by Mark Lane
The commission, having been told that Oswald had purchased an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano, rejected the testimony of those officers who had found a weapon where it had been planted on November 22. The switch might have confounded the Central Intelligence Agency which, on November 25, 1963, in a top secret report, stated that the murder weapon was not an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano but in fact a German Mauser. Apparently the interagency coordination was imperfect.
Approximately fifteen minutes after the gunfire Craig saw Lee Harvey Oswald travel from behind the book depository building and enter a light-colored station wagon that was being driven by a person waiting for him. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had left the scene immediately after the shots and had worked out an elaborate timeline that accommodated their false presumption that Oswald had shot Officer Tippit. That fifteen-minute delay demonstrated that the commission’s version was inaccurate. Was Craig wrong? Certainly a brief observation of a man walking toward a vehicle could reasonably be contested.
However, Craig later entered the offices of Dallas Police Captain J. Will Fritz, where Oswald was being held. He entered the room, saw Oswald, and said that he was certain that it was the same man he had seen. In Craig’s presence, Fritz asked Oswald to explain his entry into a vehicle. Oswald replied, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine. Don’t try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it.” According to Craig, Oswald was annoyed and said, “Everybody will know who I am now,” as he rose partially out of the chair in which he was seated and leaned over the desk, looking directly at Fritz. Craig had testified that the light-colored station wagon was equipped with a built-in luggage rack on the top. Ruth Paine owned a light-colored Nash Rambler with a luggage rack on the top. Mrs. Paine was responsible for separating Lee Oswald from his wife, Marina, and moving Marina to Dallas, which inevitably led to Lee Harvey Oswald moving to Dallas. Mrs. Paine and her friend, CIA operative George De Mohrenschildt, who became the official babysitter of the intelligence agencies for Oswald, found a job for Oswald at the book depository located directly on the route selected for the presidential motorcade.
All of the observations by Craig were worthy of serious inquiry and evaluation. At the very least, Craig should have been called as a witness before the Warren Commission so that his credibility could be judged. He was not, although I was asked to testify twice before the Warren Commission and I was in New York City at the time of the assassination. The commission, under the leadership of Allen Dulles, sought to eradicate dissenting views, not to secure the facts. The commission concluded that it “could not accept important elements of Craig’s testimony,”29 although no commission member had ever talked to Craig. The commission said that Craig could not have seen Oswald leave the depository building fifteen minutes after the assassination, because Oswald was, according to their unsubstantiated timeline, “far removed from the building at that time.”30 The commission declined to comment on Craig’s statement that the weapon found in the building was a German Mauser. Since the prosecuting authorities had photographs of the weapon that was located on the sixth floor, which were taken even before the rifle was removed from its location, that matter could have been easily resolved by an examination of the pictures. However, the pictures have not yet surfaced.
In Rush to Judgment, and in lectures before that book was published, I discussed the investigative work that Craig accomplished beginning just after the assassination. Later, I produced a documentary film comprised of an interview with Craig and evidence that he had uncovered.31 Craig was fired from the sheriff’s department in 1967 because he continued to discuss the facts related to the assassination. That year he was asked to testify for the prosecution in the trial of Clay Shaw, who was indicted for the murder of President Kennedy. A sniper fired a shot that grazed his head. As public attention became refocused on the subject matter, and demands were made for a congressional investigation relying in part upon Craig’s observations, another shot was fired at him. During that period, he was starting his car when a bomb planted in it exploded, injuring him. Later, the car that Craig was driving was forced off of the road by two men in a vehicle parked across the highway. He was seriously injured and hospitalized for one year with a broken back, broken leg, and other injuries.
During 1974 and 1975, I participated in drafting legislation to establish the House Special Committee on Assassinations to investigate the murders of President Kennedy and Dr. King. During 1975, we organized support for the legislation and secured more than one million signatures on petitions, letters and telegrams that were delivered to the members of Congress. Craig was to be a witness to numerous events. On May 15, 1975, Craig was shot to death with a rifle. The official version was suicide. His good friend, Penn Jones, Jr., said that Craig had owned two pistols, but not a rifle. He seriously doubted that Craig had killed himself.
Lisa Howard
Not long after I opened my law office in East Harlem, I visited the posh Lexington Democratic Club. It had been founded in 1949 primarily by upwardly mobile, white and accentless law school graduates. Even today, its published mission states as its first listed objective the resolve to remain involved in selecting judges. In the early days, the political bosses made the selections. Often their choices lacked judicial temperament and knowledge, but abounded in unbridled devotion to those who gave them their jobs. One can note a slight improvement in the judiciary, but the fealty factor has survived. People with school-age children were willing to pay almost exorbitant sums to rent an apartment or buy a condominium in the area because the public schools there were far superior to others and even compared favorably with expensive private academies.
