Slawson tried to imagine what had prompted this. Kennedy had insisted publicly, more than once, that he believed the commission’s findings. Had Kennedy learned something that had changed his mind?
“Joe, I still think we got it right,” Slawson told Dolan. “I think Oswald did it alone.”
As they stood there, the afternoon traffic whizzing by, Slawson offered a shorthand version of how he and the commission concluded there had been no conspiracy.
Dolan listened closely and nodded in what seemed to be agreement.
“Thanks, Dave,” he said. “I’ll take this back to the senator. He’ll be glad to hear it.” The two men shook hands, and Dolan walked off, seemingly satisfied.
* * *
Charles Thomas and his wife, Cynthia, had come to love Mexico City, where Charles was posted in April 1964 as a political officer in the U.S. embassy. “We felt like the luckiest people in the world,” said Cynthia, who was twenty-seven when the couple arrived in Mexico as newlyweds. They had married two months earlier after a whirlwind romance that began with a chance meeting at a party thrown by a mutual friend, a Broadway costume designer, in New York; Cynthia had been working in Manhattan as a researcher for Time magazine and attempting to launch an acting career. After the wedding, her well-to-do parents held a candlelit reception for the couple at the Plaza hotel in New York. Their first child, Zelda, named for his late mother, was born in Mexico in 1965.
For American diplomats in the mid-1960s, Mexico City was considered an important—and pleasant—assignment. The city then had a relatively manageable population of about four million people, a figure that would explode in decades to come. The Thomases found a gracious, airy, high-ceilinged hacienda not far from the embassy. Through a friend, Guadalupe Rivera, daughter of the famed artist Diego Rivera, they hired one of the city’s best cooks—“our guests knew we served the most exquisite Mexican food in the city,” Cynthia said. Ambassador Fulton Freeman considered Thomas one of his most talented deputies, and Freeman often attended parties in the Thomas home. The ambassador was enchanted by Cynthia—“in addition to being an uncommonly attractive and accomplished actress, she is an excellent hostess” who had “opened doors for the embassy to dramatic, cultural and intellectual groups of young Mexicans where we had enjoyed few if any contacts.”
The couple made good friends at the embassy, although Cynthia found herself “a little wary” in her encounters with Win Scott; it was well known among diplomats’ families that Scott was “the CIA man” in the embassy, operating undercover as a State Department political officer. Scott could be charming, and he often praised Charles to his wife. “Charles should really be in Paris and could do a lot of good work with his extraordinary knowledge of French,” he told her at a party. But she found it disquieting when Scott asked if she could be of help gathering intelligence for him in her contacts with prominent Mexicans. She felt she was being recruited to work for the CIA. “I found it very awkward,” she said.
The Thomases were favorites among local writers and artists. “Charles was an extraordinary man,” said Elena Poniatowska, a Mexican writer of both fiction and nonfiction who would become one of her country’s most celebrated investigative journalists. “He was an intellectual. He could speak about anything.” The Thomases became especially close to another talented Mexican writer—Elena Garro. Cynthia remembered Garro as an “intelligent, charming, thoughtful woman. So full of life.”
It was at a party in December 1965 that Garro took Charles Thomas aside and told him the astonishing story about Oswald and the “twist party.” She explained how she had shared the story a year earlier with the American embassy and had heard nothing since. She offered Thomas an additional, startling bit of information that she had not told the embassy; it was about her cousin Silvia Duran. Garro said there had been a sexual relationship between Oswald and Duran and that others in Mexico City were aware of it. She had been the assassin’s “mistress.”
Thomas wondered if this could be true. He knew Garro to be unusually intelligent and well informed, but what would it mean if the man who killed Kennedy had an affair, just weeks before the assassination, with an employee of Castro’s government, at a time when Oswald was supposedly under close surveillance by the CIA in Mexico?
