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

by Philip Shenon

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  Hoover gave in and agreed to the interview, setting aside an hour for Manchester in early June. As expected, much of the interview focused on Hoover’s telephone calls with Robert Kennedy on the day of the assassination. Hoover portrayed his tone in those calls as professional, not cold, and he appeared to suggest that it was Kennedy who had drawn the initial conversations to an end, not him. After telling Kennedy in the first call that his brother had been shot and was being rushed to a hospital, Hoover recalled, “the Attorney General had been quiet for a few moments and had then requested” that the FBI “keep him informed of any further facts” before ending the call. The attorney general, he said, was “not the explosive type” and seemed reasonably calm during the call, given the circumstances.

  Hoover offered Manchester his long-standing defense of the FBI’s failure to alert the Secret Service to Oswald’s presence in Dallas—“we did have some information regarding Oswald; however, it was quite flimsy in nature”—while repeating his attack on the competence of the Dallas police. “If the FBI had taken custody of Lee Harvey Oswald … he never would have been killed by Jack Ruby,” he said. “All of this could have been avoided had the Dallas police taken proper action.”

  The interview ended with what Hoover and his deputies might have seen as an odd question from Manchester: Why had Hoover not attended the president’s funeral services or burial, which were conducted only a few minutes’ drive from FBI headquarters in downtown Washington? It would have been impossible, Hoover replied; there was too much work to be done, both in managing the investigation in Dallas and Mexico City—“leads had spread to Mexico”—and in overseeing the security arrangements for the many foreign dignitaries who traveled to Washington that weekend for the funeral ceremonies. As Hoover explained it, he had “been at his desk constantly.”

  51

  ONE CHASE MANHATTAN PLAZA

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  TUESDAY, JULY 21, 1964

  For much of the summer, John McCloy, like most of the commissioners, dealt with the investigation from a distance. He worked from his luxurious offices in One Chase Manhattan Plaza, the sixty-story white-steel skyscraper in lower Manhattan that was home both to Chase Manhattan Bank, which he had run as chairman from 1953 to 1960, and the white-shoe law firm that bore his name, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. His name was so synonymous with the bank and the law firm that there was no suite or floor number on his office stationery; it was unnecessary. There were hundreds of offices and thousands of workers in the building, but a letter addressed simply to John McCloy, One Chase Manhattan Plaza, New York, would reach him.

  After reading through some of the draft chapters sent up from Washington, McCloy decided that the commission should just admit it: Oswald might have been trained by the KGB to spy. That did not mean there was a Russian conspiracy to kill Kennedy—not at all. McCloy had told the other commissioners he agreed that Oswald had been the lone gunman and that it was hard to imagine that the Soviet Union had anything to do with the assassination. But it was possible that the Russians might at some point have considered using Oswald as a “sleeper” agent who, after returning to the United States, would lie in wait, maybe for years, to carry out an operation on Moscow’s behalf. The fact that Oswald seemed to know some spycraft—using false names to open post-office boxes, for example—suggested that he might have undergone KGB training. The commission’s report would only be stronger, McCloy said, if it acknowledged that there were still many mysteries about Oswald’s past.

  On July 21, McCloy dictated a letter for Lee Rankin and asked his secretary to mark it PERSONAL. He wrote to praise the latest draft of the chapter in which the commission addressed—and ruled out—the possibility of a foreign conspiracy. “I think this draft is much better than the earlier one,” McCloy told Rankin. But he had a suggestion. “Somewhere,” he wrote, “I feel there should be added something like this”:

  The Commission has noted that Oswald did exhibit some tendency toward the use of undercover practices which raises a suspicion that he did receive some rudimentary instruction in undercover activities.… It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Soviet authorities may have considered using him as a sort of “sleeper” in the United States, on whom they might call at some future time, but our more considered view is that even in this capacity they would have had serious doubts regarding his reliability.

  In other words, the KGB might have considered using Oswald as a spy but, ultimately, the Russians were too smart to have anything to do with “that punk,” as McCloy often referred to him.

  The letter effectively disappeared after it reached Washington. If McCloy’s suggestion inspired debate within the commission, it would not be reflected in its records or in the final report. The letter, which several of the staff lawyers say they never saw, was filed away in Rankin’s personal papers at the National Archives, apparently forgotten. Years later, the lawyers were not surprised that the chief justice would have resisted McCloy’s suggestion to leave open the possibility of ties between Oswald and the KGB. By that summer, Warren seemed determined to produce a final report that ended speculation about Oswald as anything other than a delusional, violent young man who was alienated from all people and institutions—certainly not someone who would be seen by the Kremlin as a potential spy.

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  David Slawson had written much of the draft that McCloy had just read, and the young lawyer was pleased with the way his material in the report had taken shape. As the writing had begun in earnest, Slawson felt convinced that there was no foreign conspiracy, or at least no credible evidence of one. He reserved final judgment on the question until the FBI completed its late-summer review of the claims of Silvia Odio in Dallas. If her account of meeting Oswald proved to be true, everything changed, and the question of a conspiracy would have to be reopened. If Odio’s allegations proved false, however, Slawson felt comfortable with the conclusion, as stated in a July 15 draft, that the commission had investigated “all rumors and allegations” and “found no credible evidence indicating that the Soviet Union, Cuba or any other foreign nation was involved in the assassination. All of the facts on Lee Harvey’s life, literally from his birth to his death, have been examined for evidence of subversive foreign connections.”

