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

by Philip Shenon

  “It seemed to me that Mother felt that now, at last, she was about to get the kind of attention she had sought all her life,” Robert recalled. “She had an extraordinary idea of her ability and her importance.” His mother “seemed to recognize immediately that she would never again be treated as an ordinary, obscure, unimportant woman.”

  Even in those first hours, Robert sensed the danger that his mother posed to any effort to learn the truth about Lee’s guilt or innocence. From the start, Robert admitted to himself that there was a strong possibility that Lee was the president’s assassin. His younger brother, Robert knew, was a delusional, violent, attention-seeking man. Their mother, however, would never allow herself to be burdened with the facts about Lee. The assassination, Robert sensed, would now give her an international stage to spout—and at some point, sell—her delusional conspiracy theories about Lee and his work as a government “agent.”

  It had always been infuriating to Robert how his mother could sound rational, even articulate, in short bursts of conversation. He feared that government investigators and journalists, not knowing any better, might actually believe what she told them.

  * * *

  On the afternoon of the assassination, Mrs. Oswald was driven from her home in Fort Worth to Dallas by Bob Schieffer, a twenty-six-year-old reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She had called the newspaper’s city desk, asking for help in getting to Dallas.

  “Lady, this is not a taxi service,” Schieffer told the woman on the phone. “And besides, the President has been shot.”

  “I know,” the caller replied, almost matter-of-factly. “They think my son is the one who shot him.”

  Schieffer and a colleague grabbed a car and rushed to Mrs. Oswald’s home on the west side of Fort Worth.

  “She was a short, round-faced woman wearing enormous black horn-rimmed glasses and a white nurse’s uniform,” Schieffer recalled of his first glimpse of Mrs. Oswald. “She was distraught—but in an odd way.” For most of the trip, he said, “she seemed less concerned with the death of the President or her son’s role in it than with herself.” She spoke obsessively about her fear that her daughter-in-law Marina “would get sympathy while no one would ‘remember the mother’ and that she would probably starve. I chalked it up to understandable emotional overload, and I couldn’t bring myself to use her self-serving remarks in the story I filed later that day. I probably should have.” Later, Schieffer, who went on to a long career in television news, concluded that Oswald’s mother was “deranged.”

  Arriving at police headquarters in Dallas, Mrs. Oswald and Schieffer were ushered into a small room—perhaps an interrogation room, Schieffer thought—to wait to speak to the police about her son. Later that afternoon, Marina Oswald was also brought into the room. The two women had not seen each other in more than a year, and because Marina still spoke almost no English, they had—literally—almost nothing to say to each other.

  Marina had just undergone a first round of questioning by the police and the FBI; as she admitted later, she was terrified. She was fearful, above all, that she would be separated from her children and arrested, even though she had insisted to her interrogators—through a translator—that she knew nothing about any plan by her husband to assassinate the president. Her fear of arrest was understandable: she knew she would have been taken into custody if she’d been back home in the Soviet Union. “That’s how it would have been in Russia,” she explained later. “Even if your husband was innocent, they would arrest you until it was straightened out.”

  Marina admitted that it might be natural for suspicion to fall on her: it was hardly implausible that she would know about, if not actually participate in, any plot by her husband to kill the president. Here she was, Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova, still newly arrived from the Soviet Union, who had entered the United States after a hasty marriage to an American turncoat who had never hidden his embrace of Marxism. There might be additional suspicion of Marina because of her family ties to Russian intelligence: an uncle worked in St. Petersburg, the city then officially known as Leningrad, in the Russian Interior Ministry.

  Among those with early suspicions about Marina was her brother-in-law, Robert. On the day of the assassination, he considered, at least momentarily, that she was part of a plot to kill Kennedy, although the more he thought about the idea, the less likely it seemed. It was a matter of logic. If the Russians had launched a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, would they enlist the help of this tiny, seemingly petrified young woman who barely spoke English? And why would they have married her off to his misfit brother who soon saddled her with two small children?

  In the days after the assassination, Robert’s suspicions turned elsewhere—to Ruth Paine, the soft-spoken, thirty-one-year-old Pennsylvania-born woman who had given shelter to Marina, and to Ruth’s estranged husband, Michael Paine, a thirty-five-year-old aircraft engineer. The Paines had separated a year earlier, although they remained friendly, if only for the sake of their own two children. Ruth, a Russian-language teacher who had been introduced to Marina through the local Russian expatriate community, lived in Irving, Texas, just outside Dallas, and she had welcomed Marina and her daughters into her home. In accordance with the charitable tenets of her Quaker faith, Ruth said, she did not ask Marina to pay any rent.

