Reclaiming History (87 page)

The late Sylvia Meagher, who usually had absolutely no trouble with the hundreds upon hundreds of deliberate, flat-out lies told by her colleagues in the conspiracy theory community in their books, had no tolerance or understanding at all for someone like Marina, who, as indicated, answered literally thousands of questions by the authorities on and off the witness stand and didn’t even speak English. Meagher, nitpicking over minutia, did her best to gather up all the examples she could muster of the contradictions in Marina’s testimony, but failed miserably, only citing a small handful—all, I believe, while Marina was not under oath.
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The very few times Marina was caught in a lie were when she understandably was trying to
protect
her husband shortly after the assassination. An example is her lie (not under oath) to the FBI, which she subsequently admitted to the Warren Commission, that she had no knowledge that Oswald had taken a trip to Mexico,
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probably thinking this would somehow be incriminating to him in view of his having instructed her not to tell anyone.
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(She told the Warren Commission that she did “not like [the FBI] too much. I didn’t want to be too sincere with them.”)
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But when someone does the opposite and incriminates a loved one (as Marina’s testimony before the Warren Commission did concerning the night before, and the morning of, the assassination), there’s hardly any reason to disbelieve what that person says. In fact, it could be said that if someone’s lies are almost always in favor of another individual, this only increases the former’s credibility when he or she says something damaging about that person.

