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

by Philip Shenon

  Weinreb was alarmed from the moment he arrived in the VFW building. He could see all the empty desks, and he quickly learned from the remaining lawyers how much work remained to be done. “I remember having a sense of an office where everyone was springing for the hills,” with these few “poor suckers left behind,” he recalled. It would prove to be a “perfectly awful job,” with the staff expected to work fourteen- or fifteen-hour days, seven days a week, throughout the summer until the report was finished. He was startled to discover that the offices were not air-conditioned on weekends, despite temperatures that could sometimes reach one hundred degrees in Washington at the height of summer. “It was a lousy building,” he said. “It was miserable. I think a lot of the poor quality of the Warren reports comes from these very banal things.”

  He was given the assignment of writing Oswald’s biography, which would then be published in the final report. The biography had originally been the responsibility of Albert Jenner, but Jenner had proved incapable of finishing it, given his obsession with confirming the tiniest details of Oswald’s life story. “Jenner was still tracking down utterly remote leads,” Weinreb said. “He could not let go of it.” Jenner, he said, “simply had no conception of what doing history was. His idea was that anyone mentioned anywhere—maybe a fifth cousin whom Oswald had never seen—had to be checked out.”

  Weinreb had a strong sense that, by midsummer, it was Willens who was holding the investigation together, taking on responsibilities that should have been Rankin’s. “Howard was essentially in charge of the staff at that point,” he said. “Willens was a vastly more powerful person intellectually than Rankin,” he said. “Rankin seemed to be a middle-level bureaucrat.” Weinreb had no contact with Warren, which was no surprise given what he already knew of the chief justice’s “protective perimeters” in dealing with his clerks and clerical staff back at the court.

  Weinreb did find the job of writing the biography interesting. He said he first went in search of all of the background reports on Oswald’s life, including the top secret files from the CIA about his time in Russia. It was the first time Weinreb had seen classified national-security documents. “I remember having a sense of wow, this is cloak and dagger stuff.” Most of the biographical material on Oswald was found in large files—four or five inches thick—that had been compiled from FBI and CIA reports. As he started to page through them, though, Weinberg detected a problem. Much of the paperwork he expected to find was missing, apparently taken by other staff members while writing their own parts of the report. “There was absolutely no order to the evidence,” he said. Some staff lawyers appeared to be hoarding files for fear they might otherwise disappear into someone else’s desk. “You literally walked around the halls to see if you could get a hold of something and then you hid it in your bottom drawer to maintain possession. You put it in your bottom drawer because you didn’t want anybody else to take it.”

  Weinreb did not agonize over the actual writing of the biography; he had been known to his fellow Supreme Court clerks as an elegant, and quick, writer. He prided himself on not needing to rewrite his work; his first draft was usually his final draft. And he did not agonize, he said, over the question of whether Oswald had killed the president and whether Oswald had been part of a conspiracy. From all that he could see in the commission’s files, Oswald appeared to be the lone assassin. Weinreb could understand why the conspiracy theories had developed, but the evidence against Oswald was overwhelming, he said. “It would have taken a lot to make me think otherwise.”

  * * *

  Richard Mosk began making plans to leave the commission’s staff in mid-August; he had been called back to duty by the air national guard. Before departing, he completed a detailed study of Oswald’s marksmanship skills. He did not have trouble believing that Oswald had the ability to fire the shots that killed Kennedy and hit Connally. The Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was “a very accurate weapon,” Mosk wrote.

  Mosk reviewed the testimony taken from four expert marksmen, including that of Major Eugene Anderson, assistant head of the Marksmanship Branch of the U.S. Marine Corps. He testified that the shots that struck Kennedy’s neck and head were not “particularly difficult,” especially given how slowly the president’s motorcade was moving. An FBI firearms specialist, Robert Frazier, told the commission that Oswald would “not have any difficult hitting” his targets, especially since his rifle had been equipped with a telescopic sight. “I mean it requires no training at all to shoot a weapon with a telescopic sight,” Frazier said. A gunman would simply “put the crosshairs on the target” and pull the trigger. “That is all that is necessary.”