  Robert Oswald admitted later that he had no evidence—because, he conceded, there was none—to show that the Paines had anything to do with the assassination. Still, there was something about the couple that troubled him, especially about Michael, who was introduced to Robert at Dallas police headquarters in the hours after the assassination. “Nothing really to put my finger on, but I just had a feeling. I still do not know why or how, but Mr. and Mrs. Paine are somehow involved in this affair,” he told investigators. “His handshake was very weak and what I might term a live fish handshake. His general appearance, his face, and most particularly his eyes to me had what I would term a distant look to them, and that he wasn’t really looking at you when he was.” On the basis of little more than a weak handshake and a distant stare, then, Robert Oswald decided to cut off all contact—forever, as it turned out—between Marina and the Paines. It deprived his sister-in-law of a loyal Russian-speaking friend, Ruth Paine, who might have helped Marina navigate the troubles to come in the language of her birth; Marina would never fully command English.

  * * *

  Robert Oswald was the first of many men to enter Marina’s life in the days after the assassination—some to help her, others to prey on a young woman whose fragile beauty was often remarked on. In photographs, she could be film-star pretty, so long as she avoided smiling; she was a victim of inadequate Soviet dentistry.

  After her husband’s murder by Jack Ruby, Marina and her children—as well as her mother-in-law and Robert—were hastily moved to a motel on the outskirts of Dallas, the Inn of the Six Flags, where it was thought they could be kept safe. The motel’s dapper resident manager, thirty-one-year-old James Martin, readily agreed to take them in. It was the off-season for the motel, which was adjacent to the newly opened Six Flags Over Texas amusement park, and there was plenty of space for the Oswalds and the team of Secret Service agents protecting them.

  Martin did not recall that he was ever actually formally introduced to Marina, but he quickly befriended the young widow. The following Thursday was Thanksgiving, so he invited the Oswalds to his home for a holiday dinner with his family; Martin and his wife had three children. (Martin did not invite Marguerite Oswald—an oversight, he said later—because she had returned to her own home in Fort Worth.) “They weren’t going to have a very happy Thanksgiving, and living in those rooms was pretty cramped,” Martin recalled. Marina and Robert accepted.

  A few days after the holiday, Martin—without consulting his wife, he acknowledged—proposed to Marina that she and the children move in with the Martin family in their three-bedroom house. “I know the Secret Service made a statement that they were quite concerned as to where Marina wou
ld go after she left the inn. They had no place to put her and they had no idea where she was going to go,” Martin said. “I told them that if they couldn’t find any place for her that I would be glad to take them into my home.”

  Marina soon moved into one of the Martin children’s bedrooms, which adjoined the bedroom of Martin and his wife. He did not ask Marina to pay any rent or compensate the family in any way, at least initially. Two weeks later, however, Martin proposed that he become Marina’s full-time business manager, in exchange for 10 percent of the tens of thousands of dollars in contracts she was offered—in late November alone—to sell her story to news outlets and book publishers. Marina agreed. Martin also found a local lawyer to represent her; the lawyer took another 10 percent.

  Marina would later say she was naive and that she had welcomed help from these friendly American men who seemed to know what they were doing. She believed they could help her establish a new life without her husband. Her inability to speak English made her all the more dependent on them.

  Quickly, Martin made it clear that he hoped for a different sort of relationship with Marina Oswald—he wanted to be her lover. He had pursued her romantically almost from the day they met, Marina said later. She remembered that on New Year’s Day 1964, when his wife was out of the house, Martin put a record of songs by the crooner Mario Lanza on the phonograph and professed his love. The advances continued for weeks. “He always hugged me and kissed me when his wife or children or the Secret Service agents were not around.”

  * * *

  New people were finding their way into Marguerite Oswald’s life as well. In early December, Mrs. Oswald, who had a listed phone number and welcomed calls from reporters and almost anyone else who had the patience to listen to her, picked up the receiver and heard the voice of Shirley Harris Martin. Mrs. Martin introduced herself as a forty-two-year-old homemaker and mother of four from Hominy, Oklahoma, who had become fixated on the idea that there had been a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. (She was no relation to James Martin in Dallas.)

  Within days of the assassination, the garage of Mrs. Martin’s home had begun filling up with stacks of newspapers and magazines with articles about the assassination—everything she could find, she said. She had a passion for the mysteries of Agatha Christie, and she had decided that she had a mystery of her own to solve: who had really killed the president. Soon she began to meet and hear from people from all over the country who shared her obsession.

  “In December 1963, I called Mama for the first time—Mama Oswald,” she remembered. “At that time, she was very rational. She’s such a character.” After introducing herself, Mrs. Martin had a question: Had Mrs. Oswald read an article about her son that been published that month in the National Guardian, a self-proclaimed radical leftist weekly in New York?

  The piece was a ten-thousand-word analysis of the case—or rather, the lack of a case—against her son. Headlined “Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief,” the author was Mark Lane, a New York City criminal defense lawyer and former state legislator. Mrs. Oswald had not read the article but she was eager to see it. After a copy arrived in the mail from Oklahoma, an excited Mrs. Oswald tracked down Lane by phone. “Mrs. Oswald called and asked if I could meet her in Dallas to consider representing her and her son,” Lane said later, recalling that Mrs. Oswald had described him as “the only person in America who is raising any questions” about her son’s guilt. He was surprised—and naturally intrigued. Within days, Lane was on a plane to Texas, where he met with Mrs. Oswald and offered to join her campaign to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was an innocent man.

