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

by Philip Shenon

  Simon and Schuster decided to go ahead with the book despite internal qualms, both about the quality of the sample chapters they were reading—“effortful, awkward suspense writing,” one editor said—and the propriety of Ford taking on the project at all. “I am still disturbed by the idea of one member of this august body writing a one-man ‘behind-the-scenes story,’” another editor wrote.

  Ford had worked throughout the summer to keep Life and Simon and Schuster interested in the project, even inviting editors from the magazine and the publishing house to come down to Washington to read through internal commission documents stored in his office. He made the offer even at a time when he knew he was facing questions from the FBI about whether he had leaked Oswald’s “Historic Diary” to Life. “Got Jerry Ford on the telephone,” Thompson, the magazine editor, wrote on July 8 to an executive at Simon and Schuster. “He suggested that someone might want to see some of the basic documents in his Washington office … and if you think that ought to be done, let me know.” Thompson put his own journalistic curiosity aside and passed up the offer to see the secret files. He had reminded Ford, he wrote, that documents by themselves would not sell books. Readers would instead want to read Ford’s “personal contribution”—his private thoughts about the investigation and about Oswald. “I didn’t see much purpose to be served by going over the documents, which so far are strictly from the commission.”

  In the face of later criticism that he was trying to profit off the assassination, he insisted that the book was a valuable contribution to the historical record. Ford also saw nothing wrong, he said, with his decision to allow Stiles and his other informal advisers—including John Ray, the retired congressman, and Francis Fallon, the Harvard Law student—to review classified documents. “They made a good team,” he said of his circle of advisers. “Jack was a writer, John a lawyer. They prepared questions for me to ask at commission hearings, they analyzed the transcripts, looking for discrepancies.” Without them, he said, he might have fallen far behind on his work for the commission.

  * * *

  The year had proved unusually busy anyway for Ford. He was always swamped with work as a result of his membership on the House Appropriations Committee, and in 1964 he was drawn deeply into national politics. That summer, it was widely reported that he was on the short list of vice presidential candidates being considered by Barry Goldwater. Fallon, who turned twenty-three that year, came away impressed with Ford’s commitment to the investigation, despite his heavy duties in Congress. He thought Ford’s only failing as a commissioner was his tendency to assume the best about the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover.

  As the summer wore on, Fallon urged Ford to press the commission to keep looking for evidence of a conspiracy. In a memo on July 31, he told Ford he was worried that the report was being written to gloss over evidence suggesting that Oswald had been trained for espionage in the Soviet Union. “Don’t allow a whitewash job,” Fallon told Ford. “In too many areas, we just don’t have enough information. Try to get more info if possible. Be sure you see sources for statements attributed to ‘confidential sources.’” Ford’s friend Stiles expressed even stronger suspicions. On September 4, with the investigation nearly at an end, he urged Ford to consider again the possibility that Oswald had been someone’s spy. “Do we have any real proof that Oswald was not an agent? We have no proof that he was, but it is a different matter to totally close the door on the subject.”

  Ford was closing no doors prematurely, he insisted. He said later he carefully weighed all of the conspiracy theories, including some that had not been widely shared with the public. In May, a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, the largest morning newspaper in Ford’s home state, contacted him to ask what he made of rumors that Oswald had been part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that was launched in New Orleans when he lived there in 1963. The rumors were complicated to follow and they had elements of the salacious, which explained why many reporters outside Louisiana had declined to pursue them.

  The rumors focused on a New Orleans man who was involved in right-wing groups seeking Castro’s overthrow: a former Eastern Airlines pilot named David Ferrie, who had been questioned by both New Orleans police and the FBI shortly after the assassination. As a teenager, Oswald had belonged to a Louisiana squadron of the Civil Air Patrol, or CAP—a volunteer group sponsored by the United States Air Force to encourage aviation enthusiasts. Records showed that Oswald had been a member of the local squadron at a time when Ferrie was helping run it; Ferrie would adamantly deny knowing Oswald, although a photograph would emerge years later that seemed to show them together at a CAP meeting.

