Kennedy also paid his respects to Pope Paul VI by making a brief stop at the Vatican. It was the last destination on what turned out to be the last of the nine international journeys during his presidency, many of them multicountry tours.11 The press speculated on whether the president would kneel and kiss the pope's ring-a standard practice among Catholics-but JFK knew better than to provoke the wrath of Protestant voters. "Norman Vincent Peale would love that," he quipped, "And it would get me a lot of votes in South Carolina."12 The ring went unkissed.

The president found a crowded inbox the next day when he returned to the Oval Office. Not only had his civil rights bill stalled on Capitol Hill, but the situation in Vietnam was rapidly deteriorating. When JFK took office, eight hundred American military personnel were stationed in South Vietnam; he had increased the number to sixteen thousand in only two years. The president saw Vietnam as a test case for his "flexible response" doctrine, which relied on a variety of methods to stop the spread of Communism. Eisenhower had been wary of American involvement in Vietnam, having watched the French get bogged down in Southeast Asia and then withdraw in humiliation in 1954. Kennedy was also cautious-he had refused a 1961 Pentagon recommendation to commit two hundred thousand U.S. troops to Vietnam-but he had talked tough as a cold warrior, and did not want to see any country fall to Communism on his watch. Still, gradually, the U.S. troop "advisers" had been drawn surreptitiously into direct fighting; the recipe for much deeper involvement was being concocted. In actions that some liberals have long forgotten, Kennedy ordered Green Berets to use counterinsurgency tactics against Communist guerrillas; he approved the use of napalm, a jellied gasoline that sticks to the skin as it burns, as well as Agent Orange, a defoliant that causes birth defects; and he provided Ngo Dinh Diem, the authoritarian ruler of South Vietnam, with guns and money.13 But by the autumn of 1963, Kennedy realized that his Vietnam strategy was not working. The previous December, Democrat Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader, returned from Indochina with a gloomy report-the United States was getting sucked into a tar pit, just as the French had a decade earlier. In addition, "Diem had resisted American combat troops. He did not want the U.S. to take over his war and his country. Moreover, he continued to defy the Kennedy administration's insistence that he make internal reforms." The mostly Buddhist South Vietnamese distrusted and disliked Diem, a Roman Catholic who had once lived in New Jersey. The previous May, during a ceremony celebrating the birth of the Buddha, Diem's troops had opened fire and killed nine worshippers. Monks began setting themselves on fire in protest. Diem's sister-in-law, a ruthless aristocrat named Madame Nhu, smiled when she heard the news. "Using the Vietnamese word for monk, she called it 'barbecue bonze,' and offered to provide gas and matches to any monks or American reporters who would do the same thing."14 Despite U.S. warnings and protests, Diem continued to clamp down on dissenters. His troops raided Buddhist pagodas, desecrated religious statues and holy relics, and threw monks and nuns in prison. For many South Vietnamese, Communism began to look like the lesser of two evils. Aware that the situation was spiraling out of control, JFK made a shrewd political move: he replaced Ambassador Frederick "Fritz" Nolting with his old Bay State rival, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., who had lost his U.S. Senate reelection bid to Kennedy in 1952 and later served as Richard Nixon's running mate in 1960. JFK knew that having a Republican plenipotentiary would provide him with useful political cover if the worst-case scenario unfolded in Vietnam. He also genuinely liked and respected Lodge, a seasoned diplomat who spoke fluent French. Lodge's appointment came at a time when the administration understood that Diem's days were numbered. Rumors of a revolt against Diem circulated freely on the streets of Saigon.

