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

by Philip Shenon

  Whether President Johnson knew in 1964 about the Castro plots could never be determined with certainty, although the long-secret recordings of his White House telephone calls suggest that the CIA told him nothing about the plots, and the Mafia’s involvement, until 1967. Still, in the first months of his presidency, Johnson appeared to have a strong suspicion that the assassination was somehow an act of revenge by a foreign government. That winter, Johnson told his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, who held the same job under Kennedy, that the assassination had been “divine retribution” for reported American involvement in the deaths of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, and of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam; the Vietnamese leader had been killed less than three weeks before Kennedy, during an American-backed coup d’état.

  Johnson’s remark was quickly relayed to Kennedy, as the president might have suspected, and the attorney general was furious. “Divine retribution?” Kennedy asked in astonishment. In a conversation in April 1964 with his friend, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy described it as “the worst thing that Johnson” had ever said.

  But was Johnson wrong? Whatever his fury toward the new president, Kennedy had his own suspicions that a foreign leader targeted for assassination by the Kennedy administration had simply struck first: Castro. According to Schlesinger, he asked Kennedy that fall—“perhaps tactlessly”—if he really believed that Oswald had acted alone. “He said that there could be no serious doubt that Oswald was guilty, but there was still argument if he had done it by himself or as part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by gangsters.”

  So Kennedy faced a dilemma that June, when he received the letter from Chief Justice Warren, writing on behalf of the commission, asking if the attorney general had “any information suggesting that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy.”

  Should Kennedy reveal what he knew about the Castro plots and his suspicions of a conspiracy that might involve Cuba? What would be the impact of the disclosure that he had been aware, for years, that the CIA had not only tried to kill Castro but had recruited Mafia chieftains to do it—the same mobsters who were supposedly targeted for prosecution by his Justice Department?

  Kennedy’s political strategists would certainly not have welcomed any of that information becoming public, especially in the summer of 1964, when they were—sometimes bizarrely, it seemed—trying to whip up speculation that the attorney general was the obvious choice to be Johnson’s running mate that November. Although he did little to hide his loathing for Johnson, Kennedy also did not dampen the speculation about his candidacy. Opinion polls showed him, by a wide margin, the most popular choice for number-two on the Democratic ticket.

  Kennedy delayed responding to Warren’s letter. “What do I do?” he wrote in a tiny, undated handwritten note to an aide who reminded him weeks later that the commission was awaiting his response.

  Ultimately, though, on August 4, he signed a one-page letter to the chief justice that hinted at none of what he really knew or what he suspected:

  I would like to state definitely that I know of no credible evidence to support the allegations that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy. I would like to assure you that all information relating in any way to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the possession of the Department of Justice has been referred to the President’s Commission for appropriate review and consideration. I have no suggestions to make at this time regarding any additional investigation which should be undertaken by the Commission prior to the publication of its report.

  Given what would later be learned about Kennedy’s suspicions, the letter was, at best, evasive and, at worst, an attempt to throw the commission off the trail of evidence of a possible conspiracy. The wording of the letter might be literally true, but it masked his dark fears that Oswald had not acted alone. Kennedy might have no “credible evidence” of a conspiracy, but he had plenty of suspicion. He might not be aware of evidence “in the possession of the Department of Justice” to suggest a conspiracy, but it might exist elsewhere—at the CIA, especially.

  Although the commission had already ruled out the need for his testimony, Kennedy closed the letter with an offer to appear before the panel and answer questions; it was an offer he could be confident would not be accepted. Other than President Johnson, the attorney general was the highest-ranking government official not required to give sworn testimony to the investigation.

  50

  THE OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR

  THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  AUGUST 1964

  Lee Rankin was genuinely embarrassed over the demands that the commission made on the FBI, he said. The requests for information and assistance continued nonstop throughout the summer of 1964, even as the commission was moving to finish its report. On August 18, Rankin telephoned Alex Rosen, head of the bureau’s General Investigative Division, to thank the FBI for its willingness to carry out requests “regardless of how ridiculous the request might have seemed.”

  In the final weeks of the investigation, FBI agents in Texas and across the border in Mexico fanned out to chase the commission’s new leads. Agents in Mexico City were asked to contact every silver store in that massive city in search of one that might have sold Oswald the bracelet he had given to Marina. The commission wanted the search conducted, even though its staff was convinced the bracelet was actually made in Japan and bought by Oswald after he returned to the United States. The FBI’s Mexico City office was asked to conduct a similar investigation of every photo shop where Oswald might have had passport photos taken for his visa application to Cuba.

  More significantly, the commission wanted the FBI to conduct a thorough reinvestigation of the allegations of Silvia Odio. “Mrs. Odio’s reliability has been vouched for by several reputable people who know her,” Rankin wrote to Hoover on July 24, adding that the commission wanted Annie Odio, Silvia’s sister, to be reinterviewed as soon as possible. Hoover wrote back on August 12 to report that the FBI had interviewed Annie Odio and that, although she supported her sister’s account, the FBI was still convinced that the investigation was at a dead end. “No further action is contemplated in this particular matter in the absence of a specific request from the commission,” Hoover wrote.