  Ford scribbled down notes to himself as he heard the increasingly bizarre story about Ferrie (he misspelled the name as “Ferry”), who had been dismissed by the airline “for homosexual activity” involving teenage boys and who—the reporter said—“wears a wig and false eyebrows.” (Ferrie suffered from alopecia, an ailment that causes the loss of body hair.) According to the Detroit reporter, Ferrie was also tied to organized crime figures; he worked as a part-time investigator for a New Orleans lawyer who represented local mob chief Carlos Marcello, and it was rumored that he had flown Marcello back into the United States after a Justice Department attempt to deport him during the Kennedy administration.

  “Probably knew O in CAP,” Ford wrote in his notes, referring to Oswald and the Civil Air Patrol. “Lee Harvey Oswald—Homosexual?” He tried to imagine how these details might come together: if Oswald was tied to Ferrie, possibily through a shared sexual orientation or through Cuban exile groups, could that mean that he was also tied to a Mafia boss who might have wanted revenge against Kennedy?

  On the commission’s staff, the investigation of the rumors about Ferrie—and about the possibility of other ties among Oswald and organized-crime figures in New Orleans—was assigned to Wesley Liebeler. During his New Orleans trip in July, Liebeler found nothing to support the idea of any larger conspiracy involving Ferrie or the Mafia. As a result, there was no mention of the rumors about Ferrie at all in the commission’s final report. “The FBI did a very substantial piece of work on Ferrie,” Liebeler said later. “It just did not lead anywhere.”*

  * * *

  By the end of the investigation, Ford said he had come to accept that conspiracy theories about the assassination were unavoidable given “the complexity of events, the freakish coincidences of facts” that the commission was uncovering. “In retrospect, the unbelievable coincidences that took place couldn’t happen—and yet they did.” In conversations with Stiles, Ford tried to talk through all of the possible conspiracies. They found useful ways of framing the discussion, especially after they realized that most conspiracy theories required that Oswald be a “plant” at the Texas School Book Depository. Could that be true? They reviewed the facts of how he had gotten the job in October—how at Marina Oswald’s urging, Ruth Paine had phoned a supervisor at the book depository, who agreed to meet with Oswald and then hired him. The book depository had two warehouses in Dallas. Unless the supervisor was somehow in on the conspiracy, it was only chance that led him to assign Oswald to the building that overlooked Dealey Plaza.

  Ford found another effective way to frame the debate—by analyzing calendars for the final months of 1963. If Oswald and his coconspirators had somehow arranged for him to get a job at the book depository, they would have needed to know that Kennedy’s motorcade would pass in front of the building. Ford reviewed the chronology of Kennedy’s Texas trip and how it had been organized by the White House. The timelines showed that Kennedy’s plans to visit Texas on November 21 and 22 had been known publicly since late September. But the inclusion of Dallas in the itinerary was not confirmed until November 9—three weeks after Oswald had been hired at the book depository. And it was not until November 19, only three days before Kennedy’s arrival, that the motorcade route past the book depository was made public. It was “sheer coincidence” that put Oswald in a building where he would have a cl
ear shot at the president, Ford could see. “Fate put him in the right place at the right time to play his black role.”

  Similarly, Ford felt that the timeline of the events of Sunday, November 24, the day Oswald was killed, proved that Ruby had not been part of a conspiracy. It was “pure happenstance” that had given Ruby the time he needed to get to the basement of police headquarters to gun down Oswald. The transfer of Oswald to the county jail had been held up at the last minute at the request of a federal postal inspector who wanted the chance to ask a few questions of the accused assassin; the inspector had been at Sunday church services and could not get there earlier. That brief delay gave Ruby—who had been across the street at a Western Union office, wiring $25 to one of his strippers—the time he needed. If Oswald’s transfer had been moved up just two or three minutes, Ruby would have arrived too late.