  45

  THE HOME OF SILVIA ODIO

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  JULY 1964

  That summer, Silvia Odio was trying to get on with her life. The twenty-seven-year-old Cuban refugee said she had mostly kept quiet about what had happened back in December, when two FBI agents showed up unannounced at the offices of the chemical company where she worked. They wanted her to tell them the story that she had told a few friends, about how Oswald and two young Latino men had appeared on the doorstep of her Dallas apartment before the assassination. Odio had been alarmed by the way the FBI agents had contacted her—by sending agents to her office instead of her home—and the visit had upset her boss. “It brought a lot of problems in my work,” she said later. “You know how people were afraid at the time. My company, some officials of it, were quite concerned that the FBI should have come to see me.” And after the December interview, she said she heard nothing from the FBI. For the bureau then to completely dismiss her story—the one also told by her teenage sister, Annie—was perplexing and insulting.

  In June, however, she learned that the Warren Commission might be taking her account more seriously. Wesley Liebeler called from Washington and asked if she would be available to give sworn testimony when he visited Dallas later that summer. She agreed, although she told him she continued to worry that her story, if it became public, might somehow endanger her parents, who remained in custody in Cuba as political prisoners. Her father, Amador, had been a prominent businessman there in the 1950s—he was described by Time as his country’s “transport tycoon”—and become an outspoken opponent of Castro. He had been a leader of a relatively moderate anti-Castro group known as JURE, or Junta Revolucionaria Cubana. In exile, Silvia remained a member of JURE.

  * * *

  Liebeler planned to set off on his trip to see Odio and other witnesses in Dallas and New Orleans as soon as he completed his draft chapter of the commission’s report—an analysis of Oswald’s possible motives for killing the president. He turned in the ninety-eight-page draft on June 23. In it, he offered his judgment that Oswald had not begun to think about killing Kennedy until shortly before the assassination, maybe only hours earlier, and probably not before Tuesday, November 19, the day Kennedy’s motorcade route was first announced in Dallas newspapers.

  He acknowledged in the report that no one could say with certainty why Oswald killed Kennedy. Instead, he offered a list of possible motives, tying together Oswald’s troubled childhood, his oft-stated desire for global fame, and his commitment to Marxism and to Castro’s revolution in Cuba. “Lee Harvey Oswald was a man profoundly alienated from the world in which he lived,” Liebeler wrote. “He never seemed to be able to relate meaningfully to any part of it. His life was characterized by isolation, frustration, suspicion, failure at almost everything he ever tried to do, and, increasingly, by a system of delusion and fantasy designed to protect himself from his own failure and impotence.” Oswald’s Marxism made him hostile to American government leaders and “increased his alienation from society around him.”

  Even as he wrote those words, however, Liebeler admitted to colleagues on the commission’s staff that he could be wrong and that there might be evidence of a conspiracy that they had missed. He was especially troubled, he said, by the many gaps in the commission’s knowledge about Oswald’s activ
ities in the months before the assassination. He knew how troubled Slawson was about the inability of the FBI and CIA to account for whole days of Oswald’s trip to Mexico; there were similar gaps in the time line of his activities in New Orleans and in Dallas. And Silvia Odio’s account, if true, meant that Oswald was traveling in the company of anti-Castro exiles weeks before the assassination and that he might have talked openly of his desire to see President Kennedy dead.

  * * *

  Liebeler went first to New Orleans, where he was welcomed with the blast of heat and humidity that explained the common wisdom that only the crazy, the poor, and the air-conditioned wealthy remained in “the Big Easy” in the summertime. The city, Oswald’s birthplace, had been his home again for several months beginning in April 1963; Marina thought he went there because he feared arrest in Texas as a result of his failed attempt to assassinate Edwin Walker.