Diem's stubborn refusal to embrace reform convinced JFK to support his ouster.15 Kennedy could not let Vietnam fall to the Communists, especially right before the 1964 election. He remembered the severe criticism that Harry Truman had received for letting Mao Zedong's forces overrun China and, after considerable debate, "agreed to a U.S.backed coup." At the same time, he reserved the right to change his mind up to the last minute. On August 30, 1963, Lodge sent a top secret cable to Washington intended for the president's eyes only: "I fully understand that you have the right and responsibility to change course at any time," he wrote. "Of course I will always respect that right. To be successful, this operation must be essentially a Vietnamese affair with a momentum of its own. Should this happen you may not be able to control it, i.e. the 'go signal' may be given by the generals."16 Roger Hilsman, assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, sent his own top secret memo to Rusk about how the administration should respond when the putsch came. "We should encourage the coup group to fight the battle to the end and destroy the [presidential palace] if necessary to gain victory," he wrote, adding that if Diem's family were taken alive, they "should be banished to France or any other European country willing to receive them." As for the leader himself, he "should be treated as the generals wish."17 On November 1, 1963, twenty-one days before the president went to Dallas, soldiers surrounded Diem's palace. The Vietnamese leader immediately phoned Lodge. "Some units have made a rebellion and I want to know what is the attitude of the United States?" he asked. "I do not feel well enough informed to be able to tell you," the ambassador replied coyly. "I have heard the shooting, but am not acquainted with all of the facts. Also it is four thirty A.M. in Washington and the U.S. government cannot possibly have a view." Diem couldn't believe his ears-Washington must have some sort of position! Lodge remained evasive and "told Diem to phone him if he could do anything for his personal safety."

The South Vietnamese president was brutally executed the next day, along with his brother. When JFK heard the news, he "leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with ... a look of shock and dismay," recalled Maxwell Taylor. Another aide remembered JFK blaming the CIA for Diem's murder. "I've got to do something about those bastards," he said. "They should be stripped of their exorbitant power." In the months leading up to the assassination, Kennedy had tried to warn Diem that his life was in danger. He sent a trusted friend, Torby Macdonald, to Saigon to plead with the South Vietnamese president to purge his government of corrupt officials and "take refuge in the American embassy." Diem had stubbornly refused. On November 4, the president recorded what amounted to a personal confession of his role in the assassination. "We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it," he admitted. "The way he was killed ... made it particularly abhorrent."18 When the coup occurred, Kennedy was still unsure about the right road to take on Vietnam. He had inherited the problem from Eisenhower and arguably made it worse by sending additional military advisers to Saigon. His unwillingness to set firm policy stemmed in part from the conflicting reports he was receiving. When one general and a State Department employee who had both visited Vietnam gave him opposing accounts of the war's progress, JFK joked, "You both went to the same country?"19 At this early stage, few in power or in the general public understood the dangers of Vietnam, or how events were inexorably drawing the United States into an explosive civil war. In the spring of 1962, when a reporter asked him what he planned to do about mounting casualties in Vietnam (a quartet of sergeants had recently died), Kennedy called the conflict "a very hazardous operation, in the same sense that World War II, World War I, Korea" had been when "a good many thousands and hundreds of thousands of Americans" had perished. "So that these four sergeants are in that long roll. But we cannot desist in Vietnam." During his 1963 State of the Union address, Kennedy claimed that the "spearpoint of aggression" in Vietnam had been "blunted." The address Kennedy was supposed to deliver at the Dallas Trade Mart on the day he died contained an equally firm message: "Our security and strength, in the last analysis, directly depend on the security and strength of others, and that is why our military and economic assistance plays such a key role in enabling those who live on the periphery of the Communist world to maintain their independence of choice. Our assistance to these nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task."20 In public, then, President Kennedy had been consistent and resolute, for the most part, about American involvement in Vietnam. In private, at least as his closest associates told it later, he remained skeptical about U.S. intervention in the region. "They keep telling me to send combat units over there," he said with regard to his generals' demands for additional troops. "That means sending draftees, along with regular Army advisers, into Vietnam. I'll never send draftees over there to fight."21 However, JFK never made his doubts clear on the record, never outlined precisely his intentions for Vietnam, leaving his successor the ability to follow his own path while claiming it was Kennedy's. Undeniably, there were contradictions in JFK's Vietnam record; he said one thing but did another. In October 1963, President Kennedy announced that the United States would withdraw one thousand military personnel by the end of the year. At first glance, this announcement seems to indicate that Kennedy was ready to wind down some operations in Vietnam. But months earlier, a British counterin-surgency expert, Robert K. G. Thompson, had told him that withdrawing a thousand men "would show that (1) [the Republic of Vietnam] is winning; (2) take steam out of anti-Diemists; and (3) dramatically illustrate honesty of U.S. intentions." Point two became moot after Diem's death, but Kennedy knew that points one and three could still affect the outcome of the 1964 election. Although most voters at the time could not have found Vietnam on a map, some political opponents-and friends, too-began to criticize the administration for its handling of the war. The Republican National Committee demanded that the president give "a full report to the American people" on the situation in Vietnam, even while adding that it was "firmly behind any policy which will block the Communist conquest of Southeast Asia." In April 1962, a group of academics, businessmen, theologians, and journalists had published "an open letter to President John F. Kennedy against U.S. military intervention in South Vietnam." "Frankly, we believe that the United States intervention in South Vietnam constitutes a violation of international law, of United Nations principles, and of America's own highest ideals," the group argued. "We urge, Mr. President, that you bring this intervention to an immediate end and that you initiate a special international conference to work out a peaceful solution to the crisis in Vietnam, as you have endeavored to do in Laos." Signatories included Roland Bainton, a Yale divinity professor and author of a well-known book on Martin Luther, and Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The group published a second, similar letter the following year.22 Kennedy did not respond to the appeals. But on November 21, the day he departed for Texas, he told an aide to put together "an indepth study of every possible option we've got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there." He wanted to review the "whole thing from the bottom to the top."23 What would have happened if JFK had lived? Though pro-Kennedy advocates and anti-Kennedy detractors have attempted to project a future agreeable to their own perspectives, there is no inarguable answer. As the historian Stephen Rabe notes, Kennedy "would have faced the same crisis that President Johnson encountered in 19641965. Communist forces would win the war in South Vietnam if the United States did not use its military might to stop them." JFK's life lessons, before and during his presidency, had taught him not to accept anything short of victory, and so in all likelihood he would have avoided a hasty retreat.24 And he might have accelerated troop deployments in the run-up to the 1964 election. The conservative Barry Goldwater, destined to be the Republican presidential nominee whether or not Kennedy had lived, would have insisted on toughness, and Kennedy would not have wanted to give his opponent an opening. On the other hand, a number of prominent Kennedy administration officials, most notably Robert Kennedy but many others, too, changed their minds about the Vietnam War when the carnage mounted and it became likely that the war was unwinnable. They would probably have advised the president in a second term to negotiate a settlement or at least keep the Southeast Asian engagement modest.