  * * *

  Ford was frustrated by the commission’s failure to reach a judgment about Oswald’s motives. In his book with Stiles and in his later comments on the assassination, he offered his best guess about what drove Oswald to kill President Kennedy, and it would prove to be the most detailed, and in many ways the most thoughtful, explanation offered by any of the commissioners.

  In Ford’s view, many of the answers could be found in Oswald’s “Historic Diary.” Oswald was not motivated principally by politics in anything he did, Ford thought. His “so-called Marxism” was “a mishmash of revolutionary dialectics and dreams of a better society he could not put his finger on.” Instead, Ford believed, Oswald was motivated by a desperate craving for attention and a childlike stubbornness that blocked his ability to call off an act to which he had committed himself. Ford was the father of four young children, three of them boys, and he thought he knew enough about child psychology to sense that Oswald had not outgrown the impulses of a juvenile. The “Historic Diary” was a “vivid self-portrait of a young man, who, when he couldn’t have his own way, resorted to melodramatic and rash actions to call attention to himself,” he wrote. “When thwarted by circumstances, an ordinary person might beat his fists on the table or, better yet, learn a lesson. But not Lee Harvey Oswald.… He was like a child who, failing to gain the attention he wants, finds that smashing a toy or making a mess is the easiest way to obtain recognition.”

  Ford thought something else had motivated Oswald, although he did not put it in his book or say it publicly. It involved Oswald’s sexuality. The commission had heard from witnesses, several times, about the Oswalds’ sexual problems. Ford guessed that Oswald was impotent and that Marina’s mocking of his sexual performance had left him so humiliated that he set out to prove his masculinity with a rifle. “I have a feeling, and I think others shared it, that he, Oswald, was being prodded by his wife on his impotence,” Ford said in a 2003 interview published after his death. “He had to do something to display his bravado.”

  * * *

  As Ford and his advisers read through draft chapters of the report, they pulled together long lists of editing suggestions that Ford then submitted to the commission. His editing changes were easy to track, since he submitted them—for each draft chapter—in a letter on House stationery addressed to Rankin. Many of his suggestions were welcome, since he often caught errors, reflecting the close reading that his advisers had given the drafts. On September 2, he wrote Rankin to insist that the commission correct a statement suggesting that Oswald rarely drank alcohol, an assertion that would undermine possibly credible witnesses who had claimed to see him in bars in New Orleans and Dallas. “The record is clear that he drank liquor, sometimes to excess, while he was in Russia, and also in New Orleans in 1963.” As Ford had recommended, the passage was deleted.

  He urged another change that would later become controversial, asking that a key sentence about the medical evidence be rewritten to clarify the location of the entrance wound on Kennedy’s body from the first bullet to hit him—the one that had apparently also hit Connally. The draft had originally said that “a bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder and to the right of the spine.” On his copy, Ford crossed out those words and changed them to: “A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.” The change was made. Ford explained years later that he was only trying to clarify the wound’s location. “To any reasonable person, ‘above the shoulder and to the right’ sounds very high and way off to the side—and that’s the way it sounded to me.” Conspiracy theorists would later claim that Ford was instead trying to deceive readers about the bullet’s trajectory in an effort to bolster the single-bullet theory. In fact, Ford’s change appeared to reflect the commission’s continuing confusion about exactly where the bullets had landed.

  Decades later, a congressionally authorized review by a team of independent medical experts determined that the navy pathologists who conducted the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital had made astonishing errors, including misstating the location of both entrance wounds in Kennedy’s body. When outside pathologists were finally shown the autopsy photos, they concluded that the first shot struck lower in the back than the autopsy report suggested and that the entrance wound in the head was a full four inches higher.

