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

by Philip Shenon

  As he had expected, Stern had little contact with the chief justice at the commission. From a distance, though, he became concerned about Warren’s health. He would catch a glimpse of the chief justice in the commission’s offices at the VFW building and “he was sick, rheumy,” Stern remembered. “I was worried.” He could see how Warren’s dual roles at the court and on the commission had begun to take a physical toll, even as the chief justice continued to appear in the commission’s offices each morning like clockwork, before walking down the street and pulling on his black robes to begin a full day at the court.

  25

  THE OFFICES OF REPRESENTATIVE GERALD R. FORD

  THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

  WASHINGTON, DC

  MARCH 1964

  Gerald Ford wanted to get tough on Marina Oswald. Certainly Ford was being encouraged by his political advisers and by some hawkish anti-Communists on his staff not to rule out a conspiracy involving the Soviet Union or Cuba, and the many lies of Oswald’s widow raised new concerns that she was hiding evidence of a plot. He knew that some of the commission’s investigators suspected that Marina might, in fact, be a sleeper agent for Moscow. Perhaps she didn’t actually know about her husband’s plans to kill Kennedy, but she might have been sent to the United States to provide cover and support for Oswald while he carried out whatever secret plan the Kremlin had devised for him. That would explain why they had married so quickly after meeting and why they had been allowed to leave Russia.

  In March, Ford wrote to Rankin to recommend that Oswald’s widow be questioned again, this time connected to a polygraph machine in hopes that she would be intimidated into finally telling the full truth. “A polygraph test for her on a voluntary basis would go a long way in satisfying the public’s interest in the whole matter,” Ford wrote. “We already know that she did not ‘volunteer’ a number of matters which have since come up.… Perhaps she is not ‘volunteering’ all she knows about Lee Oswald’s schools, activities and relationships with the Soviets.” Like several of the staff lawyers, he was worried that the commission did not know the truth about the reasons for Oswald’s visit to Mexico City—but that Marina did. “She appears to know something more about the Mexico visit than she told us.” He recommended that other witnesses be polygraphed “where there appears from the record certain inconsistencies or a failure to be completely frank.”

  Ford continued to chafe under Warren’s leadership of the commission. The chief justice was never impolite with Ford and the other commissioners, but he was “brusque,” never treating them as equals, Ford said. “He made a number of decisions that, at least in the original few months, were unilateral.” Warren “delegated too much power to himself” and “there was no deviation from his schedule and his scenario.” A star football player at the University of Michigan in the 1930s, Ford used a football analogy to describe the chief justice: “He treated us as though we were on the team, but he was the captain and the quarterback.”

  Whatever their differences, the chief justice had to admit that Ford was among the most diligent members of the commission, perhaps the most hardworking apart from Warren himself. Senator Russell had essentially disappeared from the investigation, and the other two lawmakers—Senator Cooper and Representative Boggs—had spotty attendance records. Ford, however, made a point of being present to hear the testimony of almost all important witnesses. His questions were consistently well thought-out and reflected his close reading of the evidence.

  He had assembled a team of outside advisers to help him prepare those questions, a fact that Ford’s records suggest he never shared with the commission. The chief justice and the other commissioners might well have been disturbed to learn that Ford allowed a group of friends and advisers—some without security clearances—to read sensitive documents from the commission’s files.

  Ford asked three men, in particular, to back him up. John Stiles, one of his oldest friends from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and his campaign manager in his first race for the House in 1948, tracked the commission’s work on a day-to-day basis, preparing long lists of questions for Ford to ask witnesses. Ford also asked for help from former Republican congressman John Ray of New York, a Harvard-trained lawyer who had chosen to step down from his House seat the year before. Later, he recruited a young constituent from Grand Rapids who was then a student at Harvard Law School, Francis Fallon, to review the evidence.

  Ford shared commission documents with his three advisers almost as soon as the material landed on his desk in his House office. When the commission’s lawyers traveled to Dallas after Ruby’s trial and started taking witness depositions there, Ford asked that copies of all the transcripts be shipped to his office “in order for me to keep fully abreast of the developments.” He then shared the depositions with his trio of advisers.

