The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  McCloy was back in New York when the coup occurred, but he and his Hanna clients were tremendously relieved at this turn of events. As Fortune magazine put it, “For Hanna, the revolt that overthrew Goulart . . . arrived like a last minute rescue by the First Cavalry.”38 The generals who now ruled the country soon saw to it that Hanna’s concession was restored.

  The 1964 Brazilian coup marked a turning point for U.S. policy in Latin America. The Johnson administration had made clear its willingness to use its muscle to support any regime whose anticommunist credentials were in good order.39 Later that year, millions of dollars were funneled by the CIA to influence the Chilean elections. And the following year, President Johnson intervened with troops in the Dominican Republic to oust a similar left-of-center government. In Brazil, thousands of citizens were arbitrarily arrested, many newspapers were closed down, and press censorship was imposed. But one had to be understanding, Ambassador Gordon told Dean Rusk only a week after the coup, because there had been a “very narrow escape from Communist-dominated dictatorship.”40 For McCloy, it was just a matter of creating the right kind of business climate. As he explained to the regime’s new leader, General Castello Branco, he had agreed to represent Hanna “only because he was convinced that such an arrangement would be in the public interest—of benefit to Brazil and to Brazilian-American relations as well as to the company.”41 What was good for Hanna was good for Brazil and its relations with Washington.

  Throughout late 1963 and early ‘64, Brazil was a mere sideshow on McCloy’s calendar. The main event was his frustrating experience on the Warren Commission. By mid-December 1963, a number of things had already prejudiced the assassination probe. Various arms of the federal bureaucracy had made up their minds on the basic facts. Only two hours after Oswald was shot on November 24, J. Edgar Hoover phoned the White House and left a message for Johnson: “The thing I am most concerned about . . . is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”42 Hoover ordered his men to concentrate exclusively on making the case against Oswald as the lone assassin 43 Without wasting any time, on December 9, Hoover handed the commissioners the FBI’s Summary Report on the assassination. It concluded that Oswald had acted alone in firing three shots at the presidential party, two of which hit Kennedy and one of which hit Governor John Connally 44

  In describing the president’s wounds, the report said that one of the bullets had entered “just below his shoulder” at a downward angle of forty-five to sixty degrees. It had penetrated to a distance of less than a finger length, and there was no point of exit. Furthermore, the bullet was not in his body.45 The report described the fatal head wound but made no mention at all of the wound in the front of Kennedy’s neck.

  Almost immediately, the commissioners saw some major problems with the FBI Summary Report. Its description of the entry wound in the president’s shoulder as being nearly six inches below the base of the neck flatly contradicted the Bethesda Naval autopsy report submitted by Dr. James J. Humes. The navy autopsy had placed this same entry wound at the base of the neck, high enough for the bullet to have exited through the wound at the front of Kennedy’s neck. If the FBI description of the shoulder wound was correct, the bullet could not have entered Kennedy at a 40-percent downward angle and then climbed enough to exit through the front of his neck.

  When the commissioners sat down behind closed doors to discuss the FBI’s conclusions, McCloy said, “Let’s find out about these wounds, it is just as confusing now as could be. It left my mind muddy as to what really did happen.. . . Why did the F.B.I. report come out with something which isn’t consistent with the autopsy when we finally see the autopsy?”46 He also couldn’t understand why there was no mention of Governor Connally’s wounds. The evidence as to how the bullets hit Kennedy, he said, “is looming up as the most confusing thing that we’ve got.”47 At this point, McCloy was not ruling out a second assassin. He said he wanted to go to the Dallas assassination site “to see if it is humanly possible for him [Kennedy] to have been hit in the front. . . .”48