I met Lisa Howard at a club function. She had been an actress and a television star. She was very bright, progressive, charming and startlingly beautiful. She had become an important journalist and was the first reporter to conduct a major interview with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations. She was hired by ABC News as a reporter and later became one of the first women to anchor her own television news program, The NewsHour with Lisa Howard.
We became friends; and during lunch at the Four Seasons, the first and only time I ate there, she said, “Mark, I’m worried about you.” When I asked her why, she said, “Those men, the not so young anymore lawyers at the Lex Club, really don’t like you.” I said that it was not a matter of concern, sipped a martini, and then proved my previous lack of sincerity by asking why. She laughed and said, “You say you want to see reform all over the city, including in Puerto Rican and black communities and among the wretchedly poor. You say we are all, including the Lex Club members, obligated to participate.” I asked what was wrong with that and added some members and leaders of her club said the same thing publicly. She sighed and said, “Yes, Mark. But those men think you mean it.” After a moment or two of silence I asked, “What about the women?” The response was a smile.
Lisa scored another journalistic coup in April 1963 by interviewing Fidel Castro. Later she produced two network news specials that were regarded as the most substantive coverage of the revolution. In 1963, she became President Kennedy’s secret intermediary to Castro. Documents released in 2003 demonstrate, in the words of Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at the National Security Archives in Washington, “that the whole history of U.S.–Cuban relations might have been quite different if Kennedy had not been assassinated.”
It all began when Lisa met Castro. In eight hours of meetings he told her that he was very interested in rapprochement with the United States and made numerous suggestions about how to proceed. Lisa was asked to meet with CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms. Helms, in charge of the “dirty tricks department” (so designated by the CIA) was at that time engaged in planning to assassinate Castro. CIA Director John McCone argued to McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security advisor, “that no active steps be taken on the rapprochement matter at this time.” He also suggested that the Lisa Howard report be “handled” to prevent word from getting o
ut. Lisa saw the CIA as an agency that would rather kill Castro than resolve differences with Cuba through negotiations. She rejected the CIA’s demand for silence.
Instead, Lisa, in defiance of the CIA edict, wrote an article stating that in her conversations with Castro he had proposed that all issues that separated the two countries should be examined in a new light with the objective of eliminating them. Lisa said that Castro “made it quite clear that he was ready to discuss: the Soviet personnel and military hardware on Cuban soil; compensation for the expropriated American lands and investments; the question of Cuba as a base for communist subversion throughout the hemisphere.”32 Lisa had told Castro that Cuban interference with other states in Latin America was a genuine concern for Kennedy and urged Castro to make that matter the capstone of his proposals for change. She then suggested that the Kennedy administration “send an American government official on a quiet mission to Havana to hear what Castro has to say.” She added that a country as powerful as the United States “has nothing to lose at a bargaining table with Fidel Castro.”
I asked Lisa if she was concerned about retaliation from the CIA. She replied, “JFK is with me on this. I feel safe as long as he is around.” On September 12, 1963, William Attwood, an advisor to Kennedy on foreign policy and to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, having read Lisa’s article, asked her if she could arrange a meeting at her apartment with him and Carlos Lechuga, the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations. On September 20, Kennedy authorized direct contacts between Attwood and Lechuga, and on September 23, 1963, one day less than two months before the assassination, Lisa, Attwood and Lechuga met in her apartment to discuss rapprochement. When Lisa told me about the meeting, I could almost imagine where they each had been seated. She had earlier arranged a much less important meeting at her place between me and Adlai Stevenson.
Events were moving quickly, both Kennedy’s efforts to resolve differences with Cuba and the CIA’s plan to murder Castro. On September 24, Attwood met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy in Washington. Bobby said that he believed the matter was “worth pursuing.” On November 5, Bundy stated that “the president was more in favor of pushing toward an opening toward Cuba than was the State Department.” Bundy directed that his assistant, Gordon Chase, be in direct contact with Howard and the White House about future meetings with Fidel Castro.
During October, Castro told Lisa that he was very eager to begin negotiations with Kennedy and proposed that he, Castro, send an airplane to Mexico to pick up Kennedy’s representative and fly him to a private airport near Varadero where Castro would meet him and the two would speak alone. Kennedy agreed to send Attwood. Lisa transmitted that decision to Castro on November 14, eight days before the assassination.
On November 20, Kennedy chose a public speech to demonstrate to Castro that rapprochement was at hand, in a clever Kennedyesque manner. His coded words were meant for Castro alone: “Cuba has become a weapon in an effort dictated by foreign powers to subvert the other American republics. This and this alone divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible.” Of course the CIA was listening closely. It was two days before the assassination.