  Wesley Liebeler said that he was astonished by the letter. Why did the FBI have so little interest in following up on a seemingly credible witness whose account might point to conspirators in the president’s murder? He began his own detailed review of Odio’s claims, matching her account against what was known of the chronology of Oswald’s trip to Mexico. The outcome suggested to Liebeler that although time would have been extraordinarily tight, Oswald could have made the trip to Dallas in late September. If he had had access to a private car or had flown, he could have slipped into Dallas, if only for a matter of hours, before crossing the border into Mexico.

  In late August, Liebeler drafted a detailed letter for Rankin to sign in which the commission would, effectively, demand that the FBI reopen and reinvestigate every part of the Odio story. Rankin could be sure the letter would not be well received by Hoover, but he sent it anyway. “It is a matter of some importance to the commission that Mrs. Odio’s allegations either be proved or disproved,” the letter said. “Would you please conduct the investigation necessary to determine who it was that Mrs. Odio saw in or about late September or early October 1963?” The letter offered Liebeler’s detailed analysis of the timetable of Oswald’s travels, and it noted the similarities between Odio’s description of one of the two Latino men at her door—“Leopoldo”—and a man who was reportedly seen in Oswald’s company in a New Orleans bar.

  The commission’s request was passed on to the FBI’s Dallas field office, and the task of following up was handed to Special Agent James Hosty, the same agent who had investigated—and dismissed—Odio
’s claims back in December. Hosty said later that he rolled his eyes at the assignment; he would be reviewing exactly the same evidence that he had gone over eight months earlier. At what point, he wondered, “would this nightmare end?” Hosty was a public figure in Dallas for all the wrong reasons that summer, he said. Anyone in the city who closely read a newspaper knew his name; all of his neighbors knew he was the beleaguered FBI agent who had investigated Oswald before the assassination and failed to see the threat he posed. Hoover and his deputies in Washington seemed determined to prove that Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy, and nothing Hosty had discovered since the assassination undermined their argument. It would take a “brave, if not foolhardy” FBI agent to dare suggest that Hoover was wrong. “How much longer do I have to hear the name Lee Harvey Oswald?” Hosty asked himself. “I was sick of this.”

  * * *

  By late summer, Hoover’s contempt for Warren and several of the other commissioners was all but total, even as he continued to fear how their final report would treat the FBI. Hoover’s internal files had become a running, venomous commentary on the commission and its work. His views were often expressed in brief notes, written in his distinctive, looping cursive, at the bottom of his deputies’ memos.

  Many of his angriest comments were prompted by press coverage. From a reading of his handwritten notes, Hoover seemed to assume any article in a major newspaper or magazine that criticized the FBI for its actions before or after the assassination had been planted by the commission—in some cases, by the chief justice himself. After the magazine the Nation questioned that winter whether Oswald had ever been an FBI informant, Hoover wrote to aides that he wanted a thorough analysis of who was feeding information to the magazine. He guessed the chief justice: “The Nation is Warren’s Bible,” he wrote. When the Dallas Times-Herald revealed details of the commission’s investigation of whether Oswald had been prone to violence while serving in the marines, an aide to Hoover prepared a summary of the article, writing that it appeared to be based on a “leak on the part of a commission member.” At the bottom of the memo Hoover wrote: “Sounds like Warren.”

  Hoover thought the commission, far from ending rumors about Oswald and a possible conspiracy to kill Kennedy, was continuing to fuel them, especially after Warren’s statement to reporters about not knowing the full truth about the assassination “in your lifetime.” “If Warren had kept his big mouth shut about this, these conjectures would not have arisen,” Hoover wrote.

  He became convinced that the FBI was also the victim of the incompetence—and, he said, the venality—of the Dallas police department and the Dallas district attorney’s office. He believed the city’s law-enforcement officials were continuing to feed disparaging information about the FBI to the commission in hopes of more lenient treatment in the final report. For a time earlier that year, Hoover had quietly ordered the FBI’s Dallas field office to cut off all contact with the city’s chief homicide prosecutor, William Alexander, because Hoover believed Alexander was spreading the rumor that Oswald had been an FBI informant. He was also suspicious of Alexander’s boss, district attorney Henry Wade. “This fellow is just a low s.o.b.,” Hoover wrote of Alexander. “Instruct our Dallas office to have no contact with him and to be most circumspect with Wade.”

  As the commission’s investigation began to wind down, Hoover admitted to aides that the bureau had mishandled its dealings with the commission, often creating suspicion where he believed none had been justified. After an incident in which midlevel FBI officials gave a narrow reading to a request for background information about Jack Ruby, leading to protests from the commission about why some documents had been withheld, Hoover wrote that he was “becoming more and more concerned about our failure to properly handle this matter.” He said in a later memo: “I don’t understand why we give narrow interpretations to the commission’s requests.”

