Ely was surprised by how little attention the commission’s investigators—and the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies—were paying to Oswald’s career in the marines, and he recommended that several of Oswald’s marine colleagues be tracked down and questioned under oath about what they had witnessed during Oswald’s nearly three years in uniform. “In the Marine Corps, Oswald was doing a great deal of serious thinking about Marxism, the Soviet Union and Cuba,” Ely wrote.
* * *
Jenner took on the assignment of investigating the background of people in Dallas who had befriended Oswald and his family and who, it was initially suspected, might have been involved in the assassination. The commission had asked the FBI to conduct background investigations on three people in particular: Ruth Paine; her estranged husband, Michael; and George de Mohrenschildt, the fifty-two-year-old Russian-born geologist who was the closest thing that Lee Oswald had to a real friend in Dallas.
The Paines came under suspicion in part because of their liberal views on foreign affairs and civil rights, which isolated them from their neighbors in the conservative suburbs of Dallas. Ruth’s interest in the Soviet Union received particular scrutiny. A Quaker, she had been studying Russian since 1959 and had participated in a Quaker pen-pal program with Soviet citizens. She said her interest in learning Russian had brought her into contact with Marina Oswald; the two women were invited to a party attended by several Russian expatriates, which ultimately led to a friendship.
The Paines’ marriage had fallen apart in 1962, and Michael had moved out that fall. Early in 1963, Ruth invited Marina—then caring for her one-year-old daughter, June, and pregnant again—to move in. Newly unemployed, Lee was planning to leave Texas in April to find work in his hometown of New Orleans. So Ruth, who had two children of her own, proposed that Marina remain with her until Lee found a job and could afford to support the family in Louisiana. Ruth said she welcomed Marina’s presence as a chance to improve her Russian.
Marina followed her husband to New Orleans in May; Ruth Paine drove her there. But Oswald had trouble holding a job in Louisiana, just as he had in Texas, and the Oswalds returned to the Dallas area that fall. Rather than live with her husband as he looked for work, Marina moved back in with Ruth and remained there until the day of the assassination. During the week, Lee lived in a boardinghouse in Dallas, commuting on the weekends to the Paine home in nearby Irving.
After the assassination, the Paines drew attention to themselves by their strangely placid reaction to the chaos around them. To some investigators, that seemed to suggest that the Paines might have known of Oswald’s plans. A Dallas homicide detective, Guy Rose, told the commission he was startled when he arrived at the Paine home on the afternoon of the assassination, before Oswald’s arrest was announced, and Mrs. Paine came to the door and said calmly, “I’ve been expecting you to come out—come right on in.” Later, Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, and his brother Robert fed the suspicion of the Paines as somehow being involved in the president’s murder.
De Mohrenschildt had a background out of a Cold War thriller. Worldly and sophisticated, fluent or conversant in at least six languages, he was born in czarist Russia to an affluent family with ties to the nobility. His parents fled to Poland when the family faced persecution as the Communists came to power in Moscow. He entered the United States in 1938 despite suspicions, noted in State Department files, that he might be a spy for Nazi Germany. He denied any Nazi ties, and none was ever proved. He initially settled in New York and worked in several different jobs, including filmmaking; for a time, he was a polo instructor. He mingled easily in high society in Manhattan and spent summers on the beaches of Long Island. Jenner and other commission lawyers were startled to discover that de Mohrenschildt’s Long Island friends included the family of Jacqueline Bouvier, the future wife of President Kennedy. “We were very close,” de Mohrenschildt said of the Bouviers. “We saw each other every day. I met Jackie then, when she was a little girl.” The future First Lady was “a very strong-willed child, very intelligent and very attractive.”
He moved to Texas to try to make his fortune in the oil industry, first earning degrees in engineering and geology from the University of Texas. As an oilman, he then took on assignments in several countries, including Yugoslavia, France, Cuba, Haiti, Nigeria, and Ghana. He acknowledged that, while living in Texas at the start of World War II, he did some spy work—at the request of a French friend—on behalf of the French intelligence services. He was never an official employee of a French spy agency, he said, but “I collected facts on people involved in pro-German activity” and tried to outbid German firms for the purchase of Texas crude oil.
By 1962, he had settled in Dallas with his fourth wife, and it was there that he was introduced by other Russian expatriates to the Oswalds, who were then reduced to what de Mohrenschildt remembered as “dire poverty.” He was especially concerned for Marina—“a lost soul, living in the slums, not knowing one single word of English, with this rather unhealthy looking baby—horrible surroundings.” Over the next year, he estimated, he saw the Oswalds “10 or 12 times, maybe more.” He helped Marina escape from her husband for a time in the fall of 1962 after discovering that Lee had beaten her, leaving her with a black eye.
De Mohrenschildt recalled a visit to the Oswalds’ in the spring of 1963 during which Marina displayed a rifle that her husband had just bought. She mocked the purchase. “That crazy idiot is target-shooting all the time,” she said. De Mohrenschildt recalled asking Oswald why he bought the weapon. “I like target-shooting,” he replied. At the time, Texas newspapers were full of stories about the seemingly fruitless search by the police for a gunman who had attempted to kill retired army general Edwin Walker; the unidentified sniper, lurking outside Walker’s home in Dallas, had fired at him through a window, missing by inches. Marina would later acknowledge that she had known, within hours of the attack, that her husband was responsible.
