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

by Philip Shenon

  While I know he will disagree with my portrayal of him in these pages, I do thank Mark Lane for welcoming me into his home in Virginia and giving me an extended interview for this book. Whatever our disagreements, I know now that the title of his most famous, bestselling book about the Warren Commission, Rush to Judgment, was an appropriate one.

  To my mother, Philippa Shenon, and the rest of my family in California and elsewhere, I apologize for my long absences from the dinner table because of the book project—this one—that I tried to keep a secret for so many years. To my friends Desmond Davis, Darnell Harvin, Betty Russell, Dino Sciulli, and Julian Wells in Washington, DC, thank you for keeping me company during so many long days and nights of writing.

  ALSO BY PHILIP SHENON

  The Commission:

  The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation

  About the Author

  PHILIP SHENON, the bestselling author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, was a reporter for the New York Times for more than twenty years. As a Washington correspondent for the Times, he covered the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the State Department As a foreign correspondent for the paper, he reported from more than sixty countries and several war zones. He lives in Washington, DC.

  A Cruel and Shocking Act. Copyright © 2013 by Philip Shenon. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.henryholt.com

  Cover image: Photographer unknown

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Shenon, Philip.

  A cruel and shocking act: The secret history of the Kennedy assassination / Philip Shenon.

  pages cm

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-8050-9420-6 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-4299-4369-7 (electronic book) 1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963—Assassination. 2. United States. Warren Commission. I. Title.

  E842.9.S46 2013

  973.922092—dc23

  2013031968

  e-ISBN 9781429943697

  First Edition: October 2013

  * The whereabouts of the president’s brain became yet another mystery. In 1979, a special congressional panel that reinvestigated the president’s murder, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, said it had learned from Dr. Burkley that he had transferred a sealed stainless-steel bucket containing the brain to Kennedy’s former secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, who then stored it for a time in 1964 at the National Archives. The committee could not track the brain with certainty past that point. In its final report, the committee said it was told by former Yale Law School professor Burke Marshall, who represented the executors of Kennedy’s estate, that he suspected Robert Kennedy ultimately obtained the brain and other autopsy evidence and “disposed of these materials himself, without informing anyone else.” Marshall said, “Robert Kennedy was concerned that these materials would be placed on public display in future years in an institution such as the Smithsonian and wished to dispose of them to eliminate such a possibility.” (House Select Committee on Assassinations, vol. VII, “Medical and Firearms Evidence,” March 1979.)

  * At Hoover’s direction, the FBI had been hunting for years for evidence of Communist sympathizers on the faculties of major American universities; a few were uncovered on the faculty of Howard University, the historically black university in Washington, DC.

  * Given inflation, Hoover’s new $17,500 annual salary would be equivalent to about $171,000 in 2013.

  * In his memoirs, which were published posthumously in 1977, Warren revealed that he had reviewed the photos during the commission’s investigation, although he did not disclose exactly when in 1963 or 1964 the review had taken place.

  * The airport was named for John Foster Dulles (1888–1959), secretary of state under President Eisenhower and the brother of Allen Dulles, the former director of Central Intelligence and a member of the Warren Commission.

  * Given inflation, $25,000 in 1964 would be equivalent to about $188,000 in 2013.

  * Lane would later say that he did not talk to anyone who claimed to have witnessed the Carousel Club meeting. The information, he said, had instead come to him secondhand from the late Thayer Waldo, a reporter for the Fort Worth Star Telegram—the same reporter who told Drew Pearson about how Secret Service agents had gone out drinking the night before the assassination. Asked if he believed the meeting had actually taken place, Lane told the author of this book in 2011, “I have no idea now, and I had no idea then.” (Lane interview.)

  * Given inflation, $36,000 in 1964 would be equivalent to about $271,000 in 2013.

  * Ruby’s acquaintances offered stomach-churning stories to the FBI about his relationship to his pets. One witness described watching as Ruby casually masturbated one of his dogs in front of visitors. Another described Ruby allowing his dogs to lick blood from his hand after a deep cut with a kitchen knife.

  * Years later, Lane would insist that he had not harassed Helen Markham, suggesting instead that he had done a service by revealing that such a seemingly important witness before the Warren Commission could be confused about what she had seen. He noted, correctly, that Markham’s credibility had been damaged by the fact that she initially claimed to the commission under oath that she had never talked to him. “It’s not badgering,” said Lane, adding that he remains convinced that Oswald did not kill Tippit despite the many other witnesses who said otherwise. “It’s only what every lawyer in the world always does” in cross-examination. “No lawyer will look at that and say I did anything wrong.” He acknowledged that he had taped the call without notifying Markham, although he said that was legal so long as he did not divulge the contents, which he did not do; it was the commission that released the transcript. In its final report, the commission would describe Markham’s testimony as “reliable” and that “even in the absence of Mrs. Markham’s testimony, there is ample evidence to identify Oswald as the killer of Tippit.” (Lane interview; Warren Report, p. 168.)