R
ather belatedly, on February 25, 1964, the Commission, wanting to ensure the fairness of its inquiry to the alleged assassin and his family, requested Walter E. Craig, president of the American Bar Association, to participate in the hearings and investigation and advise the Commission whether the proceedings “conformed to the basic principles of American justice.” In effect, he was to look after Oswald’s interests and was even authorized to question witnesses if he desired. Marina Oswald agreed with the arrangement. Craig accepted the appointment but he (and two associates of his who attended the hearings whenever he was absent) was virtually a nonexistent presence at the hearings, asking very few questions (and those innocuous and non-adversarial) of very few witnesses. In no way could they be considered conventional cross-examination. He could have performed the function of a responsible devil’s advocate, asking key Warren Commission witnesses questions that a competent defense attorney would have, but he failed abysmally in this effort and, through no fault of the Warren Commission, turned out to be mere window dressing for the expressed goal of helping to guarantee that a deceased accused be treated fairly and objectively.
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In mid-March, after Jack Ruby had been convicted of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald and sentenced to the electric chair, Joseph Ball and David Belin flew to Dallas to begin, as the FBI had been doing for a few months, their own “field investigation,” held off until now so that Commission staffers would have sufficient time to prepare for their fieldwork and to avoid potential future charges that the Commission had interfered with Ruby’s right to a fair trial.
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They set up in the offices of U.S. Attorney Barefoot Sanders in the Dallas Post Office Building, Sanders serving as their liaison to local authorities. They interviewed police officials and witnesses about various aspects of the assassination and the two killings that followed it, and arranged for some of them to testify to the Commission in Washington the following week. On March 20, Ball and Belin staged a reconstruction of Oswald’s believed movements at the time of the assassination, in which many of the eyewitnesses participated. By March 23, most of the assistant counsels were in Dallas starting their field investigations. While the staff immersed itself in the field investigation, the most important eyewitnesses to the assassination testified before the Commission in Washington during fourteen days of hearings conducted that month.
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Inevitable staff changes were made during the month of March, the kind any large organization goes through as schedules change. Francis W. H. Adams, the senior counsel for Area I, investigation of the actual assassination, was unable to participate very much because of unavoidable responsibilities at his prestigious law firm, so even more of the work of this crucial investigation fell on the shoulders of Arlen Specter. Belin later described Adams’s noninvolvement as one of the best-kept secrets inside the Commission. “He should have been asked to resign,” Belin wrote, “when it first became apparent that he was not going to undertake his responsibilities, but because of some mistaken fear that this might in some way embarrass the Commission, Mr. Adams was kept on in name only and the entire burden in Area I fell upon Arlen Specter. Fortunately for the Commission, Arlen Specter was able to carry the entire weight of Area I on his own shoulders. Nevertheless, it is indicative of the nature of investigations by governmental commissions that the need for a second lawyer in Area I was outweighed by a political decision. The ramifications of the fact that this decision was made by the Chief Justice of the United States are indeed chilling.”
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Another senior counsel, William Coleman, was unable to devote as much time as he would have liked to the Commission, and so a young lawyer from the Justice Department, Stuart Pollak, was assigned to work with the junior counsel, David Slawson, in Area IV. With Ball and Belin otherwise occupied in Dallas, Melvin Eisenberg was given the job of examining expert witnesses (e.g., on firearms, fingerprints, etc.) at the Washington hearings. John Hart Ely, Warren’s law clerk, was appointed to help Albert Jenner and Wesley Liebeler develop Oswald’s history.
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To many of the junior counsels in the trenches, the seven commissioners often seemed out of touch with the investigation. Senior counsel Joseph Ball thought the Commission “had no idea what was happening. We did all the investigating, lined up the witnesses, solved the problems, and wrote the report.” Eisenberg saw the Commission as a corporation’s board of directors, with Rankin as president and the staff as its officers. Howard Willens commented that “the commissioners were not in touch with the investigation at all times.” But J. Lee Rankin countered that some of the younger lawyers “simply didn’t understand how a government inquiry worked” and that the collective experience and wisdom of the commissioners provided the inquiry with its direction.
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Norman Redlich, Rankin’s assistant, agreed. “I have never known a staff that thought that the group that it worked for was as well informed as the staff was, and the Warren Commission was no exception,” he told the HSCA in 1978. Contrary to other staff opinions, Redlich thought that several of the commissioners were “tremendously well informed,” citing in particular the chief justice, Gerald Ford, and Allen Dulles. He described the chief justice’s almost daily appearances at the Commission, in particular, as “heroic.”
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The investigation in Dallas continued into the first two weeks in April. Nearly one-half of all the depositions taken by the Commission staff were taken in Dallas during this period. Ball, with the help of Belin, Samuel Stern, Ely, and Alfred Goldberg (a member of the staff who was a U.S. Air Force historian), established Oswald’s movements from the time of the assassination until his arrest; Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin investigated Oswald’s death, and Liebeler and Jenner interviewed Oswald’s relatives and acquaintances in the hope of shedding light on his motive.
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Back in Washington, Redlich, Specter, Willens, Eisenberg, and others wrestled with problems emanating from the Zapruder film. Rifle tests had determined that the murder weapon could not fire two bullets in the time period that the film
seemed
to show both Kennedy and Connally being hit. The assistant counsels began to develop the hypothesis that came to be known as the “single-bullet theory,” the concept that the president and the governor were hit by the same bullet.
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The April 30, 1964, executive session of the Warren Commission dealt with a potpourri of matters, such as additional areas of inquiry that should be explored (e.g., taking Ruby’s deposition); reaching a decision that two or more Commission members should go to Dallas to examine the entire assassination scene; the problem with the Kennedy family not wanting the autopsy photos to become a part of the record because they didn’t want the president “to be remembered in connection with those pictures” (the tentative position was to honor the family’s request but to have at least “a doctor and some member of the Commission…examine them sufficiently so that they could report to the Commission,” if such be the case, that there was “nothing inconsistent with the other findings in connection with the matter in those pictures”); the realization of the “very serious problem now in the record” that Governor Connally had testified earlier in the month that he was sure he wasn’t struck by the same bullet that struck Kennedy; taking time, near the end of the session, to look at the front windshield of the presidential limousine, which was brought into the conference room; and even such matters as agreeing to buy and read the first ever pro-conspiracy book,
Who Killed Kennedy?
, published in London that month by an American Communist expatriate named Thomas Buchanan. (Dulles: “I think I can get it through London [by asking] my former associates [at the CIA] to arrange through the British [intelligence] services there to get us a copy of this book immediately.”)
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At an early May staff meeting, Rankin told the attorneys to wrap up their investigations and submit their first draft chapters of the report by June 1, with June 30 set as the deadline for publication. To the hardworking staff lawyers, these dates seemed rather more exhortative than mandatory. Some teams had yet to resolve thorny problems in their areas, others had turned up new evidence requiring still further investigation. Junior counsel Arlen Specter, working virtually alone in his area, felt the time pressure as keenly as anyone, but never believed it jeopardized the integrity of the results. “No one ever said sacrifice thoroughness for speed,” he told the HSCA years later.
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Arlen Specter and Joseph Ball were the only ones who made the June 1 deadline, the others still trying to wrap up their fact-finding.
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The Warren Commission members met in executive session on May 19, 1964, to resolve the most politically sensitive issue they had yet to be confronted with. Several months earlier, General Counsel Rankin had asked the FBI to conduct full field investigations on each member of the Commission staff for security clearances, since they would be reading classified documents in their work. The FBI took much longer than Rankin had anticipated, but all the reports were now in and there were problems with two assistant counsels. A few years earlier, Joe Ball had joined in with other members of the California Bar Association to denounce the House Un-American Activities Committee (UAAC) for the way it conducted itself during a trip to the West Coast. The Commission members had no problem dismissing the issue with regards to Ball, all agreeing, without even a vote, that his employment should continue.

