by Gus Russo
Corso remembers that, even with his dissent noted, Russell had to be “arm-twisted” by Johnson into signing the Report. Russell was later shocked to learn that despite Warren’s guarantee, his dissent was not published with the rest of the report, nor mentioned in it. For years, Warren Commission critics wondered about the contents of the Russell dissent.107 It was only recently discovered among Russell’s papers at the University of Georgia.
Fellow Commissioner (and future president) Gerald R. Ford (R-Michigan) shared Russell’s suspicions. In a secret meeting with Hoover’s assistant Cartha DeLoach shortly after the Commission’s first meeting, Ford voiced his suspicions of a foreign conspiracy, and his fears of a narrow investigation. DeLoach wrote of his meeting with Ford:
Ford told me that he was currently having problems inasmuch as a majority of the members of the Commission desired to go along with the recommendation made in Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach’s letter to the Commission dated 12-9-63. In this letter, Katzenbach recommended that the Commission make an immediate press release pointing out that the FBI clearly showed that there was no international conspiracy and that Oswald was a loner.108
The memo went on to say that Ford disapproved of such an early rush to judgment. When CIA Director John McCone told Ford that the Cubans may have paid Oswald, “Ford stated this excited him greatly inasmuch as it definitely tended to show that there was an international connection involved in the assassination.” Like Russell, Ford may have had some inside knowledge that encouraged his suspicions. In a 1995 interview with the BBC, Ford revealed:
I had been on two committees in the Congress that had responsibility of our overall intelligence community and secondly, a committee that had jurisdiction over all money for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, etc. . . As a member of those two committees, I had certain background information that at least gave me the understanding that our government was doing whatever was needed in order to make a change in Cuba.109
Although Ford asserted publicly that this knowledge did not color his thinking about the assassination, he was to become, as President, a key force behind the eventual leaking in 1975 of the CIA-Mafia plots that some insiders believe resulted in JFK’s death. As Ford told his White House Counsel Phil Buchen in 1975, “I do not recall this information being furnished to the Warren Commission. . . As I remember, those of us on the Commission got the impression the Agency had not engaged in activities against Castro. I would be interested in any information you can give me on this subject.”110 Papers from the Ford Presidency indicate that his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, continually updated Ford on the later Congressional investigations into possible Cuban complicity.
Warren Commission member Hale Boggs, from Louisiana, was known to have had strong disagreements with the Commission’s official conclusion. As has been noted, Boggs told his wife, Lindy, that he’d wished he’d never signed on to the report. It has been known for years that Boggs, like much of the public, was suspicious of stonewalling by the FBI and CIA. What has not been known is that Boggs, like Ford, may have been apprised of the plots to kill Castro.
Boggs’ Louisiana colleague in the House, Gillis Long, was one of Boggs’ closest friends. Long had known of the Castro plots since their inception. He was a lifelong friend of Robert Maheu, the acknowledged go-between in the early Castro plots, and had himself once worked for Howard Hughes as a Maheu aide. Maheu had told Long about the early Castro plots when they first started.
In the early 1960s, Long began retelling—to colleagues—Maheu stories about assassination plots. For example, Wayne Thevenot (now a D.C. lobbyist) accompanied Long on a trip to meet Maheu in Las Vegas in 1965. Maheu had contacted Long when Hughes lost ownership of TWA and wanted to vent about banking corruption. At that time, Long was a member of House committees regulating banking and business.
Thevenot, who had disbelieved Long’s “keystone cops” story of the plots against Castro, was seated directly across from Maheu at the Desert Inn, when Long said to Maheu, “Go ahead, tell him what you told me. I want him to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” Maheu proceeded to tell his story, exactly as related previously.
What is most important is that Long, who had heard the story long before the Kennedy assassination, would undoubtedly have relayed these stories to Warren Commission member Hale Boggs. As Thevenot recalls, “Gillis and Hale were as close as you can get. They had no secrets from each other.”111
The Warren Commission legal staff also had doubts about the “Oswald alone” conclusion. In 1993, staff attorney Burt Griffin said of his work on the commission, “We spent virtually no time investigating the possibility of a conspiracy. I wish we had.”112 Commission senior attorney Lee Rankin also voiced concern that the murder had a Cuban component. When Congressional investigators contacted Rankin in 1978, he asked them, “Are you looking into the [anti-Castro] plots on the basis of whether they were covered up by the CIA because some of the very people involved in them could have been involved in the President’s assassination?” When answered in the affirmative, Rankin exhorted them:
Good. Good. You have to look at it that way. . . I’ve been afraid that it was all true. . . You’ve got to go after that. Helms’ role in the plots and his concealment of them from the Commission would just have been unconscionable. [That information] would have changed so much back then.113
Earl Warren and the Report
“Earl never closed the door on the possibility of a conspiracy.”
