Reclaiming History (81 page)

Senator Richard B. Russell, the conservative leader of the Southern Democrats who had been LBJ’s mentor in the Senate and the one most responsible for his rise to power, nominating him to be majority leader in 1953, had objected vigorously to the idea of serving with Warren, whom he loathed for the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring public school segregation unconstitutional.
*
Johnson bluntly refused to bow to the senator’s homegrown scruples, calling him on the evening of November 29, 1963, to advise him that he had appointed him to the Commission.

“But I just can’t serve,” Russell protested. “I don’t like that man [Warren]. I don’t have any confidence in him.”

“Dick, it’s already been announced, and you can serve with anybody for the good of America,” LBJ tells his friend. “You’re not gonna be in
Old Dog Tray
company [a reference to the 1853 Stephen C. Foster song by that name where Tray is a servile friend], but you never turned down your country…I can’t
arrest
you and I’m not going to put the FBI on you, but you’re
goddamned
sure going to
serve
—I’ll tell you
that
!” Johnson roared at Russell.

“Mr. President, you ought to have told me you were going to name [Warren],” Russell said.

When LBJ puts a mutual friend, a local Texas judge who hunts with LBJ and Russell, on the phone to help him with Russell, Russell tells the judge, “I don’t know when I’ve been as unhappy about a thing as I am this. This is awful.” With LBJ back on the phone, Russell says, “I think you’re sorta takin’ advantage of me, Mr. President.”

“I’m not,” LBJ says, “’cause you
made
me and I know it, and I don’t ever forget…But you gonna serve your country.”

Russell reiterates that “I just don’t like Warren.”

“Well, of course you don’t like Warren, but you’ll like him ’fore it’s over with.”

“I haven’t got any confidence in him.”

“Well…you can
give
him some confidence.
Goddammit! Associate
with him!”

Russell, beaten into submission, tells LBJ, “If it is for the good of the country, you know damned well I’ll do it, and I’ll do it for you…I’m at your command…I’ll do anything you want me to.”
³⁰

Warren, not wanting to forsake his enormous responsibilities as the chief justice of the Supreme Court, would later recall in an interview that he “got them to rent the building right across the street here from the Court and I would just come here to the Court for every conference, come here for every session of the Court, and then as soon as that was over I would run over there to that building [Warren Commission headquarters] and work on that [Commission business] until maybe midnight…I think it took a good bit out of me…to be doing that, [but] I didn’t want to give up my work on the Court…and I did carry on my work throughout the year.”

Warren was grateful to Johnson for all the support and latitude he and his Commission were given, saying in a later interview that there was no interference by the White House in anything.

“The White House never gave us an instruction, never, never even looked at our work until I took it up to the President.”

Question: “The President never made any suggestions?”

“Never once in any way, shape or form.”

Question: “Was there anyone that you felt you should have seen that you couldn’t get at?”

“I’ve never been able to think of one person that we should have called that we did not call…The president gave us the broadest powers…to get anything in the government…We could get any documents or anything else that we wanted.”

Question: “You had no budget limitations?”

“Oh no. There was just no problem of that kind at all, nothing. No limitations of any kind [were] put on us. We were just free agents, and did everything we wanted.”

Warren’s interviewer asked him whether his Commission’s investigation was influenced in any way by the fact that it was during an election year for President Johnson, whereupon Warren replied, “This wasn’t in the election that we did this, was it? This was in 1963.” The interviewer informed him the year was 1964 and observed, “It must not have been much of a factor.”

