A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (73 page)

The headline in the
New York Times
that Monday ran across the entire front page in black type only slightly smaller than the font size used ten months earlier for the headline reporting Kennedy’s death:

WARREN COMMISSION FINDS OSWALD GUILTY

AND SAYS ASSASSIN AND RUBY ACTED ALONE;

REBUKES SECRET SERVICE, ASKS REVAMPING

Anthony Lewis of the
Times
, the recipient of so many of the commission’s leaks, wrote a sweeping, three-thousand-word article on the front page that—in its opening paragraph—stated the report’s findings as fact, without attribution, as if there was no question about the truth of what the investigation had found:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27—The assassination of President Kennedy was the work of one man, Lee Harvey Oswald. There was no conspiracy, foreign or domestic.

The article praised the report for its “painstaking detail, fairness and neutrality” and “genuine literary style.” The article continued: “Few who loved John Kennedy, or this country, will be able to read it without emotion.” In an editorial, the
Times
declared that the report was “comprehensive and convincing,” adding: “The facts—exhaustively gathered, independently checked and cogently set forth—destroy the basis for the conspiracy theories that have grown weedlike in this country and abroad.”

Time
magazine was also full of praise: “In its final form, the Commission’s report was amazing in its detail, remarkable in its judicious caution and restraint, yet utterly convincing in its major conclusions.”

There were a few discordant notes in the nation’s major newspapers. James Reston, the respected Washington columnist for the
Times
, suggested that while the commission had “tried, as a servant of history, to discover truth,” the report was disappointing because it had left many questions unresolved. “The central mystery of who killed the President has been answered by the commission only in the process of raising a new catalogue of mysteries,” including why Oswald had done it; his motives were only guessed at in the report. On that question, Reston concluded, “the distinguished members of the commission and their staff obviously gave up.”

*

Warren was pleased with the response from the Kennedy family. Just weeks before the report’s release, Robert Kennedy had stepped down as attorney general to join the race for a Senate seat in his newly adopted home state of New York. On the day of the release, he provided reporters with a written statement in which he said he believed the Warren Commission had established the truth about his brother’s murder. His praise was unqualified. He noted that he had “not read the report, nor do I intend to.” It would simply be too painful, his friends said. “But I have been briefed on it and I am completely satisfied that the commission investigated every lead and examined every piece of evidence. The commission’s inquiry was thorough and conscientious.… As I said in Poland last summer, I am convinced Oswald was solely responsible for what happened and that he did not have any outside help or assistance. He was a malcontent who could not get along here or in the Soviet Union.”

At his request, his surviving brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, did read through the report and arranged a meeting with the chief justice in the commission’s offices to discuss how the panel had reached its conclusions. “Bobby asked me … because he emotionally couldn’t do it,” Kennedy recalled later in his memoirs. “When I reached him by telephone, Warren told me he would be glad to give me a briefing and go over the parts of the report that were particularly contentious.” The chief justice “gave me a full briefing, as I requested,” he said. “I asked many questions. The whole process took about four hours.” He recalled that Warren “told me quite persuasively that he felt a responsibility to the nation to get it right.” And Kennedy said he came away convinced that the commission had gotten it right, and that Oswald had acted alone. “I reported to Bobby that I accepted the commission’s report and thought he should, too. Bobby agreed readily.” According to Edward Kennedy, at least, his brother “did not want to continue to investigate Jack’s death.”

For Warren there was also a heartening initial response from the public. Opinion polls suggested that the investigation had convinced millions of Americans that there had been no conspiracy. The Harris Survey conducted polls in September 1964, just before release of the report, and in October, just after it was issued. The polls showed that after the report, 87 percent of respondents believed that Oswald had killed the president, up from 76 percent days before. The share of the polls’ respondents who believed that Oswald had accomplices fell to 31 percent, from 40 percent just before the report’s release. It would be the last time a major national poll showed that a plurality of Americans accepted the idea that Oswald acted alone.

Some of the commissioners reveled in the early praise. Congressman Boggs was quoted in the weekly newspaper the
National Observer
on October 5 as saying he should write a book because he had kept such extensive notes. “It was he who wrote many of the 300,000 words in the final report,” the newspaper declared, a statement that drew chuckles from staff lawyers who knew the truth.

One commissioner, however, wanted to distance himself almost immediately from the report: Richard Russell. He gave an interview to the
Atlanta Constitution
, his state’s largest newspaper, for an article published two days after the report’s release. Although he described the report as “the very best we could have submitted,” he expressed skepticism that the commission knew the full truth. It was still unknown, he said, if Oswald acted “with the encouragement or knowledge of anyone else,” adding that speculation about Kennedy’s death would “continue for hundreds of years or longer.”

*

J. Edgar Hoover got his copy of the report on September 24, the same day as President Johnson, and he immediately turned it over to Assistant Director James Gale, the head of the FBI’s internal affairs department. Hoover attached a note: “I want this carefully reviewed as it pertains to FBI shortcomings. Chapter 8 tears us to pieces.”

For Hoover, the news was as bad as he had long feared. As he saw it, the bureau had been disgraced, and it might even be dismantled, as a result of the report, given the suggestion that the FBI had missed a chance to prevent the president’s assassination. The commission did not accuse Hoover himself of any personal misconduct, although it would later become clear from his own files that he had lied repeatedly—and under oath. His most obvious lie was his repeated statement that FBI agents had not mishandled the investigation of Oswald before the assassination, even as he was quietly disciplining those same agents.

