13
THE CHAMBERS OF THE CHIEF JUSTICE
THE SUPREME COURT
WASHINGTON, DC
JANUARY 1964
For a brief moment, Earl Warren thought Oswald might have been part of a foreign conspiracy. In the hours immediately after the assassination, when the chief justice heard the first reports about Oswald’s aborted defection to the Soviet Union, he thought there might be a plot involving the Soviets. “The only thing that gave me any pause about a conspiracy theory was that Oswald had been a defector to Russia,” he recalled.
But in the days that followed, especially after the initial police reports from Dallas seemed to establish that Oswald was the sole assassin, Warren’s instincts as a veteran criminal prosecutor overwhelmed any suspicion about a conspiracy. He was convinced that Oswald acted alone in Dealey Plaza. Although the crime was monstrous and had changed the course of history, Warren sensed that Oswald actually had much in common with the violent, impulse-driven, often mentally ill young thugs he had prosecuted in homicide cases back at the district attorney’s office in Oakland in the 1920s. Warren believed he knew how criminal minds worked and that Oswald had not needed anyone’s help to assassinate the president.
Within a week of Kennedy’s murder, Warren concluded that there was no conspiracy in Dallas or anywhere else. “I never put any faith in a conspiracy of any kind,” Warren said later. “As soon as I read about Oswald working at the Texas School Book Depository and leaving it as he did—the only employee to disappear—and after the gun was found, with the cartridges, it seemed to me that a surface case was established.” Warren insisted that he never shared these thoughts with the commission’s staff because he did not want to prejudice their investigation. Rankin said he never heard Warren rule out a conspiracy: “I never heard anything from him except find out what the truth was.”
Many of the commission’s newly hired young lawyers agreed later that they heard nothing at the start of the investigation to suggest that Warren had reached an early conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Several would have been disappointed to know it—because they had come to Washington determined to find a conspiracy in the president’s death. “I assumed conspiracy,” said David Belin, a thirty-five-year-old lawyer from Des Moines, Iowa, who had been hired on the recommendation of a classmate from the University of Michigan law school who was then working in the Johnson administration. (The classmate, Roger Wilkins, would go on to become a prominent journalist and civil rights activist.) Belin suspected that the conspiracy might have involved Castro, eager for revenge against Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis. Oswald’s murder might well have been the conspiracy’s second act, he thought. “I felt it was highly probable that there was a conspiracy, that Lee Harvey Oswald might not be the real assassin, despite the claims of the FBI, and that Ruby had killed Oswald to silence him.” He was thrilled by his assignment as the junior partner on the two-man team for Area 2, responsible for proving the identity of the assassin or assassins. The assignment would put Belin and his partner, Joseph Ball, the California lawyer, at the heart of the search for accomplices.
Burt Griffin, thirty-one, a former federal prosecutor in Cleveland, also suspected a conspiracy before joining the commission’s staff. He thought some group of racists, determined to put an end to Kennedy’s advances on civil rights, might have been responsible. “My initial reaction was it was some segregationist southerners,” he said years later. Willens had recruited Griffin, who also had a Yale law degree, to join the commission’s staff at the suggestion of a mutual friend from Ohio. Unlike so many of his young colleagues, Griffin had experience in Washington, having worked in the capital three years earlier as a clerk to a federal appeals court judge. He and his wife loved Washington and were excited to return. “I called home to tell my wife that we were going to Washington, and she was packing before I got off the phone.”
When he entered law school, Griffin had planned to apply his degree to a career in journalism or in politics, but he was diverted to the law because he was so successful at Yale. He actually hated the law school: “I didn’t think the faculty members were very interested in education; they were interested in indulging their egos with this old type of Socratic method.” Still, he excelled, and his grades earned him a job on the law review, “so I thought I must have some knack for it,” he said. After graduation, he found himself drawn further down a career path in the law, including a two-year stint in the United States attorney’s office in Cleveland, his hometown. He loved the job, he said; it allowed him to ferret out wrongdoing like the investigative reporter he had once planned to be, albeit with the advantage of subpoena power.
When he arrived in Washington in January, Griffin was struck by how few of his new colleagues had been prosecutors or had any other experience in law enforcement. He was the only one of the junior lawyers who had ever had significant contact with the FBI, and he warned the others that they needed to be wary of the bureau’s competence, and its honesty. As a federal prosecutor in Ohio, he had worked closely with agents from the FBI’s Cleveland field office, and he came away with little respect for J. Edgar Hoover and the bureau. “They were a bunch of bureaucrats,” he said. “They have a great myth about their ability.” If there had been a conspiracy to kill the president that was the least bit sophisticated, Griffin was not convinced the FBI had the investigative skills to uncover it. “They could only stumble on it.”