Warren: “No, no, really it was no factor. It was no factor at all.”
³¹

Gerald Ford confirmed this position. “President Johnson,” Ford later wrote, “did not push us, and most importantly, we were encouraged to thoroughly pursue all possibilities—even those that sounded like something out of a James Bond or an X-Files script. We were not given any parameters or restricted by any assumptions or agencies. Everyone and everything were open for scrutiny. We didn’t accept anyone’s word at face value. There were no…sacred cows…We didn’t assume any answer but investigated all possibilities and let the facts reveal the truth.”
³²

The purposes of the Warren Commission, as stated in the executive order, were “to examine the evidence developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and any additional evidence that may hereafter come to light or be uncovered by Federal or State authorities; to make such further investigation as the Commission finds desirable; to evaluate all the facts and circumstances surrounding such assassination, including the subsequent violent death of the man charged with the assassination, and to report to me its findings and conclusions.”
³³
Although accurate, there are indications that a secondary task was expected. It was apparent, at least to Chief Justice Warren and President Johnson, that rumors and speculation had to be quelled.
³⁴
Staff counsel Norman Redlich believed that allaying public fears was “a byproduct of the principal objective which was to discover all the facts.” There was an additional, humanly selfish motive for getting at the truth too. Staff counsel Burt Griffin recalled, “I think it is fair to say, and it certainly reflects my feeling, and it was certainly the feeling that I had of all of my colleagues, that we were determined, if we could, to prove the FBI was wrong, to find a conspiracy if we possibly could. I think we thought we would be national heroes in a sense if we could find something sinister beyond what appeared to have gone on.”
³⁵

Although the executive order authorized the Warren Commission itself to conduct further investigations if the commissioners found it desirable, Chief Justice Warren originally did not believe that additional investigations, beyond what the investigative agencies—FBI, Secret Service, and CIA—provided, would be necessary.

On December 5, 1963, just thirteen days after the assassination, the Warren Commission met for the first time in a long, two-hour-and-forty-minute executive session in a hearing room at the National Archives. During the session, Chief Justice Warren told the members of his commission, “Now, I think our job here is essentially one for the
evaluation
of evidence as distinguished from being one of
gathering
evidence [that would soon change], and I believe at the outset, at least, we can start with the premise that we can rely upon the reports of the various agencies that have been engaged in investigating the matter—the FBI, the Secret Service, and others that I may not know about at the present time.” Warren continued by saying that he didn’t think it would be “necessary for us to bring witnesses before us” (that would also soon change) and didn’t believe that the Commission needed independent investigators or the power of subpoena. Most of the other Commission members, however, disagreed with him on the power of subpoena, and in a voice vote, all members, including Warren, agreed to seek it from Congress.
*

The Commission members began the process of deciding on a general counsel. Chief Justice Earl Warren suggested one of his own protégés, Warren Olney. Senator Russell brought out that since Olney had been the chief of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice for five years, working closely with the FBI, and the FBI would be “the principal source of our information,” that choice might “cause some criticism.”
†
And the opinion of John McCloy and other members was that although they did not want to exclude Olney, they wanted to consider several other leading lights in the legal profession before settling on a general counsel.

On another matter, some members expressed concern about apparent leaks to the press attributed to FBI sources while the Commission was still awaiting the first FBI report. Senator Russell questioned, “How much of their findings does the FBI propose to release to the press before we present the findings of this Commission?”
³⁶
The senator’s rhetorical remarks were not entirely misplaced.

Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who represented the Department of Justice at the opening session to answer questions, informed the Commission that he had asked Hoover and the FBI’s man in charge of the JFK assassination investigation, Assistant FBI Director Alan Belmont, about the leaks. “They are utterly furious at the information that got into the press. They say they are confident it could not have come from the FBI,” Katzenbach reported, “and I say with candor to this committee, I can’t think of anybody else it could have come from, because I don’t know of anybody else that knew that information.” But Katzenbach then allowed that “some agent” or “a clever reporter” who “put together a, b, and c” may have been responsible for the information leaks.