During the visit, de Mohrenschildt said, he tried to make a joke about the Walker shooting. “Are you then the guy who took a pot shot at General Walker?” he remembered asking. “I knew that Oswald disliked General Walker, you see.”
Oswald did not answer, although a “peculiar” look came over his face. “He sort of shriveled, you see, when I asked this question.”
* * *
After months of careful review of the FBI files on the Paines and de Mohrenschildt, Jenner said he believed they had nothing to do with the assassination. In many ways, he came to see the Paines and de Mohrenschildt—their lives upended, dogged for years by a lingering suspicion about their ties to the assassination—as some of Oswald’s other victims. To be certain of their innocence, however, Jenner subjected all three to hours of questioning under oath, especially over evidence suggesting that they might have guessed what Oswald was about to do.
Jenner put it directly to Ruth Paine during her testimony in Washington: “Mrs. Paine, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
“I am not now and have never been a member of the Communist Party,” she said.
Jenner tried it a different way: “Do you now or have you ever had any leanings which we might call Communist Party leanings?”
“No,” she replied. “On the contrary.… I am offended by the portion of the Communist doctrine that thinks violence is necessary to achieve its aims.”
Her interest in the Russian language, she said, was the result of her faith. “God asked of me that I study language,” she explained. She chose Russian, she said, because it coincided with the efforts of the Quaker Church to organize exchange programs in the Soviet Union.
She invited Jenner and the commissioners to ask blunt questions to prove her truthfulness, even awkward questions about why her marriage had fallen apart.
“Members of the commission have voiced to me some interest in that,” Jenner admitted. “They are seeing to resolve in their mind who Ruth Paine is and, if I may use the vernacular, wha
t makes her tick.… What was the cause of the separation between your husband and yourself, in your view?”
The answer, she said, was simple. Her husband was always kind and attentive, but he did not love her. Her tone was matter-of-fact. “We never quarreled, we never indeed have had any serious difference of opinion, except I wanted to live with him and he is not that interested in being with me.”
She acknowledged that, months before the assassination, she worried that Oswald was capable of violence—she knew he beat Marina—and that he might have a troubling connection to the Soviet embassy in Washington. She had found a copy of a letter he had written to the embassy, referring to FBI surveillance of his activities in Dallas.
So why had she permitted him into her home at all? And why, given what she knew, did she then help him get a job at the Texas School Book Depository? Jenner thought Paine had reasonable answers to both questions. She had not wanted Oswald in her home for the weekend visits. “I would have been happier had he never come out.” But she was eager to help Marina and excited at the chance to improve her Russian. She also welcomed the company that Marina offered. With her marriage over, “I was lonely.” She readily acknowledged that she helped get Oswald his job at the book depository and explained, in detail, how it happened. She had been at a “coffee klatch” with a group of women friends, including Marina; one of the women mentioned that her brother worked at the book warehouse and that a job might be open there. Marina pleaded with Paine to call the warehouse. The job was available, and Lee was hired in October. Paine insisted she had no idea the warehouse was on Dealey Plaza.
Jenner spent most of two full days taking testimony from de Mohrenschildt, who required several hours just to get through a summary of his globetrotting life story, beginning with his childhood in Russia. He seemed to understand why people might assume the worst about his friendship with Oswald, given de Mohrenschildt’s own unconventional, “bohemian” life. “All sorts of speculation have arisen from time to time,” he admitted to Jenner. “I am very outspoken.”
The more he answered Jenner’s questions, the more his story about his unlikely friendship with Oswald made some sense. De Mohrenschildt said he found Lee Oswald a “sympathetic fellow” who seemed to want to improve himself even though he was “a semi-educated hillbilly.” The Oswalds, he declared, “were very miserable, lost, penniless, mixed up.” He said he found it laughable to imagine that the Soviet Union or any other foreign power would recruit Oswald as a spy. “I never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important,” he said. “An unstable individual, mixed-up individual, uneducated individual, without background? What government would give him any confidential work?”
He said he continued to feel sorry for Oswald even after discovering he beat Marina. “I didn’t blame Lee for giving her a good whack on the eye.” Marina, he said, openly mocked her husband in front of the de Mohrenschildts for his failings as a husband, including his lack of interest in sex. De Mohrenschildt said he sensed that Oswald was “an asexual person.” Marina was “straightforward about it,” telling the de Mohrenschildts, with her husband listening, that “he sleeps with me just once a month, and I never get any satisfaction out of it.”
De Mohrenschildt said he and his wife were so uncomfortable with Marina’s open complaints about her sex life that they cut off their friendship with the Oswalds in mid-1963, just as de Mohrenschildt was about to move to Haiti for a business venture. “This is really the time that we decided just to drop them,” he said. “We both decided not to see them again because we both found it revolting, such a discussion of marital habits in front of relative strangers, as we were.”