  It was in New Orleans that Oswald had first tried to make a name for himself as a public champion of Castro’s revolution and to identify himself with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. That spring, Oswald purported to set up the committee’s New Orleans branch. He used one of his aliases—Lee Osborne—to print up membership forms, as well as pamphlets bearing the slogan “Hands Off Cuba.”

  At the same time, it appeared that Oswald was making attempts in New Orleans to infiltrate anti-Castro groups, possibly to gather intelligence that he could later share with the Cuban government in a demonstration of his loyalty to Castro. On August 5, the FBI determined, Oswald visited Carlos Bringuier, a Cuban-born lawyer who was active in the anti-Castro movement, and asked to join the exiles’ struggle.* Bringuier told the FBI that Oswald identified himself as a former marine who had guerrilla training. The day after their first meeting, he gave Bringuier his Marine Corps handbook as proof of his military background.

  If Oswald was in fact attempting to infiltrate anti-Castro groups, that mission came to a violent end a few days later, when Bringuier and two other Cuban exiles encountered him on a street corner as he handed out Fair Play for Cuba flyers. A fight broke out, leading to Oswald’s arrest. Oswald, who spent the night in jail, asked to speak to an FBI agent, seemingly to create an official record at the bureau of what he was doing. He told the agent that he belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and that the president of the local chapter was a man he identified as A. J. Hidell—the alias that he would use to purchase his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Marina Oswald said she thought her husband used the alias Hidell because it rhymed with Fidel. Liebeler had taken Bringuier’s testimony in New Orleans in April and found him credible.

  During his return in July, Liebeler met with others in New Orleans who, he believed, had far less credibility but who still needed to be interviewed to be certain that the commission’s record was complete. This included Dean Andrews Jr., a colorful, small-time lawyer who seemed to live in a perpetual state of Mardi Gras. Even in exotic New Orleans, he was hard to miss, both because of his appearance—he was obese and wore sunglasses constantly, including indoors—and from his unusual speaking style. He talked in the language of a Cajun hipster; a stylish man was a “swinging cat” and a good bar was a “freaky joint.”

  Within days of the Kennedy assassination, Andrews had contacted the FBI to report that Oswald had visited his law office in the summer of 1963, seeking help in reversing his “undesirable” discharge from the Marine Corps. That part of Andrew’s story made sense to the FBI and to the Warren Commission, since they knew Oswald had been agitated over the less-than-honorable discharge. Andrews’s tale to the FBI went well beyond that, however. Oswald, he said, had visited his office in the company of a trio of young homosexual Latinos—“three gay boys”—and appeared to be a homosexual himself. “He swang with the kids,” Andrews said. “He didn’t swish, but birds of a feather flock together.”

  And Oswald appeared to have a mysterious patron in New Orleans. Only hours after the assassination, Andrews claimed, he received a phone call from a local lawyer he knew by the name of Clay Bertrand, who was somehow connected to the “three gay boys” and who was himself known to be bisexual, and who asked Andrews to go to Dallas immediately to defend Oswald. The commission had pressed the FBI to follow up on Andrews’s account, especially to track down Bertrand, but the bureau said it could find no evidence to suggest that Bertrand even existed. Also, Andrews’s description of Bertrand had kept changing, including on Tuesday, July 21, when he gave sworn testimony to Liebeler.

  Liebeler asked him, once again, to give a physical description of Bertrand.

  “He is about 5 feet 8 inches. Got sandy hair, blue eyes, ruddy complexion,” Andrews replied.

  Liebeler looked back at the FBI reports of its interviews with Andrews and could see that he had initially described Bertrand’s height as six foot one or six foot two. How could Bertrand be half a foot shorter than Andrews had originally estimated?