  But even as they complained about the report, the commissioners found reasons to excuse the FBI’s behavior. “It does leave you some loopholes in this thing,” McCloy said, “but I think you have to realize they put this thing together very fast.”49 What McCloy didn’t know was that the FBI chief was withholding evidence from the Commission. Hoover had been unhappy that Johnson had even appointed an outside body to investigate the assassination. He regarded the Commission as a threat to the Bureau, particularly since he was soon informed that the Bureau’s handling of the Oswald case in the months prior to the assassination could be severely criticized. Among other things, soon after the assassination the FBI ordered one of its agents to destroy a threatening note written to the Bureau by Oswald just a few weeks before the assassination.50 In addition, Hoover had conducted his own internal investigation of why Oswald hadn’t been listed on the FBI’s Security Index, a list of more than twenty thousand potentially disloyal citizens. On December 10, he was told that Oswald should have been on the list, and that the FBI’s investigation of Oswald should have escalated when the Bureau learned from the CIA that Oswald had made an appointment to see a KGB officer in the Soviet Embassy in Mexico less than two months prior to the assassination. An angry Hoover immediately acted upon this internal report by disciplining seventeen FBI agents, including William Sullivan, the assistant director. But this action was to remain secret, since Hoover felt that, if the Bureau’s deficient handling of the Oswald case became known, the FBI’s reputation would be compromised.51 Indeed, Hoover believed there was “no question” that the Bureau “failed in carrying through some of the most salient aspects of the Oswald investigation.”52 But he was not about to admit this to the Warren Commission. Instead, he withheld information critical of the Bureau’s handling of Oswald. And just in case the Commission began to attack the Bureau, he asked his men to dig out “all derogatory material on Warren Commission members and staff contained in FBI files.”53 Finally, he did everything he could to find out how its investigation was being conducted. To this end, an obliging Congressman Ford soon began giving confidential briefings to the FBI on the commissioners’ top-secret deliberations.54

  The FBI was not the only agency withholding information from the Commission. The CIA had numerous critical facts in its possession concerning the possible motives various foreign powers may have had to assassinate the president. Among other things, on the very day of Kennedy’s murder a CIA agent had met in Paris with a Cuban official who claimed he was willing to assassinate Fidel Castro. The Cuban, whom the CIA later determined was probably a double agent, was actually given an assassination weapon, a poison pen with a hidden syringe.55 This was only the most recent of numerous plots to kill Castro, but neither it nor any previous attempts were revealed to the Warren Commission. (Some of these CIA plots involved the use of various Mafia networks, a highly relevant fact given Jack Ruby’s underworld associations.) Of course, one commissioner, Allen Dulles, was aware that the Agency had targeted Castro during his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Whether he shared this information with McCloy or any of the other commissioners is not known. Like everyone else, McCloy knew that both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had wanted to destroy Castro’s regime, and in his mind this alone might have given Castro reason to retaliate.56 But, given Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union, he also thought the accused assassin may have been recruited by the KGB. He had talked about the case with Ellen, who thought it “pretty suspicious” that Oswald had found it so easy to obtain an exit visa from the Soviets for his Russian wife.57 (Unknown to him at the time, a December 1963 CIA memo gave voice to the same speculation.58) Alternatively, he thought the possibility that Oswald may never have been a genuine defector, that he might have been sent to the Soviet Union by the CIA, was “a very realistic rumor” and worthy of investigation.59 In short, he thought anything was possible.

 
; This was underscored for him when, on the afternoon of January 22, 1964, he received an unexpected call from the Commission’s newly appointed general counsel, J. Lee Rankin. The lawyer informed him that an emergency meeting had been scheduled for five o’clock that afternoon in the Veterans of Foreign Wars Building on Capitol Hill. Canceling his other appointments, McCloy flew down from New York and arrived just as the meeting began.60 Taking his seat around an eight-foot oblong table with the other commissioners, McCloy heard Rankin report some shocking news: the Texas attorney general had just forwarded an allegation that Oswald had been an undercover agent of the FBI, that he had been paid $200 a month since September 1962, and that his agent number was 179.61

  The commissioners were aware of the explosive nature of this news. Representative Ford later wrote, “I cannot recall attending a meeting more tense and hushed.”62 By the time they parted two and a half hours later, the commissioners had agreed that Rankin should with the greatest secrecy interview the Texas attorney general and report to the Commission on what he learned. Five days later, the commissioners met once again in the Veterans of Foreign Wars Building, where they now had taken over two floors of office space.

