The main topic of the lunch conversation was the troubled Kennedy marriage. “We recalled the flagrant way in which Kennedy had played around with other women” and how Mrs. Kennedy had traveled to Greece earlier that year and spent time on the yacht of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis “chiefly to spite her husband.” Pearson noted that Onassis was in Washington for the funeral and was expected to spend time with Mrs. Kennedy’s sister, Lee Radziwill, who had a well-publicized romance with Onassis that summer as she prepared to divorce her husband. “It will be interesting to see whether the Radziwill divorce and remarriage to Onassis now comes off,” Pearson wrote.
The columnist had lunch four days later with an influential Washington lawyer, Joe Borkin, who warned that “the tide has begun to turn against Jackie on several points,” especially after the disclosure that Mrs. Kennedy had insisted on many of the most dramatic flourishes of her husband’s funeral service and burial, including the open-air procession in which President Johnson, French president Charles de Gaulle, and other world leaders had marched down Connecticut Avenue. The event had created a panic at the Secret Service; Johnson admitted to friends that he worried that he would be assassinated by a gunman in the crowd. “She demanded that the heads of state march behind the body in the funeral, which could have meant a heart attack for Lyndon, pneumonia for De Gaulle and risked the lives of the free world chiefs if an assassin had wanted to risk his own life,” according to Pearson’s diary.
Borkin told Pearson there were growing behind-the-scenes attacks on Mrs. Kennedy over her plans to install a gas line at the Arlington National Cemetery for a so-called eternal flame to mark the president’s gravesite. The move was seen as presumptuous. “There’s only one other eternal light in front of a grave, and that’s at the Paris tomb of the unknown soldier,” Pearson noted in his diary. “Some people think that Kennedy doesn’t really rate this yet.”
Several news accounts in the days after the funeral described Mrs. Kennedy’s effort to persuade President Johnson to rename the national space center in Florida for her husband—Cape Kennedy, instead of Cape Canaveral—and to put the Kennedy name on the new national cultural center that was being built on the Potomac River. “Lincoln didn’t get a memorial for about 75 years and Teddy Roosevelt and FDR still don’t have a memorial,” Pearson wrote after the lunch with Borkin. “Yet already they want to name the Cultural Center the Kennedy Center.”
In the weeks after the assassination, Pearson noted, there were uglier attacks on Mrs. Kennedy over her repeated, well-publicized visits to the Arlington cemetery, as if her displays of devotion were an attempt to rewrite the story of her marriage. “The ladies seem to think that Jackie’s five visits to the grave were too much and also there has been a lot of comment about the fact that Bobby Kennedy, her brother-in-law, accompanied her on some of these trips,” Pearson wrote in his diary.
Pearson knew that some of the venom being directed at Mrs. Kennedy came from people who were supposedly her most devoted friends, including Marie Harriman, the wife of former New York State governor and Democratic kingmaker Averell Harriman. The Harrimans had volunteered to move out of their palatial home in Georgetown temporarily to allow Mrs. Kennedy and her children to move in while they searched for a home of their own. But as Mrs. Harriman was packing up her things to move into a nearby inn to make way for the Kennedys, she called Pearson’s wife, Luvie, to say she “regretted having given up her house to Jackie.” According to Pearson’s diary, Mrs. Harriman “talked to Luvie on the telephone today, complaining that she was now cleaning out her drawers, putting away her toilet articles and preparing to move to the Georgetown Inn, where, she said, the food is terrible.… Marie is wondering why Jackie couldn’t have gone down to Virginia for one month of mourning and then come back and found a house for herself. But no, Jackie likes Georgetown and has to stay there.”
Pearson was certainly not above trading in gossip about Mrs. Kennedy in his column. On December 10, he reported that a White House doctor had medicated Mrs. Kennedy and her children to help them get through the funeral. “TV viewers of the Kennedy funeral were impressed with the manner in which the president’s widow stuck close to her brothers-in-law,” the column said. “This was no accident. The doctor had dosed Jackie with tranquilizers and asked the two brothers to stay by her side in case she faltered. Caroline and John Jr. got children’s tranquilizers in case they got too frisky.”
The column produced an angry denial from Mrs. Kennedy through a friend, Washington socialite Florence Mahoney, “who telephoned me to say that Jackie Kennedy was very upset,” Pearson wrote. “Florence says that Jackie claims it isn’t true and was quite emotional about it.” He admitted in his diary that he regretted publishing the item, at least in the form it had appeared. The story, he said, had come from Jack Anderson, his junior reporting partner. “I wish I had used better judgment in editing it,” Pearson said. “I called Jack Anderson who had written the item and who swears it is true. I am not sure.” The item also angered Robert Kennedy, who canceled a scheduled interview. Kennedy’s spokesman, Ed Guthman, “telephoned me on behalf of Bobby Kennedy to say that he was sore at me and would not see me,” Pearson said.
