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

by Philip Shenon

  Dallas Morning News reporter Hugh Aynesworth interviewing Marina Oswald, while daughter June Oswald plays on the floor.

  Admiral George Burkley, the White House physician, insisted that military pathologists hurry Kennedy’s autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the night of the assassination.

  The autopsy-room pathologists: Navy Commander James Humes, M.D. (center), was in charge of the autopsy, assisted by Navy Commander J. Thornton Boswell, M.D. (left) and Army Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck, M.D. (right). Humes’s decision to destroy the original autopsy report and his notes would spark conspiracy theories that he was trying to hide something.

  Secret Service Director James Rowley would face some of the commission’s harshest questioning after admitting that he had not disciplined agents in the Dallas motorcade who had gone out drinking the night before.

  FBI special agent James Hosty in Dallas would find his career derailed because he had Oswald under surveillance at the time of the assassination and had failed to detect the threat he posed.

  Marguerite Oswald often appeared to delight in her celebrity. Smiling, she talks with Dallas Judge Joe B. Brown, who oversaw the trial of Jack Ruby for her son’s murder.

  She retained New York lawyer Mark Lane, who quickly established himself as a leading critic of the Warren Commission, to represent her.

  During her trip to Washington to testify for the first time before the commission, Oswald’s young widow, Marina, was joined by her business manager, Jim Martin, whose private relationship with Marina would come under scrutiny by the commission.

  Oswald’s older brother, Robert, is shown in Washington on February 20, 1964, after finishing his testimony before the commission.

  Marina Oswald, shown in Washington for testimony before the Warren Commission, said she was convinced that her husband had killed the president and that he had acted alone.

  Marina’s friend Ruth Paine, shown in Washington with her estranged husband, Michael; the Paines became entangled in the investigation.

  George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian-born oil engineer who tried to help the impoverished Oswalds, said he broke off his friendship after Marina Oswald openly mocked her husband’s sexual performance.

  The commission determined that Oswald fired his rifle from an assassin’s perch at a sixth-floor corner window of the Texas School Book Depository overlooking Dealey Plaza; stacks of book cartons would have hidden what he was doing.

  By attaching a camera to Oswald’s rifle, the FBI attempted to re-create the assassin’s view from the window at the moment a bullet was fired at the president’s head.

  The evidence. Oswald’s Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.

  The evidence. Two artists’ reconstructions of the fatal head wound.

  The evidence. The president’s bloodied shirt.

  The evidence. The bullet that, the commission’s staff was convinced, hit both Kennedy and Connally.

  The evidence. An artist’s reconstruction, based on autopsy photos, of the president’s head wound, the skull open to the right.

  Chief Justice Earl Warren and Gerald Ford visited Dallas on June 7, 1964, to inspect Dealey Plaza and take the testimony of Jack Ruby. They are shown leaving the Texas School Book Depository, followed by general counsel J. Lee Rankin and staff lawyer Joseph Ball.

  In September, Senator Richard Russell (center) organized his own visit to Dallas to see Dealey Plaza and interview Marina Oswald. He was joined in front of the Texas School Book Depository by fellow commission members (far left) Hale Boggs and (far right, in hat) John Sherman Cooper.

  The commission’s staff lawyers staged several reenactments in Dealey Plaza. David Belin is shown at the fifth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, during an experiment to determine what would have been seen and heard there as rifle shots were fired from the sixth-floor window above.

  Arlen Specter explains the single-bullet theory, with government agents positioned in a limousine at the spots where President Kennedy and Governor Connally had been seated.

  Although CIA and FBI officials ruled out Cuban involvement, the American ambassador to Mexico and others were convinced the assassination was connected to the government of Fidel Castro, shown after capturing a Marlin in the Caribbean.

  In a photo taken September 7, 1963, Castro is shown making a point to Associated Press correspondent Dan Harker (with arms crossed) during an encounter in Havana. Harker reported in a resulting article that Castro threatened to retaliate against American officials who had targeted Cuban leaders for violence.

  Commission staff lawyer Wesley “Jim” Liebeler’s decision to grow a beard outraged Chief Justice Warren, who ordered that it be shaved off. Over time, Liebeler would establish himself as the commission’s in-house contrarian and most determined rule-breaker. Although married, he boasted of his many female conquests while working on the commission staff.

  Silvia Odio, a Cuban refugee in Dallas who seemed credible in her insistence that she saw Oswald in the company of anti-Castro activists weeks before the assassination, complained to congressional investigators years later that Liebeler had invited her to his hotel room and tried to seduce her.

  In December 1965, American diplomat Charles Thomas (far right) was told by noted Mexican author Elena Garro de Paz (center) that she had encountered Oswald at a dance party in Mexico City weeks before the assassination. Garro claimed that her cousin, Silvia Tirado de Duran, a Cuban embassy employee, was also at the party and had briefly been Oswald’s mistress. At left is Garro’s daughter, Helena, who also reported seeing Oswald at the party. The man between Garro and her daughter is unidentified.

