Reclaiming History (88 page)

Warren made it clear that in his mind, Redlich would have to be retained since the only issue was whether he was a loyal American, and since no Commission members thought he was not, there was no basis to terminate him. Warren added that if, indeed, the Commission were to decide that there was “any question of his loyalty, the least we could do” would be to give Redlich an opportunity to defend himself, saying the courts had held that in government employment, “before you discharge a man for security reasons…he has a right to an administrative hearing.” If the other members were concerned about the “image” issue with Americans, “we would at least want to have an image of fair play…to those who have worked for us, and who have been loyal to us…if we expect people to think we have been fair to Oswald.” Warren said that to fire Redlich now without cause would be “un-American,” tantamount to “dropping him as a disloyal individual. And that is a hurt that can never be remedied as long as a man lives.” Warren added that “there will be very little morale left in the staff of this Commission” if Redlich was let go, the staff already “deeply offended” by the assault on Redlich.

McCloy joined in strongly with Warren, noting that “if we dropped [Redlich] at this point, we would be in the middle of as great a controversy as if we did not,” receiving “as much criticism” as they would “if we retain him.” He also made the point that at the heart of the attacks on Redlich was that he could influence the report, which McCloy felt was ill-founded, since the Commission, not the staff, was “going to be responsible for this report.” Cooper agreed that “the Commission is going to make the report,” not the staff. Rankin had said that the staff, of course, would only prepare drafts for the Commission’s revisions and ultimate approval.

Since no one on the Commission personally questioned Redlich’s loyalty as an American, and all had a high opinion of him and his work, the Commission finally decided to issue a press release not even mentioning Redlich, simply saying that “all” Commission staff had been cleared for security purposes.
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Meanwhile, arrangements were made to test the single-bullet hypothesis in Dallas on May 24 with an elaborate reenactment of the assassination in Dealey Plaza. The tests confirmed the theory of Specter, Redlich, and other assistant counsels that the alignment of Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies to each other in the presidential limousine was such that the bullet that struck Kennedy in his upper right back and exited his throat would have had to go on to hit Connally.
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Two weeks later Specter, Rankin, and Warren went to Dallas. Specter’s assignment was to take Warren to the sniper’s nest window and explain the single-bullet theory to him. After Specter did so, Warren walked away from the window, silent, apparently absorbing and understanding the theory for the first time.
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“It was the only time he was quiet and listened for a few minutes,” Specter would later recall. “He didn’t say anything, but I think I convinced him.”
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In late May, Chief Justice Warren announced that other than the Commission’s report, the supporting volumes of testimony and evidence would not be published owing to the prohibitive cost.
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General Counsel Rankin and a number of assistant counsels felt it was virtually obligatory that these volumes be published. Rankin asked the Government Printing Office for an estimated cost. The figure he received was “something around one million dollars, or thereabouts.” Warren was shocked.

“My, we can’t spend money like that,” he told Rankin.

“Well,” Rankin replied, “I think the report without it is not going to have the validity that it will have if it is supported and people can check out what we did.”

Warren advised Rankin to speak to the congressional members of the Commission. Rankin approached Senator Russell first and told him what he recommended and why. Russell agreed immediately. “Go right ahead,” he told Rankin, “don’t worry about it. We will get the money for you.” Russell himself enlisted the support of the three other congressional members of the Commission—Boggs, Ford, and Cooper—and the funding was arranged.
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The cost of printing the report and the first fifteen hundred copies of its twenty-six volumes eventually came to $608,000.
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When Redlich and Willens told Warren that the June 30 deadline could not be met, he became so agitated and flush that Willens, for a moment, feared that Warren might have a heart attack. Calming down, Warren said with a tone of resignation, “Well, gentlemen, we are here for the duration.”
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The deadline for the report was extended to July 15.
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Although Rankin constantly urged his staff to keep moving, the general feeling among them was that there was more emphasis on getting it done right rather than quickly. Specter noted that “as we moved along…there were comments on attitudes that we should be moving along, we should get the investigation concluded,” but he was clear that they “did not seek to sacrifice completeness for promptness.”
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The Warren Commission met in executive session again on June 4, 1964, to address a single issue, a spate of articles in major newspapers and national magazines that the Commission had already reached a decision that Oswald killed Kennedy and there was no conspiracy—he had acted alone. There had been speculation about this before, but now the stories were adding the imprimatur of the Commission itself by saying the source of their story was “a Commission source” or a “source close to the Commission” or even “a spokesman for the Commission.” Warren was confident that no Commission member was the source of this information, but he wondered who was leaking it. Without accusing anyone, he said, “Now, the staff of the Commission, individually or collectively, may have come to certain conclusions such as this. However, the staff, individually or collectively, have no right to make such implications to the press.”

There were two problems with the story. Number one, the media was essentially, as Representative Ford said, “preempting what we may or may not say.” Obviously, if the story the media was presently peddling, and could be expected to peddle right up to the time the Commission’s report was issued, turned out to be accurate, the report would be completely anticlimactic and bereft of all weight. The other problem was that the story just happened to not be true. Not only hadn’t the Commission made a final judgment yet on the issue of Oswald’s guilt and conspiracy, but not once in all its executive sessions had the Commission even, Warren said, “discussed these matters as a Commission to my knowledge. I don’t like being quoted when I have not made any final judgment.”

Ford: “When we see this practically every day now, and in responsible and highly regarded newspapers, I think it has gotten to a point where something ought to be done.”

McCloy agreed that something should be done and recommended that the Commission put out a statement that no final judgment had been reached on either of the two issues. Indeed, as Warren said, the Commission was still taking testimony. The Commission agreed to issue an immediate statement to the press.