  * Warren would later insist that the commission had been fair to Oswald, even in death, through an arrangement made in February with the president of the American Bar Association, Walter E. Craig, who agreed to evaluate the commission’s work “in fairness to the alleged assassin and his family.” Although Craig was invited to cross-examine witnesses and offer the names of witnesses who should be called, the records shows that he and two associates had little involvement in the investigation. (See Warren Report, pp. XIV–XV)

  * Lane said he knew the FBI and other government agencies had placed him under surveillance and that they were trying to gather derogatory information about his private life. After he began to speak out about the Kennedy assassination, he said that he was routinely stopped by U.S. immigration authorities when returning from speaking trips abroad. He suggested he was most offended when he was temporarily detained in 1964 at New York’s newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport—“I was not allowed into the city where I was born” without harassment. As for the FBI effort to compile derogatory information and share it with members of the Warren Commission, Lane suggested he wore it as a badge of honor. “They did the same thing with Martin Luther King,” he said. (Lane interview.)

  * Ruby denied any connection to Hunt and insisted he was given the scripts at a local trade fair at which Hunt family companies were promoting their Texas-made food products.

  * Those news reports, especially in the New York Times, were later found to have been seriously exaggerated. In later years, others journalists and researchers determined that only a few witnesses near the scene of Genovese’s murder would have been in a position to see or hear anything.

  * The commission would not learn until June that Lane had tape-recorded his telephone call with Markham.

  * Although Specter offered this account in his memoirs and noted it in interviews with the author of this book, the Jewish holiday actually began later in the month. In 1964
, the first day of Passover was Saturday, March 28.

  * Connally’s remark that “they” were trying to kill the occupants of the limousine would often be cited by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Texas governor knew that there was more than one gunman. Connally said later he meant no such thing and that he accepted the conclusion that Oswald had acted alone.

  * Although commission records would show that Coleman worked substantially fewer hours than most of the lawyers, Specter appeared unaware before his death in 2012 that Coleman had taken on special assignments for the commission away from Washington.

  * Specter would finally be shown the autopsy photos in the National Archives in April 1996, when he was a United States senator from Pennsylvania. He described what he saw: “The photos are gruesome. John F. Kennedy is lying on an autopsy table, his handsome face discolored and distorted by the gaping bullet wound in his head. As I looked at the slain president, I was struck again by the same waves of nausea that had hit me when I first read the medical reports 35 years earlier. I was also struck by the president’s clearly robust physical condition, which somehow made the photographs even more ghastly. Kennedy, at 47, had well-defined, muscular shoulders and arms, a flat stomach and a full head of hair.” (Specter, Passion for Truth, p. 89.)

  * In fact, Hosty had kept his handwritten notes, a fact that he later insisted he had not remembered at the time of his testimony to the commission. “Several months after the Warren report was released, I discovered the notes among my papers in my desk. Realizing their significance, I chose to hang on to them, and I kept them safely stored away.” (Hosty, Assignment: Oswald, p. 146.)

  * Given the effects of inflation, the $2,500 paid to Aynesworth in 1964 would be equivalent to $18,800 in 2013, while the $20,000 payment to Marina Oswald would be equivalent to $150,700.

  * Specter had other reasons to be agitated that afternoon, since his hometown Phillies were defeated by the San Francisco Giants, 4–3, in ten innings, allowing San Francisco to hold on to first place in the National League.

  * At the request of the author in 2012, the National Archives researched the question of why a copy of Hoover’s June 17, 1964, letter was found in the CIA’s declassified files but not in the commission’s. The National Archives said it was unable to determine the answer.

  * Coleman said the author of this book was the first journalist he had ever told about the secret mission. Other former staff members of the commission told the author they had heard rumors about Coleman’s meeting with the Cuban leader. Asked about the rumors, Coleman confirmed to the author that they were true. He said he made no mention of the Castro meeting in his own memoirs, Counsel for the Situation, published in 2010, because he understood the information was still classified.

  * Breyer would join the Supreme Court as an associate justice in 1994.

  * Members of Bringuier’s militant anti-Castro group, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (“Revolutionary Student Directorate”), or DRE, participated in the Bay of Pigs operation. Although its leaders were known to be especially bitter toward President Kennedy for his failure to oust Castro, the group continued to accept money and other support from the U.S. government, most of it funneled through the CIA. (House Select Committee on Assassinations, vol. X, “Anti-Castro Activities,” March 1979).