  Thomas and his wife, Cynthia, at a party in Mexico City in the mid-1960’s.

  Charles and Cynthia Thomas on the steps of their Mexico City hacienda, with Charles holding the couple’s daughter Zelda, who was born in Mexico in 1965.

  Silvia Duran, a self-proclaimed Socialist who was a Mexican employee of the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, had been under surveillance by both the CIA and the Mexico government for months before the Kennedy assassination. In a police surveillance photo, Duran (center) is seen with her husband, Horacio, a Mexican journalist, and an unidentified woman.

  Duran’s mug shot, taken after she was arrested by the Mexican police at the request of the CIA.

  A smiling Duran in the 1970’s in a photograph obtained by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which interviewed Duran.

  CIA “mole hunter” James Jesus Angleton pushed aside an agency colleague to take control of information shared with the Warren Commission.

  CIA Mexico City station chief Winston “Win” Scott, in a home movie of his 1962 wedding, which was attended by Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos, shown far left with Scott. In next photo, CIA operative David Phillips is shown left of López Mateos; shown right of Scott is future Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz.

  American ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann, in conversation with President Johnson, was convinced that Cuba was involved in the assassination.

  New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison claimed in 1967 that he had uncovered a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination that the Warren Commission had failed to detect—or had covered up. He is shown with Mark Lane in New Orleans on March 28, 1967.

  Garrison’s witnesses included colorful New Orleans lawyer Dean Andrews, who had earlier told the commission that he had been asked to go to Dallas to defend Oswald hours after the assassination. The request, he said, had been made by Oswald’s mysterious patron—“Clay Bertrand.” Andrews, shown being escorted by New Orleans sheriffs in August 1967, would later be convicted of perjury.

  Silvia Duran, shown outside her home in 2013, still insists she never met with Oswald away from the Cuban consulate.

  Helena Garro, daughter of Elena Garro, at a 2013 forum in Mexico City to honor her late mother; she says they saw Oswald at the Duran family party.

  Duran’s claims are also rebutted by her former sister-in-law Lidia
Duran Navarro, who recalls distinctly that Silvia talked of going on a date with Oswald.

  Francisco Guerrero Garro, a prominent Mexican newspaperman, revealed in 2013 that he too had seen Oswald at the party.

  In January 2013, Robert Kennedy Jr. revealed that his father had never accepted the Warren Commission’s findings. He is shown being interviewed in Dallas with his sister Rory and TV host Charlie Rose.

  Acknowledgments

  I began this project reluctantly. The Kennedy assassination is the most written about—and without doubt, most misunderstood—event in modern history, and I now know that many of the mysteries that surround November 22, 1963, will likely never be solved. As I explain elsewhere in these pages, I was led to this project because my first book was a history of the 9/11 Commission. It seemed logical to consider doing my next book on the Warren Commission, the other landmark federal investigation of a national tragedy in my lifetime. Still, I worried: Was I going to fall down the rabbit hole, pursuing the ultimate unknowable story? As a reporter, I usually begin an investigation with confidence that I will end up with the answers to most of my questions. I had no such confidence here, although five years later, I am convinced that A Cruel and Shocking Act does reveal startling new evidence about the assassination.

  As I set to work on the research for this book, I was hit almost immediately by the realization that, by comparison, the terrible story of the 9/11 attacks was downright straightforward. The debate about the Kennedy assassination is an absolute morass, in part because of the failings of the Warren Commission, which clearly rushed its investigation and left so many questions unanswered despite the eagerness of its young staff investigators to get to the truth. (I am struck by the fact that the 9/11 Commission had twenty months to complete its work and did not begin investigating until after Congress had completed its own exhaustive inquiry. The Warren Commission was “finished” in half that time; it was established just seven days after the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza.) Some of the conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination are not so far-fetched, especially given the legal definition of conspiracy, which requires only that two people plot wrongdoing. If only one other person aided Oswald in a plot to kill Kennedy, there was by definition a conspiracy.

  So I begin these acknowledgments by thanking a handful of writers, researchers, and historians whose books and other work gave me an all-important head start in trying to make sense of what is easily the most complicated story I have ever pursued. Since I am reaching for superlatives, I start by crediting the authors of what may be the single most intriguing government report I have ever seen—by Dan Hardway and Edwin Lopez-Soto, two then very young Cornell University law students who were recruited in the 1970s as staffers for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Their report, entitled “Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City,” would not be declassified until the 1990s, and it gave me the essential road map that led me to the story of Charles Thomas, Elena Garro, and the “twist party” in Mexico City. Dan and Ed were generous with their time in interviews for this book.