He recorded Garro’s account in a memo dated December 10, 1965, that was presented to Scott and others in the embassy. “She was very reluctant to discuss the matter, but finally imparted” the story, Thomas wrote. In the memo, he also noted Garro’s strange account of what had happened to her in the days after the assassination. After learning of Oswald’s arrest, she said, she immediately assumed that Cuba was involved, given what she knew about Oswald’s contacts at the Cuban embassy. Outraged, she and her daughter drove to the embassy on Saturday, the day after the president’s murder, and stood outside the compound and shouted, “Assassins,” at the Cubans inside. Later that day, she and her daughter received a visit from a friend who was an official in Mexico’s Interior Ministry. The friend, Manuel Calvillo, broke the news to them about the arrest of Silvia Duran—it had not been announced publicly—and warned them that they were in danger from “Communists.” Calvillo told them they needed to go into hiding. “He had orders to take them to a small and obscure hotel in the center of town,” Thomas wrote.
Garro tried to protest. “She told Calvillo she wanted to go to the American Embassy and explain what she knew of Oswald’s connections here with the Mexican Communists and Cubans,” Thomas reported. But Calvillo warned that the embassy “was full of Communist spies.” Frightened that not even the U.S. embassy could be trusted, Garro and her daughter agreed to go into hiding and to say nothing. They were escorted to a small, nondescript hotel across town, where they remained for eight days.
* * *
After reading Thomas’s report, Win Scott immediately began to create a paper trail that would mock Elena Garro and dismiss her story. Scott wanted it to be established—for the official record—that he was accusing Garro of making this all up.
“What an imagination she has!” he wrote on Thomas’s memo.
Scott would take a risk by ignoring the memo entirely, given the suggestion—again—that the CIA might have missed so much information about Oswald’s contacts in Mexico. He invited Thomas to a meeting at his office along with Nathan Ferris, the FBI’s new legal attaché. Scott and Ferris “pointed out that there had been a great many rumors about Oswald at the time of the assassination and that some could not be verified and others had proved false,” Thomas wrote later. “They asked me, however, to try and get a more detailed replay of Miss Garro’s story.”
At a gathering on Christmas Day, Thomas talked with Garro again, and he followed up with a detailed five-page memo—typed up that same day—for his embassy colleagues. In the new conversation, Garro talked about how frustrating it had been to try to tell her story about Oswald to the embassy the year before. “The embassy officials did not give much credence to anything they said,” which explained why she “did not bother to give a very complete story,” Thomas wrote.
Garro tried to remember more details about the small hotel where she had gone into hiding. She could not remember its name, but she remembered roughly where it was. She took Thomas on a driving tour until they found it: the Hotel Vermont in the Mexico City neighborhood known as Benito Juarez. (In 1966, the FBI confirmed that part of her story to Scott; she was indeed registered at the hotel from November 23 to November 30, 1963.) Garro also explained why her sister, Deva, had never come forward to confirm the sighting of Oswald at the party. According to Elena, Deva had been visited by two “Communists” after the assassination who threatened her and warned her never to reveal that she had seen Oswald.
Thomas’s Christmas Day memo went to Scott and Ferris—and both said they were unimpressed. Ferris sent a memo to Ambassador Freeman on December 27, in which he said he did not intend to reopen the investigation. “In view of the fact that Mrs. Garro de Paz’s allegations have been previous
ly checked out, without substantiation, no further action is being taken concerning her recent repetition of those allegations.” Scott sent a separate cable to Langley to report on the FBI’s decision not to pursue the Garros’ story. One of his deputies, Alan White, attached a note to Scott’s cable. He questioned whether the embassy had done enough to follow up on Elena Garro’s claims. “I don’t know what the FBI did in November 1964, but the Garros have been talking about this for a long time, and she is said to be extremely bright,” White wrote.
“She is also ‘nuts,’” Win Scott wrote back.
