by Kai Bird
The controversy over the autopsy was only one of several issues that the Commission found troubling. As late as August 1964, just a few weeks before the report was submitted to President Johnson, the commissioners expressed skepticism about elementary pieces of evidence.71 McCloy was startled one day to hear testimony from a Dallas police officer that he couldn’t make a positive identification of Oswald’s palm print on the alleged assassination rifle.72 His frustration with the case mounted as he and his colleagues listened to a barrage of confusing and sometimes contradictory testimony. Some of the most curious statements concerned the “grassy knoll” to the right of the assassination site. Numerous witnesses swore they had heard shots fired from this direction, and some said they had seen puffs of smoke in the same location. Others claimed to have talked to men on the grassy knoll who had flashed Secret Service badges and told them to move on. But there had been no Secret Service personnel near the grassy knoll. As for the “puffs of smoke,” McCloy knew from his knowledge of hunting rifles that modern ammunition was virtually smokeless: “There haven’t been any ‘puffs of smoke’ like they say since the Gettysburg battle during the Civil War.”73
Certainly the most intriguing story to come before the Commission involved an important Russian defector who had come to the United States in February 1964. At the time, Yuri Nosenko was the highest-ranking KGB officer to have crossed over to the West. He told his CIA debriefers that he had, coincidentally, seen Lee Harvey Oswald’s KGB file, dating from his 1959 defection to Moscow. Nosenko reported that the KGB had never even debriefed Oswald, and, indeed, had never used him for operational purposes. If Nosenko’s testimony was to be accepted, the KGB had nothing to do with Kennedy’s accused assassin. But as the Warren Commission soon learned, there were many within the CIA who believed Nosenko was a disinformation agent, sent by the KGB to reassure the Americans that Oswald had not been their man. Placed in solitary confinement and relentlessly interrogated by the Agency’s counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, Nosenko never changed his story. Angleton became obsessed with the Nosenko case; it seemed to him incredible that the KGB would not have debriefed an American defector with Oswald’s credentials. As a radar operator in the Marines, Oswald had been stationed in Japan, where he had had access to classified information about the U-2 spy planes. Angleton and his allies within the Agency convinced Richard M. Helms, the CIA’s deputy director for plans, that there were enough subtle inconsistencies in Nosenko’s story to warrant his continued detention and interrogation.I
Helms—who had been designated the CIA’s liaison to the Warren Commission—naturally became alarmed when he learned that the Commission intended to rely on Nosenko’s story to exonerate the Soviets from any involvement in the assassination. So, one humid day in late June, he asked for a private meeting with Chief Justice Warren and told him that the Agency could not vouch for Nosenko and did not want him to testify before the Commission. The chief justice reacted to this news with visible annoyance. He had been given to understand by J. Edgar Hoover that Nosenko’s bona fides had checked out. Helms replied that he could only speak for the CIA, but that there was a division of opinion within his Agency over Nosenko. At this, Warren curtly thanked Helms, and later the same day the commissioners met behind closed doors to discuss this new problem.74
The minutes of this extraordinary meeting are still classified, but we know McCloy, for one, had all along thought there were legitimate reasons to suspect Oswald had some kind of relationship with Soviet intelligence. By the summer of 1964, Warren Commission lawyers William Coleman and David W. Slawson had concluded that Oswald probably began planning his defection while stationed in Japan. They pointed out that he could have established contact with Soviet agents through an active Japanese Communist Party.75 After his defection, Oswald had lived in Minsk, next door to a school for training Soviet Army intelligence agents. He had been paid well by the Soviets and given a spacious apartment. He had married a Russian woman, whose uncle was an army-intelligence colonel. The Soviets had then allowed Oswald to redefect to the United States, together with his Russian bride. McCloy thought all of these facts suspicious. But neither he nor any of the Warren Commission’s later critics concluded that the Soviets had sent Oswald to kill the president. Rather, if Oswald had been recruited, he may well have been sent back as a “sleeper,” an agent instructed to lie low until activated in a crisis or for some specific operation. This theory did not rule out the possibility that Oswald was being used by more than one intelligence agency. Theoretically, he