* * *
Under his contract with the publisher Harper & Row, William Manchester had three years to finish his book. He worried from the start, he said, that he could not get it done on time. By comparison, then, the deadlines facing the staff of the Warren Commission were brutal. There was constant pressure on the staff from the chief justice to get their work done. Warren always felt that the investigation was “taking too damn long,” said Alfred Goldberg. “The commissioners all wanted to get back to their jobs. Warren wanted to get back to the court.”
In April, Rankin asked Goldberg to prepare a final outline for the report, as well as a memo recommending a uniform writing style for the staff. He also wanted Goldberg to draft a brief introduction to the report that would establish its tone and purpose.
In his style memo, Goldberg recommended that the report be written for the general public: “It should aim to achieve the maximum of clarity and coherence through the use of simple, straightforward language.” Much of the report, he thought, should take the form of a narrative—a well-documented chronology of the assassination and its aftermath. The report might well be hundreds of pages long, “and it seems to me that it is too much to expect the reading public, not all of whom will be lawyers, or even historians, to grope for the thread of a narrative through 500 pages of what will be chiefly analysis.”
Goldberg had known since his Baltimore childhood that serious history was best presented as a compelling story, albeit with a rigorous adherence to the facts. His career as a historian was born, he said, in the pages of the books of G. A. Henty, the prolific nineteenth-century British novelist who wrote more than a hundred adventure stories for children that “covered the whole history of the world,” beginning with Ancient Egypt. By the time he was twelve, he figured, “I’d probably read 50 or 60 of them.”
He recommended to Rankin that the commission’s report include a special section on “theories and rumors” to respond to the many conspiracy theories being spread by Mark Lane and others. “This part should demonstrate that the Commission was fully aware of these questions and took due notice of them,” Goldberg said, cautioning, however, that the “rumors” chapter should be brief. “To explore these questions in detail would give them much more than their due.”
On March 16, he provided Rankin with his first draft of an introduction:
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, shocked and grieved the people of the United States and, indeed, most of the peoples of the world. Within a few hours of the deed the Dallas police arrested and subsequently charged as the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who had in the interim allegedly shot and killed Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit. On the morning, of November 24, 1963, Oswald was himself shot and fatally wounded while in the custody
of the police in the Dallas police station. Oswald’s murder loosed a flood of rumor, theory, speculation and allegation that threatened to becloud and distort the true facts surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy.
When Goldberg’s outline was circulated within the commission, there was an angry response from some of the staff lawyers. They argued that the report should read more like a fact-filled judicial opinion or a law review article—the type of writing they understood best—and focus on scientific evidence and witness testimony that would presumably establish Oswald as the president’s sole assassin. Goldberg had sensed that would be the reaction, especially among the younger lawyers. “They had all been law-school hot shots at the very best law schools, very full of themselves,” he said. The lawyers had been trained how to write dry legal briefs, not the more easily digested history that Goldberg was proposing.
No one on the staff was more hostile to Goldberg’s approach than David Belin. “From an overall standpoint, I take basic exception to the entire proposed outline,” Belin wrote after reading the historian’s drafts. “I believe that it is essential that the report be prepared by the lawyers who have been working in each area with the standards of a legal document, rather than the discussion of a historical approach. So far as possible, the report should be written on a fact-finding basis. There should be a minimum of opinions and conclusions other than those clearly shown by the facts.”
Goldberg did not yield. On April 24, he completed a new memo to Rankin, with another impassioned plea for the commission’s conclusions to be structured around an easy-to-follow narrative of the assassination. The memo took an unsubtle swipe at Belin and some of the other young lawyers: “This report should be a narrative and members of the staff should remind themselves that it is intended for the public and not for lawyers.”
33
THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION
WASHINGTON, DC
APRIL 1964
David Slawson understood why Silvia Duran might want to say nothing. If the reports from Mexico were accurate, the United States government bore responsibility for her rough treatment, since her first arrest had been requested by the CIA’s Mexico City station. He heard that the bruises on her body might be the least of it; there were reports she had a nervous breakdown as a result of the harsh interrogations by the Mexican secret police. Slawson assumed that “she was tortured—we didn’t know it for a fact, but we strongly suspected it.” That was the reason, he guessed, that the Mexican government had tried to block the commission from interviewing her. “My own belief was that, simply, they had mistreated her and they didn’t want that to come out.”
After returning from Mexico City, Slawson began pressing the CIA for help to arrange an interview with Duran outside Mexico. He went through the new interrogation report on Duran that had been given to him by the FBI in Mexico City, but it was still full of gaps. The Mexican government had not provided a transcript of Duran’s actual words. Instead, the best the Mexicans had offered was a summary, signed by Duran, of statements in which she insisted she knew nothing about a plot by Oswald to kill Kennedy. Slawson remembered thinking that he would have been more impressed had Duran written out the statement in her own hand. Instead, the summaries were typed, suggesting she was simply handed prewritten documents to sign. “It was all second-hand,” Slawson recalled. “And that’s not enough, obviously.”