  In Lane, Mrs. Oswald had found her champion. And in Lee Oswald’s mother, Lane had found his ideal client.

  5

  THE OVAL OFFICE

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON, DC

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1963

  Lyndon Johnson knew, from the first days after the assassination, that some people would suspect he had something to do with Kennedy’s murder. He seemed to take it as a given. There were simply too many ugly, obvious questions. After all, Kennedy had been gunned down in the streets of a Texas city, his alleged assassin was murdered in that same city two days later, and the hyper-ambitious former vice president—a Texan—now occupied the Oval Office. Already, the State Department had begun reporting that some foreign capitals were rife with rumors that Johnson had ordered his predecessor’s death.

  In truth, Johnson’s outrageous bad taste over the years had invited some of the suspicion. As vice president, he had liked to joke about the odds of Kennedy dying in office—how an assassination or accident would clear the way for him. Clare Booth Luce, the former congresswoman and the wife of Time, Inc., founder Henry Luce, recalled asking Johnson at the 1960 inaugural ball why he had accepted the offer of the vice presidency. She remembered his cheery reply: “Clare, I looked it up; one out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’.” He had made similar comments to others.

  It pained Johnson to realize that Dallas would long be remembered as the place where the handsome young president was killed, and that the public image of his beloved Texas had been blackened, probably for years. The night of the assassination, Lady Bird confided to her husband that what might salvage their home state’s reputation—perversely—was the fact that their good friend Governor Connally had also been hit. His grave injuries would dampen some of the talk of a Texas-based conspiracy. Lady Bird said she would have been willing to take the bullet herself, instead of Connally, to spare the good name of Texas. “I only wish it could have been me.”

  All this was just more proof to Johnson of why Chief Justice Warren had to run the investigation. His name would give instant credibility to the commission. The chief justice had many critics in Washington and around the country, but he also had a reputation for personal honesty and political independence that could help convince the public that the truth was not being hidden from them. “We had to bring the nation through this bloody tragedy,” Johnson said. “Warren’s personal integrity was a key element in assuring that all the facts would be unearthed and that the conclusions would be credible.”

  On the afternoon of Friday, November 29, Johnson dispatched Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Solicitor General Archibald Cox to meet with Warren in his chambers in the court and convince him to lead the commission. As solicitor general, Cox, on leave from his teaching post at Harvard Law School, argued regularly in front of Warren and the other justices, and he had the chief justice’s admiration. The feeling was mutual. Cox described Warren as the “greatest Chief Justice after John Marshall.”

  The conversation was over almost before it began. The words were barely out of his visitors’ mouths before Warren rejected the president’s request: “I told them I thought the president was wise in having such a commission, but that I was not available for service on it.”

  He reminded Katzenbach and Cox of the unfortunate history of court members taking on outside government assignments. There had been harsh criticism of Associate Justice Owen Roberts as chairman of the commission that investigated the Pearl Harbor attacks, and of Associate Justice Robert Jackson, who left the court for a year in 1945 to oversee the Nuremberg war-crimes trials. Former chief justice Harlan Fiske Stone described the trials as a “fraud” and accused Jackson of participating in a “high-grade lynching.”

  Warren thanked his guests for their visit and sent them back out the door to deliver the bad news to the White House. “Katzenbach and Cox went away, and I thought that that settled it,” the chief justice remembered.

  But nothing was settled, as Warren was about to discover; Johnson was determined to change his mind. “Early in my life, I learned that doing the impossible frequently was necessary to get the job done,” the president said later. “There was no doubt in my mind that the Chief Justice had to be convinced that it was his duty to accept the chairmanship.”

  At about three thirty that a
fternoon, the president had a secretary phone the Supreme Court to ask Warren to come to the White House—immediately. Warren was not told the purpose of the meeting, although the issue was “quite urgent,” Warren recalled. “I, of course, said I would do so.” The White House dispatched a limousine.

  The chief justice was about to be subjected—in full force, for the first time—to what had long been known in the Capitol as “the Johnson Treatment.” A potent mixture of flattery, pleading, deceit, and menace, it was a kind of salesmanship that Johnson had perfected in Congress to bend others to his will. It worked because it was so audacious—so unexpected, even undignified—that its targets were often too startled to do anything but give in.

  Many times in the past Johnson had shown that, if necessary, he was prepared to reduce a proud man to weeping. In Warren’s case, he was ready to make the case that the chief justice was all that stood between the people of the United States and Armageddon.

  “I was ushered in,” Warren said, recalling his arrival in the Oval Office. “With only the two of us in the room, he told me of his proposal.”

  The president said he needed Warren to change his mind. The assassination investigation had to be led by someone of Warren’s stature, the president explained. Johnson said he was concerned about the “wild stories and rumors that were arousing not only our own people but people in other parts of the world.”