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

by Philip Shenon

  The commission had not been able to resolve a serious discrepancy between accounts given to the FBI by Curry and one of his officers, Captain W. B. Frazier, about events in the early morning hours before Oswald’s death. Frazier had worked the overnight shift beginning Saturday night and was alarmed when he was told of a seemingly credible report that a mob of as many as one hundred people would gather downtown on Sunday to kill Oswald. He consulted with the head of the department’s Homicide Division, who said that Curry should be notified immediately, so that the department could beef up security for Oswald that morning. Frazier repeatedly tried to call Curry’s home telephone between five forty-five and six a.m. The line was constantly busy, and Frazier said he asked an operator for help. She told him that the phone appeared to be out of order. When he finished his shift at six, Frazier said the call had still not gone through, and he left it in the hands of the relief officer to try to contact the police chief to warn him that Oswald’s life appeared to be in danger.

  Questioned by the FBI after Oswald’s murder, Curry insisted that his home telephone had worked fine and that he received no call about threats to Oswald. Frazier’s account, he said, was wrong.

  In July, the commission asked the FBI to try to work out the discrepancy between the accounts. And in an interview with the bureau on July 17, Curry announced that he needed to correct the record. It turned out, he said, that his wife had taken the phone off the hook that Saturday night to allow the couple to get some sleep. He acknowledged what that meant: on the last night of Lee Oswald’s life, and only two nights after the president of the United States was gunned down in the streets of Dallas, the city’s police chief was unreachable.

  48

  THE LAW OFFICES OF HERRICK, LANGDON, SANDBLOM & BELIN

  DES MOINES, IOWA

  AUGUST 1964

  The commission suffered from public-relations stumbles throughout the year. None was more damaging, it was clear to the commission’s staff, than Warren’s statement to reporters in February that the full truth about the assassination might not be known “in your lifetime.” David Belin, back at his law firm in Iowa that summer, wrote Willens in August to say that Warren’s “lifetime” comment was so damaging that it needed to be addressed—and formally repudiated—in the commission’s report. The report needed to make clear that the chief justice had seriously misspoken, he said. “There is no other way that I know of to take away the fears of so many people that we are glossing over matters and not letting the people know the true facts.”

  But that recommendation, like so many others offered by Belin, had no effect on the final report, which would make no reference to Warren’s blunder. And while Belin and the other young staff lawyers appeared to have no way of knowing the extent of it, the commission did in fact begin to censor its records heavily that spring. Most significantly, it abruptly stopped keeping a verbatim record of its own deliberations.

  For the first six months of the investigation, closed-door meetings of the commission had been carefully transcribed by a court reporter, with the understanding that the transcripts would be classified as top secret and not released publicly for years, if ever. The approach was designed to give the commissioners confidence that they could speak openly but also to give assurance to the public that there was a complete record that future investigators could consult. Warren hired Ward & Paul, a respected private court-reporting company in Washington that often worked for the CIA and FBI when the agencies needed to take testimony involving classified material. The company employed a number of court reporters who themselves had high-level security clearances.

  That changed in June, however, when the commission, for reasons it did not explain, ended the arrangement with Ward & Paul and stopped keeping transcripts of its internal deliberations. The commission’s files do not reveal who made the decision, but it meant that the public would forever be deprived of knowing exactly what was said among the commissioners in their final and most important deliberations, and of how close the commission had come to producing a divided final report.

  The commission’s last fully transcribed meeting took place on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 23, with three members—Warren, Ford, and Allen Dulles—in attendance. It focused on a question of censorship: Should the commission strip the final report of references to Yuri Nosenko, the Russian defector? The CIA’s lobbying campaign to censor the Nosenko material had been effective, and there was little debate among the three commissioners. “I have been led to believe, by people who I believe know, that there is a grave question about the reliability of Mr. Nosenko being a bona fide defector,” Ford said. “I would have grave questions about the utilization of what he says concerning Oswald.” Warren agreed: “I am allergic to defectors, and I just think we shouldn’t put our trust in any defector unless it is known absolutely and positively that he is telling the truth—unless it can be corroborated in every respect. And we cannot corroborate this man at all.”

  * * *

  The next executive session was scheduled for Monday, June 29, when the commission would begin to debate, in earnest, the conclusions of the final report. All seven commissioners attended. Instead of a transcript, the commission prepared a nine-page summary of what was discussed at the session, and even that summary would disappear from the commission’s files. A copy was uncovered decades later in Rankin’s personal papers.

  According to the summary, most of the meeting was taken up by a discussion of a checklist of seventy-two questions that the commission’s staff believed the report would need to address, including the all-important question of whether there was evidence of a conspiracy. As they went down the list, the commissioners mostly sided with the staff about the conclusions they should reach. Although the debate continued over the single-bullet theory, they agreed that the evidence suggested that the three shots were probably fired at the motorcade from behind the president’s limousine (and that at least two of them hit); that all of the shots came from the sixth floor of the book depository; and that Oswald was the lone gunman.

