by Jim Newton
Warren heard all of that in silence, but when it came time for him to speak, he reversed the clear momentum of the Commission. “As far as I can see, the only real criticism against him is that he has been against the Un-American Activities Committee of the Congress,” Warren said, simplifying the case somewhat for effect. “And there are some very, very fine Americans who are so recognized in all circles who have exactly the same views.” That was arch. Warren’s fellow commissioners did not need to be reminded that among those “very, very fine Americans” was Warren himself. Warren then added a sly endorsement of Ford’s view of Redlich, concurring with the congressman that Redlich was indeed able and dedicated.103
To those points, Warren added a dramatic human observation and a deft parliamentary maneuver. Lest his fellow Commissioners fool themselves about the consequences of letting Redlich go, Warren reminded them that they would be casting off a member of their staff in the face of allegations that he was disloyal to his country. They would subject him and his family to harassment. His wife would suffer, as would his children. And that suffering would go on and on. To be branded disloyal, Warren reminded all of them, “is a hurt that can never be remedied as long as a man lives.” That sobering observation then led Warren to his conclusion: If the Commission was inclined to question Redlich’s loyalty, Warren insisted that the professor be granted a hearing where he could present his own evidence and challenge those who questioned him. Such a hearing in the midst of the Commission’s work would be a time-consuming spectacle, as Warren well knew. None of the commissioners was prepared for such a course, but none dared challenge Warren’s authority to demand it. Suddenly, the issue was turned—the human costs of casual dismissal were now before the Commission and the practical matter of how to carry it out was now vastly more daunting.
McCloy was the first to speak when Warren concluded, and he joined Warren in arguing that Redlich should be allowed to stay. Ford continued to insist on an up-or-down vote on Redlich’s continued employment, but Warren again maneuvered. The chief justice insisted that the Commission first vote on whether to grant all its staff members, including Redlich, their security clearances. Since Ford already had acknowledged that he had no question about Redlich’s loyalty, he could only vote in favor. The motion passed unanimously. And then, once Redlich’s loyalty was off the table, the idea of firing him became more complicated. Fire him for what, precisely? And for those who wanted him gone as a way of appeasing the Commission’s critics, what of Warren’s threat to expand the matter with a full hearing? Still hoping for a vote that would allow him to go on the record against Redlich, Ford moved to force the issue. “It seems to me that from the position I take, that there ought to be some action by the Commission affirming his continued employment—if that is what the majority of the Commission wants to do,” Ford insisted. But his allies were dropping off. Dulles now saw the futility of that approach and began to craft an alternative. Warren had the momentum, and he allowed himself the luxury of losing his temper with Ford. “Jerry, there are no charges against this man,” Warren said, dropping his customary formality and addressing Ford by his first name. “There are no charges against him.”
Other members of the Commission then jumped in, urging Ford to withdraw his motion, which no member would agree to second. All members of the Commission staff, including Redlich, were granted their clearances and allowed to continue working. Chastened, Ford retreated, but he did not soon forget Warren’s handling of the matter. “He was given that job to run the show,” Ford remarked forty years later. “And he did.”104
As with so much of the Commission’s work that spring, the Redlich debate sapped Warren’s strength. When the Commission adjourned that evening, Warren headed home, where his old friend Bart Cavanaugh waited for him.105 Nina Warren had asked Cavanaugh to spend some time with Warren, to help revive him from the wearing months of early 1964. Arriving in Washington, Cavanaugh was distressed to find Warren in shaky health. His weight, which normally hovered around two hundred pounds, was way down. He was watching his diet carefully, and he was accompanied everywhere by Secret Service. “It was getting to him,” Cavanaugh realized.106
So that Friday, at Nina’s urging and without tipping off the Secret Service, Cavanaugh hijacked his friend, piled him into a car, and headed for New York. They arrived in time to catch the late innings of a baseball game, then went for dinner and checked into a hotel. They stayed through the weekend, watching games during the day, relaxing at night. Warren liked Toots Shor’s and New York’s other grandly male habitations; he liked a scotch at the bar, a booth with friends, and a steak. He and Cavanaugh enjoyed the city for two days and nights, then headed home, Cavanaugh at the wheel. Warren was back at work on Monday morning.