Warren: “We will see if this won’t stop it. I hope so.”
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On June 7, Warren and Congressman Ford held a special hearing for Jack Ruby in the interrogation room of the Dallas county jail. The room, overlooking Dealey Plaza, was crowded with a menagerie of attorneys and law enforcement personnel. At his trial, Ruby had wanted to testify in his own defense but had been talked out of it by his counsel, the flamboyant San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli, who had tried to convince a Texas jury that Ruby was a victim of something called psychomotor epilepsy, a novel medical theory which implied that at the very moment of the shooting, Ruby had been temporarily “insane” and was not really responsible for his actions. Now, touchingly eager to tell his story to the chief justice, Jack regaled Warren and the other Commission members with a confused, harrowing account of his agonized thoughts and actions over the weekend of the assassination. Ruby seemed unable to understand why the city he loved and for which he had committed his act of heroism had turned on him and brought him so low.
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The Commission announced the completion of its hearings on June 17,
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and ten days later General Counsel Rankin told the press that the report would not be released until after the Republican National Convention, due to begin on July 13.
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All five senior counsels—Adams, Coleman, Ball, Hubert, and Jenner—returned to their private practices, leaving only junior assistant counsels to continue working for the Commission full-time. The arduous task of writing the final report fell on the shoulders of twenty or more different staffers, including Norman Redlich and Alfred Goldberg, the Department of Defense historian. The basic approach was for the assistant counsels to submit draft chapters on the area they worked on to the Commission members for their review.
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Howard Willens reported in 1978 that “each chapter of the Warren Commission report went through six or more substantial redrafts, with different persons assuming editorial responsibility at different times.”
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Willens would later tell the HSCA that author Edward Jay Epstein’s summary of who wrote the final report was “seriously flawed and should not be relied upon,” adding that “it is a matter of record that [Epstein] interviewed only a few members of the Warren Commission staff…Accordingly, his summary substantially overstates the contributions of some members of the staff, understates the contributions of others, and does a disservice to the twenty or more members of the staff that participated significantly in preparation of the final report.”
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Redlich, working up to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, thought the work “would go on forever.” Goldberg finally told Warren that it was “impossible” to finish by July 15, and the deadline was extended to August 1, then August 10. Because of staff disagreement on the use of psychological terminology to describe Oswald’s behavior, Rankin arranged for three psychiatrists to meet with staff and Commission members for an all-day colloquium, which ultimately concluded that there was not enough evidence for reaching any firm conclusions about Oswald’s motives and psychology. When a draft chapter on the subject was submitted on July 20, Redlich and Rankin thought it too psychological and sent it back for a rewrite.
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The August deadline came and went as Commission staffers struggled to reach a consensus on the particular language. The deadline for the completed report was soon extended to mid-September. Meanwhile, the pressure to publish the report kept increasing. Most of the commissioners and staff wanted to publish the report as soon as possible to keep it from becoming a political issue in the fall elections. Finally, on September 4, galley proofs of the final draft were distributed to commissioners and staff for correction.
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That very same day, however, Assistant Counsel Wesley Liebeler wrote a memorandum to General Counsel J. Lee Rankin in which he recommended that further investigation be conducted to resolve the implications in the testimony of Sylvia Odio.
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(See discussion of the Odio matter in conspiracy section.) It elicited a response from Rankin that has become a famous part of the imperishable lore of the assassination that Warren Commission critics love to cite for the proposition that the Warren Commission was never really interested in getting to the truth. Rankin told Liebeler, “At this stage, we are supposed to be closing doors, not opening them.” The conspiracy theorists,
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up to their old tricks, never bother to tell their readers the precise context in which Rankin made this remark—the very day that the final draft of the Warren Report was being distributed to the commissioners and staff. When I spoke to Liebeler about Rankin’s remark, he said that because of the circumstances, Rankin’s words “were not inappropriate at the time. From the beginning we were all after the truth, and there were no limitations on that. We could do anything we wanted to do. But this was at the very end, when the report was about to go to press, so he [Rankin] said something to the effect that
at that
point we should be closing doors not opening them.”
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In other words, Rankin, it seems, was simply showing his irritability over the fact that after all this time, the Commission
should
be in a position of closing all doors. There shouldn’t be any doors still to be opened.

On September 6, two days after receiving the galley proofs of the chapter on the identity of the assassin, Liebeler, the Warren Commission’s in-house devil’s advocate, submitted a twenty-six-page critique of the chapter, forcing publication of the report to be held up again while the chapter was revised.
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In later years, Arlen Specter would note, “It is hard to specify the people or Commissioners who were pushing for a prompt conclusion, but it was an unmistakable aspect of the atmosphere of the commission’s work.”
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On the other hand, Specter said that in the last analysis “the Commission used ample time in finishing its investigation and coming to its conclusion. The Commission was flexible in its timetable. It started out with the thought that the investigation could be in the three-to-six-month range. When the investigation required more time, more time was taken.”
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Howard Willens thought the time to complete the report was “sufficient,” although he could not deny “that the work could have gone on for another month or two or six.”
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However anxious the country was to know what had happened and whether any conspiracy was involved, Rankin did not think there was any undue pressure. “There was no indication at any time,” he told the HSCA in the late 1970s, “that we should try to get it out for any such [political] purpose and not adequately make a report or investigate whatever sources we were able to find.” Commissioner John McCloy summed up the final month’s work when he told HSCA investigators, “We had no rush to judgment. We came to a judgment,” adding that by the time of the report, “We had already arrived at [our] conclusions.”
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