Reclaiming History (85 page)

Slawson said that junior assistant counsels worked very hard “for eight months, six days a week, and usually until ten o’clock in the evening.”
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Specter would later write that the distinction between junior and senior lawyers was eventually dropped, and all the lawyers were classified as “assistant counsel.”
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With all the junior lawyers, and senior lawyers like Willens, Redlich, and General Counsel Rankin, the unrelenting pressure, tension, and concomitant exhilaration in investigating the biggest murder case in this nation’s history left an ineradicable mark. “How often in your life do you have a chance to devote a 100 percent effort to one honorable thing—in this case, a national tragedy?” Redlich asked. “Next to high school in Russell, Kansas, it was the best experience I’ve ever had,” Specter said. “I didn’t have any gray hairs until the Warren Commission,” Willens observed.
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An additional eleven “staff members,” six of whom were lawyers and recent graduates of major law schools who again were near or at the top of their class (including Warren’s law clerk, John Hart Ely), were appointed to do research and “gofer” work for the assistant counsels and Commission members. Five nonlawyers (an editor from the Department of State, a historian from the Department of Defense, and three accountants from the IRS who worked exclusively on Oswald’s and Ruby’s finances) completed this section.
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Per Arlen Specter, though the assistant counsels did most of the day-to-day work, “the Commissioners themselves paid close attention to the work” of the staff. “The Chief Justice was a dominant figure moving throughout the entire investigation, and so were the other commissioners in terms of knowing and understanding and participating in the scope and depth of the Commission work.”
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On December 28, 1963, Howard Willens drafted a memorandum that laid out the Commission’s plan of attack. A senior and a junior lawyer would be assigned to each of six major areas
*
of concentration: Area I was “Basic Facts of the Assassination,” assigned to Francis Adams and Arlen Specter, and focused primarily on determining the location from where the shots were fired; Area II was “Identity of the Assassin,” given to Joseph Ball and David Belin; Area III was “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Background,” handled by Albert Jenner and Wesley Liebeler, and included seeking to determine if there was a domestic conspiracy apart from the questions involving Jack Ruby; Area IV was “Possible Conspiratorial Relationships,” assigned to William Coleman and W. David Slawson, and was concerned with the possibility of a foreign conspiracy; Area V was “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Death,” with Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin, and concentrated on Jack Ruby and his possible involvement in a conspiracy, including whether Oswald and Ruby had a previous association with each other; and Area VI was “Presidential Protection,” assigned to Samuel Stern, with General Counsel Rankin assisting, which included an evaluation of the quality of protection afforded the president under existing standards. The organizational plan did not call for a separate investigation into the murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, which was considered a part of Area II, “Identity of the Assassin.”
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Norman Redlich worked on special projects including the drafting of procedural rules for the Commission, and worked with Ball, Belin, and Specter on the investigation itself. Redlich also attended as many Commission meetings as possible and reviewed and edited drafts of the report. Willens assisted Rankin in organizing the work, reviewing materials received from the various investigative agencies, and requesting further information when necessary.
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Several former staff members testified in 1978 that they generally believed the organization of the Commission was effective in producing a professional and thorough investigation aimed at finding the truth.
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Of those who testified, only Burt Griffin expressed some dissatisfaction, stating that the Commission looked upon Jack Ruby’s activities (Griffin and Hubert’s area of investigation) as “largely peripheral to the questions that they [the Commission] were most concerned with.”
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Toward the end of December, Willens and Rankin arranged for the appointment of liaisons to the Commission with the four principal government agencies in the investigation: Inspector James J. Malley from the FBI, Inspector Thomas Kelley from the Secret Service, Raymond G. Rocca from the CIA, and Abram Chayes from the State Department.
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During the first three weeks of January 1964, the lawyers reported for work and were each assigned a secretary and an office in the Commission’s headquarters. Willens brought in two more lawyers, Charles N. Shaffer Jr. and Stuart Pollak, to assist on clerical and administrative procedures, and the FBI installed a scale model of the assassination site, film projectors, and other equipment in the basement.

The massive task of investigating the assassination events began by dividing more than twenty thousand pages of reports from the FBI, Secret Service, and other agencies into the preassigned areas and handing them over to the responsible teams. Joe Ball, who arrived in Washington from Los Angeles on January 2, 1964, and had the biggest investigative area of all, “Identity of the Assassin,” recalled that on the first day “about 10,000 pieces of paper were rolled into my office, the written reports of the various investigative agencies…During the first month of the investigation, we classified the information found in the reports by means of a card index system. This permitted the immediate retrieval of this information when needed.”
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Wesley Liebeler, realizing that a lawyer in one area, like Ball, might not perceive the importance of information to another area, proposed that at least one attorney should read all of the reports. Rankin thought it more important for each team to get to work on its own material right away. Later, “if time permitted,” a staff member could read all of the material.
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On January 20, 1964, Chief Justice Warren met with the Warren Commission staff at their first formal staff meeting. In discussing the role of the Commission with the staff, Warren “placed emphasis on the importance of quenching rumors, and precluding further speculation such as that which has surrounded the death of Lincoln.
He emphasized that the Commission had to determine the truth, whatever that might be
.”
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Wary of questions of national security which might turn up, he asked the staff not to discuss their work outside the Commission.
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Rankin warned them against forming conclusions too quickly, before they had a chance to evaluate all of the material, and told them not to accept the FBI’s summary report as final. Rankin told his team, “Gentlemen, your only client is the truth.”
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“No one knew,” Assistant Counsel Arlen Specter said, “where the Warren Commission investigation would lead, and that was just as it should have been.”
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The next day, the Commission met to discuss procedural questions, including whether its hearings, scheduled to begin in February, would be open or closed. The Commission decided to keep them closed (unless, as indicated, the witness appearing before the Commission requested an open hearing). The commissioners were concerned that open hearings might interfere with Ruby’s right to a fair and impartial trial. They also realized that some of the testimony presented would be inadmissible in a real trial, which this was not, and might prejudice innocent parties in subsequent lawsuits if it were to be made public out of context. Finally, since sworn depositions, affidavits, and statements would not be taken in a logical sequence, the premature release or partial publication of such testimony might start more rumors than it allayed. Other housekeeping matters were also resolved, like who would attend the hearings involving testimony (they wanted a minimum of two commissioners always present, and hoped General Counsel Rankin would be present at all of them), who would do the questioning (in the main, it should be by the assistant counsel who prepared and worked with the witness), and how to deal with the prying media (they did not want a press agent, but agreed they had to be careful, accurate, and limited in what was said; also, the media had to be told certain things or “they will speculate,” which would be bad).