Although he found it impossible to believe that Oswald was a spy, he did say he worried at times that Oswald was somehow up to no good. “He had been to Soviet Russia—he could be anything,” de Mohrenschildt said. He testified that he asked another Russian expatriate friend in Dallas, “Do you think it is safe for us to help Oswald?” The friend said he had been in contact with the FBI about Oswald and that the bureau had no concerns.
De Mohrenschildt said he believed he also mentioned Oswald’s name in 1962 to another friend, Walter Moore, who was known to be “a government man—either FBI or Central Intelligence,” and that Moore offered nothing to suggest Oswald was a risk. The commission later determined that Moore was, in fact, a CIA official based in Texas whose office was responsible for gathering information from Dallas-area residents who had recently visited or worked in Communist countries. The investigation found no evidence to show that Moore had ever been in contact with Oswald, although the commission’s disclosure of a friendship between Moore and de Mohrenschildt would feed conspiracy theories about the assassination for decades to come.
35
THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION
WASHINGTON, DC
MAY 1964
At their late-night staff dinners, Specter and some of the other young lawyers began to mock the commissioners. They joked about “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” with Warren and the other commissioners in the role of the dwarfs. “Snow White was alternatively Marina or Jacqueline Kennedy,” Specter said. “Warren was Grumpy,” while Congressman Boggs of Louisiana was “Happy” because he sometimes arrived in the commission’s office after “having had several cocktails late in the afternoon.” Specter thought that Dulles qualified either as “Sleepy” or “Dopey,” given the former spymaster’s strange, sometimes barely coherent presence.
Slawson, the staff lawyer who worked with Dulles most closely, was increasingly convinced that Dulles, seventy-one years old, was demonstrating signs of senility, perhaps brought on by his humiliating public ouster from the CIA after the Bay of Pigs debacle. Dulles often dozed off at commission hearings, and his gout seemed to get no better over the months of the investigation. When Malcolm Perry, the emergency-room doctor from Parkland Hospital in Dallas, arrived in the commission’s offices to give testimony in March, he was pulled aside by Dulles, who asked if Perry had any suggestions for his painful feet. “Sorry, it’s not my field,” the startled Perry told him.
Over time, Specter came to agree with Slawson that Dulles may have forgotten much of what he knew about American intelligence operations directed against Castro and other foreign adversaries who might have wanted to see Kennedy dead. And it was possible, he thought, that Dulles never knew some of the agency’s most closely held secrets; his deputies could have kept the information from him, maybe even at his request, to allow him plausible deniability. When Dulles joined the commission, “everybody thought he was really smart,” Specter said. “He turned out to be a nit.”
Dulles did, unintentionally, bring lighthearted moments to some of the commission’s otherwise most somber hearings. Specter recalled having to struggle to avoid laughing when, during an examination of vials that contained two metal fragments removed from Kennedy’s body, Dulles stopped the proceedings with the startling announcement that actually the vial contained four fragments, not two. The FBI agent who attended the session “raced from one end of the table to the other to inspect the contents of the vials,” Specter recalled. “The agent took two of the fragments and crushed them between his fingers.”
“No, Mr. Dulles,” the agent said in exasperation. “These are two flakes of tobacco that fell out of your pipe.”
Specter was not the only one to snicker, he recalled, when Dulles became confused during the testimony of Dr. James Humes, the Bethesda pathologist. In discussing what became of Kennedy’s clothes in Dallas, Humes explained how the president’s tie had been cut off at Parkland Hospital to help him breathe. Following procedure, the fabric was cut to the left of the loop. “Dulles may have been distracted, or maybe he’d dozed off,” Specter said, because when Humes held up the two pieces of the obviously expensive blue-pattered Christian Dior tie, Dulles, who spoke in the manner of an English school don, saw the knot and blurted out: “By Jove, the fellow wore a ready-made tie.” Specter
remembered that “we all found it funny that anyone, even for a moment,” could think that the dashing John Kennedy “would wear a ready-made.”
Dulles deserved credit for at least making the effort to attend the testimony of essential witnesses. That was not true for the majority of the commissioners. From what Specter could see, most of them remained ignorant of even the basic facts of the assassination: “I don’t think the commissioners ever knew much about the case.” Warren and the other commissioners never invited the junior lawyers into their executive sessions, and Specter said that in their few encounters with the staff, most of the commissioners “came and they sat there—they never asked any questions, made any suggestions. We ran the investigation ourselves.”
Few among the staff lawyers were more critical of Warren than Specter. He tried always to qualify his criticism, describing Warren as a great chief justice. “He had a deep sense of decency … the moral conscience of the nation.” But Specter felt that Warren lacked any similar intellectual depth. “Warren wasn’t much of a lawyer. He wasn’t brilliant. He wasn’t even really smart.” In running the commission, he said, Warren’s stubbornness and impatience—and, most alarmingly, his unshakable loyalty to the Kennedys—damaged the investigation. Specter believed Warren was taking shortcuts in the investigation, rushing it in ways that threatened to create new conspiracy theories. Since Warren was convinced early on that Oswald acted alone, “it was all cut-and-dry for him.” His’s attitude was “let’s get the goddamned thing over with,” Specter said. “Warren wanted to get everything done in a hurry.”
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Page 38