could have been recruited in the Marines as a sleeper for U.S. military intelligence or the CIA when he initially defected to the Soviets. The Soviets, suspicious of the genuineness of his defection, could have sent him back to the United States ostensibly as one of their own sleepers, but with the intention of feeding disinformation to his U.S. intelligence handlers.76 Whomever he worked for, once he arrived in the United States, according to this theory, Oswald went awry and eventually acted alone in killing the president. If this is what happened, any or all of the intelligence agencies he ever had a relationship with would have been frantic to cover up their connection to him. It would also explain Nosenko’s timely defection only two months after the assassination with the news that the KGB had nothing to do with Oswald. This was a line of speculation McCloy found plausible.77
He knew that in the business of intelligence one found many men of unsavory character. Earlier in the year, he had amused his colleagues on the Commission by observing, “Well, I can’t say that I have run into a fellow comparable to Oswald, but I have run into some very limited mentalities in the CIA and FBI.” Everyone laughed at this, and then Warren chimed in, “It almost takes that kind of man to do a lot of this intelligence work.”78 Neither McCloy nor the other commissioners were naïve men. They knew, to use one of McCloy’s favorite words, that they were grappling with one of those “imponderables.” The puzzle of Oswald’s life would probably never be solved. All that really mattered now was to determine if there was enough evidence that Oswald had pulled the trigger.
None of the other evidence concerning Oswald’s possible foreign connections could ever be verified. McCloy was impatient to have the Commission’s report out, if only to “lay the dust,” as he had said on the first day of their investigation. He was annoyed by the publicity generated by Mark Lane, an early conspiracy theorist, who had embarked on a lecture tour of Europe that spring. On the afternoon of April 30, 1964, McCloy told his fellow commissioners, “. . . Generally speaking, from the reports that come to me from all over Europe, what with Mr. Lane’s visits over there—there is a deep-seated feeling that there is a deep conspiracy here. . . . Let’s to the best of our ability search these out and attack them.”79
Later that spring, McCloy and Allen Dulles went to Dallas to look at the scene of the murder.80 The trip became a turning point for McCloy. Whereas before he had sometimes described himself as “a doubting Thomas,” he came back from Dallas prepared to endorse the lone-assassin theory.81 Oswald, he decided, fit the pattern of a “loner” rather than a “plotter.”82 He also reconciled his doubts about Connally’s wounds and accepted that one of the three bullets fired from Oswald’s rifle had hit both Kennedy and Connally.83 Having made up his mind, McCloy was disappointed when the Commission decided it had to extend its deadline for submission of first-draft chapters of the report from June 1 to July 1. The “ugly rumors” in Europe would “spread like wildfire,” he feared, if the publication of the report was delayed much longer.84
Adding to McCloy’s concerns about the drift in European opinion was the fact that Senator Barry Goldwater seemed assured of being the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in the November elections. Gold-water’s foreign-policy views, particularly on the Atlantic alliance, were strongly isolationist. McCloy recognized that, from a European perspective, both the assassination and Goldwater’s impending nomination cast doubt on America’s ability to lead the Atlantic alliance. So, for the first time
since the Willkie campaign in 1940, he became active in Republican Party politics. In late June, Drew Pearson reported that McCloy was “working backstage” for Goldwater’s strongest remaining opponent, Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania.85 There was pressure for McCloy to endorse Scranton, a political act he thought inappropriate for a man in his position. He was watching “Meet the Press” on July 12,1964, when Scotty Reston asked Scranton why such men as McCloy and Lovett, who represented a certain high tradition in the Republican Party, had not come out forcefully against Goldwater. Scranton diplomatically replied that he knew McCloy and had a high regard for him, but that he didn’t think it was appropriate for such a man to engage in party politics. As soon as the program was over, McCloy received a message from Scranton, and when he returned the call, Henry Kissinger came on the line and said he was speaking for the governor. Would McCloy help the Scranton campaign draft a platform plank on the control of nuclear weapons? McCloy said he would be happy to do this.86 He would go that far, but he never allowed his name to be used at the convention in association with any “stop-Goldwater” effort.