And Griffin had darker suspicions about the bureau. From the start, he worried that the FBI might try to hide the full truth about the assassination, to cover up its own mistakes with Oswald in Dallas. Griffin thought that the bureau, in a frantic effort to shield itself from the allegation that it had missed evidence of a conspiracy, would try to pin the blame solely on Oswald, whatever the evidence actually showed. “I thought the FBI might be trying to frame Oswald,” he said. Others on the commission’s staff, Griffin remembered, felt the same way. Several of the young lawyers were “downright excited” by the possibility that the commission would uncover a conspiracy, if only because it might disgrace Hoover, a man many of them already disdained. “We were determined, if we could, to prove that the FBI was wrong—to find a conspiracy if we possibly could,” Griffin said. “We thought we would be national heroes.”
Griffin was assigned to work as the junior lawyer on Area 5, investigating the background of Jack Ruby, and shared an office with Leon Hubert, the courtly Louisianan who would be his senior partner. Their office was cramped, about ten feet square; the two lawyers worked at desks placed side by side. As he introduced himself around the office, Griffin was impressed to encounter a former college classmate, David Slawson, who had been a year ahead of him at Amherst. Griffin remembered feeling intimidated: “I was in awe of Slawson—Phi Beta Kappa, president of the student body. I felt honored to be there with Slawson.”
Staff meetings could resemble an Ivy League reunion, reflecting Willens’s preference for graduates of a handful of elite law schools. If the commission’s staff botched the investigation, they joked, their law professors back at Harvard and Yale would have some explaining to do. Griffin and the other three Yale graduates were matched by an equal number from Harvard, and many other lawyers with Harvard law degrees would arrive at the commission as the months passed. The Harvard graduates: Slawson and Coleman; Samuel Stern, a thirty-four-year-old Washington lawyer who had been a law clerk to Chief Justice Warren and was now a member of the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering; and Melvin Eisenberg, who graduated first in the Harvard Law class of 1959 and worked at a large New York firm, Kaye Scholer.
Stern became the one-man team responsible for Area 6. He would evaluate the Secret Service and its performance in Dallas, as well as research the larger history of how presidents had been protected from assassins over the years. He was the only junior lawyer without a senior partner. Warren felt that the subject matter could be handled by a single lawyer, and he trusted the quality of Stern’s work.
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br /> Even though Eisenberg was still new to Kaye Scholer and knew that even a temporary absence might endanger a climb to partner, he jumped at the invitation to join the commission. “It was like meeting my wife,” Eisenberg recalled. “From the moment I met her, I wanted to marry her.” Besides, he had grown disenchanted with life in a big law firm. “At Harvard and the law review, you’re the center of the world, and then all of a sudden, I found myself writing memos” for older lawyers he barely knew. He had already been thinking about leaving the law for a career as an English professor.
Eisenberg was assigned to work as Redlich’s deputy, a recognition that Redlich might otherwise be buried under a mountain of paper, given his decision to volunteer to read every document that entered the commission’s offices and then decide how the paperwork should be divided among his colleagues. For his first major assignment, Eisenberg was asked to make himself an expert on the science of criminology—fingerprints, ballistics, acoustics, eyewitness testimony—and determine which evidence the commission should pay most attention to and which it could ignore. Since he had no background in law enforcement, Eisenberg turned to books. The Library of Congress was two blocks away, and he requested a collection of its best works on criminal science.
It was no secret among the junior lawyers that most of them shared the same political leanings; they were registered Democrats, considered themselves liberals, and had supported President Kennedy. The odd man out was Wesley James Liebeler, known to his friends as Jim, a thirty-two-year-old New York litigator who was a graduate of the University of Chicago law school and was recommended to the commission by the school’s dean. Born in Langdon, North Dakota, and raised on the farmlands of the Great Plains, Liebeler was a fiercely outspoken Republican who liked to boast about his intention to vote for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in the presidential election that November. He made it clear that his conservatism did not extend to his private life, however, and, to the amusement of his new colleagues, he liked to boast about this, too. Within days of arriving in Washington, he told his colleagues—he told almost anyone who would listen, in fact—that he intended to use his time in the capital to meet women. That he was married and had two children back in New York seemed no hindrance at all.
Liebeler was named the junior lawyer on Area 3; he and his senior partner, Albert Jenner, would be responsible for investigating Oswald’s life. From the start, Liebeler was less respectful than his colleagues in dealing with Rankin, Redlich, and Willens. He told Specter that he worried Willens had been brought onto the commission’s staff from the Justice Department as a “stoolie” for Robert Kennedy—a stool pigeon who would protect the attorney general’s interests, whatever they might be.
* * *
Rankin was struck by the wariness of Warren and some of the other commissioners to speak—even privately, among themselves—about the possibility that there had been a foreign conspiracy to kill Kennedy. There was no similar fear, Rankin said, among the young lawyers, who were ready to follow the facts. He recalled conversations among the lawyers about what would happen “if we find a conspiracy with the Soviet Union involved or Cuba” and how that could lead to a nuclear showdown. And they seemed unfazed by that prospect, even of war, Rankin remembered. “They were eager to get the information and get it out and didn’t care who it hurt or helped,” he said. “Maybe that is youth and a lack of recognition of all the hazards.” He also saw a determination by the staff lawyers—especially the young ones, at the start of their careers—to get to the truth about the president’s murder because they knew their “reputations would be destroyed” if they participated in anything that could be labeled a cover-up.
