Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  The undertaker opens the coffin to give the family one final look at Lee Oswald. Marina kisses her husband, dressed for burial in a dark brown suit, white shirt, brown tie, and brown socks. She slips two rings on his finger. Her stoic, almost distant composure dissolves into bitter sobs. The two infants, hearing Marina, cry loudly as Robert and Marguerite take a long, last look at Lee’s face. As they return to their chairs, the gaunt Reverend Saunders steps up to conclude the stark service.

  “God of the open sky and of the infinite universe, we pray and petition for this family who are heartbroken. Those who suffer and who have tears in their hearts will pray for them…Their need is great.”

  For Lee Harvey Oswald he reserves the final words: “May God have mercy on his soul.”

  It’s over in twenty minutes. After the service, Marguerite, Marina, and the children are escorted back to the car to return to the Inn of the Six Flags. Robert lingers for a moment to watch his brother’s coffin lowered into the steel-reinforced concrete vault. He finally returns to his waiting family and the two-car caravan drives off.

  The grave diggers work hard to get the grave filled before dark, watched by a sprinkling of reporters and a few spectators. Finally, a light bulldozer moves in to help. The two floral arrangements are tossed onto the mound of raw earth. Two policemen are ordered to start an around-the-clock watch on the grave.

  “We like to think Fort Worth folks are even-tempered,” Chief Hightower explains, “but we can’t take any chances. We don’t want this grave bothered.”

  As the crowd melts away, a few more of the onlookers beyond the fence slip over and come down to collect a few souvenir clods of dirt from the assassin’s grave.1557

  Four of the darkest days in American history are finally over.

  In an address to a joint session of Congress two days later, President Johnson says:

  All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.

  The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time. Today John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works that he left behind. He lives on in the mind and memories of mankind. He lives on in the hearts of his countrymen.

  No words are sad enough to express our sense of loss. No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began.

  The dream of conquering the vastness of space, the dream of partnership across the Atlantic—and across the Pacific as well—the dream of a Peace Corps in less-developed nations, the dream of education for all of our children, the dream of jobs for all who seek them and need them, the dream of care for our elderly, the dream of an all-out attack on mental illness, and above all, the dream of equal rights for all Americans, whatever their race or color—these and other American dreams have been vitalized by his drive and by his dedication. And now, the ideas and ideals which he so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action…No memorial or oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought for so long. We have talked long enough about equal rights in this country. It is time now to write the next chapter and write it in the books of law.

  The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 quickly followed.

  The Investigations

  The Warren Commission

  From the moment the shots rang out in Dallas, the need for some trustworthy and reasonably definitive official account of the events became immediately apparent. The swelling tide of speculation, rumor, and paranoia threatened the credibility of American institutions, not just with the American public but with foreign nations too, which somehow had to be persuaded that the new government to which leadership of the world had been passed had not come to power by some sort of silent coup. Already the rumor mills were filled with speculation about Oswald’s visit to Russia, his marriage to Marina, his trip to Mexico City, and his being pro-Castro. People everywhere wondered whether there was a connection between Ruby and Oswald and how the Dallas police could have “allowed” Oswald to be killed.

  Because of the unprecedented importance of the case, and though no official announcement had yet been made, on the evening of the assassination President Johnson asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the president’s murder.1 And as we have seen, at 9:52 EST, the FBI sent a Teletype to its fifty-five field offices saying, “The Bureau is conducting an investigation to determine who is responsible for the assassination.” (However, it should be noted that as early as forty-five minutes after Oswald’s arrest, two FBI agents were already present during the first interrogation of Oswald.)2 An editorial on November 23, 1963, in the New York Times stated that President Johnson “must convince the country that this bitter tragedy will not divert us from our proclaimed purposes or check our forward movement.”3 Later that day, Director Hoover sent Johnson the results of the bureau’s preliminary investigation. The report detailed the evidence known to that point, and it indicated Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt.4 The next day, the New York Times reported that Pravda was charging right-wingers in the United States with trying to use the assassination of President Kennedy to stir up anti-Soviet and anti-Cuban hysteria, adding, “Moscow radio said Oswald was charged with Mr. Kennedy’s slaying after 10 hours of interrogation, but there was no evidence which could prove this accusation.”5

  Ruby’s murder of Oswald at approximately 11:20 a.m. on Sunday, November 24, immediately changed the complexion of the entire saga. There would be no trial of Oswald during which, it could be presumed, or at least hoped, all the relevant facts of Kennedy’s assassination would be revealed. Only an investigation by a blue-ribbon commission appointed by the president of the United States could possibly get to the bottom of the matter and allay the doubts and anxieties of the American public.