  The commissioners hesitated, however, when they came to Question 48: “Is there evidence of any foreign conspiracy?” According to the summary, the commission “reserved its answer on this question—and said this would be answered later.”

  The commissioners rejected, once and for all, the draft chapter by Liebeler on Oswald’s motives. According to the summary, the commissioners “were unwilling to assign any particular motive or get involved in psychiatric theories or terminology.” The draft “was too soft and sympathetic about Oswald.”

  * * *

  There was a different type of censorship under way at the commission, much of it aimed at presenting a final report that would not make delicate readers blush. Rankin wanted it scrubbed clean of anything that might be considered distasteful, scurrilous, or a violation of privacy—even of Oswald’s privacy.

  David Slawson urged one last time that the commission reveal in the report that Oswald had been stricken with venereal disease while in the marines. In a memo to Rankin, he wondered if Oswald’s gonorrhea had been properly treated and if that could have affected his mental health: “It is worthwhile at least to inquire confidentially of a competent physician who specializes in this kind of disease or a related area to find out whether gonorrhea in particular can have this kind of serious aftereffect?” In fact, as Slawson learned later, untreated gonorrhea could lead to devastating physical complications, but not directly to mental illness. As Rankin had already decreed, there would be no mention of Oswald’s venereal disease in the report.

  Stuart Pollak, the young Justice Department lawyer detailed to the commission, was given the task of reviewing the draft chapters, as well as some of the witness transcripts that would be published later, for other instances of bad taste or violations of privacy. In memos, he went page by page through the drafts, citing every instance in which someone named in the report was accused of a crime, a sexual indiscretion, or some other character flaw. He wa
s not surprised by several examples of off-color material involving Ruby’s Carousel Club and witness descriptions of his strippers and their onstage performances. In a memo, Pollak questioned whether the report should retain a witness’s descriptions of one of Ruby’s most popular strippers, Janet “Jada” Conforto, who was said to be “just a little indecent about her act,” requiring Ruby to “turn off the lights every once in a while and tell her to clean it up a little.”

  Pollak cited every instance of profanity. “The record includes several mild profanities, such as reference to a ‘goddamn,’” he wrote. He also questioned whether the report needed to include some of the grislier details about the president’s corpse and his bloodied clothing. Pollak asked: Was it really necessary “to include a description of the president’s underclothing?”

  As for the alleged assassin, Pollak wrote: “I take it that everything about Lee Harvey Oswald is fair game and essential to a complete evaluation of the individual.” Still, he wondered if the commission should cite every distasteful detail it had learned about Oswald’s private life, especially about his sexuality. “Attention should perhaps be directed to the references to him as a possible homosexual … and to his unsatisfactory sexual relations with Marina.”

  Rankin also asked the staff to censor out some of more graphic descriptions of the army experiments that had been conducted, at the commission’s request, to try to replicate Kennedy’s and Connally’s wounds. The commissioners were squeamish, Rankin suggested, over how to describe the tests in which live goats were shot. He asked that “the words ‘animal flesh’ be substituted for the term ‘goat’ wherever it appears.” Similarly, Rankin said, the commissioners did not want to reveal that the army had fired shots at human cadaver wrists in trying to duplicate Connally’s wrist wounds. The commission, Rankin wrote, “directed that where there were references to ‘cadaver wrist,’ there be substituted ‘bone structure’ or some other expression.”

  * * *

  That summer, senior government witnesses who appeared before the commission were given the right to request changes to the written record of their testimony. Few took up the offer, although there was a last-minute editing request by Secret Service director James Rowley. In a brief note to the commission in late June, Rowley requested a subtle, but telling, change to his answer to a question about the Secret Service agents who had gone out drinking the night before the assassination. It came in a passage of the transcript in which a clearly agitated Warren asked whether the agents could have better protected the president if they had not been out drinking hours earlier.

  Rowley’s original answer was: “Yes sir, but I don’t know of anything they could have done that they did not do.”

  In his note, Rowley asked that those words be replaced with: “Yes sir, but even so, I still do not believe this would or could have prevented the tragedy.”

  With his revision, Rowley was qualifying his defense of his agents. He seemed now to be suggesting that the agents might have been able to do something more to save the president if they had remained fully sober the night before. After consulting with Warren, Rankin agreed to revise the transcript using slightly different words, so that Rowley’s answer for posterity would read: “Yes, sir, but I don’t believe they could have prevented the assassination.”

  49

  CHAMBERS OF THE CITY COUNCIL

  KRAKÓW, POLAND

  MONDAY, JUNE 29, 1964

  The Polish man looked nervous as he stood to ask Robert Kennedy what he described as “a personal question.” The young Pole, a local Communist Party official in Krakow, the country’s second-largest city, said his countrymen wanted to hear Kennedy’s “version of the assassination.”