From a distance, Slawson and Coleman had a favorable impression of Duran. Whatever her political views, she was said to be smart and gutsy. “From what we heard about her, she was a woman of real character,” Slawson said. “I can’t remember whether it was reading between the lines or what, but Bill and I had some reason to see this woman was a straight-shooter.” He thought she might say things in Washington that she had been too scared to say in Mexico. Even if she stuck by the account she had given to her Mexican interrogators, Slawson believed it was important for the commission to judge her credibility face-to-face. “There was obviously some chance of getting more detail from her, especially if she trusted us,” Slawson said. “And if we weren’t beating her up.”
The first challenge, he said, was simply to determine where Duran was. Her protective husband, Horacio, had moved her into hiding and was blocking access. “We couldn’t get to her, the CIA couldn’t get to her, nobody could,” Slawson recalled. “She was hiding out” and her husband was “mad as hell” about the way she had been treated.
Slawson could not recall exactly when he got the news, but within weeks of his return from Mexico, Ray Rocca reported that the agency had made contact with the Durans and believed Silvia Duran would agree to come to Washington. Slawson remembered that Rocca seemed excited by the news—“he was really eager”—and wanted to help with the logistics. Rocca asked if the commission wanted the agency to take the next step and make arrangements for Duran to travel, probably with her husband. “Bill and I didn’t have to think two minutes to say, ‘Yes, yes,’” Slawson recalled.
He was exhilarated to think he would now get a chance to talk to the woman who—more than anyone else, possibly including Marina Oswald—may have known Oswald’s thoughts in the weeks before he killed Kennedy. Slawson suspected that to Oswald, Duran must have seemed a kindred spirit. She was a fellow Socialist and a fellow champion of Fidel Castro. She could speak with him in English, and she seemed genuinely to want to help him get his visa for a trip to Cuba. She had been “very, very sympathetic to him,” Slawson said.
Slawson remembered telling Rankin about the CIA’s good news on Duran and asking permission to begin organizing her travel. “And Lee said, ‘I’ll talk to the chief.’” It was typical of Rankin not to make a decision like this himself, no matter how obvious it seemed to be, Slawson recalled. “He made no decisions without the chief’s approval.”
And Rankin returned with Warren’s unexpected, baffling reply. “The chief says no,” he told the stunned Slawson. There would be no interview with Duran.
Slawson could not recall if Rankin offered a detailed explanation for Warren’s reasoning, but the chief justice seemed to be suggesting that Duran’s support for Castro and her self-declared Socialism—she denied to her Mexican interrogators she was a Communist—made her unacceptable as a witness. It was similar reasoning to Warren’s earlier decision to block Slawson from seeking paperwork from the Cuban government about Oswald—the decision that Slawson had decided to ignore, at his peril.
In passing on Warren’s decision about Duran, Rankin cushioned the blow by telling Slawson that “the decision wasn’t final” and that he could appeal directly to Warren if he felt so strongly about the need to interview her.
Slawson was astonished at the idea that he might be denied the chance to talk to Duran. “It was stupid, stupid,” he thought. Much as his colleague Arlen Specter felt he needed Kennedy’s autopsy photos and X-rays to do his work in reconstructing the events in Dealey Plaza, Slawson needed to talk to Duran if the commission wanted to rule out any possibility of a conspiracy. The commission did not have to accept anything Duran had to say at face value, he reminded himself. “We didn’t have to accept her word,” Slawson said. “But we should talk to the enemy if we need to.”
He told Rankin he wanted to see the chief justice as soon as possible, and he asked for help from Howard Willens, who was “totally supportive” of the plan to bring Duran to Washington. Increasingly, Willens was viewed by Slawson and some of the other lawyers as their best advocate—much more so than Rankin. There were reports that, behind closed doors, Warren was angry about what he saw as Willens’s impertinence. “He thought Howard was disrespectful,” Slawson said. “Howard was maybe the only guy who disagreed with him to his face.” Warren, for his part, confirmed that years later, saying that Willens “was very critical of me from the time he came over to us” from the Justice Department.
Slawson was nervous as he prepared himself for the meeting. The chief justice appeared in the commission’s offices virtually every day but continued to ha
ve little interaction with the young lawyers. He rarely invited conversation. “He was the chief justice of the United States, and you didn’t go in there to shoot the breeze with him,” Slawson said. “He would have given you short-shrift if you tried.” Still, Slawson and Willens quickly got their appointment, and Slawson remembered that he was received graciously by Warren, who welcomed the two lawyers into his office with a smile. “He asked us to have a chair, and we did, and then we made our case to him.”
Slawson explained why Duran might be such an important witness, since she might offer information about Oswald that she had not risked sharing with the Mexican police. He argued that there was the possibility that the Mexican police had intimidated, even tortured her into silence, so that she would not reveal details pointing to a conspiracy hatched on Mexican soil.
What was there to lose by talking to her? Slawson remembered asking Warren. “There might be something valuable to gain.”
The chief justice did not hesitate with his answer: He had not changed his mind. There would be no interview with Duran. Slawson said he remembered Warren’s exact words:
“You just can’t believe a Communist,” Warren said. “We don’t talk to Communists. You cannot trust a dedicated Communist to tell us the truth, so what’s the point?”
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Page 36