  The memos to Ford from his advisers were often not signed or initialed, suggesting how close he was to them. He took their advice seriously, often converting their memos wholesale into letters that he sent under his own name on congressional stationery to Rankin, with long lists of tasks for the commission’s staff. In March, Ford passed to Rankin a list of scores of detailed questions that he wanted asked of witnesses who were at Dealey Plaza and at the scene of Officer Tippit’s murder.

  Ford’s advisers also prepared lists of follow-up questions for the staff, prompted by witness testimony. After Mark Lane appeared before the commission in March, Ford was provided with a three-page list of all of Lane’s cover-up allegations, taken page by page from a transcript of Lane’s testimony. Next to each allegation was a box for Ford and his staff to check if Lane’s facts could be verified. (A copy of the checklist maintained in Ford’s files showed that not a single box had been checked.)

  Ford also sought expert advice from House colleagues who were doctors or had other medical training, and who could give him some perspective on the hospital records from Dallas and on the autopsy report. Representative James D. Weaver of Pennsylvania, a retired air force surgeon who had begun a second career in Republican politics, reviewed the medical evidence at Ford’s request and wrote back to say that given Kennedy’s massive head wounds, “there was nothing that could have been done in any way that would have saved the life of the late president.” He also shared with Ford, politician to politician, why he thought there had been so much confusion about the medical evidence—why the Parkland doctors, for example, had initially suggested that an exit wound in Kennedy’s throat might have been an entrance wound. The doctors had faced “harassment” by irresponsible reporters—“press or alleged press,” as Weaver put it—to say things they did not intend to say.

  The memos from Stiles and Ford’s other advisers reflected their consistent worry that the commission was overlooking evidence of a conspiracy. A memo to Ford dated March 17 warned that Chief Justice Warren might “arbitrarily rule out the possibility of the assassination involving a conspiracy—and particularly one which has international implications or involves a foreign power.” Stiles reminded Ford of the disturbing news reports from Cuba in the weeks before the assassination, including the wire service interview with Castro in September in which Castro seemed to threaten Kennedy’s life. The memo noted the continuing mysteries over Mexico: “Has the commission been able to account for all of the time spent by Oswald in Mexico City?”

  * * *

  All winter, Ford continued to be swamped with letters from House Republican colleagues, and from conservative constituents, demanding that Norman Redlich be fired from the commission’s staff. “How did it happen that this goat was sent to guard the cabbage patch?” Representative Richard Poff, a Virginia Republican, asked Ford in a letter. A Texas doctor wrote in with a threat to make political trouble for Ford among voters back home in Michigan: “As a member of Congress, don’t tell me you can’t do anything about Pro Commies in the Warren Commission like Redlich. If you don’t expose them and remove them, we will let the Michigan press know.”

  On April 3, Ranki
n wrote to Ford to bring his attention to a provocative article that Redlich had written eleven years earlier for the Nation. The article, an attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy, argued in support of the right of witnesses appearing before McCarthy to cite their Fifth Amendment rights to silence. Rankin’s belated discovery of the article, headlined “Does Silence Mean Guilt?,” was just more evidence for Ford of why Redlich should never have been hired. McCarthy might have died in disgrace in 1957, but there were still members of Congress, including friends of Ford’s, who quietly cheered at the mention of his name.

  It had not been announced publicly, but Ford and the other commissioners knew the FBI was quietly conducting a new, intensive background investigation on Redlich in response to the public attacks. Ford wrote Rankin in April to say that the belated discovery of the Nation article was proof of why the FBI investigation “should be expedited to the maximum” and “I believe the full commission should meet to discuss the situation and take whatever action appears appropriate.” In a separate letter to Rankin on April 24, Ford passed along a copy of an editorial from the Richmond Times Herald, the influential, archconservative Virginia newspaper, with the headline, “Who Hired Redlich?” The editorial said that the “apparent close affinity of Communist front-ers with a key member of the investigation does not inspire confidence in the Warren Commission.”

