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

by Philip Shenon

  Rankin’s memo asked that all staff lawyers attend a screening later that month of the film taken in Dealey Plaza by the Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder. Most of the lawyers had seen only the individual frames published in Life magazine, so it would be their first chance to see Zapruder’s full, grisly film.

  * * *

  The seven commissioners convened again on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 21. It had been more than a month since their last meeting, and it was their first in the new offices in the VFW building.

  Warren opened the session with a progress report on the hiring of the staff lawyers; he also described the assignment of two Internal Revenue Service agents to the commission who would “trace every dollar that we can in the possession of Oswald and every dollar that he spent, because we don’t know where his money came from.”

  Gerald Ford said he was pleased to hear that the commission had hired one of his former Michigan constituents, David Slawson of Grand Rapids. “His father,” Ford declared, “is a fine lawyer in my home town.” Warren said he had not yet met Slawson, but reported that he had been approached at lunch at the court that day by Justice Byron White with congratulations. “White came up to me and said, ‘You took one of the finest young men in Colorado from my old firm.’”

  John McCloy asked about Slawson’s partner on the staff, William Coleman: “Is he the colored fellow?” Warren said nothing about Coleman’s race, simply replying that Coleman was “a tremendous lawyer” and that the commission was lucky to have him.

  The chief justice then turned to the issue that seemed never far from his thoughts—when to end the investigation. “It is not too early for us to start thinking about when we anticipate quitting,” he said. “If this should go along too far and get into the middle of a campaign year that would be very bad for the country.” As he had already told the staff, he said he wanted to set a June 1 deadline. “Things can drag on if you don’t have a target date.”

  One problem, he acknowledged, was Ruby’s impending trial. The commissioners agreed that an intensive on-the-ground investigation in Dallas would have to wait until after the trial was over. Warren feared the presence of the commission’s staff in Dallas might interfere with Ruby’s defense.

  For related reasons, he said he wanted to bring Marina Oswald to testify before the commission in Washington rather than in Dallas, where the presence of the commissioners might create a media circus that would intimidate the young widow. She could be better protected in Washington, he said. He asked Russell, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, if he could arrange a military plane to bring “that little woman with her babies” to Washington. If she took a commercial flight, “she will be subjected to flashbulbs and everything, and she will be embarrassed and maybe she will be hostile.” Warren’s feelings toward the young widow—long before he had met her—had become almost paternal. Russell, who wielded more power at the Pentagon than most four-star generals, said there would not be “the slightest difficulty” in arranging a military jet.

  Marina Oswald was swiftly emerging as the key witness against her dead husband; in interviews with the FBI and the Dallas police, she had left little doubt that she believed her husband had killed the president and that he had acted alone. It was a story she had begun to sell to news organizations, a situation that did not seem to bother Warren; he suggested she had had no other obvious way to support herself. She had already sold magazines a fifty-page handwritten summary of her life; it was being translated from Russian to English. “Her attorney is apparently cooperating very well with us,” the chief justice told the other commissioners. “She intends to sell her story to one of the magazines, but we got him to agree to send the story to us, and let us see it and let us examine her before the thing goes to the printer.”

  Rankin suggested that Marina’s credibility with the commission had grown because of her refusal to work with Mark Lane, who had approached her in Texas in hopes of representing Oswald’s legal interests. “She didn’t want any part of him,” Rankin said. The commissioners knew they would still have to deal with Lane, though, since by then he had announced that he was representing Oswald’s mother.

  * * *

  When Rankin joined the commission, he believed he could work well with J. Edgar Hoover. He still respected the FBI director, despite all the vicious criticism directed at Hoover by Rankin’s growing circle of liberal friends in his new home in New York. Hoover liked Rankin, too. He told aides in December he welcomed the news that Rankin had been hired as the commission’s general counsel. Hoover said he had “the closest and most amiable working relationship with Mr. Rankin during the Eisenhower administration.”

  Rankin understood from the start why the FBI would be anxious about the commission’s investigation, and he suspected that the bureau might delay turning over witness statements or evidence that might somehow reflect badly on the FBI’s performance; Hoover would probably want to review that material personally before it was turned over. Even so, Rankin said, he joined the commission believing that Hoover and his deputies would never engage in any sort of cover-up. “I never believed he would withhold information or have it withheld,” Rankin said later. “I thought the FBI would never lie about anything.”

  It took only weeks for Rankin to realize just how wrong he had been. “To have them just lie to us,” he said later, angrily, of the FBI. “I never anticipated that.”

  The relationship between the commission and the FBI began to sour in December with the bureau’s apparently well-orchestrated leaks of its initial report on Oswald. After that, Rankin said, the commissioners took a more skeptical view of the FBI and decided that “we had to be careful about anything that they gave us.”

  The relationship was damaged much more seriously on Wednesday, January 22, when the phone rang in Rankin’s office shortly after eleven a.m. The caller was the state attorney general of Texas, Waggoner Carr. Rankin remembered the excitement in Carr’s voice. “He said he thought he had some information that he should get to us immediately,” Rankin said later. “Carr said that he had received information from a confidential source that Lee Harvey Oswald was an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and had been paid $200 a month by the FBI since September 1962.”

