truth of the story. That was Lie
beler’s nature; he could not help himself if a pretty woman was nearby.

  Years later, some of his former colleagues were embarrassed to admit that—at the time, in the summer of 1964—they found it amusing, not offensive, that Liebeler would try to have sex with the widow of the president’s assassin. On reflection, Slawson said, “it was, of course, reckless and stupid.” He was more horrified to imagine Liebeler’s attempted seduction of Odio. On the staff, it had been Slawson, more than anyone else, who had seen her potential importance as a witness, and understood how she might link Oswald to a conspiracy involving anti-Castro Cuban exiles. He knew of Odio’s struggles as a young refugee in Dallas and her decision to seek psychiatric help. It would have been “just cruel” for Liebeler to prey on her, Slawson said. He thought how lucky Liebeler had been that Odio’s allegations did not surface publicly at the time; it could have ended his career.

  47

  THE OFFICES OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 1964

  During the trip to Dallas, Liebeler interviewed several other witnesses, including Abraham Zapruder, the local women’s wear manufacturer whose home-movie camera had captured the essential, nightmarish moments of the assassination. Zapruder—under oath and between bouts of sobbing as he recalled the scene in Dealey Plaza—came close to perjuring himself as he was questioned.

  Warren, in particular, had been alarmed for months about the fact that Zapruder had sold the rights to the film to Life magazine, and Liebeler had been directed to press Zapruder on how much money he had been paid. Warren said he thought the film’s sale had set a terrible precedent for the marketing of trial evidence.

  “I would like to ask you if you wouldn’t mind telling us how much they paid you for the film,” Liebeler asked Zapruder. “The commission feels it would be helpful.”

  Zapruder resisted. “I just wonder whether I should answer it or not because it involves a lot of things and it’s not one price.”

  Liebeler tried the question again.

  “I received $25,000,” Zapruder replied, explaining that all of that money had been given to a local benevolence fund for Dallas police officers and firemen, with a suggestion that it go to the widow of Officer J. D. Tippit.*

  “You gave the whole $25,000?” Liebeler asked.

  “Yes,” Zapruder replied. “I am surprised that you don’t know it. I don’t like to talk about it too much.”

  Liebeler seemed impressed by Zapruder’s generosity. “We appreciate your answer very much,’” he said. “I want to tell you that your film has been one of the most helpful things to the work of the commission.” He explained to Zapruder how the film had been used to determine “with a fair degree of accuracy” the facts about the ballistics evidence.

  Zapruder insisted modestly, “I haven’t done anything.”

  What he hadn’t done, in fact, was tell Liebeler the whole truth about the sale of the film. Years later, Life would acknowledge that it agreed, within days of the assassination, to pay Zapruder at least $150,000 for the rights to the film, in annual installments of $25,000. (In 2009, the federal government would purchase the rights from Zapruder’s heirs for $16 million, after rejecting the family’s initial request for $30 million.) Zapruder had sold the film to Life after screening it for several news organizations—including CBS News, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Associated Press—and weighing rival bids. Richard B. Stolley, Life’s Los Angeles bureau chief and the man who negotiated the deal, said Zapruder was worried about “exploitation” and obtained the magazine’s promise to treat the images as respectfully as possible. But Zapruder also clearly “understood its value to his family’s financial future,” Stolley said.

  * * *

  In Dallas, Liebeler also took testimony from Edwin Walker, the retired army general apparently targeted for assassination by Oswald seven months before Kennedy’s murder. Walker, an outspoken segregationist and a prominent member of the ultraconservative John Birch Society, had been forced out of the military by President Kennedy in 1961 after it was learned that he had distributed Birch Society materials to troops under his command in Germany. Walker recalled how he had narrowly escaped being shot in the head when a bullet was fired into his Dallas home on the evening of Wednesday, April 10. “I was sitting behind my desk,” he testified. “It was right at 9 o’clock and most of the lights were on in the house and the shades were up.” He was crouched over the desk, working on his income taxes, when he heard a blast over his head. He turned around to see a bullet hole in the wall.

  Marina Oswald had told the commission that her husband admitted to her that same night that he had been responsible. According to Marina, Oswald called Walker a “fascist” and compared him to Adolf Hitler, saying Walker’s assassination was justified because of his political views. Photos of Walker’s home were found among Oswald’s possessions.

  Although Marina said she was convinced her husband had acted alone in trying to kill Walker, the retired general was not sure. Walker said he had been conducting his own investigation to try to determine if Oswald had coconspirators, including Jack Ruby. Walker, whose anti-Semitism was well known, would refer to Ruby only by his birth name, Rubenstein. “The indications seem to be not only mine, but all over the country, that Rubenstein and Oswald had some association.” Pressed by Liebeler, Walker admitted that he had no evidence of any conspiracy, beyond the theories of Mark Lane and others.

