The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  There was a smug coziness to the entire Warren investigation. It was a clubby affair. When Treasury secretary Dillon finally appeared before the commission in early September—less than three weeks before its final report was delivered to the president—he was warmly greeted by Dulles as “Doug.” Dillon was treated to a kid-gloves examination by the commission, even though there were troubling questions left unanswered about the Secret Service’s behavior in Dallas, where Kennedy’s protection had mysteriously melted away.

  Led by Willens, the commission staff had tried for months before Dillon’s appearance to obtain Secret Service records related to the assassination. Willens believed that “the Secret Service appeared to be neither alert nor careful in protecting the president.” This was a delicate way of characterizing what was a criminally negligent performance by the service entrusted with the president’s safety. The buildings surrounding Dealey Plaza and its shadowy corners were not swept and secured by the Secret Service in advance of Kennedy’s motorcade. There were no agents riding on the flanks of his limousine. And when sniper fire erupted, only one agent—Clint Hill—performed his duty by sprinting toward the president’s vehicle and leaping onto the rear. It was an outrageous display of professional incompetence, one that made Robert Kennedy immediately suspect that the presidential guard was involved in the plot against his brother.

  But Dillon stonewalled Willens’s efforts to pry loose Secret Service records, and when the commission staff persisted, the Treasury secretary huddled with his old friend, Jack McCloy, and then appealed to President Johnson himself. “Dillon was a very shrewd guy,” Willens marveled late in his life. “I still can’t believe he involved President Johnson in this.”

  Instead of being grilled by the commission about why he had withheld records and why his agency was missing in action in Dallas, Dillon was allowed to make a case for why his budget should be beefed up. If the Secret Service was given more money, staff, and authority, Senator Cooper helpfully asked, would it be possible to offer the president better protection in the future? “Yes, I think [we] could,” Dillon replied brightly.

  If any blame was assigned in the death of the president during Dillon’s gentle interrogation, it was placed on the victim himself. Soon after the assassination, Dillon and others began circulating the false story that Kennedy preferred his Secret Service guards to ride behind him in motorcades, instead of on the side rails of his limousine, and that Kennedy had also requested the Dallas police motorcycle squadron to hang back—so the crowds in Dallas could enjoy an unobstructed view of the glamorous first couple. This clever piece of disinformation had the insidious effect of absolving the Secret Service and indicting Kennedy, implying that his vanity was his downfall. And with Dulles’s help, Dillon was able to slip this spurious story into the commission record.

  When the Warren Commission delivered its 912-page report and twenty-six volumes of appendices to President Johnson in the White House on September 24, 1964, the towering stack seemed designed to crush all dissenting opinions with its sheer weight. But the bulk of the Warren Report was filler. Only about 10 percent of the report dealt with the facts of the case. On Dulles’s insistence, most of it was taken up with a biography of Oswald that, despite its exhaustive detail, managed to avoid any mention of his contacts with U.S. intelligence. The CIA, in fact, was given a clean bill of health by the report, which reserved its modest criticisms for other arms of government.

  Predictably, The New York Times and The Washington Post set the euphoric tone of the press coverage, with Robert Donovan—the same journalist whose book on assassinations had already proved so useful for Dulles—trumpeting the official report in the Post as a “masterpiece of its kind.” Newsweek national affairs editor, John Jay Iselin, sent Dulles a complimentary copy of the issue with the Warren Report on its cover, along with a fawning note. “Without exception, every one of our editors who was involved in our too-hasty assimilation exercise found himself deeply impressed with the judiciousness and thoroughness of the Commission’s findings. I think we can all be proud of your labor.” Iselin thanked Dulles for helping to guide the magazine’s coverage of the report, telling him that the editorial staff’s efforts to absorb the massive report on a tight deadline “was made easier through your kindness in giving us some idea of what to be on the watch for.” Meanwhile, just as he had put Dulles in charge of investigating himself, LBJ put Dillon in charge of implementing the Warren Report’s recommendations.