  “I am guessing now,” Andrews conceded.*

  Liebeler took what he thought of as more useful testimony that same day from a Cuban-American bartender, Evaristo Rodriguez, who had told the FBI that Oswald had visited his bar on Decatur Street, the Habana Bar, sometime in 1963. Oswald had been in the company of two other men, one of them clearly a Latino. Rodriguez recalled that Oswald appeared to be drunk and “draped himself” over the bar before ordering a lemonade. The Latin man ordered tequila. “So I told him the price of the tequila was 50 cents,” Rodriguez said. “The man protested at the price, thought it was too high, and he made some statement to the effect that he was a Cuban … and words to the effect that surely the owner of this bar must be a capitalist.”

  Although other witnesses insisted that Oswald never drank heavily after his return from Russia, Liebeler was struck that he might have been in the bar in the company of a Cuban who was so outspoken in sharing Oswald’s anticapitalist views. He asked for a physical description of the Cuban. Rodriguez said he thought the man was in his late twenties and that he had an irregular hairline; he was balding in an unusual way at the front of his head. Liebeler remembered that in her earlier interviews with the FBI, Silvia Odio had described one of the Latin men traveling with Oswald—“Leopoldo”—as having an unusual bald spot at the front of his head.

  46

  THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  JULY 1964

  For months, the FBI had been aware of reports that the commission was mishandling classified documents. Gerald Ford had been the first to come under suspicion, with the rumors that he was leaking secret files, and maybe even selling them, all of which he furiously denied. The first documented case of a serious security breach by a commissioner centered on Congressman Boggs, who left a copy of a top secret White House document about the assassination on the front seat of his government-issued Mercury sedan in April. Boggs had parked the car, which had markings to show that it was assigned to his House office, at Baltimore’s Friendship International Airport, not far from Washington. A Pennsylvania man who parked in front of the car noticed the document in the front seat, clearly stamped TOP SECRET, and he called the FBI. The car doors were unlocked, the man could see.

  Wesley Liebeler’s breach was far more serious than Boggs’s, however, because it was so brazen—and because it was brought directly to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI chief learned of the security violation in a letter sent to him by name in June from a retired U.S. naval officer from Wilmette, Illinois, James R. David, who wanted to report what he had witnessed aboard a Northeast Airlines flight from Keene, New Hampshire, to New York, on May 31, the Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend. David was seated in one of two seats at the far rear of the plane. The flight was full, and the last seat was taken a man who had “red hair, a red face and a rather full red beard.” David was unable to determine the man’s name, but he “carried a slim black attaché case” embossed with the initials W.J.L.

  Almost as soon as the red-haired man took his seat, David wrote, he opened the case and pulled out a
report with a cover identifying it as “U.S. Department of Justice, Copy No. 10 of 10, The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.” David said he was astonished as the man then began—“indiscreetly”—to page through what was clearly a highly classified document. “Each page was identified at the top and bottom in large block red letters TOP SECRET,” David wrote. “Without too much difficulty I could have read most of this report. However, because of the security classification of this document, I had no interest in doing so—with the exception that for further identification, I attempted to memorize one sentence which occurred at the top of page 412 and read, to the best of my memory, as follows:

  “Mr. Rankin: ‘Did he take money from the wallet from time to time?’

  “Mrs. Oswald: ‘No.’”

  It took the FBI no time to determine that the red-haired man was Liebeler, who was on the flight, returning to New York from his country home in Vermont.

  Hoover passed on the information to Rankin, apparently leaving it to the commission—at least for the moment—to decide how to deal with Liebeler. And Hoover sent a personal thank-you note to David for alerting the FBI to what he had seen in the plane. Hoover’s files show that a background check was conducted on David to be certain he was not himself a security risk. The check found no derogatory information.

  Other staff lawyers said they were only vaguely aware of the incident, which Rankin appeared eager to keep quiet for fear that it could become a scandal; certainly he might have feared that Hoover would leak news of the security breach at an opportune moment for the bureau. Slawson said he understood that Liebeler was “just bawled out, very, very strongly” by Rankin and that “Warren let him know, through Rankin, he was extremely displeased.” None of the staff lawyers remembered Liebeler as being especially alarmed over the incident.