John Kennedy had far more international and foreign policy experience than Lyndon Johnson, a classic domestic policy politician. Kennedy had seen the horror of war close up, in PT 109 and when his brother Joe died in a plane crash; Johnson had never seen real combat. JFK also had searing, unpleasant experiences involving the competency and prejudices of his generals and the CIA during the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other events-an education LBJ apparently missed or ignored. No one will ever know for sure, but the weight of evidence, looking at the whole of Kennedy's career, would argue against his committing more than a half million troops to the fight in Vietnam, or doing so in such a foolishly slow manner as Johnson chose (which allowed the enemy to keep up). Having seen how difficult it could be to manage a tiny secret war against Cuba-just ninety miles from U.S. shores-would JFK have bet his entire presidency on a major Cold War confrontation in Vietnam, six thousand miles away? It is hard to believe that the Kennedy image makers, especially Bobby, would have permitted JFK to be burned in effigy all over the country, letting the intelligentsia JFK admired and considered himself a part of slip away because of the Vietnam draft. University communities and well-educated elites were a key part of Kennedy's political base, and good politicians always try hard to avoid alienating their base. Further, the Cuban Missile Crisis shows how clever and resourceful Kennedy could be under pressure. At a minimum, we can say that during his final weeks in office, JFK was reconsidering his Vietnam policy and refused to take any options off the table.25 Kennedy's final days also paint a picture of a man who craved excitement. Perhaps because two of his siblings, Joe and Kathleen, had died young and the president himself had repeatedly faced death-as a youth, in World War II, and after a back operation in the 1950s-JFK seemed unusually conscious that his time on earth was fleeting. Kennedy could be humorously morbid, joking about the best ways to die (war and poisoning were his choices) and how short his life would be (he once guessed he would make it to forty-five, only a year off the final mark).26 He strove to secure a place in the history books before it was too late. Friend and foe alike agree that John Kennedy seized every moment, embraced every challenge, and lived life to its absolute fullest. This restless ambition sometimes produced great blessings for the nation. In September 1963 the Senate approved his Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty; never again would the Soviet Union or the United States detonate nuclear devices above ground. According to Ted Sorensen, "No other single accomplishment in the White House ever gave him greater satisfaction." The treaty helped preserve the environment and also reduced tensions between the two superpowers, while paving the way for future Cold War agreements.