  In March, a top Hoover aide, William Branigan, wrote to recommend that the FBI reject the commission’s request for closer surveillance of public appearances by Mark Lane and Marguerite Oswald. He suggested the potential for a scandal if it became known that Warren’s investigation was having its critics followed. “The requests of the commission are extremely broad and, if literally interpreted, could pose a serious investigative burden on us which would also be of great potential embarrassment,” Branigan wrote. Hoover, however, was wary of turning the commission down. “I do not like this constant reluctance on our part to comply fully with the commission’s requests. I realize how impractical and absurd many of them are,” he wrote. “But it is a fact that at least Warren is hostile to the Bureau & we are furnishing him ammunition by our equivocation.”

  Rankin would later say that much of his energy that year had to be directed to trying to salvage some sort of relationship with the bureau. Behind the scenes, the investigation was faced with repeated threats by Hoover and the bureau to shut off the FBI’s assistance. There was a showdown that spring over the commission’s decision to have outside experts review some of the physical evidence that had already been inspected by the FBI Laboratory, including the bullets and bullet fragments from Dallas. The move was seen by senior aides to Hoover as an affront to the bureau, suggesting that the commission did not trust the lab’s findings. Hoover seemed to be offended, too: “I concur it is getting to be more and more intolerable to deal with this Warren Commission.”

  At one point, he appeared to authorize Assistant Director Alex Rosen to threaten to cut off the laboratory’s assistance to the commission entirely. “I pointed out to Mr. Rankin that our Laboratory was greatly burdened with a large volume of work and that if the examinations that we made were not going to be accepted, it would appear there would be no reason for our Laboratory experts to be tied up on these examinations,” Rosen wrote.

  Rankin tried to make amends. He repeatedly spoke by phone with Rosen and apologized for the many “unreasonable requests” the commission had made. Rankin tried to be conciliatory, praising the FBI Laboratory and insisting that the outside experts would simply confirm the accuracy of the bureau’s findings. After more pleas from Rankin, including more statements of “my respect for the FBI and the work of its laboratory,” the bureau lifted its threat. Still, Hoover felt the dispute was a useful moment to remind his deputies to ignore any words of praise or other “sweet-talk” they heard from Rankin and his colleagues at the commission. “I place no credence in any complimentary remarks made by Warren or the commissioners,” Hoover wrote on a copy of one of Rosen’s memos. “They are looking for FBI ‘gaps’ and, having found none, they try to get ‘syrupy.’”

  * * *

  Whatever his hostility toward Warren, Hoover worked to maintain a good relationship with the commissioner who, he felt, would defend the FBI in the writing of the report: Gerald Ford. His files show that he met Ford at a party given at the home of Cartha DeLoach in April. The next day, Hoover followed up with a note to Ford: “I want to let you know how much I enjoyed talking to Mrs. Ford and you during the party at DeLoach’s home last night. Particularly, I was very pleased to discuss in this informal manner some vital matters of interest to you, as well as the FBI.” The letter did not reveal what the “vital matters” were. “It is always encouraging to know that we have alert, vigorous Congressmen, such as you, who are aware of the needs and problems confronting our country,” he continued. “Whenever you have an opportunity, I would be happy to have Mrs. Ford and you drop by FBI headquarters for a special tour of our facilities. And of course, I would like you to feel free to call on me any time our help is needed or when we can be of service.”

  The bureau also kept tabs throughout the year on William Manchester, as he gathered research for his book. DeLoach asked for a background check on the writer, and the results were encouraging. As a Washington correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, Manchester had dealt with the bureau occasionally, and a review of FBI files showed that “our relations with him in the past have been most cordial,” DeLoach re
ported. That spring, Robert Kennedy asked Hoover to meet with Manchester; the request came to the FBI director through Edwin Guthman, Kennedy’s press secretary, whose office was helping schedule the author’s appointments. Hoover, who was rarely in a mood to do favors for the attorney general, initially refused to be interviewed for the book. Instead, Manchester was invited to speak with DeLoach, and Kennedy’s office organized the meeting for April 22.

  While outlining his research plan for DeLoach, Manchester pressed for the chance to speak directly with Hoover; he said he wanted a full understanding of what happened in Washington in the hours after the president’s murder, including the exact sequence of phone calls between the FBI director and Robert Kennedy in which Hoover broke the news of the assassination. (Kennedy had already told Manchester how appalled he had been at Hoover’s cold, almost robotic tone during the calls.) Manchester signaled to DeLoach that Hoover took a risk if he chose not to tell his side of the story because the other side of the story—as told by Kennedy—might be very unflattering. The writer made clear how much he already knew. According to DeLoach, Manchester said that he had “visited the Attorney General’s home and the swimming pool where the Attorney General had been standing at the time the Director had called him.”