by Barry Ernest
Indeed, the only thing he was on record as saying about the matter was his quote to an author in 1966 that he simply was too busy at his law firm—his real job—and that “he had a different concept of the investigation.”76
I was curious what he meant by “different concept,” so I wrote Francis Adams often at his law office and residence in New York. I left telephone messages with his secretary.
He never replied. Yet I had this strange feeling about the man. That feeling became stronger when I spoke with his daughter many years later.
From an obituary in the New York Times, I discovered that Francis Adams had died on April 20, 1990, at a convalescent home in Devon, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. His wife, Katherine, and two daughters, Judith Clifford and Joyce Adams, were listed as survivors.
I addressed a letter to his wife, mentioning my intentions and interest in her husband. Five days later, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, the telephone rang at my home. It was Joyce Adams.
She explained her mother had recently turned ninety-five and “doesn’t remember things.”77 Her sister, Judith, had intercepted and read my letter, became frightened by the nature of its contents, and turned the matter over to Joyce. She apparently was the more unruffled sibling.
“So, what’s up?” she asked me, rather offhandedly after introducing herself. Before I could answer, she began a long-distance grilling of my interest in the assassination, my background as a researcher, and whether or not I had spoken with “Specter,” using a condescending tone with his name and assuming I knew whom she meant. The line of personal questions made me wonder if she had ever been associated with S. M. Holland.
I explained I had tried on several occasions to reach “Specter,” but he refused to return my calls or answer my letters.78
“What is it about my father that makes you so curious?” she inquired.
I explained I suspected Francis Adams had discovered something amiss in the way the Warren Commission was handling the investigation, and rather than take part in it, he chose to back away.
“That sounds just like my father,” she replied. “Are you sure you didn’t know him? If he didn’t think it was right, he’d quit immediately—no hesitations. If he didn’t think it was being run properly, he would be the type to leave.”
Some had felt, I explained to Joyce, that her father had dropped out of the Commission because he was too busy at his own law firm.
“I read that somewhere,” she responded, with a bit of sardonic laughter. She obviously did not believe that excuse. “Why would he have accepted the position in the first place if that were the case?”
In no uncertain terms, she explained that her father definitely would have considered his duties investigating a presidential assassination to be of paramount importance—the highest priority—and certainly would not have abandoned them because of his law firm. That, she said, could not have been the reason.79
Then I broached my big question. I inquired if her father had made any kind of notes or kept any personal papers concerning his days with the Commission.
She hesitated. Yes, I heard her whisper, he had. But it was her sister, Judith—the timid one alarmed by my letter—who maintained possession of those “private” files.
“My father was opinionated and wrote his notes in longhand,” Joyce said, adding he had once confided to her that the area of investigation he was assigned to oversee—the source of the shots—“was the most important area” of the entire case.
“Perhaps if I could review your father’s files, I may be able to clarify his actions, strictly for the historical record,” I suggested.
She paused again. “Just what do you expect to find in there?”
I told her I didn’t have a clue but would know if I found it.
“Well, you probably will not find the smoking-gun, midnight memo listing everything,” she said. “But I’ll get in touch with Judy and tell her that I have no problem with this. Let me call you back in two or three days.”
Two or three days passed, then two or three weeks. A month later, I wrote a follow-up letter to Katherine Adams, knowing it would end up in Joyce’s lap once again.
There was only silence. I didn’t seem to be having any luck with anyone named Adams.
CHAPTER 21
May-September 1999
Sometimes it is simply a matter of luck when you’re at the Archives. Occasionally, out of all those hundreds of thousands of documents and millions upon millions of words—out of all that verbal rubble—all it takes is a single innocuous sentence. Sometimes that sentence is so innocent and simple in content that, to the uninformed eye, it means absolutely nothing.
Yet to one crazy enough to keep tabs on the evolving evidence, one bedeviled with the pursuit of time-consuming details, that simple sentence can snatch the breath away. It had happened to me before. It was about to happen again.
It was getting late on this particular afternoon. I was rushing to finish reviewing an otherwise boring box full of files sent to the Warren Commission in 1964 by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas. Only fifteen minutes remained before I had to leave for dinner and a hockey game with my son, who worked in downtown Washington.
That’s when I found it.
My habit was to thumb through files looking for documents concerning Victoria Adams, hoping to discover something—anything—either overlooked in the past or perhaps newly released. Usually, I found nothing. But as I took a parting glance that day at these papers out of Dallas, a page caught my eye.
Across its top was the handwritten notation, “Adams, Vicki.” The single sheet was a copy of a registered letter sent by airmail to J. Lee Rankin in Washington. It was signed by Martha Joe Stroud, an assistant U.S. attorney, on behalf of Barefoot Sanders, the U.S. attorney for Dallas.1
The date typed under its Department of Justice letterhead was June 2, 1964. Miss Stroud was forwarding to Rankin a copy of Miss Adams’ signed deposition, taken less than two months earlier, on April 7, in that same office by Commission counsel David Belin. During the intervening time, the official transcript of her questioning had been prepared and then shown to Miss Adams. In her letter to Rankin, Miss Stroud listed half a dozen errors Miss Adams had identified in her testimony and wanted corrected.2
As a way of refreshing Rankin’s memory, Miss Stroud wrote, “Mr. Bellin [sic] was questioning Miss Adams about whether or not she saw anyone as she was running down the stairs.”3
It was Miss Stroud’s next sentence, the final one in the text, that punched me in the gut. “Miss Garner, Miss Adams’ supervisor, stated this morning that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up.”4
After Miss Adams went down the stairs, Dorothy Ann Garner saw Roy Truly and Officer Marrion Baker come up. I could not have been more stunned had someone tapped me on the shoulder at that moment and announced, “Hi. I’m Victoria Adams and I heard you’ve been looking for me.”