—Jeffrey Warren, Earl’s grandson, 1994114
Earl Warren is not known to have made public statements about the Commission’s conclusions, even after the Castro-plotting revelations of the Church Committee in 1976. Jeffrey Warren believes that his grandfather was content with the Commission’s work and would not have protected his friend John Kennedy at the cost of getting to the truth of the murder. Nonetheless, Jeffrey Warren concedes, “Earl knew everything. I’m sure he knew about Operation Mongoose.” Earl himself, while saying that he had seen no concrete evidence of Cuban complicity, nonetheless added, “I am quite prepared to believe that Castro wanted to kill Kennedy, and may have sent some teams here to do it.”115
This belief is buttressed by a statement made by a staff member of the Church Committee, which eventually made Mongoose public, and which unearthed the assassination plots. The aide was asked about how the committee initially learned of the Kennedy Administration’s anti-Castro plotting. He responded, “You can bet one thing: if it hadn’t been for Drew Pearson, [Earl] Warren, and LBJ pushing the thing, we never would have been told about it.”116
Jeffrey Warren’s opinion notwithstanding, it strains credulity to believe that a man of Warren’s ability, knowing of the Kennedys’ provocation of Castro, would not have been more interested in Oswald’s Cuban contacts in New Orleans and Mexico City. There is evidence that he was.
Warren Commission Staff counsel William Coleman has spoken privately about being sent to Havana by Warren to investigate possible Cuban complicity in the crime. When asked about the trip recently, Coleman admitted to making the journey, but would say nothing else. “I can’t talk. It was top-secret,” Coleman said. He offered a “No comment” when asked if he was successful in meeting with Castro.
Although Coleman has stated that he came away from the Cuban trip convinced of Cuba’s non-involvement in the assassination, it’s hard to imagine that his findings were conclusive. It seems doubtful that one young, lone attorney could locate the pro-Castro functionaries who may have met with Oswald in Mexico City, and then persuade them to confess.117 In sending this young attorney, Earl Warren may have made a decision not to air the dirty laundry of his friend John Kennedy.
Johnson and the Official Conclusion
“I never believed that Oswald acted alone.”
—Lyndon Johnson, 1969118
“LBJ saved the day. . . With one masterful hand, he clamped the lid down tight with the Warren Commission. . . thus saving the ‘genius’ R
FK who, blinded by his own foolish stupidity, accompanied by a host of ‘friends,’ all murdered his own brother.”
—Jack Martin, New Orleans associate of Guy Banister and David Ferrie119
It has long been known that Lyndon Johnson privately disagreed with the Commission’s conclusions. Evidence given secretly to Johnson as the years progressed only served to validate his beliefs.
Lyndon Johnson was the man who commissioned the Warren Commission report, and who accepted it when delivered to him on September 24, 1964. Yet only four days later, Johnson told Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield what he really believed. “There’s a good deal of feeling that maybe the Cuban thing. . .” Johnson mused. “Oswald was messing around in Mexico with the Cubans.”120
In fact, the Commission’s report and Johnson’s imprimatur on it were merely an attempt to reach a socio-political closure so the nation could move forward. Johnson had been against the Kennedys’ Cuba policy of assassination, and his statements suggest a man who felt that Kennedy and Castro had been engaged in an irresponsibly dangerous game that Kennedy lost with his life. Deciding that 39 million lives should not be jeopardized because of the prideful actions of two men of privilege—John Kennedy and Fidel Castro—could have been Johnson’s finest moment. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley has written:
The withholding of that information from the public was thus complete—all because the White House seemingly considered the risk of a confrontation with the Soviet Union over the Kennedy assassination too great.121
Marty Underwood, Johnson’s most-trusted advanceman and close friend, agrees. “Johnson had to set that thing up. We had to whitewash it,” says Underwood. “Christ, with the mental state of the country—if they had thought for a minute that Castro or anybody was behind it, they would have gotten after them.”122
General Alexander Haig, who not only worked on Bobby Kennedy’s Cuban sabotage program, but later became a close friend of Lyndon Johnson, adds another possible component to Johnson’s motivations, saying, “Johnson believed that if it were ever suggested that Castro had a hand in the assassination of Kennedy [and the U.S. did not retaliate], there would be a right-wing uprising marking the end of the Democratic Party’s domination of the contemporary scene.”123
Johnson’s suspicions of an international component to the Kennedy killing never wavered. His initial behavior on board Air Force One bordered on the hysterical. The Warren Commission notwithstanding, everything Johnson would learn in the coming years only reinforced his beliefs. Even as the Warren Commission finished its work, Johnson initiated his own investigation into Kennedy’s death. It was an initiative he would repeat in 1968, with dramatic results. Historian Michael Beschloss was briefed by the CIA’s Richard Helms about Johnson’s special investigation. Beschloss wrote:
Richard Helms found Lyndon Johnson distracted well into 1964 by his worry that Kennedy had been assassinated by a conspiracy. As Helms recalled, the Agency “was very helpful to Johnson on this” and met the new President’s request for an independent CIA study.124
According to LBJ Chief of Staff Bob Hardesty, Johnson also asked Nick Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark to investigate the Oswald-Castro connection.125 LBJ’s press secretary, George Reedy, noted, “[LBJ] frequently made statements that the Cubans must have been involved. The whole idea that the Cubans—meaning Castro—might have had something to do with it was linked to the CIA’s attempt to assassinate Castro. That was the root of Johnson’s concern.”126
