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

by Philip Shenon

  Aynesworth had many gifts as a reporter, including a phenomenal memory, a polite, aw-shucks manner, and a slow, soft speaking style that encouraged people to trust him. Despite a boyish face, he was a big man who knew how to defend himself. He had a scar that ran from his throat to one ear, the result of an encounter with a knife-wielding assailant who broke into his home in Denver when he worked there as a reporter for United Press International. An admiring Texas reporter once said that the scar made Aynesworth “look like a cross between Andy Hardy and Al Capone.”

  On the day of the assassination Aynesworth was not supposed to be in Dealey Plaza. He was the paper’s aviation and space correspondent—seen as the most prestigious reporting job on the paper, given the proximity of the new NASA space center in Houston—and originally he had no part in covering the president’s visit. He went to the plaza as a spectator, excited to see Kennedy and his glamorous wife. The moment shots rang out, however, he found himself in the middle of the mayhem. He immediately went to work. “My God, this is really happening,” he said to himself.

  He had no notepad, so he grabbed a utility bill from his back pocket. He had no pen either, so he paid a child on the street 50 cents for his “fat jumbo pencil, like the ones kids used to use in early grade school.” A tiny plastic American flag dangled from the eraser.

  “I was a reporter and I knew to start interviewing people,” Aynesworth said. And it was clear from the first minutes that the shots—he distinctly heard three of them—had probably been fired from the Texas School Book Depository. “I remember three or four people pointing toward the upper floors of the Book Depository.”

  He saw police gathering around a frightened man on the street outside the book warehouse and overheard the man offer what appeared to be an eyewitness description of the assassin. The witness—Howard Brennan, a forty-four-year-old steamfitter who was still carrying his helmet from work—was telling the police officers that he had been across the street from the depository when he saw a man with a rifle lean from the window of one of the upper floors of the building. “I knew he was scared to death,” Aynesworth said of Brennan, who had noticed that reporters were listening in on the conversation, which made him even more upset. “He asked the police to get rid of us.”

  About forty-five minutes after the assassination, Aynesworth heard a police radio crackle with a bulletin that a policeman, Officer J. D. Tippit, had been gunned down across town—in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. Aynesworth sensed, instantly, that the shooting must be connected to the assassination, so he jumped in a car and rushed to Oak Cliff, where he found several people who said they had witnessed Tippit’s murder.

  Helen Markham, a forty-seven-year-old waitress at the nearby Eatwell restaurant, had seen the killer—she later identified Oswald in a police lineup—pull a gun on Tippit and shoot him as the officer stepped from his squad car. “Strangest thing,” Aynesworth quoted her as saying of Oswald. “He didn’t run. He didn’t seem upset or scared. He just fooled with the gun and stared at me.” Then, Markham said, Oswald jogged away.

  Several minutes later, Aynesworth followed police when they entered the nearby Texas Theatre, which was in the middle of a matinee showing of the film War Is Hell. Witnesses had reported a man resembling Oswald darting into the theater without buying a ticket. Aynesworth watched as the police entered the theater, turned up the lights, and grabbed Oswald, who initially resisted the arrest and pulled a pistol from his hip. After a scuffle, Oswald was taken into custody, yelling out, “I protest this police brutality.”

  Aynesworth woke up on Sunday, November 24, to hear the news on television that Oswald would be transferred within minutes to the county jail. He rushed from the house without shaving or eating breakfast, arriving just in time at Dallas police headquarters. He was about fifteen feet away when Jack Ruby pushed through the crowd and shot Oswald in the stomach.

  Aynesworth knew—and disliked—Ruby, a self-promoting strip-club operator who was always trying to befriend police officers (in hopes of protection) and reporters (in hopes of publicity). “He was a nut,” Aynesworth said. “Ruby was a showboat—always trying to get his picture in the papers, pictures of the strippers.” At the News, he was considered a “noxious presence” and a “loser.” Aynesworth recalled how, in the newspaper’s cafeteria, Ruby would “cut a peephole in his paper to keep up his surveillance as he pretended to read”—surveillance of what, it was never clear. Ruby was notoriously violent and always carried a gun. “I saw him twice beat up on drunks,” Aynesworth said. Ruby’s Carousel Club had a steep set of stairs that he turned into another weapon. “I remember him beating up this one guy and throwing him down the stairs, hurting the guy bad.”