All along, the Commission discredited Miss Adams. All along it said she could not have come down the stairs when she said she did. The Commission’s logic was simple. Oswald fired the shots. Oswald came down the stairs. If Miss Adams was on the stairs when she said she was and didn’t see or hear him, then obviously she was the one who was wrong.
Based on the Commission’s reasoning, she therefore had to have come down the staircase after Oswald did, after the escaping assassin already had passed by the fourth floor in his descent, and after Officer Baker and Roy Truly had passed by the fourth floor as they headed up to the roof. Thus, she had to come down later than she thought.
The Commission admitted that if Miss Adams was correct with her timing, she “would probably have seen or heard” Oswald either above or below her.5
The only alternative was if Miss Adams happened to pass by as Oswald, Truly, and Baker were already in the second-floor lunchroom. Even under those circumstances, with Oswald getting to the lunchroom only seconds ahead of Truly and Baker, plus the brev
ity of the encounter there, Miss Adams still should have heard Oswald somewhere on the stairs. Yet she had seen and heard no one.
As the Commission concluded, “she actually came down the stairs several minutes after Oswald and after Truly and Baker as well.”6
In order for the Commission’s conclusion to be accurate, Miss Adams would have had to descend the stairs after Truly and Baker had continued their path up those same stairs from the second floor and after they had both passed the fourth floor, where Miss Adams’ trek originated.
I stared at Miss Stroud’s letter again and reread those important words: Miss Garner, Miss Adams’ supervisor, stated this morning that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up.
It was after Miss Adams had gone down the stairs that Dorothy Garner, who remained behind, saw Truly and Baker emerge onto the fourth floor. Miss Garner’s impromptu verification of this detail confirmed what Miss Adams had been saying all along. Miss Garner’s statement showed that Miss Adams did in fact descend the stairs when she said she had—not when the Commission surmised.
Why then didn’t Victoria Adams see or hear Lee Oswald?
And to whom was Miss Garner making this statement? Was it to David Belin? Was Belin troubled by what Miss Adams told him in her testimony nearly two months earlier? Was Belin seeking clarification from Dorothy Garner, Miss Adams’ boss? If the Commission attorney was that conscientious, why then hadn’t he sought out Sandra Styles?
If Miss Garner was being officially examined, as the wording of Martha Stroud’s letter implied, where then was that interview or testimony? The National Archives, the Dallas D.A.’s office, and the U.S. Department of Justice had no record of it. The Warren Commission never officially called Miss Garner as a witness. There is no official record of her ever having been questioned by Belin or anyone else on the Commission’s staff.
Nothing other than Miss Stroud’s reference exists. But the bottom line was that Miss Adams had been telling the truth.
“So she was telling the truth!” Weisberg eerily echoed my thoughts as he read my copy of Martha Joe Stroud’s letter.7
It had taken me a while to find him this time. Normally, as I drove up the long driveway to his home, I’d spy him typing at his desk behind the large corner window to his office. After I’d break his concentration by tapping on the glass, he would look up, smile, and wave for me to enter the back door.
The house was dark and locked this day and more unkempt than usual. I became worried. Neighbors told me Weisberg and his wife, Lil, had taken up temporary residence in a rehabilitation center. They were recuperating from recent illnesses.
I hated to visit him there. It reminded me of my father.
“What I can’t figure out,” I told Weisberg, “is why Sandra Styles was never questioned.”
“The Commission didn’t want any confirmations,” he answered. “Having one was enough; two was worse. They both would have had to see Oswald.”
I was thinking about that when he made a suggestion.
“You need to write a book on this.”
In all these years, I had never given it a thought. Never once had I entertained the idea of writing extensively on my research. To have the discipline, time, and organizational skills necessary to put into readable form the results of my decades-long efforts, to me, sounded impossible.
Who would want to read it anyway?
“Who would want to read something by me?” I asked. “And wasn’t it you who always liked the fact I stayed in the background with my work?”
“That was when you were helping me and I was writing the books,” Weisberg replied. “But I can’t do that anymore. You need to put your material down, if for nothing more than the historical record. Use my files, anything I’ve written. If I’m able, I’d be happy to edit it for you.”
“Ah, I think I’ll pass on that one,” I joked. Then I got serious. “Anyway, there are way too many books on this subject out there already. The world doesn’t need another one.”
“Write about your search for Vicki Adams,” he said. “That’s new; that’s fresh. And yes, there is a lot of trash out there. That’s why you’d have to do yours differently. You’d have to write the truth.”