By mid-July, it was too late: Goldwater’s grass-roots organization of conservative Republicans easily gave him the nomination at San Francisco. Shortly after the convention, McCloy took a swing out to California and Illinois to gauge Goldwater’s strength. He told Averell Harriman afterward that he had found evidence of “some nationalization of [the] Goldwater business. . . . Most of the businessmen were for him.” He saw a real danger of an “overwhelming collapse of the [Republican] party.”87 He felt himself being dragged into partisan political matters, and he didn’t like it. But he had already confessed in an earlier conversation with Harriman that “in the course of the campaign I may want to come out for the Democratic nominee. . . .”88 Harriman called Mac Bundy, Johnson’s national-security adviser, with this piece of political intelligence. He told Bundy that McCloy was “disturbed” and “almost ready to do anything within his dignity to help.”89 He advised Bundy, however, against organizing a “Republicans for Johnson” committee. McCloy would never have anything to do with something so publicly partisan. Instead, Harriman suggested that the White House get liberal and moderate Republicans like McCloy to sign on to an elite bipartisan committee. (McCloy wasn’t the only distinguished Republican to feel so disaffected. Robert Lovett told McCloy he was going to vote for Johnson.90)
Shortly before the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, Bundy took Harriman’s advice. He wrote the president a memo entitled “Backing from the Establishment.” Bundy has always disclaimed the existence of any “Establishment.” But as the result of a satirical article by Richard Rovere in the May 1962 issue of Esquire, the term was in vogue among Bundy’s circle of friends. Rovere had written that John Kenneth Galbraith, challenged to name the chairman of the Establishment, had by “sheer intuition” named John J. McCloy. The Esquire article had been written tongue in cheek; but even as men like Bundy had a good laugh reading Rovere’s spoof, they had to admit that, as with all good satire, there was some truth in his description of a foreign-policy establishment.91
So, in all seriousness, Bundy told Lyndon Johnson, a man he knew to be profoundly self-conscious around “Eastern Establishment” types, that “the key to these people is McCloy.” Bundy defined “these people” as “the very first team of businessmen, bankers et al.” McCloy, he wrote, “is for us, but he is under very heavy pressure from Eisenhower and others to keep quiet. I have told him that this is no posture for a man trained by Stimson, and I think he agrees in his heart, but I also think that in the end the person to whom he will want to say ’yes’ is you. He belongs to the class of people who take their orders from Presidents and nobody else.” Bundy also told the president that he knew McCloy’s personal choice for the vice-presidential spot was Senator Hubert Humphrey, and “if in fact that is your decision, you might make a lot of money by telling McCloy just before you tell the country.”92
McCloy did think that Humphrey had “grown a great deal and has a good bit of sense.”93 There is no indication that the secretive Johnson let McCloy in on his choice of Humphrey as vice-president, but one can imagine him savoring the idea that the Establishment was closing ranks behind his campaign. Late in July, Harriman moved things along by planting a story idea with New York Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger. Why not urge the president to send Jack McCloy across the Atlantic to calm European concerns about both the assassination and Goldwater’s nomination?94 A week later, Sulzberger’s widely read column reported, “. . . personalities high in the Government are giving serious thought to efforts to calm opinion in certain allied lands. There has been private talk of encouraging distinguished Republican moderates who do not sympathize with Senator Goldwater’s more extreme views, to travel overseas during coming weeks and explain American realities and the underlying constancy of our national position.” Sulzberger named McCloy as the ideal candidate for such a mission, not only because he was so “highly respected in Europe,” but also because he was a member of the Warren Commission, “which is expected to lay the ghost of any suspicion Mr. Kennedy was killed by organized conspiracy.”95 In the event, McCloy was already too busy with other matters to take time off for a trip to Europe. (Unknown to Sulzberger, the president was talking to McCloy about a secret mission to the Middle East.)