  It is not known for sure who first proposed such a commission, or even whether it was prompted by Oswald’s death, but assassination researcher Donald Gibson has come up with the best evidence thus far that it was Eugene Rostow, dean of Yale Law School. Rostow called LBJ aide Bill Moyers on the afternoon of November 24* and suggested that “a presidential commission be appointed of very distinguished citizens in the very near future.” In the tape-recorded conversation, Rostow says he had already spoken about his suggestion to Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach “about three times” that day but decided to call Moyers directly to make sure LBJ got the message because he said Katzenbach “sounded so groggy that I thought I’d pass this thought along to you.”6

  Later that Sunday afternoon, Hoover telephoned another Johnson aide, Walter Jenkins, and said, “The thing I am most concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”7 Conspiracy theorists have maintained for years that this statement by Hoover means Hoover was trying to set Oswald up. It wouldn’t enter their minds that another interpretation of these words was that Hoover (like virtually everyone else in law enforcement at the time) was convinced that Oswald was guilty and Hoover wanted to help make sure a vulnerable and severely traumatized American public, susceptible to rumors and speculation, also became convinced of this reality.

  In 1978, Katzenbach, who prior to the assassination had been the deputy attorney general under Robert F. Kennedy, recalled his reasons for wanting some kind of statement issued: “I think…speculation that there was a conspiracy of various kinds was fairly rampant at that time, particularly in the foreign press. I was reacting to that and…to repeated calls from people in the State Department who wanted something of that kind…to quash the beliefs of some people abroad that our silence in the face of those rumors was not to be taken as substantiating it in some way. That is, in the face of a lot of rumors about conspiracy, a total silence on the subject from the government neither confirming nor denying tended to feed those rumors.”8

  On November 25, 1963, Katzenbach wrote a memorandum to Mo
yers stating, in part, that “the public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.”9 Conspiracy theorists have had a field day with Katzenbach’s choice of words, using the memorandum to support their claims that the Warren Commission was created to cover up the truth in the Kennedy assassination. As you’ll see later in this section, nothing could be further from the truth.

  On the evening of November 25, the same day Katzenbach drafted his memo, the White House announced a statement from President Johnson instructing the Department of Justice and the FBI to conduct a “prompt and thorough investigation of all the circumstances surrounding the brutal assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of his alleged assassin.”*

  In telephone conversations that Monday morning, Johnson had said he was persuaded by his lawyer’s advice that “the president must not inject himself into local killings.” Instead of a presidentially appointed commission, he hoped that a two-pronged attack (an FBI report submitted to the attorney general, and a Texas Court of Inquiry headed by Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr, who had met with Johnson for an hour and a half the previous evening and proposed such an inquiry) would satisfy the nation’s desire for the truth.11

  Meanwhile, the foreign rumor mill persisted in pounding at the notion of conspiracy in the Kennedy murder. A TASS dispatch published in the New York Times on November 26, concluded, “All the circumstances of President Kennedy’s tragic death allow one to assume that this murder was planned and carried out by the ultra-right-wing, fascist, and racist circles, by those who cannot stomach any step aimed at the easing of international tensions, and the improvement of Soviet-American relations.”12 An editorial in the Washington Post that day stated, “President Johnson has widely recognized that energetic steps must be taken to prevent a repetition of the dreadful era of rumor and gossip that followed the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. A century has hardly sufficed to quiet the doubts that arose in the wake of that tragedy.”13

  On November 27, 1963, Senator Everett M. Dirksen proposed in Congress that the Senate Judiciary Committee conduct a complete investigation of the assassination, and Congressman Charles E. Goodell suggested that a joint committee of seven senators and seven representatives conduct an inquiry.14

  By November 28, President Johnson was beginning to come around to the idea of a presidential commission, believing that a “bunch of Congressional inquiries” might not be the advisable way to get to the bottom of what happened, and could spiral out of control.15

  Katzenbach later told investigators, “I doubted that anybody in the government, Mr. Hoover, or the FBI or myself or the president or anyone else, could satisfy a lot of foreign opinion that all the facts were being revealed and that the investigation would be complete and conclusive and without any loose ends. So, from the beginning, I felt that…it would be desirable…for the president to appoint some commission of people who had international and domestic public stature and reputation for integrity that would review all of the investigations and direct any further investigation.”16 Katzenbach talked over his idea with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and on November 29, 1963, a memo to President Johnson from presidential aide Walter Jenkins set forth Katzenbach and Kennedy’s recommendation that “a seven-man commission—two senators, two congressmen, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Allen Dulles,* and a retired military man (general or admiral).”17 Johnson liked the idea of Warren being on the commission and dispatched Katzenbach and Solicitor General Archibald Cox that same day to the Supreme Court to ask Warren if he would chair the Commission, but Warren politely said no. He was opposed in principle to Supreme Court justices engaging in extrajudicial activities while a member of the court and felt, for instance, that Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson should not have served as the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials in 1945–1946,18 and that the appointment of associate Supreme Court justice Owen J. Roberts in 1946 to investigate Pearl Harbor “served no good purpose.”19† Warren suggested a few people who might serve well in his stead, and when Katzenbach and Cox departed, Warren thought that was the end of it.20

  That same day, President Johnson spoke with Hoover over the telephone and asked him if he was “familiar with this proposed group that they’re trying to put together on this study of your report?”