  Carr told Rankin that Oswald had an FBI informant number—179—and was apparently still in the pay of the FBI in November; indeed, he was supposedly working with an FBI agent in the Dallas office on the day of the assassination. “Carr indicated that this allegation was in the hands of the press and defense counsel for Ruby” and that its source appeared to be the office of Dallas district attorney Henry Wade.

  Carr sounded as if he knew what he was talking about, Rankin remembered. If the allegation proved to be true, the FBI was engaged in a massive cover-up of its relationship with the man who had killed the president. Rankin recalled years later that the question raced through his mind: Was it possible that someone at the FBI knew of Oswald’s plans for the assassination and could have stopped him?

  He immediately called Warren, who shared his alarm. They agreed that Carr and Wade should be summoned to Washington as quickly as possible. The chief justice called an emergency meeting of the commission for five thirty that afternoon.

  Ahead of the meeting, Rankin spoke to Carr again. “He told me the source of the information was a member of the press” whose name he did not know. “He said he was trying to check it out to get more definite information.”

  Ford was in a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee when he got a message that he was needed urgently at the commission’s offices on Capitol Hill. He tried to imagine what the emergency might be. When he walked into the offices that afternoon, he said, the tension in the conference room was overwhelming. In all his years in Washington, “I cannot recall attending a meeting more tense and hushed,” Ford said later. The commissioners took their seats around the eight-foot oblong table, and Warren somberly asked Rankin to give a summary of wh
at he had heard that morning. Ford said he and the other commissioners listened with “amazement” to Rankin’s account of how the president’s assassin might have worked for the FBI.

  The troubling news from Dallas came at a time when Ford, despite his relationship with the FBI, was already beginning to have private doubts about the bureau’s conduct of the investigation. These new rumors about Oswald only added to his suspicion that Oswald had been some sort of government agent—for the CIA, if not the FBI, despite the agencies’ adamant denials. Ford had closely read through the biographical material about Oswald, and he was struck in particular by how much exotic foreign travel he had completed before he died at the age of twenty-four—Japan and the Philippines when he was in the Marine Corps, then Europe and his nearly three years in the Soviet Union, and then Mexico briefly that fall. To Ford, “it sounded more like the journeys of a well-heeled globetrotter than the restricted life of a sometimes employed laborer without a skill.” Could they be the journeys of a young secret agent? Ford kept this speculation to himself at the time, but he wondered whether Oswald’s supposed defection to Russia was in fact a ploy by handlers at the CIA or the FBI to allow him to spy on the Soviet Union. And had Oswald then returned home to begin spying on leftists who were part of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee? “Perhaps he was a CIA agent, trained by the FBI, who had then been used to penetrate Fair Play for Cuba,” Ford recalled thinking to himself. “He could have made a perfect counteragent to spy on Castro’s supporters.”

  Others at the meeting scoffed at the suggestion that Oswald could have been anyone’s spy. Allen Dulles said he doubted the FBI would ever consider working with someone like Oswald, given his emotional instability. “You wouldn’t pick up a fellow like this to do an agent’s job,” he explained. “What was the ostensible mission?” he asked. “Was it to penetrate the Fair Play for Cuba Committee? That is the only thing I can think of where they might have used this man.”

  Rankin told the commissioners he had begun to fear it would be impossible to find the truth. If Oswald had been an FBI informant, he said, the bureau might simply deny it. Perhaps that explained why the FBI had been so eager to label Oswald as the sole assassin—it wanted to shut down the commission’s investigation before it uncovered evidence that would damage or destroy the bureau. “They found their man,” Rankin said, his skepticism about the bureau’s credibility now on full display. “There is nothing more to do. The commission supports their conclusions, and we can go home and that is the end of it.”

  Rankin said he and Warren agreed on the danger posed to the commission’s work if the allegations, true or false, became public: “You would have people think there was a conspiracy to accomplish this assassination that nothing the commission did—or anybody—could dissipate.”

  “You are so right,” Hale Boggs said. “The implications of this are fantastic.” The implications were “terrible,” Dulles agreed. At about that moment some of the commissioners realized to their alarm that their words, including their speculation about a possible FBI cover-up, were being recorded. “I don’t even like to see this being taken down,” Boggs said, nodding to the stenographer at the table.

  Dulles agreed: “Yes, I think this record ought to be destroyed. Do you think we need a record of this?”

  Rankin noted that the commission, in a spirit of transparency, had promised to keep records of its meetings. If that was the case, Dulles insisted, the transcripts should never be allowed to leave the commission’s offices. “The only copies of this record should be kept right here.”

  The commissioners adjourned for the day, agreeing there was nothing more to be done until Warren and Rankin met with the Texas officials.