  * * *

  Warren said it was alarming for him to look at the calendar in September and realize how few days remained until the first Monday in October—that year, Monday, October 5—and the start of a new term for the Supreme Court. He and Rankin announced a schedule for the completion of the commission’s work. The final executive session was set for Friday, September 18, at ten a.m., in the hearing room at the VFW building, with the full day set aside for the commissioners to debate and approve the report. The final edited galleys would then be transferred to the Government Printing Office, with a copy of the bound report ready to be hand-delivered to President Johnson the following Thursday, September 24, at the White House.

  Warren was more determined than ever to produce a unanimous report; anything less might lead the public to conclude that the facts about the president’s murder were still uncertain or that they were being hidden. “It would have been disastrous if we hadn’t been unanimous,” he told Drew Pearson. To Pearson, he recalled again, with pride, the behind-the-scenes campaign he had mounted to achieve a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. He remembered the satisfaction he felt at the moment the Brown ruling was read out, by him, in the court: “When the word ‘unanimously’ was spoken, a wave of emotion swept the room,” he said. It was an “instinctive emotional manifestation that defies description.”

  But to obtain a unanimous verdict in an important Supreme Court case, Warren often needed months of planning—and coaxing. In the Brown decision, he mounted what was, in effect, an aggressive lobbying campaign over several months to convince colleagues to sign on to the ruling, even appearing at one justice’s hospital bedside to press the case. To obtain unanimity on the assassination report, however, the chief justice would have only weeks, or even days. If Warren intended to adhere to the deadlines he had set, the final executive session on September 18 would be his last and only chance to convince the commissioners that they needed to speak with one voice about the president’s death.

  Since the commission was no longer keeping transcripts of its deliberations, at least none that would ever be made public, there would be no way of saying with certainty how Warren achieved the unanimous report or how close he might have come to failure. Over the years, however, some of the commissioners would give accounts of what happened that day.

  Russell revealed later that he had gone into the meeting ready to sign a dissent—he had already written one, after all—and he suspected other commissioners would join him in defying Warren. He had been saying for weeks that he did not believe, or at least could not support, the single-bullet theory. Yet the draft chapters he was shown before the meeting concluded that the theory had to be true. Russell felt almost as strongly, he said, that the commission had to leave open the possibility t
hat Oswald had been part of a conspiracy. But the draft chapters, as he read them, stated flatly that Oswald had acted alone.

  Russell told aides after the meeting that Warren had, at first, stubbornly refused to alter the report to raise any questions about the single-bullet theory. “Warren just wouldn’t give in,” he told his longtime Senate secretary. “He was adamant that this was the way it was gonna be.” According to Russell’s account, Warren explained the necessity for a unanimous report and then urged the commission to adopt the findings as they had been laid out by the staff: Russell recalled that Warren looked around the room at the other commissioners and declared, before inviting any discussion, “We’re all agreed and we’re going to sign the report.”

  That was when Russell spoke up to correct—and to challenge—the chief justice. They were not in agreement. There would be a dissent, he warned, especially about the single-bullet theory. “I’ll never sign that report if this commission says categorically that the second shot passed through both” Kennedy and Connally, he declared. He was offended, he said, by the idea that the commission would challenge Connally’s certainty that he had been hit by a separate bullet. Senator Cooper spoke up to support Russell, saying he also believed Connally and would sign the dissent. Russell remembered Congressman Boggs suggested that he, too, was not fully convinced by the single-bullet theory.

  On what he expected would be the final substantive day of the commission’s work, Warren was suddenly faced with a rebellion, and the possibility of a divided report. Two, and perhaps three, commissioners were prepared to dissent.

  Warren said consistently in the years after the investigation that he believed, strongly, in the single-bullet theory and that he understood the argument made passionately by the staff that the theory had to be true if Oswald had acted alone. But Warren had spent most of his career not on the bench but in politics. He knew—probably as well as anyone in that room—that while compromise could be distasteful when it meant shading the truth, it could also be the price of getting something done. So he agreed to negotiate.