  Aynesworth was horrified by Oswald’s murder, but he was not surprised that Ruby was the killer. “If I had to pick out the one guy in all of Dallas, Texas, who would do something like this, I would think Ruby would be on the top of the list.”

  * * *

  Within hours of Kennedy’s assassination, Aynesworth started hearing from strangers who claimed they had secret information about a conspiracy to kill the president. He had encountered such people before on the space beat—“loonies, tin-foil people”—but never more than two or three a year. Now, “I was inundated with them.” The first, he said, showed up on the night of the assassination at his home—“an odd, bedraggled little man sitting on my doorstep.” The man was delusional and claimed the conspiracy involved an unlikely alliance of H. L. Hunt, the right-wing Dallas billionaire, and the Soviet Union. The second showed up the next morning, “a tall, painfully thin man who stank something awful” who managed to get into the newsroom. “I’ve got the story for you,” he told Aynesworth, claiming he knew the secret behind Kennedy’s murder. The man rolled up his trouser leg to reveal a huge abscess, which he claimed was somehow related to the conspiracy. “That’s how my leg got torn up.”

  Over time, Aynesworth saw the conspiracy theorists fall into two categories. There were those who hoped to cash in on the murder by selling a wild story. “That makes money,” Aynesworth said. “Nobody pays for the truth. They pay for a conspiracy.” And there were others who wanted to enjoy, or at least embrace, the fantasy that they had played some part in this terrible drama. In that category he placed Carroll Jarnagin, a Dallas lawyer who claimed he had seen Oswald and Jack Ruby together in deep conversation in the Carousel Club days before the assassination. Aynesworth remembered Jarnagin, who was probably in his midforties, as a “bad alcoholic who always wanted to be somebody.… He just wanted attention.” The newspaperman knew better than to pay attention to Jarnagin, who also told his story about Oswald to the Dallas police. Later Jarnagin took a police polygraph examination about his claims and “failed miserably,” Aynesworth said.

  Sometime in December, Aynesworth got a phone call from Mark Lane, the New York lawyer who had already begun to attract national attention with his conspiracy theories. Aynesworth had read Lane’s National Guardian article suggesting that Oswald might be innocent, and he knew it was riddled with errors. “He told me he was representing Oswald because Oswald had nobody to represent him,” Aynesworth remembered. “He told me he was this great lawyer and had done all of these important things.” Despite his skepticism about Lane’s motives, Aynesworth agreed to meet with the lawyer the next night at his home.

  “He came by my house and started telling me what had really happened” and how Oswald had been framed. Aynesworth recalled being startled by Lane’s brash attempt to pretend he knew more about the assassination than Aynesworth did; in effect, Lane argued that Aynesworth should not believe what he had seen with his own eyes in Dealey Plaza. Aynesworth was angry. “You don’t take it too kindly when somebody tells you you didn’t see some of what you saw.”

  Sitting at Aynesworth’s kitchen table, Lane claimed that there was “no doubt” that Ruby and Oswald knew each other. He said he had an interview scheduled for the next day with a secret witness with an “impeccable memory” who
had seen Oswald and Ruby together at the Carousel Club—a source Aynesworth was certain was the drunken lawyer Jarnagin. “I talked with him on the phone and he sounded like the real thing,” Lane said of his secret witness.

  Increasingly irritated, Aynesworth explained, point by point, how Lane was misstating the facts of the assassination and how he was misleading the public about the president’s death.

  “How do you know the truth?” Lane demanded.

  “How do I know?” Aynesworth asked. “I’ll tell you how I know. I know because I have their statements, I know exactly what the witnesses said on the day of the assassination, where they were, who they were, everything.”