56
1966 THROUGH MAY 1967
In the fall of 1966, Lyndon Johnson worried that his presidency was being tarnished by the growing attacks on the Warren Commission—that they might even do damage to his reelection hopes for 1968. He saw the hand of his political enemies in the conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination, especially since some of the theories continued to point to him as a suspect. He told aides he was convinced that Robert Kennedy and his political strategists were trying to keep the conspiracy theories alive. Johnson was outraged by an October 1966 opinion poll, conducted after publication of the books by Epstein and Lane, in which 2 percent of the respondents said they believed he was somehow responsible for Kennedy’s death. While 2 percent might represent only a small fringe of the people who were polled, Johnson was astonished that anyone could still suspect him of such a terrible thing. The poll was conducted by the survey company run by Louis Harris. “Lou Harris is just owned by Bobby,” Johnson told a friend.
Johnson wanted Warren to speak out to defend the commission. He dispatched a White House aide, Jake Jacobsen, to the Supreme Court to urge the chief justice to respond publicly if the attacks on the commission became more serious.
The president also asked for help from Warren’s newest colleague on the bench: Associate Justice Abraham “Abe” Fortas, who had been nominated to the court by Johnson the year before. Fortas, a former law professor at Yale who had founded a powerhouse Washington law firm, had been a friend and political adviser to Johnson for years. To the dismay of some of his court colleagues who knew about it, Fortas had continued to offer political counsel to Johnson, even helping write the president’s 1966 State of the Union address.
Fortas saw the problem created by the attacks on the Warren Commission. In October 1966, he told Johnson in a phone call that he had gone to the chief justice and urged him to write a book defending the commission. “I told him I thought somebody ought to … do it right away,” Fortas said. “He thinks the best man to do that is Lee Rankin.” Warren was in a “slow burn” over the criticism of the commission.
Johnson told Fortas that he was also alarmed by the impending release of the long-awaited book that the Kennedy family had authorized, The Death of a President, by William Manchester. It was scheduled for publication sometime in 1967. After being permitted to read the book ahead of publication, Look magazine agreed to pay a record $665,000 for the right to publish excerpts. That suggested to Johnson that Manchester must have bombshell disclosures. His aides heard—and confirmed—that it had an unflattering, boorish portrayal of Johnson, especially about his interactions with Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy on the day of the assassination.
The book was published the following spring, but only after Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy filed suit in New York to try to block publication. They claimed that Manchester needed, but did not have, their approval of the manuscript. Although she never fully explained what so offended her, Mrs. Kennedy, who was portrayed in the book in an almost saintly light, appeared to feel it revealed too much painful, gory detail about her husband’s murder and too much personal information about her. (It revealed, for instance, that she smoked, something she had tried as First Lady to keep secret.)
Manchester’s book was not nearly as damaging to Johnson as he had feared. And the court showdown, which ended with an agreement between Manchester and the Kennedys to edit out the equivalent of 7 pages from a 654-page manuscript, worked to the president’s political advantage, since the court fight was perceived as a heavy-handed effort by the Kennedy family to censor the historical record. Opinion polls showed that the popularity of both Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy was damaged as a result. In an unfortunate choice of words, Johnson expressed his delight to a friend over the polls: “God, it’s murderin’ Bobby and Jackie both. It just murders ’em.”
The chief justice, too, had reason to be pleased with Death of a President, since Manchester embraced the commission’s findings about Oswald as the lone gunman. Still, as with all of the other books, Warren wanted to say nothing publicly. “I can’t be in the position of answering these books,” he told Drew Pearson. “And I’m not going to. The report is going to stand or fall on what’s in it.”
* * *
In January 1967, Drew Pearson asked to speak with the chief justice in person. It was urgent, and Warren readily agreed to see his old friend. Pearson was sitting on one of the biggest scoops of his career. Unfortunately for the chief justice, it was a scoop that also threatened to damage Warren’s legacy.
It was about the Kennedy assassination, and about the possibility that Castro was behind the president’s murder. As Warren listened, Pearson explained that he had been told by a trusted source that the Kennedy White House had ordered the CIA to kill Castro; that the order had been given directly to the agency by Robert Kennedy; and—perhaps most astonishingly—that the CIA had recruited the Mafia to carry out the murder. Pearson’s source understood that Castro became aware of the plots against him, rounded up the potential assassins in Cuba before they could act, and then retaliated by dispatching a team of assassins to kill Kennedy.