  Walker’s testimony to the commission was his idea. He had demanded it in a telegram to Warren weeks earlier; he said he wanted to testify in part because he wanted to end speculation that he and his right-wing supporters in Texas had something to do with Kennedy’s death. “I am tired of them blaming the right wing, and I have had enough of this, and it is about time that the commission cleared the city of Dallas,” he told Liebeler.

  * * *

  A few days earlier, Arlen Specter had also been in Dallas on commission business, overseeing Ruby’s polygraph examination. Specter was annoyed that the task had been handed to him by the chief justice, who—to Specter’s mind—had made such a “stupid blunder” six weeks earlier in agreeing to Ruby’s request. The polygraph was scheduled for Saturday, July 18, which meant that Specter would have to spend yet another stifling summer weekend in Texas.

  The FBI had been reluctant to administer the polygraph. Aides to Hoover told the commission that it might be improper to subject a man on death row, especially one who appeared to be mentally ill, to the test. The commission insisted, however, and in the end the bureau sent one of its most experienced polygraph specialists, Bell Herndon, to Dallas. The setting was the county jail, and Specter opened the session at eleven a.m. with a discussion of whether Ruby really wanted to go through with it. If Ruby had changed his mind, Specter said, the commission was ready to cancel the test on the spot. “That will conclude the issue, so far as the commission is concerned.”

  One of Ruby’s defense lawyers, Clayton Fowler, had advised him against the polygraph, and he left the room to discuss the question with Ruby one last time. “If he insists on it, I can’t and won’t hold him back,” Fowler warned as he stepped outside. He and Ruby returned a few minutes later. “He’s says he’s going to take the test, regardless of his lawyers,” Fowler announced.

  Specter turned to Ruby, reminding him that the results of the polygraph could be used by prosecutors to undermine his appeal. Ruby, however, was certain of his decision; he said he welcomed the test. “I will answer anything, without reluctance,” he said. “There’s no punches to be pulled. I want to answer anything and everything.”

  He sat down in the chair that had been rigged with the polygraph equipment. Herndon, the examiner, pulled a rubber tube around Ruby’s chest to monitor his breathing. Small sensors were attached to his fingers to measure electrical patterns in his skin; a blood-pressure cuff was placed on his left arm. Strapped to the devices, Ruby repeated what he had told Warren the month before—that he had killed Oswa
ld on impulse. “There was no conspiracy,” he said. “I felt so carried away—that at that particular time of the great tragedy, I felt somehow in my little bit of a way I could save Mrs. Kennedy the ordeal of coming back for trial here.”

  “Is everything you told the Warren Commission the truth?” Specter asked.

  “Yes,” Ruby replied.

  Specter had two lists of questions for Ruby—one that he had drawn up, another that Ruby and his lawyers had prepared. The combined lists were so long, and Ruby’s answers were so disjointed, that an examination that would normally take about forty-five minutes lasted nearly nine hours, Specter remembered; he said he exaggerated only slightly in describing it as “the longest polygraph test in the history of the world.” The questioning would not end until nine p.m. The next day, Specter and Herndon flew back to Washington together. Herndon told Specter that Ruby “had passed the test with flying colors and clearly was not involved in the assassination.” While Specter was still skeptical about the accuracy of polygraph exams, he was also convinced that Herndon was right.

  * * *

  The FBI and the commission were trying to tie up other loose ends in Dallas. There was still confusion about why the city’s police department and its hapless chief, Jesse Curry, had not done more to protect Oswald on the morning of his murder, especially since both the department and the FBI had received scores of phone threats against Oswald’s life in the hours before his death.

  The fifty-year-old Curry was already a target of the commission’s ridicule. It was Curry who had allowed Dallas police headquarters to become a circus in the days after the assassination, with an armed Jack Ruby wandering the halls virtually at will. Curry and the city’s district attorney, Henry Wade, had made repeated errors in their statements to reporters in the hours after Kennedy’s murder—statements that complicated the work of the commission and provided Mark Lane and others with the opportunity to allege a cover-up. One of the worst of the misstatements came on the night of the assassination, when Wade told reporters that the police had recovered a German-made Mauser rifle from the book depository; in fact, the weapon was Oswald’s Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano. Wade later admitted the error, but it was too late to stop Lane, who would argue for decades that a Mauser had been found in the assassin’s perch, more proof that Oswald was not the president’s killer.