Moreover, JFK convinced the country that, however huge the obstacles, it could land a man on the moon. Twenty-four hours before he died, Kennedy spoke at the Aerospace Medical Health Center in San Antonio, where he encouraged his fellow citizens to keep their eyes on the heavens: We have a long way to go. Many weeks and months and years of long, tedious work lie ahead. There will be setbacks and frustrations and disappointments. There will be, as there always are, pressures in this country to do less in this area as in so many others, and temptations to do something else that is perhaps easier. But this research here must go on. This space effort must go on. The conquest of space must and will go ahead. That much we know. That much we can say with confidence and conviction.

Other, small achievements toward the conclusion of the Kennedy presidency are often overlooked but deserve mention. After standing up to Soviet aggression in Cuba, Kennedy offered his enemy an olive branch when the threat diminished. In October 1963 he authorized the sale of American wheat to the Soviets in order to help them cope with a poor harvest. The same month, while Congress debated his civil rights bill, the President's Commission on the Status of Women issued its final report. In response, JFK created the Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women and the Citizens' Advisory Council on the Status of Women. Both committees "provided ongoing leadership" on gender issues which, according to some Kennedy advocates, helped usher in the modern women's rights movement.27 Kennedy's New Frontier agenda also included the Equal Pay Act, signed by JFK in June 1963, which claimed to eliminate pay inequities based on gender. In practice, it had little effect in most economic sectors until strengthened by court decisions in the 1970s and further congressional action in subsequent administrations.28 Otherwise, Kennedy produced few advances for women in politics or government. His cabinet, for example, did not include a single woman, and he was certainly no feminist in his professional or private life. Offsetting his accomplishments, JFK had a much darker side. The same internal fire that fueled his political success could also burn out of control. A ten-year-old John Kennedy had once noted in a letter to his father (requesting an allowance increase) that he had "put away childish things."29 He achieved that goal in many areas of life, but not in his irresponsible relationships with young, beautiful women. In July 1963 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover informed Bobby Kennedy that he knew about the president's past relationship with an alleged East German spy named Ellen Rometsch. The wife of an army officer who had been assigned to the West German embassy, Rometsch supplemented her income by turning tricks for Washington's best and brightest. Her pimp was a high-profile Senate aide named Bobby Baker, who had close ties to Lyndon Johnson. In late August 1963, Rometsch was flown back to Germany on a U.S. Air Force transport plane at the behest of the State Department. According to author Seymour Hersh, she was accompanied by La-Vern Duffy, one of Bobby Kennedy's colleagues from his days on the McClellan Committee. Records related to Rometsch's deportation have either vanished or were never created in the first place.30 As the Rometsch case demonstrates, Kennedy's unrestrained sexual appetite threatened his personal and political safety. It also alienated some of the men who were assigned to protect him. Larry Newman remembered the "morale problems" that the president's indiscretions caused among his fellow Secret Service agents. "You were on the most elite assignment in the Secret Service, and you were there watching an elevator or a door because the president was inside with two hookers," said Newman. "It just didn't compute. Your neighbors and everybody thought you were risking your life, and you were actually out there to see that he's not disturbed while he's having an interlude in the shower with two gals from Twelfth Avenue." Newman also remembered joking with his colleagues about which one of them would testify on Capitol Hill if and when "the president received harm or was killed in the room by these two women." Kennedy had affairs with scores of other women, including two White House interns nicknamed "Fiddle" and "Faddle," Pamela Turnure (Jackie's personal secretary, whom JFK had conveniently encouraged her to hire), and Mary Meyer, a prominent Georgetown artist who was the "niece of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist and Teddy Roosevelt's chief forester."31 JFK probably also had an affair with Marilyn Monroe. Although Kennedy's strongest supporters have denied the relationship, pointing out there is no absolute proof, the behavior fit the president's