  “I haven’t heard of that,” Hoover replied, and predictably registered his opposition, adding that it would be “very, very bad to have a rash of investigations on this thing.”‡

  LBJ: “Well, the only way we can stop them is probably to appoint a high-level one to evaluate your report and put somebody that’s pretty good on it that I can select…and tell the House and Senate not to go ahead [with their proposed separate investigations] because they’ll get a lot of television going and I think it would be bad.”

  Hoover: “It would be a three-ring circus.”§

  At this point, the conversation quickly progressed to a discussion of people LBJ was thinking of appointing and Hoover’s opinion of them.21**

  Later that afternoon, Johnson, not about to accept Earl Warren’s no for an answer, summoned the chief justice to the Oval Office and applied his famous combination of charm, flattery, and muscle in trying to convince Warren to head the commission. Still, Warren was reluctant to take the job.22 Warren later recalled in his memoirs that he told Johnson there were several reasons why such an appointment was not in the best interests of the court. “First, it is not in the spirit of constitutional separation of powers to have a member of the Supreme Court serve on a presidential commission; second, it would distract a Justice from the work of the Court, which had a heavy docket; and third, it was impossible to foresee what litigation such a commission might spawn, with resulting disqualification of the Justice from sitting in such cases.”

  But Johnson would hear none of it. “You were a soldier in World War I, but there was nothing you could do in that uniform comparable to what you can do for your country in this hour of trouble,” Johnson told him, invoking the words of Kennedy’s inaugural address. “He then told me,” Warren recalls, “how serious were the rumors floating around the world. The gravity of the situation was such that it might lead us into war, he said, and, if so, it might be a nuclear war. He went on to tell me that he had just talked to the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who had advised him that the first nuclear strike against us might cause the loss of 40 million people. I then said, ‘Mr. President, if the situation is that serious, my personal views do not count. I will do it.’”23 According to Johnson, Warren had “started crying” when he refused to let him off the hook during the face-to-face meeting.24

  That evening (November 29), in order “to avoid parallel investigations and to concentrate fact-finding in a body having the broadest national mandate,”25 President Johnson signed Executive Order 11130 creating the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, thereafter called the Warren Commission.26 Seven people were appointed to the Commission: Hale Boggs, Democratic representative from Louisiana who was the majority whip; John Sherman Cooper, Republican senator from Kentucky and former ambassador to India; Allen W. Dulles, former director of the CIA; Gerald R. Ford, Republican representative from Michigan; John J. McCloy, former U.S. high commissioner of Germany after World War II and former president of the World Bank; Richard B. Russell, Democratic senator from Georgia; and Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.27 All seven were lawyers. Unlike their staff of prominent attorneys who worked full-time, all of the members of the Commission, except Dulles (who was retired), had full-time jobs, and hence could not devote all their waking hours to the Commission’s work.*

  Like Warren, the other commissioners cited national interest as their motivation for participating. Allen Dulles was highly conscious of the fact that the atmosphere of suspicion interfered with the functioning of government and its foreign relations. John J. McCloy fe
lt it necessary to “show the world that America is not a banana republic where a government can be changed by conspiracy.” Senator John Sherman Cooper wanted to lift “the cloud of doubts that had been cast over American institutions.”28 Gerald Ford said that he and the other Commission members “were asked by the president to undertake this responsibility as a public duty and service, and despite the reluctance of all of us to add to our then burden or operations we accepted.”29

  Senator Richard B. Russell, the conservative leader of the Southern Democrats who had been LBJ’s mentor in the Senate and the one most responsible for his rise to power, nominating him to be majority leader in 1953, had objected vigorously to the idea of serving with Warren, whom he loathed for the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring public school segregation unconstitutional.* Johnson bluntly refused to bow to the senator’s homegrown scruples, calling him on the evening of November 29, 1963, to advise him that he had appointed him to the Commission.

  “But I just can’t serve,” Russell protested. “I don’t like that man [Warren]. I don’t have any confidence in him.”

  “Dick, it’s already been announced, and you can serve with anybody for the good of America,” LBJ tells his friend. “You’re not gonna be in Old Dog Tray company [a reference to the 1853 Stephen C. Foster song by that name where Tray is a servile friend], but you never turned down your country…I can’t arrest you and I’m not going to put the FBI on you, but you’re goddamned sure going to serve—I’ll tell you that!” Johnson roared at Russell.