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

by Philip Shenon

  Warren convinced himself that the commission did not need the photos and X-rays, since the navy doctors who had conducted the autopsy were available to testify and the commission had full access to the written autopsy report, which contained hand-drawn diagrams of the wounds to the president’s body. The photos and X-rays were of no special value, Warren declared. The commission, he said, would have “the convincing testimony of the Naval doctors who performed the autopsy to establish the cause of death, entry, exit and course of the bullets.”

  * * *

  Other horrifying images from the day of the assassination were beyond Warren’s control. The public had already begun to see portions of the astonishing amateur film taken by a Dallas women’s wear manufacturer, Abraham Zapruder, who had captured the assassination on his Bell & Howell Zoomatic home-movie camera. The fifty-eight-year-old Zapruder had been standing near a grassy bit of Dealey Plaza a few feet from the Texas School Book Depository, a spot that reporters covering the aftermath of the assassination quickly began to refer to as the “grassy knoll.”

  On Monday, December 9, Warren’s press officer at the Supreme Court, Bert Whittington, got a call from a representative of Life magazine, which had bought the film from Zapruder. In its “John F. Kennedy Memorial Issue,” the week before, Life had reproduced thirty frames of the film, beginning with an image of the president’s limousine as it began to move slowly down Elm Street in front of book depository. Published in black and white, the frames captured images of the president being struck by a bullet, apparently in the neck, and then dropping into his wife’s lap; later frames showed the First Lady trying to climb onto the trunk of the car in what the magazine’s editors described in a caption as a “pathetic search for help.”

  In that issue, Life did not explain to its readers what it had left out—that the full twenty-six seconds of film were far more horrifying and that the film was in color. The magazine chose, in particular, not to publish the frame that captured the moment a bullet struck the president’s head, blowing away much of the right side of his brain in a halo of pinkish, bloody mist. “We felt that publishing that grisly picture would constitute an unnecessary affront to the Kennedy family and to the president’s memory,” recalled Richard Stolley, the Life correspondent who bought the film from Zapruder on behalf of the magazine.

  In his memo to Warren, Whittington wrote that the magazine was offering the commission a copy of the entire film, in color. Warren returned the memo to Whittington with a handwritten note asking him to contact Life immediately and thank them for their cooperation. “We will undoubtedly want to see it and will advise,” he wrote.

  A few days later, a copy of Zapruder’s film arrived in Washington, and Warren had a chance to see for himself what the magazine had chosen not to show its readers.

  THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  DECEMBER 1963

  By late December, Rankin and Willens—the younger man’s authority grew by the day—decided on a final structure for the staff, which would initially total fifteen lawyers. Most of them would be assigned to two-man teams led by a “senior counsel” whose partner—a younger, less experienced lawyer—would have the title of “junior counsel.”

  With Warren’s approval, Rankin and Willens settled on six areas of investigation. Area 1 would reconstruct a time line of everything that happened from the moment President Kennedy departed the White House on Thursday, November 21, to begin his Texas trip, until the moment his corpse returned to lie in state at the White House in the predawn hours of Saturday, November 23. Area 2 would gather evidence to establish—conclusively, it was hoped—the identity of the president’s assassin, presumably Oswald. Area 3 would reconstruct Oswald’s life. Area 4 would study the possibility that there had been a foreign conspiracy, with a focus, it was assumed, on the Soviet Union and Cuba. Area 5 would construct the biography of Jack Ruby and look for any possible connection between him and Oswald. Area 6 would investigate the quality of the protection provided to President Kennedy by the Secret Service, as well as the history of law-enforcement efforts to protect other presidents from harm.

  Warren had little trouble coming up with the names of prominent, well-established lawyers for the “senior counsel” jobs. They were the sorts of lawyers the chief justice and Rankin had worked with every day of their careers for decades. William Coleman was asked to lead Area 4—the “conspiracy” team—since he had experience in foreign policy issues. That year, Coleman had become an adviser to the government’s newly created Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, so he already had a government security clearance.