  Of the more than two thousand books published about the assassination, only a handful will still be read generations from now. And while I might fundamentally disagree with the conclusions of a few of these authors, I know that the essential library will always include Jefferson Morley’s remarkable Our Man in Mexico, which opened my eyes even wider to the unanswered questions about Oswald’s Mexico trip; The Last Investigation by Gaeton Fonzi; Case Closed by Gerald Posner; Brothers in Arms by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton; Castro’s Secrets by Brian Latell; Conspiracy by Anthony Summers; Inquest by Edward Jay Epstein; Oswald and the CIA by John Newman; Brothers by David Talbot; and Evan Thomas’s gracefully written and revealing Robert Kennedy: His Life. I deeply admire the work of the nation’s two great historians on the assassination—Max Holland, whose book The Kennedy Assassination Tapes is perhaps the best starting point for anyone who conducts research on this subject, and Vincent Bugliosi, whose 1,612-page masterwork, Reclaiming History, has sat on my desk for most of the last four years. I have read and reread Don DeLillo’s brilliant Libra and I marvel at how close I think his work of fiction might have come to the truth.

  I’ve had a real partner in this undertaking: Kathy Robbins, who is my cherished friend and my literary agent, in that order. She is a born editor and has shaped this book in countless invaluable ways, all the while keeping my spirits up when the project threatened to overwhelm me. She is backed up at home and in life by another magnificent editor, her husband, Richard Cohen, whose suggestions have made this a much better, more readable book.

  I am grateful to the legendary Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of Henry Holt and Company, for seeing the promise in this project, and for his patience. Steve is that rare thing: a true gentleman. There are many people at Holt or associated with Steve to thank, including Maggie Richards, Phyllis Grann, Pat Eisemann, Kenn Russell, Muriel Jorgensen, Emi Ikkanda, Meryl Levavi, and Michael Cantwell.

  At the Robbins Office, I am thankful for the wise counsel of David Halpern, Louise Quayle, Katherine DiLeo, and their former colleagues Micah Hauser and Mike Gillespie. Thanks to photo researcher Laura Wyss and photo restorer Matthew Brazier for helping organize such a strong lineup of images. Laura and I are both grateful to Rex Bradford of the Mary Ferrell Foundation and Mark Davies of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas for all their assistance with the photos. JoAnne Hakala-Applebaugh was an intelligent, thoughtful research assistant and voice of good cheer.

  My biggest stroke of luck was the discovery—through my friend and former New York Times colleague Ginger Thompson—of Alejandra Xanic Von Bertrab. Xanic, who often works for the Times out of Mexico City, is a phenomenal journalist and managed to track down many of the central characters in the tangled story of Oswald’s visit to Mexico; these are the people the FBI and the CIA ignored or missed fifty years ago. It was no surprise to me—but it was a delight—when Xanic won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her part at the Times in exposing how Walmart used bribery to take control of much of Mexican retailing.

  The talented Washington author Charles Robbins generously agreed to talk me through his understanding of some of the inner workings of the Warren Commission—knowledge he had gained as a former top aide to Senator Arlen Specter and as coauthor of the senator’s memoirs, Passion for Truth. Charles helped me arrange two of the last interviews that Specter, who died in 2012, would ever give to discuss his key role on the commission. Charles also graciously helped me track down some of the commission staff lawyers and others he had interviewed for the senator’s book.

  I was fortunate to come across talented archivists and librarians to guide me through a mountain of evidence related to the assassination: Mary Kay Schmidt at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; William H. McNitt at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Karen M. Albert at the Arlen Specter Center for Public Policy at Philadelphia University; Sheryl B. Vogt at the Richard B. Russell Library at the University of Georgia; Brian C. McNerney at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; and also in Austin, Stefanie Lapka, Margaret L. Schlankey, and Aryn Glazier of the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas. Marie Fonzi, Gaeton’s widow, has a valuable collection of material gathered by her late husband from his work on the House Assassinations Committee.

  I was relieved to discover the existence of private research groups that have created digital libraries of declassified material about the assassination, notably the Mary Ferrell Foundation (www.maryferrell.org), which has a searchable archive of more than a million documents related to the deaths of both John and Robert Kennedy, as well as of Martin Luther King. The foundation’s ninety-nine-dollar-a-year research fee was among the wisest investments I made for this book. Among the other groups with impressive electronic archives on this subject are the Assassination Archives and Research Center (www.aarclibrary.org) and History Matters, (www.history-matters.com).

  The families of several of my sou
rces have been unfailingly gracious as I have intruded into their lives, especially Kaaren Slawson, David’s wife; Paula Aynesworth, Hugh’s wife; and Laura and Tom Belin, David’s daughter and son. Laura and Tom’s loving devotion to their father’s legacy is an inspiration. I owe a special debt to the family of Charles William Thomas—especially to his widow, Cynthia, who took such a risk by talking with me after talking to no other reporter or author for decades about the most traumatic events of her life. I have huge admiration for Cynthia’s daughter, Zelda Thomas-Curti, who has the instincts of a reporter and who sensed years ago that the true story about her father was being hidden. I was delighted to be introduced to Charles’s other daughter, Jeanne-Marie Thomas Byron, in the final stages of writing this book and to learn that she, too, has been searching for the truth.