On June 7, Warren and Ford led a small Commission delegation to Dallas. Warren was in good spirits that morning. He picked up Arlen Specter in his limousine on the way to Andrews Air Force Base, and he chatted brightly with Ford during the flight.107 In Dallas, it fell to Specter to explain to Warren the theory that he had developed regarding the shots to Kennedy and Connally—namely, that a single bullet had struck Kennedy from behind, had passed straight through his neck without striking any bones, and had exited his throat, nicking his tie as it tore through his body and clothing. That bullet, continuing in a direct line but wobbling slightly, then struck Connally in the back, just to the left of his right armpit and, after hitting a rib, exited below his right nipple. It then passed through the back side of Connally’s left wrist and, at last spent, hit him in the thigh. That shot—later to be derided as the “magic bullet”—was followed by another, which struck the back of Kennedy’s head and exploded out of the right front of his skull, the force of that aerial explosion snapping his head backward. Warren initially was skeptical of the single-bullet theory, as were many upon first hearing it.
And yet that theory was consistent with all the medical evidence in the case—consistent with the wounds to Kennedy’s neck and throat and Connally’s injuries. It was consistent with the positions of Connally and Kennedy and with the so-called Zapruder film, which the Commission reviewed and which captured the moments of the assassination. It was supported by the majority of witnesses who heard the shots and recalled that there were three, one of which apparently had missed. It explained Kennedy’s motions—his hands pulled toward his throat after first being shot in an involuntary muscle reflex; his head slumped forward, but his back was propped up by the brace he was wearing that afternoon; after the next shot, the right side of his skull blew up and jerked backward. And it answered another vital question: If Connally and Kennedy were struck by separate bullets, then where was the additional bullet, the bullet that struck Kennedy in the back but that was subsequently unaccounted for?108 It should have lodged in the car, and yet none was there. Specter’s theory, meanwhile, was supported by the bullet found on Connally’s stretcher, only slightly damaged. When fired, that bullet had weighed approximately 160 to 161 grains; when recovered, it weighed 158.6 grains, with the balance being explained by the fragments recovered from Connally’s wrist and thigh. Specter laid out the evidence for Warren in about eight minutes, talking with the chief justice as the two stood in the window of the Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald had been spotted by witnesses moments before the shooting. Warren stared down at Dealey Plaza. He said nothing. He quietly turned and walked away.109
The second act of that trip—the only trip that Warren would make to Dallas in connection with the assassination probe—was to interview Jack Ruby. Warren had avoided Dallas during the time that Jack Ruby was on trial, but by June, Ruby had been tried for the murder of Oswald and had been sentenced to death. Late that morning, after taking in the scene of Kennedy’s murder and visiting that of Officer Tippit’s death, Warren and his entourage arranged to meet Ruby in the kitchen of the local sheriff.110 Specter retired downstairs to watch the Giants-Phillies game on television, but after about an hour, he was summoned back into the interrogation. R
uby, who was Jewish and who, in his consuming paranoia, was convinced that Jewish children were being murdered in the jail, had asked for a Jew to be present during his questioning. Specter filled that role.111
With Texas officials, Ford, and Specter all on hand, Warren began the session, but even before Ruby was sworn in, he asked that he be allowed to take a lie detector test. Warren was not a believer in lie detectors and tried gently to dissuade Ruby, but added, “ [I] f you want such a test, I will arrange for it.”112 From there, the interrogation spun away, with Ruby holding forth about subjects at best tangentially related to the assassination. He went on at great length, for instance, to describe his decision to close his burlesque club after the Kennedy assassination, and he frequently interrupted himself to make sure Warren was tracking him. To the extent it was possible, Warren seemed to. He urged Ruby along, hearing him out, eliciting from him a wobbly tale of the anguish that Ruby felt over the assassination and of his two-day descent into violence. That Sunday morning, after Ruby read a public letter to Caroline Kennedy in the Dallas Times Herald, his emotional state fractured: “Suddenly I felt, which was so stupid, that I wanted to show my love for our faith, being of the Jewish faith, and I never used the term and I don’t want to get into that—suddenly the feeling, the emotional feeling came within me that someone owed this debt to our beloved President to save her [Jackie Kennedy] the ordeal of coming back [to Dallas, presumably to testify at Oswald’s trial] .”113