  Rankin recommended Francis Adams, fifty-nine, a Manhattan litigator who had been New York City’s police commissioner in the mid-1950s, while Warren offered the name of Albert Jenner, fifty-six, who was a name partner of a powerhouse Chicago law firm, Raymond, Mayer, Jenner & Block, later renamed simply Jenner & Block. Both men agreed to serve. Adams, who obviously had experience with crime scenes, was assigned to Area 1, which would reconstruct the events of the day of the assassination. Jenner was given responsibility for Area 3 and the investigation of Oswald’s past.

  Warren was eager to hire an old friend from California, sixty-one-year-old Joseph Ball of Long Beach, who was among the state’s most successful criminal-defense lawyers and also taught at the law school at the University of Southern California. To Warren, Ball was a living rebuttal to the many lawyers in the East who still assumed their counterparts on the Pacific Coast were somehow less talented or sophisticated. Ball was put in charge of the Area 2 team, which would determine if Oswald was in fact the assassin.

  With lawyers hired from the East, West, and Midwest, Warren also wanted representation from the South. Congressman Boggs came up with the name of a fellow Louisianan: fifty-two-year-old Leon Hubert, the former district attorney of New Orleans and a law professor at Tulane University who was then in private practice. Hubert was put in charge of Area 5 and the effort to reconstruct Ruby’s life story.

  THE OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1963

  Arlen Specter was a young man on the rise in Philadelphia, his adopted hometown. In 1963, the year he turned thirty-three, he was an assistant district attorney, and that June he became a local hero—certainly a hero in the district attorney’s office—after obtaining the conviction of several of the city’s most powerful Teamsters officials on racketeering charges. He was so impressive in the case that Attorney General Robert Kennedy called Specter to Washington for a face-to-face meeting to try to recruit him to join the Justice Department to assist in the prosecution of Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters’ national leader. Specter turned down the offer, in part, he said, because he hoped to run for local office in Philadelphia.

  Colleagues in the district attorney’s office, as well his adversaries on the defense table, saw Specter as unusually self-confident, often to the point of being cocky and arrogant. Specter did not necessarily disagree with the description.

  The recruiting call from the commission came on New Year’s Eve. It was about five thirty that afternoon, and Specter was still at his office, “trying to concoct an excuse for arriving home so late,” he remembered. His wife, Joan, was planning a New Year’s Eve party that night with some friends. The caller was Howard Willens, a classmate from Yale Law School. Now in his second week working for Chief Justice Warren on the assassination commission, Willens urged Specter to come to Washington to join the investigation.

  Specter turned down the offer, citing the appeals court battles to come in the Teamsters case. At the party that night, however, he was convinced to change his mind. He mentioned Willens’s call to his wife and their guests and—to his annoyance, he insisted later—their response was unanimous: it was his duty to take the job. “They were all very excited about me going off to war—to fight to the last drop of Arlen Specter’s blood,” Specter said. He called Willens back and accepted the
job.

  Two weeks later, Specter arrived in Washington to discover the city buried under heavy snow. He trudged to the VFW building on Capitol Hill, where he was greeted by Willens and introduced to Lee Rankin, who, he remembered, was “paternal and soft-spoken, with a light humor.” Rankin explained the organization of the staff and told Specter that, given his youth, he would be the junior member of whichever two-man team he joined. Since he was among the first lawyers hired, Specter was given his choice of assignments. He selected Area 1, which would focus on Kennedy’s activities in the final hours of his life—and on the murder itself. “It seemed the most compelling,” Specter said. He did not want to spend that night in Washington—he wanted to sleep in his own bed in Philadelphia—so he filled his briefcase with some of the early investigative reports about the assassination and returned to Washington’s Union Station for the train ride home. “The paperwork would keep me busy for much of the week ahead,” he figured. He told Rankin he planned to return to Washington—full-time—in several days.