  This pattern continued into the next decade when now president Ford appointed Dillon to another panel that examined a possible CIA connection to the Kennedy assassination. The 1975 commission was chaired by a lifelong friend of Dillon—none other than Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. After pondering the matter, the Rockefeller Commission—which also included another old Kennedy antagonist and Dulles ally, retired general Lyman Lemnitzer—surprised no one by concluding that any allegations of a CIA conspiracy in the JFK case were “far-fetched speculation.”

  Following the release of the Warren Report, there were still a few murmurs of doubt, including some within the commission itself. Senator Russell, who strongly suspected that Oswald had been backed by others, seemed eager to distance himself from the report as soon as it was released. He fled home to Georgia, refusing to make himself available to sign ceremonial copies of the report or to autograph the official group photo of the commission.

  Some tendrils of suspicion even fluttered here and there in Dulles’s own social circle. Bill Bundy over in Foggy Bottom was among those who did not find the Warren Report completely convincing. “I think he accepted the Warren Report, but did he believe it? That’s another matter,” recalled Bundy’s daughter, Carol, after his death. “I think he thought it was for the good of the country—this is what we put together and now we need to move forward.”

  Even those establishment personalities who were nagged by doubts about the official story convinced themselves that the national shame had to be laid to rest. But the nightmare of Dallas kept afflicting the nation’s slumber. Its telltale heart kept beating beneath the floorboards where it had been buried. And it would not leave Dulles alone.

  21

  “I Can’t Look and Won’t Look”

  In December 1965, a year after the Warren Commission wrapped up its business, Allen Dulles agreed to spend a few days on the Los Angeles campus of the University of California, as a well-paid Regents Scholar lecturer. All he had to do, for what was described as “a princely sum,” was to give a few talks and rub elbows with students in casual settings. Dulles—looking forward to a relaxing winter respite in the California sun—brought Clover with him.

  By this point, however, a wide network of Warren Report critics had begun to flourish—men and women from all walks of life, none of them famous (except for Mark Lane, whose CIA-inspired bad press and bullish personality had rendered him notorious). Among these critics of the official story were a poultry farmer, sign salesman, small-town newspaper editor, philosophy professor, legal secretary, civil liberties lawyer, United Nations research analyst, and forensic pathologist. They spent untold hours poring over the most arcane details of the Warren Report, analyzing photos taken during the fateful moments in Dealey Plaza, and tracking down eyewitnesses. Their zeal for the truth would make them the target of unrelenting media mockery, but they were doing the work that the American press had shamefully failed to do—and in many cases, they went about their unsung labors with great skill and discipline.

  Among this band of loosely connected independent researchers was a twenty-six-year-old UCLA graduate student in engineering and physics named David Lifton. Lifton had not given the Kennedy investigation much thought—assuming, like most Americans, that the distinguished Warren Commission would get it right—until he happened to attend a Mark Lane lecture one evening in September 1964, around the time the report was released. The grad student went to the lecture on a lark. “For similar reasons I might have listened to an eccentric lecturer that
the earth was flat,” he later recalled. But as he took in Lane’s lawyerly presentation that night at the Jan Hus Theater—inside a hulking, old, red-brick church on New York’s Upper East Side—Lifton found it so disturbing that it changed his life forever. Soon afterward, he threw himself into the Kennedy case with an engineer’s passion for detail and precision.

  Back in Los Angeles, Lifton plunked down $76 at a local bookstore to buy the entire, twenty-six-volume set of the Warren Report and spent a full year methodically working his way through its contents. He added another dimension to his understanding of the case by reading the best of the conspiracy literature that was starting to emerge, primarily in left-wing publications like The Nation and Liberation, and in more obscure sources like The Minority of One, a cerebral monthly published by a brilliant Auschwitz survivor named Menachem [M.S.] Arnoni that boasted such luminaries as Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling on its editorial board. Lifton further honed his analysis of the assassination by intellectually sparring with Wesley Liebeler—one of the few members of the Warren Commission legal staff to at least consider the possibility that their report was flawed—whom he found teaching law at UCLA.