  Ray, the former congressman advising Ford, speculated that Redlich might somehow be connected to Mark Lane and other left-wing conspiracy theorists. He prepared a handwritten chart to see if he could determine if Redlich and Lane had been members of the same “Communist Fronts,” as Ray labeled them—left-wing civil rights and civil liberties groups that the FBI listed as subversive. Down the left-hand column, he listed groups that both Redlich and Lane had been affiliated with, including the New York–based Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Next to each group, he put the years of Redlich’s and Lane’s affiliations, as best as Ray could determine it. Ray wrote Ford to say that he dropped the inquiry after determining “there is less overlapping than I had expected to find.” Under “Communist Party Membership,” Ray wrote—for both Redlich and Lane—“No evidence.”

  An unsigned staff memo to Ford in April outlined ways that the commission could force out Redlich. The author admitted that Redlich’s position on the commission was not actually “dangerous” to its work. “He is not in a position to be that important, nor is there any reason in his work thus far to find fault,” the memo said. “However, the fact that he remains on the commission will be—and has been—criticized.” The memo urged that Redlich not be fired outright, since that might create public confusion and lead some people to assume there was “even more basis for ‘plot’ theories” about the assassination. Instead, Redlich could be kept on the payroll “but simply excluded in the future from the important work of the commission.” He should be moved to a “harmless job” and, to limit his grounds to protest, allowed to keep his salary.

  Prominent conservatives around the country saw Ford as their voice on the commission, and they considered him their best defender against the persistent rumors, especially in Europe, that right-wing groups had a role in the assassination. Articles in left-wing newspapers and magazines in Europe often mentioned H. L. Hunt, the ultraconservative Dallas oil magnate, as a potential paymaster for the murder plot. One of Hunt’s sons had helped pay for the black-bordered ad published in the Dallas Morning News on the morning of the assassination that accused Kennedy of abandoning anti-Castro guerrillas in Cuba. Kennedy, the ad said, had adopted the “Spirit of Moscow.” Radio scripts prepared by a far-right Hunt-backed group, Life Line, were found in Jack Ruby’s car on the day of the assassination.*

  In January, Ford’s Washington office received a cryptic letter from Hunt in which the oilman questioned whether Ford and Senator Russell had become unwitting tools of a larger left-wing conspiracy to hide the truth about Kennedy’s murder. “I know of many favorable things about you, but do not know the extent of your awareness of the conspiracy,” Hunt wrote, without explaining what the conspiracy was. “It may be that you and Senator Russell are only being used on the commission to investigate the assassination to lend prestige and respectability to others in public life who are considered by many astute anti-Communists to be pro-Socialist or pro-Communist.” Hunt enclosed several copies of recent Life Line newsletters that he said might be helpful to Ford in pursuing “the cause of Freedom.”

  Word of Ford’s behind-the-scenes attacks on Redlich began to circulate among the other young lawyers on the staff, and they worried that Ford might actually try to oust Redlich from the investigation. “When I heard about this, I thought it was absurd,” said Alfred Goldberg, the air force historian. “I thought it was a pure political ploy by Ford.” The attacks had begun to poison Ford’s reputation among Redlich’s friends on the staff. Many said later that they had assumed the Michigan congressman was trying to use the commission as a stepping-stone to greater power in the House; they feared that Redlich was about to become a victim of Ford’s ambition.

  * * *

  In his hard work on the commission, Ford may have been motivated by something other than pure public service. He and his old friend Stiles had quietly decided to write a book about the investigation—the “inside story” of the commission—and they thought it had the potential to be a bestseller. They intended to publish the book as quickly as possible after the commission issued its final report, possibly within weeks of the report’s release. That spring, they went in search of a book agent in New York, and a publisher. Warren and several other commissioners said later that they had known nothing about the book project until the final weeks of the investigation. The chief justice told friends he considered Ford’s book an appalling betrayal, creating the appearance that Ford was going to profit from a national tragedy. “Warren was still angry about it many, many years later,” recalled Alfred Goldberg, who became close to the chief justice after the investigation. “It certainly added to his distaste for Ford.” Goldberg said the chief justice felt that Ford was “simply untrustworthy—he had contempt for Ford.”