If only elements of the story were true, it proved that the CIA and Kennedy had withheld information from the Warren Commission that would have offered a clear motive for Castro to kill Kennedy, since the Cuban dictator knew that Kennedy was trying to kill him. It also meant that a member of the commission, Allen Dulles, who was running the CIA at the time of the plots, had probably joined in the cover-up. Pearson revealed his source to Warren: an influential Washington lawyer named Edward Morgan, who was then representing Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa. Morgan had learned about the Castro plots—and the possibility that Kennedy had been killed in retaliation—from another of his clients, Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent turned private investigator who had been hired by the CIA to organize Castro’s murder.*
Morgan said he agonized about whether to tell Pearson—and through him, the chief justice. “I wrestled with this for a long time,” he recalled. As a trial lawyer, he said, he didn’t lose much sleep about the awful secrets he was sometimes told by his clients in criminal cases. “If you do, you don’t live long. But this bothered me terribly.” He said he finally decided to act because he was desperate to protect Warren, a personal hero. “I finally said to myself, how do I at least get this information to the Chief Justice?”
Morgan recalled visiting Pearson at his palatial town house several blocks from the White House. “I said, ‘Drew, I have got to talk to you about something that I want sealed in blood.’ … We went in the back room, and I told him essentially what I knew” about the CIA plots. The columnist’s reaction, he said, “was one of absolute disbelief.” He “went through the ceiling.” Morgan did not want Pearson to write about any of this in his column, at least not immediately, but he did want him to warn that “poor devil” Warren that he risked being humiliated by the disclosure that the commission had been wrong and that there had been a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death. “I will sleep better if I know that the Chief Justice … knows this,” Morgan told Pearson. “It could undercut the validity of the report, and even his reputation.” Warren was a “sitting duck” for scandal.
Pearson did as he was asked. At his meeting with the chief justice on Thursday, January 19, he laid out the complicated story about the CIA’s plots against Castro, and how Kennedy might have been killed by Castro in retaliation. Warren, h
e said, “was decidedly skeptical,” insisting that it would not have made sense for the Cuban leader to order Kennedy’s death and then have only one assassin in Dallas, especially one as volatile as Oswald. “It would not have been a one-man job,” the chief justice said.
Warren declined to meet with Morgan, but he was willing to pass the information to law-enforcement agencies. He asked Pearson which agency should be alerted. Pearson said Morgan, who had a tangled relationship with Hoover, preferred that the information go to the Secret Service instead of the FBI. The chief justice contacted Secret Service director James Rowley, asking to meet with him privately at the Supreme Court. The meeting took place at eleven fifteen a.m. on Tuesday, January 31, Rowley’s records showed. It was the first time he had met with Warren in an official capacity since Rowley’s awkward testimony before the commission. The Secret Service director recalled years later that the January 1967 meeting with Warren at the court lasted about half an hour and that the chief justice thought the allegations about the Castro plots needed to be taken seriously, even if they sounded far-fetched. “He said he thought this was serious enough and so forth, but he wanted to get it off his hands.”
* * *
Pearson had shared news of the CIA assassination plots with someone else: President Johnson. Whatever their differences in the past, Pearson had generally been supportive of Johnson’s presidency, and the columnist had easy access to the Oval Office.* On January 16, three days before meeting with Warren, Pearson visited Johnson at the White House to tell him about the Castro plots and how they might be linked to Kennedy’s assassination. “Lyndon listened carefully and made no comment,” Pearson recalled in his diary. “There wasn’t much he could say.” The secret recordings of his Oval Office telephone calls would suggest that at the time of Pearson’s visit, more than three years into his presidency, Johnson was still ignorant of exactly how the CIA had schemed for years to kill Castro.
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Page 59
