Liebeler knew his voluminous memos that summer had created a permanent record of how strongly he had fought, over what he considered matters of principle, in the writing of the report, so at some point, he decided to keep copies of his memos for himself. He began to slip the copies out of the commission’s offices, putting them in his attaché case, and then filing them away at home, initially at his apartment in Washington. If there ever came a time when the commission’s legacy was under attack and he needed to defend his own reputation, Liebeler would have all of his memos and files available; he could make them all public.
* * *
Senator Richard Russell was always apologetic about how many of the commission’s meetings he missed. As he had predicted from the start, 1964 had turned out to be an awful year in his long career in the Senate. He spent most of the first six months of the year trying, and ultimately failing, to block the momentous civil rights legislation that Johnson had offered as a tribute to Kennedy, most important the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Some of Russell’s fellow segregationists had hoped his close friendship with Johnson might convince the White House to weaken the act. Russell, however, had sensed from the start that it was hopeless. He described the Senate vote on the bill on June 19 as “the final act of the longest debate and the greatest tragedy ever played out in the Senate of the United States.” It passed overwhelmingly, 73 to 27, and was signed into law by Johnson on July 2. Russell was praised by the president after the Georgian repeatedly urged fellow southerners to comply peacefully with the law. “Violence and defiance are no substitute for the campaign of reason and logic we must wage,” Russell said.
Russell’s absence from the commission meant that he had mostly forfeited his ability to control how the investigation was conducted, including how the staff was chosen and what they were assigned to do. The controversy over Norman Redlich that spring had created trouble for Russell with conservative constituents back home. Russell drafted a letter that could be sent out to Georgians who wrote in to complain. “Let me tell you again that I did not know that Redlich was working for the commission until the hearings were practically concluded,” he wrote, blaming the hiring on Lee Rankin. “When the matter was before the commission, I made it clear that had I known of his employment and background, I would have vigorously opposed his employment, and I told Mr. Rankin that I thought he had been derelict.” In May, he had complained directly to Johnson about Redlich. “I sat up last night until 11:30 readin’ the FBI reports on some son-of-a-bitch that this fellow Rankin hired over here on the Warren Commission,” he told the president in a recorded phone call. “Everybody’s raisin’ hell about him bein’ a Communist and all … a left-winger.”
But even while he participated little in the day-to-day work of the commission, Russell continued to monitor the investigation with the help of Alfredda Scobey. Every night, he insisted, he took home transcripts of the commission’s witness testimony. He read through the commission’s paperwork “until I thought my eyes were going to burn up,” he complained to an aide. And from a distance, he did not like what he was reading. He repeatedly told his Senate staff that he was disturbed by the way Warren was running the “assassination commission.” (Russell’s former press secretary, Powell Moore, said later that the senator refused to call it the Warren Commission. “Senator Russell always insisted on calling it the assassination commission.”) While the commission might be moving toward a conclusion that Oswald had acted alone, Russell was never certain of it; he said he found it hard to believe that Oswald “could have done all this by himself.” He was troubled by what he was reading about Oswald’s visit to Mexico and about his friendship while he lived in the Russian city of Minsk with a group of young Cubans.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act allowed Russell to become involved—reluctantly, he said—in the commission’s work. He announced that he wanted to see the scene of the assassination for himself and to interview Marina Oswald. He asked Rankin to organize a trip to Dallas. The other two southern lawmakers on the commission—Senator Cooper of Kentucky and Congressman Boggs of Louisiana—agreed to join him. Cooper recalled that Russell hoped he might be able to break Oswald’s widow and convince her to tell him secrets that she was still keeping from the commission. Warren, Russell complained, had treated her too gently, even after all her lies had been exposed. The chief justice “was all too grandfatherly,” he told his Senate secretary. “She should have been given something closer to a third-degree type of questioning.”
Russell’s delegation arrived in Dallas on Saturday, September 5, and toured the book depository the next day. Russell nearly created a panic on the streets outside the warehouse. The Dallas Morning News reported that about 150 sightseers were startled when they looked up and noticed an elderly man with a rifle standing at the window of the sixth floor, seeming to take aim at them. It was explained to them that it was Senator Russell, holding the weapon as he tried to imagine what Oswald would have seen. “Well, I just hope he’s not using real bullets,” said a woman scurrying for cover.
That afternoon, the delegation went to a nearby military base to meet Marina Oswald. Russell arrived with a long, handwritten list of questions. The session lasted more than four hours, with the congressmen learning almost nothing that had not been revealed before. Russell focused his questions on the relationship between Mrs. Oswald and her husband; he goaded her, suggesting that Oswald had actually been a “very devoted husband” who had been entitled to her loyalty.
“No,” Mrs. Oswald replied. “He was not a good husband.”