pattern, and he had opportunities to pursue it. Both Kennedy and Monroe discussed the encounters with friends, and they were in at least one secluded place together.32 The well-supported story of Mimi Alford, a nineteen-year-old White House intern at the time of her involvement with JFK, is impossible to overlook.33l Initiated into JFK's sexual world just four days into her internship, Alford lost her virginity to Kennedy as he conducted what can only be called a deeply inappropriate affair with a young charge; it even included a Kennedy-directed episode of oral sex with aide Dave Powers while Kennedy watched. This behavior, barely hidden from others within the White House and involving government resources to shuttle Alford to and from the traveling president, has caused some to question Kennedy's basic fitness for the highest office. Many have tried to reconcile JFK's high-minded, skilled public persona with his sleazy, reckless private self. It is simply impossible to match up the two sides rationally, and it is certainly inadequate to say that the rules of his time or a sometimes empty marriage permitted or justified these escapades. Any private citizen with modest responsibilities would be condemned for them, and as president, JFK risked his White House tenure, the welfare of his party, his policy goals, and everyone he supposedly held dear.34 Jackie was European in outlook, and while aware of some of her husband's philandering, she apparently tried to tolerate it as Continental wives had done for centuries. The late Robert Pierpoint, the White House correspondent for CBS television during the Kennedy years, once recalled an episode that revealed Mrs. Kennedy's matter-of-fact acceptance of JFK's bold unfaithfulness: I was sitting in the White House press room one day shortly after noon. And through the corridor came a French magazine correspondent who worked for Paris Match and he said, "Bob, I've just had a very unusual experience. I have to tell somebody about it." He was somewhat agitated and said that he had been invited to have lunch with Jackie upstairs in the private area and the president joined them, and then after lunch the president said, "Jackie, why don't you show our friend around?" She did, and brought him over to the west wing. Between the cabinet room and the Oval Office there is a small room where the secretaries sit. As she ushered him into that room she said in French, "And there is the woman that my husband is supposed to be sleeping with." He was quite upset and didn't know what to answer; it was kind of embarrassing for him.35 Although the president's infidelities often put a terrific strain on his marriage, he and Jackie appeared to reconcile after their infant son Patrick Bouvier died in August 1963. Born with a severe lung problem, Patrick survived for only two days. Afterward, a close friend saw the president-deeply distraught and openly weeping after his son's death-holding Jackie in his arms, "something nobody ever saw at the time because they were very private people." That autumn, close observers said they detected renewed affection in this most enigmatic of public-private couples. Though anyone would be skeptical, given long past practice, perhaps JFK's views and behavior were changing in this realm as well. There would not be enough time to find out.

On October 28, 1963, the family attended a public worship service together for the first time at a church in Middleburg, Virginia, called St. Stephen the Martyr.36 Never an especially religious person-despite his strong public and political identification with the Roman Catholic Church-Kennedy might have contemplated the life of the man for whom the church was named: Stephen was murdered for defying the religious orthodoxy of his day. The president had always respected courage and admired people who were willing to sacrifice their careers and lives for their principles. While in the White House, Kennedy had shown courage in challenging the steel industry, the Soviet Union, his generals, and eventually, segregationists. President Kennedy was no saint like Stephen, but he had shown and earned grace during the better part of three tumultuous years in power. Three weeks after the worship service, he would proceed to his own martyrdom.37 kIn 1989, East and West Berliners tore down the wall that had kept them separated for so long, and to this day, residents of Berlin still celebrate the Kennedy speech that lifted their spirits during a dark time in their history. For the fortieth anniversary of the speech, they gathered in front of the Rathaus Schneberg (city hall) in John-F.Kennedy-Platz to hear the president's speech rebroadcast over giant loudspeakers.

lAlford had refused to talk for years, but in 2011, at age sixty-nine, she published a book about her relationship with the president.