The Commission set a flexible “target date” for its report of June 1, 1964. The Commission also rejected a request by Mark Lane, representing Marguerite Oswald, to represent the interests of her son before the Commission. Five of the seven Commission members were already on the federal payroll and hence precluded from receiving additional compensation for their work on the Commission. And the two who weren’t, Dulles and McCloy, agreed to serve without compensation, all seven agreeing to only receive reimbursement for their expenses, mostly anticipated to be for travel.
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The following morning, January 22, a bombshell exploded on the Commission. Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr telephoned the Commission’s general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, to inform him that an allegation was floating around Dallas that Oswald had been an “undercover agent” (the “undercover agent” designation quickly evolved into that of “paid informant”) for the FBI, receiving two hundred dollars a month “for an account designated as number 179.” Rankin immediately informed Chief Justice Warren, who called an emergency meeting of the Commission that evening.
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In a hushed, tense, executive session, Rankin explained the allegation to the Commission. They speculated about what the FBI might have been using Oswald for, then turned their attention to the implications of the allegation. Rankin found it unusual that the FBI was insisting that Oswald was the lone assassin, yet the bureau hadn’t yet run down “all kinds of leads in Mexico or in Russia.” This, he said, “raises questions.”

Rankin told the Commission members that he and Chief Justice Warren had reflected on this and “we said if [the allegation] was true and it ever came out and could be established,” then simply because of it, some people would think “that there was a conspiracy to accomplish this assassination” and “nothing the Commission did” could change this impression.

Representative Boggs: “You are so right.”

“Oh, terrible,” Allen Dulles moaned.

“[The] implications of this are fantastic, don’t you think so?” Hale Boggs observed.

“Terrific [possibly a typographical error for
terrible
],” Chief Justice Warren answered.

When Dulles asked the question of why, if Oswald were an FBI informant, “it would be in their [FBI’s] interest…to say [Oswald] is…the only guilty one?” Warren answered, “They would like to have us fold up and quit.”

“This closes the case, you see,” Boggs interjected. “Don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see that,” Dulles acknowledged.

“They found the man,” Rankin continued. “There is nothing more to do. The Commission supports their conclusions, and we can go home and that is the end of it.”

“But that puts the men [typo for
burden?
] right on them,” Dulles argued. “If he was not the killer, and they employed him, they are already it, you see. [This sentence would seem to make sense only if Dulles had not used the word “not.” He could have misspoken or the stenographer could have made a mistake.] So your argument is correct if they are sure that this is going to close the case, but if it [doesn’t] close the case, they are worse off than ever by doing this.”

“Yes, I would think so,” Boggs replied “…I don’t even like to see this being taken down.”

“Yes,” Dulles agreed. “I think this record ought to be destroyed. Do you think we need a record of this?”

Rankin: “I don’t, except that we said we would have records of meetings.”
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On January 23, 1964, Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr, along with two of his special counsels, Dean Storey and Leon Jaworski, and Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade and his assistant, Dallas DA William Alexander, flew to Washington, D.C. The following day they met with Chief Justice Warren and General Counsel Rankin to discuss the explosive allegation. At the meeting, the Texas contingent said the rumor was “constant” in Texas, and that “the source of their information was a man by the name of Hudkins [newspaper reporter Alonzo Hudkins].”

Although the source of the allegation has become almost permanently mired in dispute and obfuscation, one thing is very clear. It was a fabricated story with no substance (see in-depth discussion in FBI conspiracy section), but at the time, the Warren Commission did not know this and took the allegation very seriously. The first suggestion on how to handle the rumor was to have the U.S. attorney general look into it, but Rankin said he had already spoken to high officials in the Department of Justice who told him that since the FBI is a part of the Justice Department and the attorney general’s office works so closely with the FBI, “such a request [to the attorney general] might be embarrassing, and at least would be difficult for the attorney general.” To put, what Rankin called, this “dirty rumor” to rest, he suggested that he talk with Hoover directly and ask him to demonstrate by the bureau’s records that the rumor was untrue. In a nod to the power of the FBI, Rankin said he would seek Hoover’s permission to do an independent investigation of the Oswald-FBI rumor should it prove necessary. Although Chief Justice Warren said he disliked the idea of going to Hoover without investigating the rumor on their own first, other members were worried that eliciting a statement from the FBI, then conducting a subsequent investigation, would appear to undermine the FBI’s authority and cause “grave embarrassment to everybody.” The Commission then discussed the problem of proving or disproving the allegation.

“If Oswald never had assassinated the president,” Senator Richard Russell said, “[but]…had been in the employ of the FBI, and somebody had gone to the FBI they would have denied he was an agent.”

“Oh, yes,” Dulles, the former CIA director, answered.

“They would be the first to deny it,” Russell continued. “Your agents would have done exactly the same thing.”