But the FBI field investigation also found that Norman Redlich had been a member of the Emergency Civil Liberties Council, which not only was against the UAAC, as many Americans were, but was considered to be a Communist-front organization by the UAAC as well as the Internal Security Committee of the Senate, though it was not on the attorney general’s list. The FBI check on Redlich was so thorough that it included interviews with elevator operators at Redlich’s New York City apartment building, neighbors of his at his vacation home in Vermont, even, remarkably, with the obstetrician who had delivered him. Someone obviously had leaked the FBI report and Redlich had become subjected to attacks in the conservative media as well as from speeches on the floors of the House and Senate, questioning his loyalty to America and whether the Commission could possibly issue an objective report with such an important leftist staff member like Redlich on it.

Rankin, who knew Redlich from Yale Law School and had been the one who hired him to work on the Commission, opened the discussion by saying that Redlich was a brilliant man who had been working “long hours, longer than anybody else,” someone who was “more familiar with our work than anyone else, and has been of great assistance to me and other members of the staff,” all of whom were “very much disturbed about the attack on him. They have worked intimately with him and are fully satisfied of his complete loyalty.” Rankin added that with a deadline for the report set for June 30, he absolutely needed Redlich to help him, particularly since the staff was soon to be depleted by several members who had to go back to their law firms in early June, such as Eisenberg, Jenner, and Hubert. Rankin felt there was “no question of Mr. Redlich’s loyalty as an American citizen” and asked the Commission members to formally determine that he had a “right to a security clearance.” Rankin noted the irony that Redlich had already been working with “classified materials” for months.

The Commission members then started a spirited debate on the issue, which consumed almost fifty pages of transcript. The member who led the argument to terminate Redlich’s employment was Gerald Ford, who acknowledged that the FBI report did not contain “a scintilla of evidence that he is a member of the Communist Party. As I read the report, he’s given in this connection a clean bill of health.” And Ford didn’t question Redlich’s loyalty. The problem, Ford pointed out, was that the report of the Commission “will be a part of American history as long as the country exists. And it is vitally important, because of the nature of the assignment, that we be as free of any criticism as possible. The image of the Commission, in my opinion, is something that just cannot be tarnished in any way.” Ford’s most telling point, which he reiterated several times, and with which all of the members other than Warren seemed to agree, was that a person with Redlich’s affiliations (he was a member of several other left-wing “cause” groups), if they had been known at the beginning, would not have been hired. “Since I would not have approved an individual with these affiliations then,” Ford said, “I have a terrible time trying to convince myself that we ought to continue the employment” now, though Ford felt it was “very regrettable,” since he liked Redlich, admired his work, had “no doubt whatsoever about his loyalty,” and didn’t want to “hurt him in the slightest.” Boggs, Cooper, Russell, and Dulles agreed with Ford that Redlich should be let go, Dulles saying he should be terminated even though his departure would “cripple us a great deal.”