  By the time Allen Dulles arrived at UCLA, David Lifton was ready to do battle. Contacting the student who was acting as Dulles’s host, Lifton passed word that he would like to sit down with the spymaster for a private fifteen-minute interview to discuss the Warren Report. Dulles refused to meet with Lifton alone but did agree to answer his questions in public at a student chat session scheduled for that evening in a dormitory lounge. The student host warned Lifton not to “badger” Dulles. Another Warren Report critic had tried to get the best of Dulles the previous night, the host told Lifton, and the wily old spook had made “mincemeat” of him.

  That evening, when Lifton showed up at the Sierra Lounge in Hedrick Hall, he was wracked with anxiety. “I have never been more frightened in my life, in connection with speaking to anyone,” he later wrote Vincent Salandria, a Philadelphia lawyer who had established himself as one of the foremost critics of the Warren Report. Dulles entered the lounge with Clover and the evening’s moderator. He lit up his trademark pipe and leaned back in his chair. Still alert at seventy-two, Dulles scanned the group of forty or so students sitting in chairs arranged in semicircles in front of him, quickly picking out the young man positioned front-row center who had obviously come to duel with him. Lifton had brought along an arsenal of evidence, including two hefty volumes of the Warren Report, a file box filled with documents, and photo exhibits of Dealey Plaza, including copies of the “kill-shot” frames from the Zapruder film. The engineering student had made a point of wearing his best suit, and his friends who accompanied him for moral support were similarly attired. “It was obvious,” he told Salandria, “we were not beatniks of any kind.”

  After Dulles wittily deflected a question from a student about the CIA budget, the spymaster suddenly found himself confronted by the earnest, bespectacled student sitting directly in front of him. Lifton, not knowing how long he would be given the floor, leaped right to the heart of the matter, directly challenging the foundation of the Warren Report. “Mr. Dulles,” he began, “one of the most important conclusions of the Warren Commission goes something like this: ‘There was no evidence of a conspiracy—’”

  “Wasn’t it, ‘We have found no evidence of conspiracy?’” interrupted Dulles. There was a twinkling charm to his manner, but he made clear that he was prepared to counter Lifton every step of the way.

  Undeterred, Lifton plunged forward. Contrary to the commission’s conclusion, he asserted, there was ample evidence to suggest a conspiracy, not least of which was the Zapruder film, which graphically demonstrated that Kennedy’s head was “thrust violently back and to the left by [the fatal] shot.” Lifton knew his law of physics, and the conclusion was unavoidable to him. “This must imply someone was firing from the front.”

  Dulles would have none of it. He calmly informed the gathering that he had “examined the film a thousand times” and that what Lifton was saying was simply not true.

  At this point Lifton walked over to the evening’s honored guest and began showing him grisly blowups from the Zapruder film. “I know these are not the best reproductions,” said Lifton, but the images were clear enough. Nobody had ever directly confronted Dulles like this before, and the Old Man grew agitated as he glanced at the photos that Lifton had thrust onto his lap.

  “Now what are you saying . . . just what are you saying?” Dulles sputtered.

  “I’m saying there must be someone up front firing at Kennedy,” Lifton responded.

  “Look,” Dulles said, in lecture mode, “there isn’t a single iota of evidence indicating conspiracy. No one says anything like that. . . .”

  But now it was Lifton’s turn to school Dulles. Actually, the engineering student informed Dulles, of the 121 witnesses in Dealey Plaza, dozens of them reported hearing or seeing evidence of gunfire from the grassy knoll. “People even saw and smelled smoke.”

  “Look, what are you talking about?” fumed the now visibly angry Dulles. “Who saw smoke?”

  Lifton began giving the names of witnesses, citing the research done by Harold Feldman, a freelance writer for scientific journals.

  “Just who is Harold Feldman?” Dulles scornfully demanded. Lifton informed him that he frequently wrote for The Nation.