7.

Echoes from Dealey Plaza

Winston Churchill's dictum about Russia fully applies to the murder of John F. Kennedy: It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The intrigue is part of the lasting Kennedy legacy. In fact, as cynical as it may sound, the assassination has taken a short presidency and made it the stuff of legend. The gnawing sense of incompleteness, the intense emotions of regret and grief felt simultaneously by almost everyone, and the overwhelming melancholia of unfulfilled dreams obliterated John Kennedy's faults. They created in the slain president the image of a secular saint that has proven impervious to all sorts of lurid revelations over a half century.

Eerily, JFK foresaw the advantages of an early death. Much given to speculation about his possible assassination-he brought the subject up frequently with family and friends-Kennedy said to Jackie after his triumph in the Cuban Missile Crisis, "If anyone's going to kill me, it should happen now." The comment was made after a historian's lecture on Abraham Lincoln, where Kennedy had asked, 'If Lincoln had lived, would his reputation be as great?" The historian's answer was obvious-no, because Lincoln would have had to struggle with the titanic problems of postCivil War reconstruction. Instinctively, Kennedy understood that it is better for a leader to leave the stage in both a moment of triumph and the tragedy of too short a time than to face the inevitable, wearing controversies of many years' leadership, being ushered out of office to a chorus of critical evaluations about his shortcomings. Such is the fate of most presidents.1 In any event, it is impossible to understand the Kennedy legacy without understanding the assassination-the sequence of events, as well as what most Americans think happened and why. Millions have never been, and will never be, satisfied with the official findings of two separate government inquiries-not least because the inquiries came to opposite conclusions on the critical question of conspiracy. The assassination dictated that JFK would not have the time to create a full record and make his whole claim on history. For fifty years the unfinished record of the man and his presidency has stirred Americans as they mourned an unconscionable loss and wondered what might have been. This "ghost legacy" is as powerful as the real one.