Slawson remembered a few early, nervous conversations among the lawyers about rumors that some rogue element of the CIA might be behind the assassination, or that President Johnson was involved. The conversations were “mostly humorous,” he said. Still, would the lawyers find their lives at risk if they unearthed a conspiracy within the U.S. government? Slawson remembered thinking that if he and his colleagues found evidence that the assassination was the result of some sort of coup d’état, they should expose it as quickly as possible, if only to keep themselves safe from an effort to silence them. “It was my theory that if you made it public, then they wouldn’t dare rub you out, because it would only solidify the evidence that it was true.”
On Monday, January 20, Warren called the first meeting of the staff. Years later, several lawyers remembered the excitement they felt to be in the presence of the chief justice, whose talents as a politician were still obvious. He charmed the young lawyers, speaking with “great warmth and sincerity,” Griffin recalled. According to memos of the meeting prepared by Willens and Eisenberg, the chief justice told the staff that their duty was “to determine the truth, whatever it might be.” He told them about his encounter with President Johnson in the Oval Office, and how Johnson had convinced him to take the job. The commission, Warren said, had a responsibility to put an end to the rumors that were sweeping the country—including rumors that Johnson himself had something to do with the murder. “The President stated that rumors of the most exaggerated kind were circulating in this country and overseas,” Warren said of his meeting with Johnson. “Some of those rumors could conceivably lead the country into a war which would cost 40 million lives.”
Warren offered a time line for the commission’s final report. It would be difficult to issue a report, he said, before the trial of Jack Ruby had been completed in Dallas; it was scheduled to begin in February. But Warren said he wanted to finish the report before the presidential campaign that fall “since once the campaign started it was very possible that rumors and speculation would gin up again.” He proposed a target date of June 1, less than five months away.
14
THE NEWSROOM OF THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DALLAS, TEXAS
JANUARY 1964
Hugh Aynesworth of the Dallas Morning News was searching for a conspiracy, too. In the weeks after the assassination, no reporter in Texas had landed as many scoops about the president’s murder as Aynesworth, a thirty-two-year-old West Virginian who had been earning a paycheck as a newspaperman since he was a teenager. Over time, the Warren Commission would be forced to deal, repeatedly, with the aftermath of one of Aynesworth’s exclusives.
At first, Aynesworth said, he doubted Oswald could have carried out the assassination by himself. He guessed it was probably a conspiracy involving the Russians. His suspicion grew after he learned how Oswald had been permitted to leave the Soviet Union in 1962 and return home to the United States with his pretty young Russian wife. “I thought there was no way that this guy could get out of Russia with a Russian wife that fast,” he said. Aynesworth admitted that his suspicions were fueled by an assumption—felt nowhere more strongly than in ultraconservative Dallas—that the Kremlin’s leaders were evil enough to assassinate Kennedy. “We were all scared to death of the Russians.”
His competitors would have been loath to admit it, but Aynesworth was running circles around them on what would likely be the biggest story of their lives. He had managed to witness every major moment of the assassination drama, beginning on the day of the murder. He was in Dealey Plaza when the shots rang out; he had been inside the Texas Theatre when Oswald was captured and arrested later that afternoon; and he had been a few feet away from Oswald on Sunday morning in the basement of Dallas police headquarters when Ruby pushed through the crowd and killed him.
Aynesworth understood the risk that Kennedy had taken by visiting Dallas: the reporter felt the city deserved its reputation as a hateful place that was full of racists and right-wing extremists. Before the president’s trip, he assumed Kennedy might face some kind of ugly protest in the city. “I never dreamed they would shoot him, but I thought they would embarrass him by throwing something at him.”
Aynesworth was ashamed of his employer, a newspaper that he felt brought out the worst in its readers. In his view, the News fostered
a spirit of intolerance in the city that might have helped inspire the assassination. “I felt badly because the editorial page of my newspaper had really caused it, as much as any other single thing,” Aynesworth said later. The paper’s “shrilly right-wing political slant appalled and embarrassed many people in the newsroom, including me.”
The paper was controlled by the radically conservative Dealey family—the small urban park where the president was shot was named for George Dealey, who bought the newspaper in 1926—and the News had criticized Kennedy mercilessly. In the fall of 1961, publisher Ted Dealey, George’s son, was among a group of Texas media executives invited to a meeting with Kennedy in the White House. Dealey used the opportunity to read a statement attacking the president to his face. “You and your administration are weak sisters,” he said. The nation needed “a man on horseback to lead the nation and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”
On the morning of the assassination, the paper had run a black-bordered, full-page advertisement placed by a group of right-wing extremists who identified themselves as the American Fact-Finding Committee. The ad accused Kennedy of allowing the Justice Department “to go soft on Communists, fellow travelers and ultra-leftists.” Jacqueline Kennedy remembered that, as they prepared to drive into Dallas in the motorcade, her husband showed her the ad and remarked, “We’re heading into nut country.”
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Page 15