After reading the report, Gale urged Hoover on September 30 to begin a second round of punishments of FBI employees. The report, Gale wrote, “has now set forth in a very damning manner some of the same glaring weaknesses for which we previously disciplined our personnel, such as lack of vigorous investigation after we had established that Oswald visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico.” Gale said it was “appropriate at this time to consider further administrative action against those primarily culpable for the derelictions in this case, which have now had the effect of publicly embarrassing the bureau.” Hoover agreed. In the new wave of disciplinary action, seventeen FBI agents and others would be demoted or otherwise punished; all but three of them had been disciplined in the first round, as well. Agent James Hosty was demoted and immediately transferred to Kansas City. “There is no question in my mind but that we failed in carrying through some of the most salient aspects of the Oswald investigation,” Hoover wrote to a group of his senior aides on October 12. “It ought to be a lesson to us all, but I doubt if some even realize it now.”

As with the first round of punishments, some of Hoover’s inner circle feared that the news would leak. “I think we are making a tactical error by taking this disciplinary action in this case at this time,” Assistant Director Alan Belmont wrote Hoover in October. “The Warren Commission report has just been released. It contains criticism of the FBI. We are currently taking aggressive steps to challenge the findings of the Warren Commission insofar as they pertain to the FBI. It is most important, therefore, that we not provide a foothold for our critics or the general public to say, in effect, ‘See, the Commission is right.’”

Hoover angrily disagreed; there would be no delay. “We were wrong,” he replied to Belmont. “The administrative action approved by me will stand. I do not intend to palliate actions which have resulted in forever destroying the Bureau as the top level investigative organization.” In a separate note to a deputy on October 6, he wrote that “the FBI will never live down this smear, which could have been so easily avoided if there had been proper supervision and initiative.”

Even as he was effectively, if secretly, agreeing with much of the commission’s criticism of the bureau, Hoover lashed out against the report. In a series of letters to the White House and Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Hoover complained that the report was “seriously inaccurate insofar as its treatment of the FBI is concerned.” He offered a detailed list of what he said were errors in the commission’s portrayal of the bureau.

Hoover’s office instructed FBI inspector James Malley, the bureau’s day-to-day liaison with the commission, to telephone Rankin on Hoover’s behalf. Malley was instructed to inform Rankin that he “did the bureau a great disservice and had out-McCarthy-ed McCarthy.” Hoover also prepared himself to strike back, if necessary, against members of the commission’s staff. After reading a flattering article in the
Washington Post
in late September that profiled Rankin and the staff lawyers (“Praise Is Voiced for Staff Engaged in Warren Report”), Hoover ordered that FBI files “be checked” for background information on all eighty-four people on the commission’s official staff roster, including secretaries and clerks—a move that was understood by Hoover’s aides to be an order to search for derogatory information. On October 2, Hoover’s office was informed that the background searches were complete and that “bureau files contain derogatory information concerning the following individuals” who had worked for the commission—sixteen of them—“and their relatives.”
^*

*

The commission’s offices on Capitol Hill were closed down once and for all in December, the two floors of office space returned to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Alfred Goldberg was one of the last staff members to leave. He had remained to compile the twenty-six volumes of evidence, witness statements, and hearing transcripts that were released to the public in November.

Before leaving Washington, Rankin had one last confrontation with Hoover, and some of the staff lawyers laughed out loud when they heard about it. On October 23, as the twenty-six volumes of the appendix were being prepared for publication, Hoover sent an angry letter to Rankin, expressing alarm that the commission was ready to violate the privacy of so many people who were identified in raw FBI files that the commission would make public in the volumes. Suddenly, it seemed, J. Edgar Hoover had become a champion of personal privacy. The files “contain considerable information of a highly personal nature which was furnished to our agents during the investigation of these cases,” Hoover warned. “I again want to specifically call this matter to your attention and point out the responsibility which must be assumed by the Commission in the event these documents are made available to the public.”

Rankin replied on November 18. He told Hoover that the commission intended to “minimize the use of information of a highly personal nature” while providing the public “with the fullest possible record of the investigation.”

That same day, Rankin sent another letter to Hoover—one that may have given him some pleasure to write. Hoover had pledged publicly that he would pursue the investigation of the president’s murder indefinitely, with the bureau aggressively following up new leads. And so Rankin’s second letter on November 18 amounted to the commission’s last assignment to the FBI—one final tip that the bureau would need to chase.

“In view of your continuing investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy, I wish to draw your attention to the following,” Rankin wrote. As the commission’s officers prepared to close, a staffer had received a telephone call from a New York man, identified as Louis Kleppel, who reported that he needed to share “information of vital importance concerning the assassination of the President,” Rankin wrote.

“Mr. Kleppel stated he was a mental case, specifically a schizophrenic, but that he felt that the government had nothing to lose by taking his statement.”

Rankin would leave it to Hoover’s men to investigate.

*

Senator Russell had one last way in 1964 to show how much he disapproved of the commission’s report. It might bear Russell’s name, but that did not mean the report had to bear his actual signature, in fresh ink.

As a memento of the investigation, Warren had wanted to give each of the commissioners—and every member of the staff—a copy of the final report that was hand-signed by all seven of them. (The report’s cover-page bore a printed version of their signatures.) He also wanted to give everyone an autographed copy of the official joint portrait of the commissioners. So more than one hundred copies of the report and the photo were set aside for that purpose, and the commissioners were invited to stop by the office at their convenience to do the signings.

On December 7, after all the other commissioners had turned up to sign copies of the report and the photograph, Julia Eide, Rankin’s secretary, told him that she was giving up on Russell. The senator had refused to sign, insisting for weeks that he was too busy with Senate business to cross the street to the commission’s offices. She called Russell’s office that day and spoke to one of his secretaries, who said the senator had just left for Georgia and did not intend to return until the new year.