  Rankin told them that the source of the allegation against the FBI was a Dallas reporter, and that the allegation probably could not be substantiated. “We do have a dirty rumor,” he said, “that is very bad for the Commission. . . . It must be wiped out insofar as it is possible to do so by this Commission.” But as they discussed the problem, it gradually dawned on the commissioners that this was something that was going to be very hard to disprove.

  “This is going to build up,” McCloy said. “In New York, I am already beginning to hear about it. I got a call from Time-Life about it. . . .” Dulles then interrupted to explain that if Oswald had been an FBI informant there might be no records of the fact, and if you interviewed the FBI agent who recruited him, he would be unlikely to admit the fact, even under oath.

  “Wouldn’t he tell it to his own chief?” McCloy asked.

  “He might,” Dulles replied, “or might not. . . . What I was getting at, I think under any circumstances, I think Mr. Hoover would say certainly he didn’t have anything to do with this fellow. . . . You can’t prove what the facts are.”63

  In other words, if Oswald had been on the FBI payroll, Hoover might not have known, or might lie about it. At this point, McCloy suggested that they either go to Hoover himself with the information or ask another intelligence agency to investigate the rumor. In the end, knowing that whatever course of action they took, the truth of the allegations could not be proved or disproved, the commissioners decided just to inform Hoover of the rumor. The FBI chief responded that there was nothing to it, and there the matter was allowed to rest.

  The crisis passed, and though the allegations that Oswald had been an FBI informant were almost certainly false, the Commission’s handling of the problem underscored a central dilemma in the conduct of its investigation. The Commission had two possibly contradictory purposes: it was supposed to expose the facts of the assassination, but the commissioners—and, indeed, most Americans—hoped the facts would reassure the nation that the assassination was the work of a lone gunman. What would happen if any of the “dirty rumors” were discovered to be true? Would the national interest be served if an unresolved conspiracy was all that could be known?

  This first crisis also made it clear that, unless they took the time and expense to establish an independent team of investigators, the Commission would remain absolutely dependent on the FBI. McCloy pointed out the inherent problem of this dependency: “There is a potential culpability here on the part of the Secret Service and the FBI, and their reports, after all, human nature being what it is, may have some self-serving aspects in them.”64 But, again, the Commission decided to live with this problem.

  By this time, McCloy was full of doubts about almost every aspect of the case. Even before the crisis over Oswald’s alleged ties to the FBI, he had been brooding about the unresolved contradictions between the FBI’s Summary Report and the Bethesda Naval Hospital’s autopsy report on the president. Sometime in mid-January, he discussed these concerns with C. D. Jackson. The Time-Life executive had just bought the rights to an 8mm movie shot by Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas businessman who had chanced to catch most of the assassination sequence on film. Zapruder’s film was to become a key piece of evidence for both the Commission and its critics in the years to come.

  On January 20, 1964, Jackson sent McCloy a series of blown-up transparencies reproduced from Zapruder’s film sequence of the assassination. In an accompanying note, he told McCloy, “Our scrutiny of these stills indicates one thing we did not notice when looking at the movie, and one other thing that you seemed to be in doubt about. I think there is no question but that the first shot actually took place behind the sign [a traffic sign that blocked Zapruder’s view], inasmuch as the first frame of the car emerging from behind the sign shows Kennedy’s hands just beginning to come up [to grasp his wounded throat].”65

  McCloy’s doubts were only heightened when he and the other commissioners viewed the Zapruder movie. As C. D. Jackson’s transparencies made clear, the Zapruder film shows that Kennedy had already been shot once as he emerged from behind the traffic sign. But it also showed clearly enough that Governor Connally had not yet been wounded—or at least he had not yet reacted, even though his rib and his wrist bone were shattered. This suggested that Connally could not have been hit by the same bullet that wounded Kennedy in the neck. After viewing the film, McCloy had the following exchange with Allen Dulles:

  “. . . you would think,” Dulles said, “if Connally had been hit at the same time [as Kennedy, he] would have reacted in the same way, and not reacted much later as these pictures show.”