  Not that he was completely satisfied, Slawson admitted. He was still troubled that so much of the information about Oswald’s Mexico trip would be attributed directly—on the commission’s orders—to the central witness he had not been permitted to interview: Silvia Duran. She would be identified by name more than thirty times in the report, with reference to the statements she had made—under duress and possibly even under threat of torture—to the Mexican police. The staff settled on the final wording about her credibility. She would be labeled “an important source of information” whose account had been confirmed by “sources of extremely high reliability,” a cryptic reference to the CIA’s wiretapping and bugging operations in Mexico City. “Her testimony was truthful and accurate in all material respects,” the report would conclude.

  William Coleman took on the assignment of writing the report’s chronology of Oswald’s Mexico trip. His draft made sweeping statements suggesting that he, even more than Slawson, was confident that the CIA and the FBI had shared all they knew. “I did trust the CIA especially,” Coleman said later.

  According to his twenty-five-page draft on the Mexico trip, dated July 20:

  The commission undertook an intensive investigation to determine what Oswald did on this trip and its purpose. As a result, it has been able to reconstruct and explain most of Oswald’s actions during this time.… The Commission is confident that what it does know about Oswald’s activities in Mexico is representative of all his actions there, and that while in Mexico, Oswald made no contacts having any relation to the assassination.

  As the summer wore on, the staff began to fall into two camps: those who were content with the way their drafts were being edited
by Rankin and his deputies, and those who were unhappy, or even furious. There seemed to be no middle ground. Arlen Specter felt his summary of the events of the day of the assassination, and his explanation of much of the medical evidence, had been edited carefully and respectfully by Redlich. Others might still find Redlich testy and territorial, but Specter only had praise; the two would be lifelong friends. “Norman was the architect of the report, and he essentially let my work stand,” Specter recalled. “You’ve got to remember that the report was put together lickety-split. I give Redlich a lot of credit.”*

  Specter would become aware only later, after the drafts were edited, how reluctant some of the commissioners had been to accept the single-bullet theory, or at least the way he had presented it. After reading through draft chapters about the ballistics, McCloy wrote to Rankin in June to warn that the commission should be wary of overstating its confidence in the theory. “I think too much effort is expended on attempting to prove that the first bullet which hit the president was also responsible for all of Connally’s wounds,” he said. “In many respects, this chapter is the most important chapter in the report and it should be the most convincing.” McCloy attached an eight-page typewritten memo to his letter in which he proposed sixty-nine other editing changes in the report, many intended to tone down what he considered its overheated language. He said he was alarmed by the use of needlessly dramatic turns of phrase, including a reference to the “fateful day” of the assassination. “If this is to be an historical document, there is no need and indeed it would appear to be improper to use phrases such as ‘fateful day.’” The phrase was removed. A more direct attack on the single-bullet theory came from Senator Cooper, who had otherwise been such a secondary figure in the investigation. On August 20, he sent a memo to Rankin in which he suggested that the theory was, simply, wrong. Cooper had been impressed by Connally’s testimony. “On what basis is it claimed that one shot caused all the wounds?” Cooper asked. “It seemed to me that Governor Connally’s statement negates such a conclusion. I could not agree with this statement.”

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  No one seemed angrier about the way the report was being edited than David Belin. Now back at his law firm in Des Moines, he said he seethed as he read through the drafts sent to him from Washington. In letters back to Rankin, he complained that the report was raising needless questions about the commission’s confidence in its own findings. The report, he said, was written defensively, focusing too much on rebutting the conspiracy theories being spread by Mark Lane and others. Belin was shocked, he said, to discover that a full chapter would be devoted to proving that all the shots fired at Kennedy’s motorcade had come from the Texas School Book Depository and not, as the conspiracy theorists argued, from the grassy knoll. “The evidence of the source of the shots is among the strongest evidence there is to show that Oswald was the assassin,” Belin wrote. “To set it aside in a separate chapter by itself is a case of gilding the lily.” The conspiracy theorists “have succeeded in steering the commission onto a false course,” he continued. “There can be absolutely no doubt about the source of the shots, and it does not take 69 typewritten pages to prove it.”

  Belin was angered, as well, to discover that the commission intended to ignore his one-man investigation that spring of a mystery that had nagged at him from the start of the investigation: Where was Oswald heading after the shooting? It was known that Oswald had left the book depository minutes after the assassination and made his way to his rooming house across town—first by bus, then by taxi after the bus was stopped in the suddenly chaotic traffic. At the rooming house, he collected his .38 Smith & Wesson revolver and began walking east; it was then that he encountered and killed Officer Tippit before hurrying on. The question was: To where? The absence of any obvious escape route fed rumors that Oswald knew Ruby and was heading in the direction of Ruby’s apartment, which was about two-thirds of a mile away in the direction he was walking. Belin, however, was convinced that the rumors were wrong. “We made every effort to uncover credible evidence of a possible link between Oswald and Ruby,” Belin said. “None was found.”