Now there was a novel idea. But I knew what he meant.
I had come a long way with this man, once described by the government as knowing more about the assassination than even the FBI.8 He had displayed that knowledge and precise detail so many times. I always paid close attention, followed his suggestions, and ended up in some fixes because of it.
But putting down 100,000 words was a lot different from composing an occasional letter to my hometown-newspaper editor. I told him I would think about it, although I never really intended to.
Then he called me at home one afternoon a couple of weeks later and reminded me to bring along my tape recorder the next time I visited him. He had some things he wanted to say.
What he had to say turned into a three-hour interview. We talked about everything regarding the assassination: witnesses, Garrison, the government, and the gullible. He discussed the frustrations of having to self-publish his own books; how deception, disguise, and disgrace had replaced truthfulness, fact, and honor; how wild-eyed conjecture and tabloid speculations had become the accepted staple of publishers and, therefore, readers; how the sum of it all—every last bit of it—still mattered to this country, whether people realized it or not; and how no one seemed to care about that anymore.
There was bitterness in his voice, a consuming sense of failure that he had not, after these many years, been able to get to the bottom of this mystery. He was discouraged. But at the same time, he realized that had he done nothing—had he not at least tried to figure it all out—he could not have lived with himself.
At that moment I saw Weisberg as the father I no longer had, the man whose humility belied his deep wisdom. Over the years, he had been labeled a lunatic, a money-hungry opportunist out for his own gain, a charlatan. Maybe it was from jealousy. Maybe it was just from the way things had become in this country.
He was none of those. I knew that.
His words to me on that day were hardly what you’d call motivational, certainly not for what he wanted me to do, or maybe expected me to do.
Looking back now, I think it was then—as I drove home from his modest home in Frederick late that day—that I reached my decision. Somewhere along Route 15 North, as James Taylor crooned “Fire and Rain” from the dashboard, I realized it. I might be able to do this. At least I should try. Weisberg had given me a message, a sense of purpose. In some small way, it was his latest assignment for me.
I would try to put my past on paper, if only for the sake of the historical record. There were so many holes to fill, though. Never intending to write about this subject, I had left countless voids in the chronology.
And the source of it all, Victoria Adams, was still nowhere to be found.
CHAPTER 22
October 1999
From nearly twenty miles out, I could see the approaching skyline, massive in its beauty against the clear blue sky and rising high above the low, flat land ahead of me. The weather was perfect, much different from that rainy day when I first set foot in Dallas with Eugene Aldredge way back in 1968. Now I was doing the driving, alone and stuck in horrendous inbound traffic along Interstate 30 on an early Sunday afternoon.
After what seemed like hours, I made my way onto the Commerce Street exit ramp, through the Triple Underpass, and up into Dealey Plaza. It was crowded with the curious.
Had more than thirty years really passed since I was here last?
I parked the car at the first available meter and walked back a few blocks, getting my first look at the place in over three decades. As always, I was struck by its beauty and historical significance. I had to stand motionless for a long while as the past and present washed over me. Visually, very little had changed.
The U.S. Post Office, on the roo
f of which stood J. C. Price, was now the Federal Building. “Old Red,” the Dallas County Courthouse where Ruby was convicted, now housed the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau. The County Records Building looked the same. The Dal-Tex Building was now more stylishly called “501 Elm Street.”
Then there was the Texas School Book Depository, no longer known as that, its former title cleanly removed from above the front entrance. It was now the Dallas County Administrative Building. The famous sixth floor had been turned into a public showpiece, aptly titled “The Sixth Floor Museum,” open daily. No longer present was the large yellow-and-black Hertz Rent-A-Car sign once prominently perched at an angle on the roof. Its absence gave the building a stark, boxlike look.
In morbid irony, a sign posted now on the front door read, No weapons or explosives are allowed in the building. All persons will be subject to search. Too bad such a policy didn’t exist in 1963.
Beside the front steps was a plaque proclaiming the structure a national landmark, the site where Lee Harvey Oswald “allegedly” fired shots to kill the president. Someone had underlined the word allegedly with white chalk.
The loading docks where Oswald routinely entered—where Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles had hurried from—had now disappeared. In their place was an oversized, brick-enclosed elevator that took paying customers up six flights to the new museum. Ground level now housed a lobby and souvenir store, where one could purchase JFK T-shirts; “Jack and Jackie” pens, key rings, and coffee mugs; and countless other tourist staples related to this particular attraction.
The old railroad tower sitting atop the grassy knoll, from where Lee Bowers had spotted two men, was still there but vacated. The nearby picket fence was in shambles, the majority of its pointed slats broken or missing, the victim of theft, time, and abuse. On the wooden slats that remained, hundreds had written messages to the world, poetic and emotional notes etched after viewing this otherwise peaceful part of town.
Behind the fence, the once-dirt parking lot was now professionally paved and lined. Most of the railroad tracks were removed, those left behind currently accommodating part of the city’s gleaming rapid-transit system. From here, it ferried people to the new Reunion Center, a series of ultramodern, black-glassed office buildings with an eye-catching spherical tower where one could get an overhead view of this former killing field.