  Kennedy appeared taken aback. For nearly seven months, he had managed to avoid any public comment about his brother’s murder. The creation of the Warren Commission had given the attorney general an excuse for his silence; he could insist he did not want to prejudge the investigation or influence Warren’s findings. But Kennedy’s triumphant trip to Europe in June—first to Germany, where he had unveiled a plaque honoring his brother in the newly named John F. Kennedy Platz in Berlin, and now to Poland—had appeared to lift his spirits. The crowds in Communist Poland had repeatedly cheered the mention of his brother’s name.

  So he decided to answer the young Pole’s question.

  President Kennedy, he said, had been assassinated by a “misfit” named Lee Harvey Oswald who had been motivated by his anger against American society. “There is no doubt” about Oswald’s guilt, Kennedy declared. “He was a professed Communist, but the communists, because of his attitude, would have nothing to do with him.” Kennedy continued: “What he did he did on his own and by himself.… Ideology, in my opinion, did not motivate his act.… It was the single act of one person protesting against society.” His remarks made for instant headlines back in the United States, since the attorney general seemed to be endorsing what the Warren Commission was expected to conclude in its final report.

  * * *

  For much of 1964, Kennedy had been beyond grief, it seemed; he had effectively gone into hiding. He had accepted Johnson’s offer to stay on as attorney general, saying he was committed to pursuing his late brother’s agenda at the Justice Department, especially on civil rights. But he then largely ignored his responsibilities at the department, staying away from the headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue for days at a stretch. He spent his time instead at Hickory Hill, the Civil War–era mansion that he and Ethel had bought from Jack in 1957, or in Georgetown with Jacqueline and her children. He seemed to find real comfort only from the company of family, especially his eight children; Ethel was pregnant with their ninth.

  Kennedy literally wrapped himself in evidence of his despair; he had taken to wearing his dead brother’s clothes. When he made his regular nighttime visits to the gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery, he was sometimes seen wearing either Jack’s favorite leather jacket or the slain president’s old overcoat. Before his trip to Europe, when the subject of his brother’s assassination came up, Kennedy insisted that he was paying no attention to the work of the Warren Commission and that he had little interest in the question of whether Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. “Why should I care?” was the answer he offered routinely when asked about the commission’s work. “None of it is going to bring Jack back.”

  But as his aides and closest friends knew, those comments were meant largely for public consumption. They would admit years later that Kennedy had never stopped suspecting that there had been a conspiracy to kill his brother. Throughout 1964, some of his Justice Department deputies—and friends elsewhere—continued to search, at his request, for evidence that might point away from Lee Oswald as the lone gunman. Kennedy appeared worried, in particular, about the possibility that Castro or the Mafia was behind the assassination.

  Kennedy would have known that there was a terrible logic to theories about a Cuban connection to his brother’s murder, since the United States had been trying for so long to assassinate Castro, sometimes with the help of the Mafia. By 1964, he had known for at least two years about the plots to kill the Cuban strongman, government records would later show. After the debacle at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, his brother placed him in charge of the administration’s secret war against Castro, known at the CIA as Operation Mongoose. Among officials who took part in Mongoose, there was little doubt that the operation was intended to bring about Castro’s violent death.

  Kennedy had been aware of the Mafia’s involvement in CIA plots against Castro since at least May 1961, only four months after he was sworn in as attorney general, when he was warned by J. Edgar Hoover in a memo that the CIA was involved in “dirty business” in Cuba with Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. Kennedy clearly read the FBI memo because he wrote a note in the margin: “I hope this will be followed up vigorously.” A year later, he was told explicitly that the “dirty business” included CIA plots to assassinate Castro. In a meeting i
n May 1962 that he requested, Kennedy was told by CIA briefers the names of the organized crime figures involved in the plots, including Giancana. According to a CIA summary of the briefing, he claimed to his briefers from the spy agency that the Mafia’s involvement in the schemes came as an unwelcome surprise: “I trust that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you will let the attorney general know.” But was it a surprise, given Hoover’s report to him a full year earlier? And while Kennedy’s friends would later insist that he would never have approved of an order to assassinate a foreign leader, the fact is that the CIA’s efforts to murder Castro would continue until the final hours of the Kennedy administration, at a time when Robert Kennedy was running the secret war against Cuba. The CIA’s inspector general, the agency’s internal watchdog, would determine years later that on November 22, 1963, the day of President Kennedy’s murder, a CIA officer was meeting in Paris with a Cuban agent to hand him a poison pen—a ballpoint pen rigged with a hypodermic needle that could be filled with a deadly, commercially available poison known as Blackleaf 40—to take back to Havana. The inspector general wrote that “it is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent … and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro.” Even after his brother’s murder, Kennedy continued to receive reports about ongoing efforts by the Mafia, with or without the CIA’s backing, to kill Castro. In June 1964, at about the time of the attorney general’s trip to Germany and Poland, the CIA forwarded a detailed memo to his office about reports of a new offer by “Cosa Nostra elements,” working with anti-Castro Cubans, to murder the Cuban leader. “They have offered to assassinate Castro for $150,000,” the agency’s memo said.