  “That is right,” said McCloy.

  “Because the wounds would have been inflicted,” Dulles said.

  “That is what puzzles me,” said McCloy.

  McCloy later asked the doctor who had treated Connally’s wounds whether the governor could have had a delayed reaction to the impact of the bullet. The doctor replied, “Yes, but in the case of a wound which strikes a bony substance such as a rib, usually the reaction is quite prompt.”66 (Connally later confirmed this view in his testimony before the Commission: he stated that it was his firm belief that he was hit after Kennedy and by a second bullet.)

  The film was puzzling. When it was finally released in 1975, most viewers had the same reaction as McCloy and Dulles. Kennedy seems to have been shot first, and Connally wounded a second and a half later. This time frame seriously undermined a lone-gunman theory of the assassination, since the Commission had already established that Oswald’s vintage 1940 bolt-action Italian rifle could not be fired more than once every 2.3 seconds. If Oswald was a lone assassin, the bullet he presumably fired through Kennedy’s neck must also have hit Connally. If a single bullet was not responsible for the wounding of both men, there had to be a second assassin. McCloy and the other commissioners, some reluctantly, adopted the explanation that Connally had had a delayed reaction to his wounds. If Oswald was the lone assassin, he had fired three shots, one of which passed through both Kennedy and Connally.

  This became the heart of the Warren Commission’s conclusions. But to reach this verdict, the commissioners had to embrace the Bethesda Naval autopsy description of Kennedy’s wounds and discount the FBI Summary Report. The latter placed the rear entry wound nearly six inches below the base of Kennedy’s neck, too low for the bullet to have exited through the president’s neck. This contradiction, and much of the ensuing controversy over the Commission’s conclusions, could have been resolved by a look at some definitive evidence. Dozens of color photographs and X-rays were taken during the Bethesda autopsy, and a close inspection of these photos could have resolved the dispute.

  But, in what was perhaps the Commission’s major mistake, Chief Justice Warren decided, out of deference to the Kennedy family, not to allow t
he Commission access to the photos and X-rays. If such photos became a part of the record, Warren said, “it would make it a morbid thing for all time to come.” McCloy agreed at the time with this decision, on condition that at least one commissioner, accompanied by a doctor, be allowed to inspect this critical evidence.67 In the event, Warren reviewed the photos in private and then allowed the autopsy doctors to testify before the Commission without producing the material.68 Just three years later, after a number of books throwing doubt on the Commission’s conclusions had been published, McCloy told a television audience on “Face the Nation,” “I think there’s one thing I would do over again. I would insist on those photographs and the X-rays having been produced before us.” He still believed the “best evidence” on the autopsy came from the sworn testimony of the naval doctors who conducted it. “We couldn’t have interpreted the X-rays if we’d had them,” he said. “But probably it would have been better to have had them for the sake of completeness in view of all the to-do that’s occurred since.”69

  Fifteen years later, McCloy’s retrospective assessment was confirmed by the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Assassinations. The Select Committee reopened the case in 1976–78 and made a point of having a medical panel examine the autopsy photos and X-rays. Although the panel reported that the entry wound in the back was two inches lower than claimed by the Warren Commission, it concluded that the wound was high enough to have allowed the bullet to exit from Kennedy’s throat.70 Obviously, if this information had been released in a clear and definitive fashion in 1964, the Warren Commission Report would have met with much less skepticism in subsequent years.