Four days after JFK was laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery, President Lyndon Johnson asked the Chief Justice of the United States to head a federal probe into the assassination. Earl Warren initially refused. He did not think that Supreme Court justices should be saddled with additional responsibilities when they already had a crowded docket; why not ask a retired judge to spearhead the investigation instead? Undeterred, LBJ summoned Warren to the Oval Office. The Chief Justice later recalled their meeting: [T]he president told me how serious the situation was. He said there had been wild rumors, and that there was the international situation to think of. He said he had just talked to [Secretary of State] Dean Rusk, who was concerned, and he also mentioned the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had told him how many millions of people would be killed in an atomic war. The only way to dispel these rumors, he said, was to have an independent and responsible commission, and that there was no one to head it except the highest judicial officer in the country ... He said that if the public became aroused against Castro and Khrushchev there might be war. "You've been in uniform before," he said, "and if I asked you, you would put on the uniform again for your country." I said, "Of course." "This is more important than that," he said. "If you're putting it like that," I said, "I can't say no."2 LBJ signed an executive order later that day that created "a Commission to ascertain, evaluate, and report upon the facts relating to the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent violent death of the man charged with the assassination." The other members of what became known as the Warren Commission were Democratic congressman Hale Boggs, Senator Richard B. Russell, Republican congressman and future president Gerald R. Ford, Senator John Sherman Cooper, former CIA director Allen Dulles, and John J. McCloy, FDR's assistant secretary of war. (Three of the four congressional members, Russell, Boggs, and Cooper, only reluctantly supported all the conclusions and would later criticize parts of the commission's final report; alone among the congressional members, Ford was an enthusiastic backer.)3 Among the staff hired by the commission was a future United States senator, Arlen Specter, who served as an assistant counsel.4 The Warren Commission was doomed from the start, because Washington's power brokers, led by the new president himself, were far more interested in preserving domestic tranquility than in finding the full truth. They wanted a report that would first calm citizens' jangled nerves by reassuring them that a lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald had acted completely on his own. Conspiratorial chatter, so the reasoning went, would only undermine public trust in government and perhaps even lead to war. Just thirteen months earlier, the United States had narrowly avoided a nuclear conflagration with Russia, and the Cold War was still freezing. The public was suspicious of Russia, Cuba, and more. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, 62 percent of the American people believed that their president had been killed in a conspiracy. Official Washington had to respond.5 On the Monday after the assassination, while most Americans were watching JFK's funeral services on television, Nicholas Katzenbach, deputy attorney general, sent a memo to Bill Moyers, then an LBJ aide, that stressed two points: "1. The public must be satisfied that Oswald [who had been killed the previous day] was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial. 2. Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists."6 It was impossible for anyone to know, seventy-two hours after the assassination, exactly what had transpired in Dallas, much less that Oswald was the lone assassin and would have been convicted at a trial. Moreover, this memo puts far more emphasis on public relations, and on pushing a preconceived, sanitized notion of the murder of the president, than it does on an honest effort to uncover all the facts. In Katzenbach's defense, his primary motive might have been to tamp down rumors of a conspiracy before they overtook the facts, which was not unreasonable. And this same course of action was recommended by others besides Katzenbach. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told another of LBJ's aides, "The thing I am most concerned about ... is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin."7 Hoover had good reasons to be concerned. While presidential protection was the province of the Secret Service and not the FBI, his agency had also failed to notice disturbing signals from Oswald, a known Communist sympathizer who had defected to the Soviet Union for a time and had a history of instability and violent tendencies.8 In the weeks leading up to the assassination, James Hosty, an FBI agent working in the Dallas field office, had twice visited the house where Marina Oswald lived and Lee Oswald visited. Hosty questioned Marina but had not been able to find Lee on either occasion-though Hosty was told a critical piece of information, that Oswald was working at the Texas School Book Depository. When Lee learned about Hosty's visits, he flew into a rage and stormed into the Dallas FBI office, demanding to see Hosty. A receptionist told Oswald that the agent was at lunch, so Oswald left a note that apparently said, "If you have anything you want to learn about me, come talk to me directly. If you don't cease bothering my wife, I will take appropriate action and report this to the proper authorities." We have to take Hosty's word for this because his boss, Gordon Shanklin, ordered him to destroy the note in the wake of Oswald's death. An FBI supervisor ordered the destruction of significant material evidence in the murder investigation of President Kennedy. This story, like so many others, was missed by the Warren Commission. Many years later, Hosty was temporarily suspended when it became apparent he had misled the commission, but Hosty was a small cog in a giant bureaucratic machine that often cared more about good press than truth. Hosty took aim at J. Edgar Hoover in his 1996 book, Assignment: Oswald, noting that he (Hosty) "came to understand that one of our jobs was to protect the bureau's image at all costs, even if it ran roughshod over individuals or principles."9 In what critics charged-accurately or not-was yet another attempt to protect the FBI's reputation, Hoover launched his own selective investigation into the Kennedy murder and, at LBJ's behest, sent the Warren Commission a copy of the bureau's final report less than a month after the assassination.10 It concluded that Oswald had been the lone gunman and that no conspiracy existed. The report also "determined" that Oswald had fired three shots from the Texas School Book Depository-the first, it said, had hit JFK in the back, the second had injured Governor Connally, and the third had shattered the president's skull. Many assassination researchers over the decades have disputed Oswald's role, while others have supported the FBI's assertion in this regard, but the bureau's rushed conclusion about the three bullets is almost universally regarded as wrong today. Interestingly, although the Warren Commission "asked that the bureau's report not be made public until it had a chance to review it," newspapers quickly printed that the FBI had effectively quashed rumors of a conspiracy.11 With the flawed FBI report as its starting point, the Warren Commission launched its own rushed investigation of the JFK assassination beginning in February 1964. Acting on President Johnson's instructions, Earl Warren urged the commission to complete its work before July, when the presidential campaign would likely heat up. Over the next six months, the commission recorded the testimony of 552 people, "examined thousands of documents," and held fifty-one sessions. Commission members skipped many of the meetings. Senator Russell, for example, attended only five of the fifty-one; John McCloy showed up for sixteen. The hard work was assigned to assistants like Arlen Specter, who invented the "single bullet theory" to reconcile apparently indisputable facts that emerged in the course of the Warren investigation, including the reality that Oswald or any marksman needed a certain number of seconds to fire a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle repeatedly within the elapsed time of the shooting.12 Specter and his colleagues had screened the publicly unseen amateur home movie shot by businessman Abraham Zapruder in Dealey Plaza, which cast grave doubts on the validity of the FBI report.13 It showed Governor Connally groaning in agony less than two seconds after Kennedy was shot in the back. The commission realized that no marksman, however skilled, could fire two shots within two seconds from a bolt-action rifle. Specter's single bullet theory-which asserted that the bullet striking JFK's back continued on, cleanly, through Kennedy's throat to cause all of Connally's wounds-neatly resolved the dilemma.