  He was referring to a stack of classified witness statements taken by police officers on the day of the assassination; the statements had been leaked to Aynesworth, and he had taken them home for safekeeping. He grabbed them to show to Lane, whose eyes widened at the sight. “The only reason I’m showing you these,” Aynesworth said, “is that you made many, many misinterpretations in your article. If you are truly interested in giving Oswald a fair shake from a historical standpoint, I think you need to know what the investigation shows so far.”

  Lane asked if he could borrow the witness statements for a few days. “Will you help me find the truth?” he asked. “I have to go back to New York in a day or so, and I was wondering if I could borrow these statements.”

  Aynesworth agreed, a decision he would soon regret. Within days, he said, Lane would begin brandishing the witness statements at news conferences as proof that he had secret sources who, when their identities became public, could vindicate Oswald.

  “I was very naive,” Aynesworth said later. “I made mistakes. I helped create the monster of Mark Lane. There’s no doubt about it.”

  * * *

  Other, less talented reporters in Texas sought Aynesworth’s help in covering the aftermath of the assassination; he was considered a walking encyclopedia on the story. Among the most persistent was Alonzo “Lonnie” Hudkins of the Houston Post, who telephoned constantly. Whatever his failings as a reporter, Lonnie was the “nicest guy in the world,” Aynesworth said. “Everybody liked him. He wore a little Homburg hat.” Hudkins had made up his mind early on about the assassination. “He had decided it was a conspiracy, and he was going to set out to prove it.”

  For a time, Aynesworth put up with Hudkins’s calls for help. “I thought he’d go away eventually,” Aynesworth said. “And then I didn’t hear from him for a while.”

  Late in December, though, the calls resumed, and Aynesworth decided he would play a trick on his friend from Houston. Hudkins was pursuing a widely circulating rumor that Oswald had been an FBI informant, a rumor that Aynesworth found no evidence to support.

  “You hear anything about this FBI link with Oswald?” Hudkins asked.

  Mischievously, Aynesworth replied that he had heard the rumors, and they were true. Oswald, he said, was indeed on Hoover’s payroll. “You got his payroll number, don’t you?” he asked Hudkins in a tone that suggested it was a widely known piece of information.

  Aynesworth remembered that he reached, at random, for one of the telegrams on his desk—he was also filing assassination stories, by telegram, to Newsweek magazine and the Times of London—and read out a sequence of numbers from across the top.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s it,” Hudkins replied, apparently thinking he had bluffed Aynesworth into giving up a world-class scoop. “That’s the same one I got.”

  Aynesworth said he forgot about the telephone call—and his joke on Hudkins—until the Post ran a front-page story on January 1, 1964, alleging that Oswald may have worked for the FBI. The byline was Hudkins’s. The headline: “Oswald Rumored as Informant for U.S.”

  Only later would Aynesworth learn, to his astonishment, that his practical joke on a competitor created the Warren Commission’s first great crisis—and forever ruptured the commission’s relationship with the FBI.

  * * *

  If Aynesworth had a counterpart in Washington for early scoops about the assassination, it was the muckraker Drew Pearson, Chief Justice Warren’s friend.

  In his column for Monday, December 2—published just three days after the creation of the Warren Commission—Pearson lobbed out a bombshell for his millions of readers: six Secret Service agents who had been part of the squad protecting the president in Texas had, the night before the assassination, gone out drinking, a direct violation of the agency’s rules of conduct. Some of the agents remained out “boozing” until nearly three a.m., and “one of them was reported to have been inebriated,” Pearson reported. “Obviously men who have been drinking until nearly three a.m. are in no condition to be trigger-alert or in the best physical shape to protect anyone.”

  The column also targeted the FBI, which, Pearson reported, had failed to notify the Secret Service about the danger posed by Oswald, who had been under surveillance by the bureau’s office in Dallas for months. Pearson declared it outrageous that a man “who had professed Marxism and whose record showed a mixed-up, unsteady emotionalism, should not have been kept under careful watch on the day the president entered his city—one of the most lawless and intolerant cities in the United States.” Pearson blamed the FBI’s failure to alert the Secret Service to the bureau’s “long-standing jealousy” of the Secret Service as the protectors of the president. “They should stop squabbling over jurisdiction and headlines at least where the life of the president is concerned.”