Russell reminded her that she had testified that Oswald had helped her with the housework and was good with his daughters.
“Well, I also testified to the fact that he beat me on many occasions,” she replied. “He was not good when he beat me.”
Russell: “He beat you on many occasions?”
Marina: “Many.”
Russell pressed her on aspects of her life in Russia before meeting Oswald, including her ties there to the Communist Party and about an uncle who worked for the Russian interior ministry. She could see where the questions were heading; he seemed to be suggesting that she was herself some sort of spy. “I want to assure the commission that I was never given any assignment by the Soviet government,” she declared.
The only surprising development in her testimony came when Mrs. Oswald volunteered her new theory that her husband had not intended to kill the president but had instead aimed his rifle at Governor Connally. The governor was the target, she said, because he, as navy secretary, had refused to intervene to overturn her husband’s less-than-honorable discharge from the Marine Corps.
Russell doubted she was right: “I think that you have your evidence terribly confused.”
Mrs. Oswald readily acknowledged that it was only speculation. “I have no facts whatsoever,” she said.
Her appearance that day reflected a seemingly newfound confidence. At her earlier appearances before the commission, she had always brought a lawyer along. This time she did not. “The attorney costs me too much,” she said.
During the questioning, Russell, like Warren before him, seemed to soften in the presence of the pretty young widow. He said he was glad that she was writing her memoirs and had found so many other ways to sell her story to newspapers and magazines, since it offered her a way to support herself and her daughters. “I was hoping that you had found some means of commercializing on it either to the moving picture people or to the publishing world.”
* * *
On matters of national security, Russell was almost certainly the best-informed man in Congress, and it had been that way for years. In 1965, he would mark his tenth year as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In that job, he was privy to the most highly classified national-security information gathered at both the Pentagon and the CIA; at the time, the budgets of both agencies came under his oversight.
After Fidel Castro came to power in Havana in 1959, Russell would have k
nown many secrets about Cuba, especially. He knew how the Kennedy administration had struggled since its first days in power to oust the Cuban government. That appeared to explain why, in his conversations with President Johnson and others after the assassination, Russell sensed, almost immediately, that Castro might have been involved, and if not Castro personally, some element of the Cuban government that believed it was operating on his behalf. He offered no similar dark suspicions about Soviet leaders.
Russell also sensed that, whatever the truth about the assassination, the CIA and the FBI were not necessarily eager to find it, if only to protect themselves from the discovery that there had been a conspiracy that the two agencies should have been able to disrupt. In his office files, Russell kept a small, ominous note that he had written to himself after the first meeting of the commission back in December. “Something strange is happening,” he wrote, referring to the investigation by the CIA and FBI of Oswald’s visit to Mexico. The investigation was only just getting under way, yet there already seemed to be a rush to demonstrate that Oswald was the lone assassin, whatever the evidence—to show that Oswald was the “only one ever considered” as the assassin, Russell wrote. “This to me is an untenable position.”
He knew that the CIA and the FBI had insisted from the start that they could find no evidence of a foreign plot. But through long experience, he also knew that the agencies were capable of lying—or so muddying the facts that no one would ever be able to figure out the truth. Also alarming to Russell was the possibility that Warren was being privately briefed—by the CIA? the White House? the president himself?—regarding sensitive elements of the investigation. At that first December meeting, he wrote, the chief justice seemed to know more about the possibility of Cuban involvement than he was telling. Warren appeared to know, for example, about the unconfirmed report from the CIA that Oswald might have received thousands of dollars at the Cuban embassy in Mexico. It surprised Russell that Warren had already been told that. The chief justice “knew all I did and more about [the] CIA.”
* * *
Russell’s last-minute trip to Dallas had not ended his suspicion of a conspiracy. Nor had the trip ended his skepticism about the single-bullet theory. He respected Governor Connally, and if Connally believed he had been hit by a separate bullet, Russell was not going to doubt him. So after returning to Washington, he knew he faced a dilemma as the commission prepared to meet to approve a final report. He needed to ask himself if he could put his name to conclusions that he could not accept. In mid-September, he called in a secretary and began dictating his formal dissent—a document that would remain secret in his Senate files until years after his death.
He began by rejecting the single-bullet theory: “I do not share the finding of the Commission as to the probability that both President Kennedy and Governor Connally were struck by the same bullet.… . Reviewing the Zapruder film several times adds to my conviction that the bullet that passed through Governor Connally’s body was not the same bullet as that which passed through the President’s back and neck.”
He then moved on to questions about whether Oswald acted alone: “While I join with my colleagues in the finding that there is no clear and definite evidence connecting any person or group in a conspiracy with Oswald to assassinate the President, there are some aspects of this case that I cannot decide with absolute certainty.” He said he was still alarmed by reports about Oswald’s association with the Cuban students in Minsk and by the lack of a “detailed account of all of Oswald’s movements, contacts and associations on his secret visit to Mexico.” He wrote that he could not share “in a categorical finding that Oswald planned and perpetrated the assassination without the knowledge, encouragement or assistance of another person.”