Sulzberger may have expected the Warren Commission to bury all the “vicious speculation” about assassination plots, but even as he wrote his column, McCloy and the other commissioners were having trouble reaching consensus.96 They discovered they were more or less evenly divided on such critical issues as the “single-bullet” theory. Russell, Boggs, and Cooper had “strong doubts.” McCloy, Ford, and Dulles felt no other theory could satisfactorily explain what had happened. When Russell said he would not sign a report that stated flatly that one of the bullets had hit both Kennedy and Connally, McCloy mediated a compromise. He told Russell that the Commission could not afford the luxury of issuing majority and minority reports. The country had to have a unanimous report. Reaching for his yellow legal pad, McCloy began to scribble out some alternative language: he suggested saying that there was “very persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet which pierced the President’s throat also caused Governor Connally’s wounds.” However, Connally’s testimony and “certain other factors have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability but there is no question in the mind of any member of the Commission that all the shots which caused the President’s and Governor Connally’s wounds were fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.”97 This language acknowledged the doubts of Russell, Boggs, and Cooper, but made their dissent irrelevant to the critical issue of whether a lone gunman in the Book Depository was responsible for Kennedy’s assassination. In the discussion that followed, which McCloy later called the “battle of the adjectives,” Ford and Russell argued over McCloy’s language. Ford wanted to strengthen the conclusion by saying that there was “compelling” evidence. Russell wanted to say only that there was “credible” evidence. In the end, they agreed to McCloy’s description of “very persuasive evidence.”98
McCloy also brokered the wording of the Commission’s primary conclusion, that Oswald had acted alone. The staff’s initial draft stated that there had been “no conspiracy.” Ford suggested it say that the Commission had found “no evidence” of a conspiracy. McCloy’s language was finally agreed upon: “Because of the difficulty of proving a negative to a certainty the possibility of others being involved with either Oswald or Ruby cannot be rejected categorically, but if there is any such evidence it has been beyond the reach of all investigative agencies and resources of the United States and has not come to the attention of this Commission.”99 This was lawyers’ language, and it laid “the dust” on all the “ugly rumors” of conspiracy without forcing the Commission to make a categorical denial, to “prove a negative.” On the other hand, McCloy’s language is categ
orical in its assertion that any such evidence of a conspiracy was beyond its reach. The commissioners, after all, had expressed doubts about the full cooperation of the CIA and the FBI. They had admitted among themselves that, if Oswald had had any kind of relationship with a U.S. intelligence agency, that fact probably could not be proved. They had been told by the CIA’s Richard Helms that the Agency could not vouch for the testimony offered by the KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, that Oswald was not a KGB asset. They knew that Oswald’s career, from the time he joined the Marines, was filled with mystery. Similar problems arose in the Commission’s final report in dealing with Jack Ruby’s connections to organized crime, the one group in the country with an unequivocal motive to kill the brother of the attorney general.
The public, however, was not to be privy to these doubts. When the report was released in late September, the eight hundred-plus pages, based on twenty-six volumes of testimony and thousands of field interviews by the FBI and the Selective Service, seemed quite definitive. The New York Times called it “comprehensive and convincing.”100 But in the end, the long-term credibility of the report was undermined as much by what it said as by what it left out. Reasonable people still could have concluded that in all probability Lee Harvey Oswald alone fired the shots that killed Kennedy. But too many questions arose in the course of its investigation for the Commission to state this or any other conclusion with finality.II
Over the years, McCloy was distressed whenever doubts were raised about the Commission’s central verdict, that Oswald had acted alone. But on occasion, some of the Commission’s own members voiced such doubts. Senator Russell told the press in 1970, “I have never believed that Oswald planned that [the assassination] altogether by himself.”102 Lyndon Johnson himself privately told one of his aides in 1967 that “he was now convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination.” The president suspected the CIA had “something to do with this plot.”103 As McCloy knew from his conversations with Johnson, the president had arrived at this conclusion when he was informed by the FBI of the CIA’s plotting with the Mafia to assassinate Castro.104 Later, McCloy told an interviewer of his own “frustration” with “the testimony of the C.I.A. before the Commission.” He had a feeling the CIA could be telling the commissioners only “what they wanted us to hear.”105