In order for Castro to know that Kennedy strongly supported a new opening with Cuba he invited Jean Daniel, a prominent French journalist, to the White House, having learned through Benjamin Bradlee, vice president of the Washington Post, that Daniel was about to visit Cuba and interview Castro. Daniel was the founder and executive editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, the weekly magazine with the largest circulation in France. Daniel later wrote of Kennedy’s message to Castro.33
Kennedy said, “I believe that there is no country in the world, including the African regions, including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I believe that we created, built and manufactured the Castro movement out of whole cloth and without realizing it. I believe that the accumulation of these mistakes has jeopardized all of Latin America. The great aim of the Alliance for Progress is to reverse this unfortunate policy. This is one of the most, if not the most, important problems in American foreign policy. I can assure you that I have understood the Cubans. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.
“In any case, the nations of Latin America are not going to attain justice and progress that way, I mean through Communist subversion. They won’t get there by going from economic oppression to a Marxist dictatorship which Castro himself denounced a few years ago. The United States now has the possibility of doing as much good in Latin America as it has done wrong in the past; would even say that we alone have this power—on the essential condition that Communism does not take over there.”
Kennedy underlined his proposed agreement with Castro indicating that the isolation of Cuba could be ended. “The continuation of the blockade depends on the continuation of subversive activities.”
The president invited the journalist to return to the White House with Castro’s response. Castro and Daniel met in Cuba. Castro was enthusiastic about the message from Kennedy and told the journalist that Kennedy could become “the greatest president of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists in the Americas.” They were speaking about the future on that bright day in Cuba on November 22, 1963, when the news arrived that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Castro turned sadly to Daniel and said, “This is the end to your mission of peace. Everything has changed.”
Lisa Howard, having initiated the effort, refused to abandon it. In 1964 she resumed her discussions with Castro and informed President Lyndon Johnson that Castro wished to have the negotiations continued. When Johnson did not respond she contacted her friend Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations. He served as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. from 1961 to 1965. Stevenson agreed with Lisa and so informed the new president. Gordon Chase, in a then top secret memorandum, wrote that it was necessary “to remove Lisa” from further participation in the matter.
Lisa invited me to appear as a guest on The NewsHour with Lisa Howard. It was to be taped with the producer closely monitoring it as it proceeded. He began by instructing us both that while I could talk about the issues relating to the assassination, not a word critical of the Warren Commission or its conclusions could be uttered. The lights were on, the tape was rolling, Lisa and I exchanged glances and she began. “Well, Mark, is Mrs. Oswald, Lee’s mother, really pleased with all the events thus far? I mean that her son is so famous now, even though regrettably dead?” I answered, “Delighted, I think would be the word … ” Before I could continue the producer waved his hand, shrugged and said, “I give up. Do it anyway you want.” And for the first time words of dissent were uttered about the official conclusions on a national television broadcast.
Lisa, undeterred by official rejection, pressed on in an attempt to have Johnson respond to Castro’s peace initiatives. She met with Che Guevara and invited him and Senator Eugene McCarthy to meet with her in her apartment for the purpose of having negotiations with Cuba restarted. The State Department was furious. The death of President Kennedy had apparently not ended the episode. Lisa was a loose end and it seemed impossible to “remove her” through suggestions and warnings.
Lisa Howard, then thirty-five years old, died near her home in East Hampton, Long Island. She had rushed to a pharmacy in an attempt to save her life. The authorities said she had killed herself. Many of her friends had doubts. I am cognizant that those close to
a person alleged to have committed suicide are reluctant to accept that finding even when it is supported by evidence. In this instance there seemed to be little credible evidence to sustain that conclusion.
The similar authorities had initially claimed that Dorothy Kilgallen, a conservative journalist who was on a diligent campaign to learn and publish the truth about the assassination, had killed herself and they would say it again about other inconvenient witnesses.
Some years ago a man presenting himself as a messenger from the CIA (I knew that he had held a fairly high commission in the U.S. Navy and that he enjoyed intelligence connections) said that the CIA would never attack me again if I agreed to never again raise issues about the possible role of the CIA in the assassination or referred to efforts by the agency to obscure the facts. I pondered a life free from constant false attacks from the CIA and its assets in the media and confess I seriously considered the offer. Nevertheless, much later, after comfortably not having been a CIA target for years, I was tempted perhaps beyond reason to conduct a successful trial in a federal court against E. Howard Hunt for his involvement with the CIA in the murder of the president and then wrote a book about it.34 The CIA attacks upon me, silent for so long, were renewed with a vengeance.
I thought of Lisa and my response to the self-described CIA representative is that some things are not political. Some things are not solely based upon principle since that concept is unfortunately too easily rationalized under the pretext of reasonable compromise. Some things are irrevocably personal.