  In the train, he sat down next to an empty seat “so I could read some of the material, taking care to shield it from other passengers.” He remembered that he turned quickly to the autopsy report from the Bethesda Naval Hospital and found it sickening to read, especially the description of Kennedy’s head wound. “As I read through the grisly details of the president’s wounds, I felt nauseated and depressed.”

  And the autopsy report was, apart from a few crude anatomical drawings, just words on paper. Specter could only imagine how he would react when he had the chance—shortly, he assumed—to see the actual autopsy photos, as well as the X-rays of the president’s body. As a career prosecutor, he understood from the start how valuable those photos and X-rays would be.

  10

  THE OFFICES OF THE LAW FIRM OF DAVIS, GRAHAM & STUBBS

  DENVER, COLORADO

  JANUARY 1964

  In the first days of January 1964, David Slawson, a thirty-two-year-old associate at one of Denver’s most prominent law firms, found himself busy with clients’ work. Not overwhelmed, just busy: partners at Davis, Graham & Stubbs admired Slawson’s ability to focus, almost totally, on the complicated corporate work in front of him and to get it done in a hurry. Unlike some of the other associates, the Harvard-educated Slawson did not need to stay at his desk late into the night to keep clients satisfied; he liked to get home at five if he could. He had not allowed his work to suffer even in the first days after Kennedy’s assassination. Slawson had loved the president and was shattered by his murder. He had worked in Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, initially at the urging of his law firm’s star partner, Byron “Whizzer” White, Slawson’s first mentor at Davis Graham. White, a lifelong Democrat, had managed the Kennedy campaign in Colorado. Within days of the election, White left Denver to become deputy attorney general under Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department; in 1962, he was named to the Supreme Court.

  Slawson had hoped to follow White to Washington. With Kennedy in the White House, the nation’s capital had glamour and star power it had not known in Slawson’s lifetime; for many young, ambitious lawyers, Washington had suddenly become the place to be. It would take Kennedy’s death, however, to get Slawson his invitation to the capital.

  The call came in early January, when Slawson picked up his office phone and heard the voice of a man he did not know—Howard Willens, who identified himself as a Justice Department lawyer assisting Chief Justice Warren in organizing the investigation of the president’s assassination. Willens had been directed to Slawson by a mutual friend, a State Department lawyer who had been a classmate of Slawson’s at Harvard. Willens asked if Slawson would be interested in joining the commission, and Slawson jumped at the offer; the only condition, he told Willens, was that his partners at the law firm would need to approve a leave of absence. There was no second-guessing about this, Slawson remembered. It would be thrilling to be part of the investigation to determine “what the hell really happened” in Dallas.

  To Slawson’s relief, the firm’s partners quickly gave their permission, with the understanding that he would be gone no more than two or three months. He made plans to leave for Washington immediately. There was no reason for delay: he was unmarried and had no steady girlfriend, so nothing except work tied him to Denver.

  Before departing, he began reading everything he could find in the local papers about the assassination and about the commission. He turned up copies of the New York Times—a precious commodity in faraway Denver at the time—and read about the commission’s plans to create teams of investigators, each focusing on a different aspect of the assassination. He was especially intrigued to read about the team that would investigate the possibility of a foreign conspiracy.

  For many of his new colleagues, the “conspiracy” team seemed an unappealing assignment. The FBI appeared insistent that Oswald, and Oswald alone, had killed the president, and so the conspiracy team would probably be off on a wild-goose chase. Slawson, however, thought he was ideally suited for the work. He imagined it would be, at heart, a logic puzzle, in which investigators would have to tease out answers on the basis of little or no concrete information. He knew little about the Cold War beyond what he read in the paper each morning, but he assumed that if the Russians or the Cubans had been involved in the assassination, they would have tried to hide every bit of evidence pointing to their guilt.