In his oral history, Robert Kennedy bitterly recounted a remark Johnson supposedly made to someone else after the assassination. “When I was young in Texas, I used to know a cross-eyed boy,” Johnson said. “His eyes were crossed, and so was his character. . . That was God’s retribution for people who were bad—and so you should be careful of cross-eyed people because God put his mark on them. . . Sometimes I think that what happened to Kennedy may have been divine retribution.” JFK himself had slightly-crossed eyes.127
Over the years, Johnson continued, albeit quietly, to pound away at the same theme. Joseph Califano, Jr., an LBJ confidante and former director of RFK’s Cuban Coordinating Committee, would recall in 1975 that “on more than one occasion” LBJ expressed “a very strong opinion, almost a conviction,” that Kennedy’s death was a “response and retaliation” by Castro. Califano remembers Johnson telling him, “In time, when all the CIA activities are flushed out, then maybe the full story of the assassination will become known.”128 Johnson told news anchor Walter Cronkite in 1969 that soon after taking office, he had learned that “we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.” In 1967, Johnson told ABC newsman Howard K. Smith, on the condition that he was off-the-record: “I’ll tell you something [about Kennedy’s murder] that will rock you. Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got to him first. . . It will all come out one day.”129
Johnson’s conclusion never wavered. In retirement at his ranch in Austin, he continued his pronouncements of Castro culpability. In 1971, one year before his death, Johnson told White House reporter Marianne Means, “Oswald acted either under the influence or the orders of Castro.”130 That same year, Johnson told the publisher of his autobiography, “I think I know who killed JFK. I can’t prove it yet, but one day I will. Goddammit, I know it. . . it was Castro. You see, the Kennedy brothers liked playing cops and robbers for the CIA and they sent people into Cuba to git Castro, but they failed and Castro git Kennedy. . . Oswald was a Communist agent. . . One day I will prove it.”131
In addition to CIA and FBI reports made available to LBJ, foreign sources may have played a role in his suspicions of Cuban involvement in Mexico City. Sharing the American Embassy in Mexico City with the CIA in 1963 was the U.S. Ambassador, Thomas Mann. In 1990, Mann recalled, “Lyndon Johnson had lines into Mexico that I knew nothing about. I knew he had information, he had his own sources, and I didn’t know who they were. [Johnson] was an amazing man. He didn’t speak Spanish, but he was a good friend of [Gustavo] Diaz Ordaz, who became president of Mexico.”132
The very week the Commission handed in its report, panel member Richard Russell phoned Johnson to say of the official conclusion, “I don’t believe it.” To that Johnson responded, “I don’t either.”
The Shortcomings of the Warren Commission
In later years, the Warren Commission’s work would be evaluated by two official government investigations. In the first, the Church hearings of 1976, the committee concluded:
The evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient and that facts which might have substantially altered the course of the investigation were not provided to the Warren Commission or those individuals within the FBI and the CIA, as well as other agencies of Government who were charged with investigating the assassination. . . The FBI investigation, as well as the CIA inquiry, was deficient on the specific question of the significance of Oswald’s contacts with pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups for the many months before the assassination. . . Senior Bureau officials should have realized the FBI efforts were focused too narrowly to allow for a full investigation. They should have realized the significance of Oswald’s Cuban contacts. . . The possibility exists that senior officials in both agencies made conscious decisions not to disclose potentially important information.133 . . .Neither the Warren Commission as a body nor its staff was given details of CIA Cuban operations. . . In any event, the Warren Commission did not pursue with the CIA the questions of Oswald’s pro-Castro and anti-Castro contacts. Of the thirty-four requests to the CIA from the Warren Commission. . . only one deals with information on a Cuban matter. That is a request for the CIA to furnish information about Jack Ruby’s alleged visit to Cuba in 1959.134
Three years later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) likewise evaluated the Warren Commission’s performance. It concluded, “The Warren Commission failed to adequately investigate the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.” Further, the HSCA poin
ted out, “the Commission overstated the thoroughness of its investigation. . . in particular, that of the conspiracy investigation. . . The report left the impression that issues had been dealt with more thoroughly than they had.”135 The Commission’s inadequacies, the HSCA Report stated, stemmed not only from severe time constraints, but from “failure by the CIA and FBI to provide it with all relevant evidence and information.”136
Among the specific areas pointed to as deficient by the HSCA were:
Oswald’s activities and associations during the periods he lived in New Orleans.
The conspiratorial and potentially violent climate created by the Cuban issue in the early 1960s, particularly the possible consequences of CIA/Mafia plots against Castro.
The full nature and extent of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City two months prior to the assassination, including not only his contact with the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic offices there, and the CIA’s monitoring of his activities there, but also his possible associations and activities outside those offices.137
The HSCA concluded, “It is a reality to be regretted that the [Warren] Commission failed to live up to its promise.”138