  The column created a firestorm at the Secret Service—because the essence of what Pearson wrote was true. Several agents had in fact gone out drinking the night before the assassination, a fireable offense. The agency’s regulations barred agents from using alcohol at all times when traveling with the president. The director of the Secret Service, James Rowley, insisted later that he knew nothing about the drinking until he read Pearson’s column, and he immediately dispatched a deputy to Texas to investigate. In the meantime, Rowley decided, he would take no action, even tentatively, against the agents. Any move to discipline them might lead the public to “conclude that they were responsible for the assassination of the president—I didn’t think that was fair.”

  In his diary, Pearson disclosed that the information about the Secret Service agents had come to him from Thayer Waldo, a reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who apparently feared that his editors would never publish such a controversial story. “Thayer said he would lose his job if it were known that he had spilled this,” Pearson wrote.

  Later in December, Pearson again took aim at J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and his second column was even more scathing. He accused the FBI of a “cover-up” of what it had known about Oswald before the assassination. “The FBI neither kept Oswald under scrutiny when President Kennedy passed through Dallas, nor did it give his name to the Secret Service. These are some of the amazing facts about the preliminary probe of the Dallas tragedy which explain why the FBI wanted to get its version of the story out to the newspapers ahead of the study by the presidential commission.” Pearson accused the FBI of leaking copies of its four-hundred-page preliminary report on Oswald—the report that essentially exonerated the FBI of mishandling its investigation of Oswald before the assassination—to preempt the findings of Warren’s commission.

  The same column praised Pearson’s friend, the chief justice, and revealed the heavy pressure that President Johnson had used in the Oval Office to convince Warren to accept the job of running the commission; they were details that only Johnson and Warren should have known. Pearson did not identify Warren as his source for the column, but Hoover and his colleagues at the FBI would say later they had no doubt that the chief justice was leaking to Pearson. Warren, Pearson wrote, “was not about to let J. Edgar Hoover decide the facts in the tragedy of Dallas even before the presidential commission could start work.”

  15

  THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  JANUARY 1964

 
; By the time many of the newly hired staff members arrived in Washington, there was already an outline of what the commission’s final report would say. Before Christmas, Lee Rankin had asked Howard Willens to draw up the ten-page outline, and it was attached to the welcome-to-Washington memo that was given to each of the lawyers on his first day of work. The outline was crafted largely on the basis of the initial reports from the FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA and reflected the assumption that Oswald was the assassin and that his past, and his possible motives, would be the focus of the investigation. “We have an important job to do,” Rankin wrote in his memo. “I know you share my desire to accomplish it with thoroughness, imagination and speed.” The memo asked each of the five two-lawyer teams, plus Sam Stern, to prepare a summary of the facts already known in their parts of the investigation and to suggest what needed to be done.

  Rankin admitted in his memo that the offices were “in disarray,” with stacks of additional classified documents pouring in almost by the hour. He promised to bring some order to it. The commission, he said, had begun recruiting secretaries from around the federal government, as well as an archivist who would run a file room. He said the commission was also seeking assistance from a psychiatrist, the recently retired superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, the capital’s large public psychiatric hospital, to offer perspective on the mental states of Oswald and Ruby. The commission would also hire a historian to help draft the final report.

  The memo made clear the central role of Norman Redlich, whose office was the clearinghouse for all documents and evidence. He had also taken on the responsibility of preparing for the testimony of Marina Oswald, who was expected to be the first witness when the commissioners began taking testimony in February. The commission had already received extensive background information from the FBI on Oswald’s widow, and it was now waiting for a detailed report from the bureau on Ruth and Michael Paine. It had also sought a full FBI background check on George de Mohrenschildt, an eccentric, Russian-born petroleum engineer who had befriended the Oswalds in Dallas.