  Since his childhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Slawson had been good at puzzles. He had the ability, in the quiet of his mind, to sort through a complicated math or science problem. He did not necessarily need to see pictures or diagrams to work his way through a puzzle; he could do it in his head. That explained why mathematics and science had come so easily for him. He had originally dreamed of becoming a physicist. It was the career path he had first pursued at Amherst College, where he graduated first in his class, in 1953. Despite the shyness that would define him all his life, he was as popular with his classmates as he was smart—one classmate remembered him as Amherst’s “golden boy”—and he was elected president of his class. Slawson then arrived at Princeton for graduate studies in physics. He planned to focus on quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that explained the behavior of the tiniest elements of the universe—subatomic particles that could never be seen by the most powerful microscope, let alone by a human eye. He remembered the thrill at catching a glimpse of the world’s most famous physicist, Albert Einstein, who had lived in Princeton since fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. “Sometimes you’d be walking by, and there he was,” Slawson said.

  What changed Slawson’s life—and pulled him away from science—was what he saw on a television screen in his apartment building at Princeton in 1954. Between classes he sat, transfixed, by the live coverage of what would become known as the Army-McCarthy hearings—the Senate hearings that effectively signaled the end of the Red-baiting McCarthy era. Slawson found a hero in Joseph Welch, the army’s chief lawyer, whose testimony before Senator Joseph McCarthy turned into a showdown over the senator’s claim that the military employed Communists in defense plants. In his bravest moment, Welch turned to McCarthy and asked: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” This, Slawson decided, was what he really wanted to do—to be a lawyer who, like Welch, took on bullies while engaging in the great issues of the day. “This is the life I want,” he remembered thinking. He had already begun to worry that a career in physics would separate him too much from the rest of the world. “It wasn’t that I didn’t love physics,” he said. “It was because the life I could foresee in physics was one of cloistered work, doing long, difficult mathematical equations—analyzing the size of galaxies and stuff—and I thought no, no, I don’t want to do that.”

  A year later, after earning a master’s degree, Slawson left Princeton to join the army; he decided to enlist rather than wait to be drafted. While in uniform he applied to Harvard Law School and was accepted. He paid for Harvard through the GI Bill and graduated near the top of his class, which
earned him an editor’s post on the law review. After that, Slawson could have had his pick of jobs at law firms in New York, but he was intrigued by the idea of working for a small firm, in a smaller city, especially one where the outdoors beckoned. Denver, he thought, was an obvious choice since he loved mountain sports.

  At Davis, Graham & Stubbs, Byron White had an eye for young talent, and he asked that Slawson be assigned to work for him. It was a heady thing to be associated with White, who had been a celebrity in Colorado for decades, first as an all-American halfback at the University of Colorado. After playing professional football for the Pittsburgh Pirates (the name was later changed to the Steelers), White won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University and then enrolled at Yale Law School. As a football player and as a lawyer—in almost everything he did, in fact—“Byron was a superstar,” Slawson recalled. It was White who turned Slawson into a Kennedy supporter. In the 1960 election, Slawson had planned to vote for Adlai Stevenson, but White pressed him to reconsider. “He gave me a bunch of stuff to read about Kennedy, and I read it, and I said, yes, I’ll switch.” White then made an arrangement with the firm that allowed his young protégé to work part-time on the Kennedy campaign.

  Slawson was in the firm’s offices on November 22, the day of the assassination; a startled secretary broke the news to him. After the announcement of Kennedy’s death, the firm shut for the day. “Everyone was told they could go home,” said Slawson, whose apartment was walking distance from the firm. “I was tremendously moved. I think I went home in tears.” When Oswald was murdered two days later, Slawson watched the scene on television, thinking to himself that it was almost too much to comprehend. It did not occur to him that some larger conspiracy—first to kill the president, then to kill the president’s assassin—might explain what was happening. “I just thought, The world is going crazy.”