Ruby’s testimony was hard to follow, but one fact alone seemed to eliminate the idea that his Sunday morning murder of Oswald was part of a larger plot. That morning, Ruby came to downtown Dallas to wire $25 to one of the dancers who worked at his club. A copy of the receipt for that wire provided solid evidence that Ruby was in the Western Union office at 11:16 A.M. Oswald had been scheduled to be moved by that time, so Ruby’s movements that morning would have precluded him from being at the police station at the right moment had Dallas police carried out the transfer as scheduled.114 Instead, Oswald’s departure was delayed, and when Ruby emerged from the Western Union office, his gun in his pocket as usual and his business with his dancer complete, he walked down the jail driveway and into the loading area just as Oswald emerged from the building. There, with a breathless nation watching, he pulled his gun, shoved it toward Oswald’s stomach, and fired—at 11:21 A.M. on Sunday, November 24.115 Coincidences may not be satisfying to the conspiratorially minded, but there was no evidence that Ruby’s arrival at the driveway at just that moment was anything but a coincidence.
A weary Warren returned that night to Washington. He had hoped that the Commission would be done by now—June 1 was his target date, apparently picked to have it out of the way in time for that year’s political conventions—and he hoped still that it might conclude its business within the month. He was to be bitterly disappointed. As the deadline approached, Warren met with Redlich and another commission lawyer, and Warren exploded when told that the staff was not ready to finalize its report. So furious was Warren that one staff member worried he might have a heart attack.116 Then resignation set in. “Well, gentlemen, we are here for the duration,” Warren remarked quietly.117
Warren did squeeze in a vacation that summer, but he cut it uncharacteristically short. He had lunch with Rankin on July 6 and departed that night for Oslo. He was gone for three weeks of fishing. His first meeting after his return was with Rankin again.118 Normally, Warren would have been in Europe or California for the notorious Washington August, when few government officials who could leave town chose to stay. This time, he supervised the Commission staff as it prepared its findings and submitted them to the full panel. Warren also enlisted his Court clerks for their help, and they proofread copies of the report as sections were completed. Warren had learned the value of a unanimous opinion in Brown, and as the Commission neared the end of its work, he lobbied hard for a report that would speak for all its members.
It had not been easy in Brown, and it was not easy now. Russell in particular remained unconvinced that Oswald had acted without help, and dickered regarding the language by which the Commission dismissed all conspiracy theories. And Ford hesitated as well. “Both refused to sign,” Warren told Drew Pearson afterward. Ford “wanted to go off on [a] tangent showing [a] communist plot,” Pearson’s notes of their 1967 conversation say.119 Convinced that unanimity was more important than the precise language used to describe the Commission’s conclusions, Warren agreed to accommodate them, especially Russell.120 Rather than state that conclusion without equivocation, the Commission reported only that it had “found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.”121 That left open, at least a bit, the possibility that new evidence could change the report’s central conclusion. The Commission similarly debated the single-bullet theory, but eventually agreed that it was the only satisfactory explanation for the injuries to Kennedy and Connally.
Russell professed not to be entirely satisfied. “I tried my best to get in a dissent,” he told Johnson a few days before the report was delivered, “but they’d come ’round and trade me out of it.”122 Even then, with the Commission’s work complete, Russell demonstrated how badly he had misunderstood the significance of the single-bullet theory, insisting that it “don’t make much difference” whether a single bullet struck Connally and Kennedy.