  This elicited an explosion of derision from Dulles. “The Nation! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.” If Dulles assumed the group of students would join in his mocking laughter, he quickly discovered that he was alone. “It is to the everlasting credit of the students,” Lifton later remarked, “that even if they did not understand the full meaning of the dialogue that was taking place, they did sense the obscenity of that laugh, that it was an attempt to intellectually smear, in disguise, and not one student laughed. Allen Dulles laughed all alone.”

  Dulles tried to retrieve the upper hand by making his antagonist look like an obsessive “time hog,” as Lifton put it. “Look,” the distinguished guest said to the group, “I don’t know if you’re really all interested in this, and if you’re not, we’d just as well . . .” But the students emphatically assured him that they were very interested. “No, no,” they insisted, “keep going.”

  So with a shrug, Dulles was forced back into the ring. But having failed to knock out Lifton with his display of contempt, he seemed at a loss how to continue the battle. “I can’t see a blasted thing here,” the old spy angrily muttered, taking another look at the hideous photos in his lap. “You can’t say the head goes back. . . . I can’t see it going back . . . it does not go back . . . you can’t say that . . . you haven’t shown it.”

  But—after passing the photos around the room—Lifton had the final word. “Each student can look and see for himself,” he told Dulles.

  After the heated exchange between Lifton and Dulles, the evening began to wind down. Dulles was given the opportunity to restore some of his dignity when a starstruck student asked a question that allowed him to discourse at length on Cold War spycraft. Then Dulles bade good night to the students, and he and Clover retired to their campus quarters. As Dulles withdrew, dozens of students gathered around Lifton, peppering him with questions about the assassination, and for the next two hours he gave a presentation based on the pile of evidence that he had brought with him. “It was really a neat night,” he reported to Salandria. “I really felt tonight as if I’d won.”

  But talking about that evening nearly fifty years later, Lifton conveyed a darker feeling about his encounter with Dulles. He had the sense he was in the presence of “evil” that night, recalled Lifton—who by then was a man in his seventies, like Dulles at the time of their UCLA duel. “It was the way he looked, his eyes. He just emoted guile, and it was very, very scary.”

  David Lifton was the only person who ever gave Allen Dulles a taste of what it would have been like for him to be put on the witness stand. No doubt Dulles would have reac
ted the same way if he had ever been cross-examined. First, he would have tried charm to disarm his prosecutor, then scorn, and finally an eruption of fury—perhaps accompanied by vague threats, as he did with Lifton, when he suggested that the grad student should submit to an FBI interrogation, if he had anything new to report.

  Dulles’s performance at UCLA offered a glimpse of how vulnerable the spymaster was underneath all his bluster, and how quickly he might have cracked if he had been subjected to a rigorous examination. But with the failure of Congress and the legal system, as well as the media, to investigate the assassination more closely, it was up to freelance crusaders like Lifton to hold Dulles and his accomplices accountable.

  Dulles would be forced to spend the rest of his life grappling with the charges leveled by these headstrong men and women, trying to discredit their books, sabotage their public appearances, and—in some cases—to destroy their reputations. He had written Jerry Ford in February 1965, telling him he was “happy to note” that attacks on the Warren Report “have dwindled to a whimper.” But it was wishful thinking. The whimper of criticism was about to become a roar.

  Sometime in the winter of 1965–66, after Dulles’s showdown at UCLA, he suffered a mild stroke. But he soon rebounded and Clover despaired that she would ever persuade him to slow down. In February 1966, she wrote Mary Bancroft, asking her advice for how to convince “Allen to take some care.” He insisted on keeping up his busy social schedule, Clover complained, even when he wasn’t feeling well. “He quite often gets a chill and as I give him electric pads, hot water bottles, etc., he says he will be getting up in a minute. This morning he said he didn’t feel well, he had done too much (two dinners in the same evening, one from 5:30 to 7:30 where he spoke, the other purely social) and that he wouldn’t go out to lunch at the Club. But of course he went and the chill came next. I try to wash my hands of it all when I see I do no good, but when I think of how awful for him and for everybody if his next stroke was worse, then I start once again, thinking of how to present the prospect of taking some care of himself.”