  26

  THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  MARCH 1964

  David Belin could not help himself. It was a clear violation of the commission’s rules, which barred the staff from discussing the details of the investigation with outsiders, but he felt he had to tell friends back in Iowa about his great, history-making adventure in Washington. He sent home regular updates about the commission’s work in a series of open letters to his partners at the Des Moines law firm of Herrick, Langdon, Sandblom & Belin.

  Belin, thirty-five years old and a proud native of the Cornbelt, liked to refer to himself as a “country lawyer,” albeit one who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the law school at the University of Michigan. He could have had his pick of jobs at prestigious law firms in Chicago or at one of the big car companies in Detroit, but Iowa was his home and he returned there to begin his law career.

  In January 1964, though, the “country lawyer” found himself transplanted to the nation’s capital—a city he thought had been made so glamorous by John Kennedy—and called upon to work with Chief Justice Earl Warren, one of Belin’s heroes, to resolve the mysteries surrounding Kennedy’s death. Despite the horrible event that had prompted the investigation, he was exhilarated. It was one thing to be celebrated back in Iowa for one’s accomplishments; it was another to achieve that sort of recognition in Washington.

  His first letter to the firm went out in late January, just days after he arrived in Washington. “First, a big ‘hello’ to everyone at HLS&B!” he began. While he might be known back at the firm in Des Moines for a desk covered with stacks of clients’ paperwork, “I have had to somewhat alter my habits here in Washington, because the material which we are going over has been labeled ‘Top Secret’ and we have a safe in each office where we have to lock everything up at night.” His senior partner on the commission
’s staff, Joe Ball, was surprised by how little of what they were reading deserved to be classified at all, Belin wrote. “He cannot understand why this material is labeled ‘Top Secret,’ and as to most of it, I tend to agree.” Both men were getting an education in the tendency of self-important federal bureaucrats, especially at the FBI and CIA, to pretend that routine information was somehow secret.

  It was a thrill to work for Warren, Belin said. The chief justice has been “extremely personable,” and Belin was excited when Warren recognized him on the street and “immediately smiled at me and said ‘Hello.’” At the first staff meeting in January, Belin wrote, Warren spoke darkly of the “rampant rumors in countries around the world” about whether there had been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. “According to Warren, President Johnson said the situation could become such a tinderbox that it could conceivably lead to war with all of the ramifications of atomic destruction.” Belin knew how tantalizing this would be to his colleagues back home—how excited they would be to hear what was happening behind the closed doors of the assassination commission in faraway Washington. And his letters were the talk of the firm for days after they arrived.

  Belin had always known how to satisfy an audience. Raised in a music-loving home in Sioux City, he was a violin prodigy who was so talented that he won admission to New York’s Juilliard School of Music. His family had little money, however, and he bypassed Juilliard to join the army; he planned to take advantage of the GI Bill to pay for college later. He brought his violin with him and performed at military hospitals in the Far East and on armed forces radio; for the radio performances, he always preferred compositions by Dvořák, which he thought he played particularly well.

  Another letter to Des Moines followed on February 11. As an Iowan, he mocked the inability of the city government in Washington to plow the streets after what was, by the standards of the Hawkeye State, a mild dusting: “Washington is completely disorganized today, for overnight there has been three inches of snow.” He then went on to share details of the recent closed-door testimony by Oswald’s mother. “One of the more cynical of the lawyers here has suggested that Marguerite be nominated for ‘Mother of the Year’ in light of her great protestations in defense of her offspring,” he wrote, adding that Warren had demonstrated remarkable patience in sitting and listening to her babble. “If some of us had gambling instincts, which of course I do not, we would start a pool in an effort to determine how long the Chief Justice will sit back and listen to all of the irrelevancies that are coming forth.”