Warren had some good news to announce to the Commission members. That morning he had been advised that the proposed Texas Court of Inquiry on the assassination (which could have resulted in a duplication of effort with the Commission and sensational headlines that could have interfered with the larger and more deliberate Commission investigation) was going to be postponed until after the Commission finished its investigation.
‡

In a prescient precursor of what experienced hands knew lay ahead for a case of unprecedented importance, Katzenbach told the Commission that the FBI had already set up a “crackpot file” for all the solutions to the case the FBI knew would be offered up by amateur sleuths around the country. “My staff is not that generous,” Senator Russell said. “They call it the ‘nut file.’”
³⁷

At the next meeting, on December 6, the Commission agreed that it should have not only the power of subpoena and to administer oaths to witnesses to tell the truth, but also the power to grant immunity. And Warren, seeing the opposition, no longer urged the appointment of Olney, and several other respected and well-known lawyers were mentioned for the job of general counsel. The name J. Lee Rankin, a fifty-four-year-old prominent Republican and former solicitor general of the United States under President Eisenhower who had argued cases before Warren’s Supreme Court, was among those mentioned. Warren knew Rankin, was impressed with him, and believed he could work with him. No one had any objection to Rankin and it was unanimously agreed to offer him the job.
³⁸

On December 8, Warren telephoned Rankin, who was now New York City’s corporation counsel, and asked him to be general counsel for the Commission. “The chief called me out of the blue and asked me to serve,” Rankin would later say. “I told him I had put in my time with the government and was just starting to build a practice. I told him some members of the commission wouldn’t want me. I told him lots of things. I had the job by the end of the conversation. Earl Warren was a very persuasive man.”
³⁹
Rankin left for Washington the next day, where he spent the next ten months attending to the Commission’s work as its general counsel. If the commissioners set broad general policy, it was Rankin, a formal and intellectually rigorous man, who actually implemented the policy, overseeing both the investigation and the writing of the eventual report, examining many of the important witnesses who testified in the hearings, organizing the Commission staff, and functioning as liaison to other government agencies.
⁴⁰

T
he evidence clearly shows that from the beginning, although FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover did nothing to directly impede the investigation, and complied with all Warren Commission requests, he viewed the Warren Commission more as a competitor than a partner in a search for facts about the assassination. Former assistant FBI director William Sullivan told investigators in 1975 that Hoover was afraid the Commission would criticize the FBI’s investigation. “Hoover did not want the Warren Commission to conduct an exhaustive investigation for fear that it would discover important and relevant facts that we in the FBI had not discovered in our investigation, [since] it would be greatly embarrassing to him and damaging to his career and the FBI as a whole.”
⁴¹
Though Sullivan had had a bitter break with Hoover, his observation was supported by the Church Committee, which noted that Hoover “repeatedly told others in the Bureau that the Warren Commission was ‘looking for gaps in the FBI’s investigation’ and was ‘seeking to criticize the FBI.’”
⁴²

According to Sullivan, the FBI director received frequent updates on the Commission’s investigation, as well as its criticisms of the bureau, from one of the Commission’s own members—Gerald R. Ford. “[Ford] was one of our [FBI] members of the congressional stable when he was in Congress,” Sullivan explained. “[When] he became a member of the Warren Commission…he was ‘our man’ on the Warren Commission and it was to him that we looked to protect our interests and keep us fully advised of any development that we would not like, that mitigated against us, and he did.”
⁴³
On December 12, 1963, Ford asked to see FBI Deputy Director DeLoach in Ford’s office. Though the Commission had only been in existence one week, DeLoach wrote in a memorandum that Ford said he wasn’t pleased that Warren had attempted to establish a “one-man commission” by having his protégé, Warren Olney, appointed chief counsel. Ford reported the activities-to-date of the Commission (including information he had learned about the CIA’s investigation in Mexico City) and “indicated he would keep [the FBI] thoroughly advised as to the activities of the Commission. He stated this would have to be on a confidential basis; however, he thought it should be done.”
⁴⁴
However, Ford, who said he had been meeting with DeLoach for years on congressional matters, disputes that he was the FBI’s eyes and ears on the Commission. He testified under penalty of perjury that he only met with DeLoach on two occasions, December 12 and 17, 1963, both of which times, he noted, were “during the organizational period of the Commission and before any investigations or hearings were undertaken by the Commission.”
⁴⁵
And no one has been able to show any contact between Ford and the FBI subsequent to December 17, 1963.