  Was it possible that Oswald had no escape route? Some of Belin’s colleagues suspected that Oswald had no destination in mind and always intended to be captured or killed. That might explain why he had left the money in his wallet—$170—for Marina that morning; he had also left behind his wedding ring. But Belin was convinced that Oswald was fleeing, and to somewhere specific, and that there were clues to his destination in a small slip of paper found in his pockets: a bus transfer, issued in the minutes after the assassination. To Belin, the transfer slip suggested that Oswald—who routinely traveled by public bus in Dallas and knew the schedules by heart—planned to connect to another bus that would take him out of town. “There must have been a reason for him to keep that bus transfer.”

  Belin thought Oswald’s most likely destination was Mexico, and then Cuba. Liebeler reminded him of testimony from one of Oswald’s fellow marines, who had said that Oswald had talked about going to Cuba through Mexico if he ever got in trouble with the law. It was significant, Belin thought, that Oswald had lied so blatantly to the Dallas police about the Mexico trip when he was interrogated after the assassination, claiming that he had never been to Mexico. “Is it not reasonable to assume that the denial of his trip to Mexico is strong circumstantial evidence, pointing to someone in Mexico who was in some way involved, directly or indirectly, with the assassination?” Belin asked. “Who would that person be?” He suspected those questions led back to Oswald’s visit that fall to the Cuban embassy in Mexico, where he almost certainly would have encountered Cuban diplomats and others who saw the Kennedy administration as a mortal threat. Belin thought there was at least a possibility then that while in Mexico, “Oswald had a conversation with a Castro agent or sympathizer about getting back at Kennedy and was promised financial and other support if he was ever able to succeed” in killing the president. Someone might have been waiting for Oswald on the border to help him—by definition, it seemed, a coconspirator in the assassination. It was “pure speculation,” Belin admitted, but it sounded logical.

  With the FBI’s help, he analyzed bus routes out of Dallas to see if Oswald had an easy way of getting to Mexico. After days with maps and timetables spread out on his desk, Belin thought he had identified Oswald’s likely route, and it was not so complicated. With the transfer slip, Oswald could have reached a pickup point for Greyhound bus lines, which that day had a bus leaving Dallas at three fifteen p.m. headed for Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border.

  Belin laid out his theory in a detailed memo to Rankin and Redlich. He offered an explanation for why Oswald had left the money behind for Marina instead of saving it for bus fare; he had not needed the money because he had his handgun. “Even if he did not have enough money to get to Mexico, the pistol would have helped him obtain some,” he said. After Tippit’s vicious murder, Oswald would seemingly have had no qualms about using the gun again to rob passersby, or even a bank. Belin acknowledged that he could not prove Mexico was Oswald’s destination, but he thought it was important for the commission report to at least suggest where Oswald was headed, if only to dampen the rumors about a rendezvous with Ruby.

  It was Norman Redlich, above all, who objected to any mention of the theory in the report. The commission should not raise questions about Oswald’s route—especially to suggest that he was headed to Mexico, where so many questions had already been raised and left unanswered—without proof, he declared. “Norman argued that because it was a theory and not a fact, no mention of it should be made in the final report,” Belin remembered. “Norman won the argument.”

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  Alfred Goldberg was stunned that summer when he learned what the chief justice intended to do with the commission’s internal files—he wanted them shredded or incinerated. “Warren wanted to destroy all the records,” Goldberg recalled. “He thought these records would stir up more than they shou
ld,” providing conspiracy theorists with evidence about internal disputes on the commission’s staff, which Mark Lane and others would then use selectively to raise doubts about Oswald’s guilt. Warren had other reasons for destroying the files, Goldberg recalled. He worried that much of the paperwork turned over by government agencies, and the CIA in particular, revealed national-security secrets only tangentially related to the president’s murder. “He thought the country and the world would be better off with those things never being made public,” said Goldberg, who decided that he had to move fast—and quietly—to convince Warren to change his mind. As a historian, Goldberg was appalled at the idea that so much raw evidence about a turning point in American history would be lost to future scholars. Worse, he was convinced that if the public ever learned what had happened, the conspiracy theories would spin out of control; Lane and the others would seize on the document destruction as proof of a cover-up.

  Goldberg thought that if anyone could change Warren’s mind, it was Richard Russell. Whatever the differences between Warren and the senator, the Georgian was one of the most respected men in the capital, and the chief justice would listen to him. “No one in Washington dared to ignore the advice of Senator Richard Russell,” Goldberg said. So he went to Alfredda Scobey, Russell’s representative on the staff, and asked her for help. She, in turn, went to Russell, who agreed to talk to the chief justice. And the senator convinced Warren that, whatever the risk of the disclosure of government secrets, “it would be a whole lot worse if we destroyed the documents,” Goldberg said. Warren quickly reversed his order. Russell, Goldberg said, had “saved the day.”

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