* * *
In the final days of editing the report, the staff at last heard back from the FBI about Silvia Odio and her claim of meeting Oswald on her doorstep in Dallas. The bureau said it had new information to prove that the young Cuban woman was wrong. FBI agents had finally identified the three men who were seen at Odio’s door—and Oswald was not among them. The news arrived on September 21 in a letter from J. Edgar Hoover. According to Hoover, the bureau had tracked down a thirty-four-year-old Cuban-American truck driver named Loran Eugene Hall who claimed he was one of the anti-Castro militants who went to see Odio. Hall identified himself as a professional mercenary who turned against Castro after serving in his guerrilla army.
In September 1963, Hall said, he had been traveling in Dallas with two fellow anti-Castro guerrillas—Lawrence Howard, who was Mexican-American, and William Seymour, who was not a Latino and spoke only a few words of Spanish—to raise money for the cause, and they had gone to the home of a woman he believed was Odio. Hall thought she might have mistaken Seymour for Oswald.
Hoover acknowledged that the investigation was ongoing and that FBI agents were still searching for Howard and Seymour. Still, there was a sense of relief at the commission about the last-minute news from the FBI. Now the final report could rule out what had previously seemed to be the strongest testimony from any witness suggesting that Oswald might have had coconspirators.
David Slawson, who had pressed so vigorously to pursue Odio’s claims, could not recall years later if he had read Hoover’s letter, nor did he remember the details of how the bureau had apparently resolved Odio’s claims. Like his colleagues, Slawson was simply too busy with the task of completing his part of the report. There was no discussion, or at least none that Slawson could recall, about having someone from the commission interview Hall; there was no time for it. “We could only assume that the FBI had it right.”
With Hoover’s letter in hand, the portions of the report that dealt with Odio were hurriedly rewritten to explain—and rebut—what she had claimed. In the report, the commission saluted itself for pushing the FBI to revisit Odio’s story: “In spite of the fact that it appeared almost certain that Oswald could not have been in Dallas at the time Mrs. Odio thought he was, the Commission requested the FBI to conduct further investigation to determine the validity of Mrs. Odio’s testimony.” The report noted the FBI’s success in tracking down Loran Hall and how it was Hall and his two companions who had appeared at Odio’s door. “While the FBI had not yet completed its investigation into this matter at the time the report went to press, the Commission has concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was not at Mrs. Odio’s apartment in September of 1963.”
* * *
Although the commission was about to close its doors and could no longer monitor the FBI investigation in Dallas, the bureau did continue to pursue the Odio inquiry, and the account it had provided to the commission fell apart almost instantly. Over time, Loran Hall would change his story more than once, eventually insisting—under oath to congressional investigators—that the FBI had misrepresented him and that he had never visited Odio’s apartment. He thought the FBI agents who had initially interviewed him might have concocted a false story to appease the commission. Seymour and Howard were also located; both insisted that they did not know Odio and had never been to her apartment. There was evidence to support their denials. The FBI was able to confirm that Seymour had been working in Florida on the night that he was supposedly in Texas.
FBI agents in Dallas paid another visit to Odio on October 1, a week after the commission’s report was issued, and showed her photographs of Hall, Howard, and Seymour. She recognized none of them, and she insisted again—as she would insist for decades to come—that it was Lee Harvey Oswald she had seen at the door of her Dallas home in September 1963.
53
THE OFFICES OF REPRESENTATIVE GERALD R. FORD
THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
WASHINGTON, DC
SEPTEMBER 1964
Gerald Ford’s book project was becoming harder to keep a secret. A fast-growing circle of editors in the publishing industry in New York were aware of his plans to write a book that would be an inside account of the investigation, with publication soon after
the commission’s report was made public. Ford and his friend and coauthor, Jack Stiles, had lined up the William Morris talent agency to negotiate a deal with the publishing house Simon and Schuster.
The final contract called for Ford to be paid an advance of $10,000, and up to 15 percent of the retail price on each book sold after the advance was recouped; a contract for the paperback rights to the book would be negotiated later. The advance alone was equivalent to nearly half of Ford’s $22,500 annual salary in the House.* The book, which would center on Oswald’s life story and his possible motives for assassinating Kennedy, was given the title Portrait of the Assassin, although Ford had initially suggested Kennedy’s Killer. Ford had been introduced to the publisher by the editor of Life magazine, Edward K. Thompson, who wanted to publish an excerpt of the book in conjunction with the release of the commission’s final report.
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Page 54