  * * *

  On Friday, January 24, the delegation from Texas, including Attorney General Carr and Dallas District Attorney Wade, arrived in Washington to meet with the chief justice and Rankin. The Texans warned them that the Oswald rumor was spreading quickly in Dallas, and the details—the $200-a-month payment, the FBI informant number—were surprisingly consistent. Wade said he had also heard allegations that Oswald was an informant for the CIA. Carr and Wade declared that several reporters in Texas knew about the rumors and were spreading them, although they named only one: Lonnie Hudkins of the Houston Post. Now even more alarmed, Warren called a meeting of the commission for the following Monday.

  Over the weekend, the possible ties between Oswald and the FBI had become national news, with the reports of major newspapers and magazines feeding off each other. The New York Times reported the rumors, noting the FBI’s flat denial of any connection to Oswald. The Nation ran a detailed article listing unanswered questions about Oswald, including his possible relationship with the FBI; the article cited the reports by Hudkins in the Houston Post. Time magazine was also pursuing the story; McCloy had been called by the magazine for comment.

  At the meeting on Monday, Rankin said gravely that the commission needed to decide how to confront the rumors, which meant deciding how to confront Hoover. “We do have a dirty rumor that is very bad for the commission,” Rankin said. “It must be wiped out insofar as it is possible to do so.”

  Warren and Rankin had considered asking Robert Kennedy, as Hoover’s superior in the chain of command at the Justice Department, to intervene. But the attorney general seemed intimidated by Hoover as well. The word of Kennedy’s reluctance to confront the FBI director came from Willens, who continued to answer to the department. He reported to Warren and Rankin that Kennedy would be uncomfortable asking Hoover about the rumors because “such a request might be embarrassing” and make it “very much more difficult for him to carry on the work of the department for the balance of his term.”

  Rankin suggested there were two options. One, he could meet Hoover privately as the commission’s representative. “I would be frank and tell him” that the FBI had to conduct an internal investigation of the rumors and that Hoover needed to provide the commission with “whatever records and materials they have that it just couldn’t possibly be true.” Rankin said that “a simple statement by Hoover” that the rumors were false would not be enough. The alternative, he said, was for the commission to investigate the rumor itself, before confronting Hoover. They would begin by interviewing Hudkins, the Houston reporter, and then question FBI officials “right up the line” to the director.

  The chief justice said he preferred the second option. “My own judgment is that the most fair thing to do would be to try to find out if this is fact or fiction” before a showdown with the FBI director.

  Boggs realized the commissioners had an expert in their midst on the subject of government informants: Dulles, who had spent his career at the CIA dealing with information from secret sources. Boggs turned to the former spymaster and asked if the CIA had sources who were so well protected that there was no paper trail at all to show they worked for the agency. “Do you have agents about whom you had no record whatsoever?”

  “The record might not be on paper,” said Dulles, explaining that the commissioners simply had to accept that Oswald could have been an FBI informant, that the bureau might lie and deny it, and that there would be no way to establish the truth. At the CIA, he said, he had always been prepared to lie himself, even to cabinet officers, to protect a valuable source. As the nation’s top spy, he owed the full truth only to the president. “I am under his control,” Dulles said. “He is my boss. I wouldn’t necessarily tell anyone else, unless the president authorized me to do it. We had that come up at times.”

  Hoover, he said, might now feel he was in a similar position. “You can’t prove what the facts are,” Dulles continued. The commission, he suggested, had no choice but to accept Hoover’s word. “I would believe Mr. Hoover. Some people might not.”

  Even in the supposed privacy of the commission’s conference room, Russell seemed to realize that he needed to choose his words carefully when it came to the FBI director. “There is no man in the employ of the federal government who stands h
igher in the opinion of the American people than J. Edgar Hoover,” he began, as if to protect himself should the transcript of the meeting ever become public. But he agreed with Warren and others that the commission had to conduct its own investigation of the rumors. “We can get an affidavit from Mr. Hoover and put it in this record,” he said. But the commission risked a harsh verdict from history if it relied simply on that. “There still would be thousands of doubting Thomases who would believe” that Hoover was lying and that the commission missed its chance “to clear it up.”

  Rankin acknowledged his concern about how Hoover would react; the director might believe “we are really investigating him.”

  Warren: “If you tell him we are going down there to do it, we are investigating him, aren’t we?”

  Rankin: “I think it is inherent.”

  The discussion left the commissioners struggling directly, for the first time, with the question of whether they could trust the FBI to conduct so much of the commission’s essential detective work, given the bureau’s determination to prove that Oswald had acted alone.

  “They have decided that it is Oswald who committed the assassination, they have decided that no one else was involved,” Rankin said.

  Russell: “They have tried the case and reached the verdict on every aspect.”

  Boggs: “You have put your finger on it.”

  Warren now supported sending Rankin in to confront Hoover directly. He outlined what he expected Rankin to do: “Go to Mr. Hoover and say, ‘Mr. Hoover, as you know, there are rumors that persist in and around Dallas, and it is getting into the national press, to the effect that Oswald was an undercover FBI agent.’” Rankin, he said, would ask for a vow from Hoover that “you will give us all the information that you have which will enable us to ferret this thing out—to the very limit.” The commission voted unanimously to dispatch Rankin to talk to Hoover the next day.