The commissioners delivered their report to Lyndon Johnson on September 24, 1964. Early reactions were widely positive—at the New York Times, James Reston wrote that the Warren Commission had “fulfilled its primary assignment,” while also predicting that the assassination would long continue to occupy American imaginations.123 Polls later that year showed that the American people overwhelmingly accepted the Commission’s conclusions .124
At the FBI, reaction was far less restrained. Hoover fumed at the Commission’s refusal to adopt the Bureau’s reconstruction of the shooting—Hoover never would accept the single-bullet theory—and at its mild rebuke of the FBI’s work. With the release of the Commission report, the long and complicated relationship between Warren and Hoover at last came to an end. The two men would never again regard each other with anything more than coldness. Three months after the Warren Commission report was published, Hoover dropped Warren from the Bureau’s Special Correspondents’ List, a group of trusted Bureau allies entitled to receive regular updates from the FBI. The two then settled into a long standoff, broken only by Warren’s announced retirement in 1968. Then Hoover sent along a note and addressed it in their old style, to “Dear Earl.” A staff notation on Hoover’s letter made clear, however, that the address was an act of nostalgia, not warmth. Until the time Warren was “deleted” from the correspondents’ list in 1964, the notation read, “He was . . . known to the Director on a first-name basis.”125
Public regard for the Commission was short-lived. Some of the early works critiquing the Warren Commission were genuine inquiries intended to raise serious questions about whether the report had solved the murder. Others were unscrupulous, and none more so than the work of Mark Lane, who was at odds with the Warren Commission even before it finished. On Tuesday, February 11, 1963, Marguerite Oswald, the eccentric mother of the assassin, returned for her second day on the witness stand, accompanied by Lane as well as another lawyer, John Doyle. Doyle offered to withdraw if Lane was to represent Mrs. Oswald, and in the confusion over who was her counsel, Warren asked her directly whether Lane represented her. “No sir, he does not,” Mrs. Oswald replied. When Lane protested, Warren gave him little quarter. “Mr. Lane, now really,” the exasperated Warren noted, “either you are here as the attorney for Mrs. Oswald or you are not entitled to be in this room—one of the two.”126 Lane was shown the door.
After Lane wrote articles and held a number of press conferences challenging the Commission and suggesting that he had evidence that would rebut its findings, the panel invited him to testify on his own. Lane appeared twice as
a witness, both times engaging the Commission in an infuriating game of cat and mouse. At his first appearance, on March 4, Lane testified that one witness who picked Oswald out of a police lineup as the man she saw shoot Officer Tippit gave Lane a description of the assailant that was inconsistent with Oswald; according to Lane, she had told him the murderer was “short, a little on the heavy side, and his hair was somewhat bushy.”127 The witness was confronted with Lane’s statements when she appeared before the Warren Commission, and she denied having met with him or having described Oswald as Lane testified that she had. To back up his version, Lane insisted he had a tape recording of the conversation. In July, the Commission asked him to appear again, paying his way to return from a speaking tour in Europe so that he might supply the tape and clear up the confusion regarding that testimony. Lane appeared but refused to supply the tape.128
Lane similarly alleged that an informant had told him of a potentially important sighting—of Oswald and Ruby together before the assassination. If true, that would contradict Ruby’s insistence that they had never met and would bolster the contention that Ruby and Oswald were involved in a conspiracy. Lane was asked to supply the name of that informant during his first appearance before the Commission. He promised to check with the source and see if he could reveal the name; when he returned in July, he was asked again, and this time refused.129
The work by Lane, first in Rush to Judgment and later in increasingly attenuated attacks on the Commission, was highly selective in its use and analysis of evidence. Commenting on the witness who saw Oswald fire the shots, Howard Brennan, Lane chose to emphasize Brennan’s inconsistency regarding whether Oswald was sitting or standing at the time, rather than to acknowledge that Brennan had testified that he had no doubt about whom he had seen.130 Lane also clipped and excerpted testimony in order to bring out details favorable to his argument while ignoring those that hurt it. Writing of the three men at the Depository window, for instance, Lane questioned why they had not gone upstairs when they heard the shots. “Representative Gerald R. Ford asked [one of the men, Bonnie Ray] Williams, ‘Why didn’t you go to the sixth floor?’” Lane wrote. “Williams replied, ‘We just never did think about it.’ ”131