  * Dean Andrews’s testimony might have been easily ignored had it not been for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who would claim in 1967 that Clay Bertrand was an alias used by a respected local businessman, Clay Shaw, who was then prosecuted by Garrison for involvement in Kennedy’s assassination. Long before Shaw’s acquittal, the case was seen as a shocking display of prosecutorial misconduct. Even so, Garrison, as portrayed by the actor Kevin Costner, was the hero of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, about the Kennedy assassination. Andrews would be portrayed by the comedian John Candy.

  * Given the effects of inflation, $25,000 in 1963 would be equivalent to about $190,000 in 2013.

  * As a United States senator, Specter suggested that his respect and fondness for Redlich was a factor in his decision in 1987 to join Senate colleagues in rejecting the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, a federal appeals court judge and former law professor at Yale. In a previously unpublished 1996 interview, Specter said that he had been offended by reports of an incident years before the nomination in which the conservative Bork ridiculed the very liberal Redlich during a dinner speech in New York, with Redlich in the audience. “Redlich had been very ill and came out to the dinner as a matter of courtesy” to Bork, Specter said. “When Redlich told me what happened between him and Bork, I really had a very negative view of Bork, which didn’t help Bork any” at his Senate confirmation hearings (Specter interviews).

  * The salary of members of the House of Representatives in 1963—$22,500 a year—would be equivalent to about $168,000 in 2013, given inflation. Ford’s $10,000 book advance would be equivalent, in 2013, to about $75,000.

  * Liebeler also investigated allegations that Oswald was connected to Marcello through an uncle who lived in New Orleans, Charles “Dutz” Murret, a New Orleans bookie alleged to be tied to Marcello’s crime network. The commission found no evidence of any link between Murret and the assassination.

  * The author has chosen not to list all those names, since most of the “derogatory” information appeared to be not that at all. The longest entry in the memo was, not surprisingly, for Norman Redlich. Joseph Ball was on the list, in part, because the FBI considered him a “civil rights libertarian” who had “consistently injected himself in support of the civil rights movement.”

  * Liebeler would later tell Vincent Bugliosi, the author and Kennedy assassination historian, that Rankin’s comment was actually “not inappropriate at the time” since Rankin made it on the very day that the final draft of the commission’s report was being distributed among the commissioners. “From the beginning, we were all after the truth, and there were no limitations on that,” Liebeler told Bugliosi. (Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, p. 358.)

  * Gerald Ford’s 1965 book on Oswald, Portrait of the Assassin, had disappointing sales, never recouping Ford’s $10,000 advance from Simon and Schuster. Under terms of the contract, he was allowed to keep all of the advance.

  * The CIA would eventually acknowledge publicly that Maheu, who had done other work for the spy agency, had been asked to organize Castro’s murder. It was Maheu who then recruited Mafia figures, including a West Coast mobster named John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, to carry out the assassination. Edward Morgan would eventually represent Roselli as well. (New York Times, August 6, 2008.)

  * Although Pearson and other journalists and Congressional investigators had continued to pursue allegations of wrongdoing involving Johnson and the Washington lobbyist Bobby Baker, the former Senate aide known as “Little Lyndon,” the scandal quieted for a time after the Kennedy assassination, and Johnson was never directly implicated in any of Baker’s crimes. In 1967, Baker was sentenced to up to three years in prison after his conviction on charges of tax evasion, theft, and fraud in an unrelated corruption case. (New York Times, April 8, 1967.)

  * Anderson, once memorably described by J. Edgar Hoover as “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures,” inherited the column after Pearson’s death in 1969. In 1972, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting about secret diplomacy between the United States and Pakistan during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.

  * In Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, which suggested that Garrison had come close to exposing the truth about a vast conspiracy in the assassination, the role of Chief Justice Earl Warren was played by the real-life Jim Garrison.

  * LIRING/3’s name was identified in CIA records that were declassified decades later. Since there is no way to confirm that the CIA records are accurate, the author has chosen not to publish the informant’s name here. Contacted by phone in 2013, the painter confirmed that he knew Duran, although he denied he had any relationship with the CIA. He also denied that Dur
an had ever told him that she had a sexual relationship with Oswald.

  * In light of the allegations against Mr. Watson, the author of this book attempted to reach him through both the CIA and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, a Washington-area group that represents retired agency employees. Both said they had no information about Watson, including whether he is still alive. “We haven’t been able to find anyone who maintains a relationship with Mr. Watson and/or his family,” a CIA spokesman said.