Other Warren Commission staffers investigated the Jack Ruby case and concluded that Ruby had impulsively killed Oswald in a fit of pique. Other pieces of the assassination puzzle were similarly assembled into the overall pattern-some easily and others with difficulty. The time pressures guaranteed that all of the evidence would not be gathered and sifted, and many key witnesses were not even interviewed. Gerald Ford was so anxious to close the case that he changed the description of the president's back wound so that it would comply with Specter's single bullet theory.14 Ford would later insist that he was simply trying to make the report "more precise." But confidential files released in 2008 show that Ford had also opened a back channel to the FBI at the beginning of the investigation. At a December 1963 meeting, he told the assistant director of the FBI, Cartha "Deke" DeLoach, that two members of the commission did not believe that JFK had been shot from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository. Ford assured DeLoach that these members' dissenting views "of course would represent no problem." He also promised to keep the FBI informed on the inner workings of the investigation.15 Until his death, Ford insisted publicly and privately that the Warren Commission was right and that he had never seen any evidence to dissuade him.16 Commission member and former CIA director Allen Dulles coached at least one CIA official on how to handle the commission's inquiries. On April 11, 1964, Dulles met with Agent David E. Murphy to discuss the allegations surrounding Oswald's true affiliations: had Oswald been recruited by the CIA or the KGB, as some were claiming? Dulles advised Murphy to deny both charges categorically in order to end the debate quickly. Dulles also knew about the CIA-sponsored assassination attempts on Castro, about which the commission was never told. Of course, it is possible that Dulles was simply trying to protect the agency he loved, but his witness tampering and refusal to share critical information with fellow commissioners casts further doubt on the investigation.17 On September 24, 1964, the Warren Commission presented its final report to the president of the United States. Johnson released a letter of appreciation later that day: "The commission, I know, has been guided throughout by a determination to find and tell the whole truth of these terrible events. This is our obligation to the good name of the United States of America and to all men everywhere who respect our nation-and above all to the memory of President Kennedy."

Like the FBI, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald and Ruby had committed their crimes without help or encouragement from anybody else. While some prominent journalists such as CBS's Walter Cronkite were privately skeptical, news organizations generally did not question the findings. This was an era very different from today, when columnists and publishers were often the government's lapdogs.18 In editorials, the nation's newspapers were overwhelmingly deferential. For example, Marquis Childs, a syndicated columnist, described the report as "a monument to patient sifting and analysis of fact, rumor, suspicion and wild conjecture." Childs also reminded his readers that no one had "come forward with any solid evidence that others participated with Oswald in the crime."19 Childs's views were in the majority at first. Most Americans initially accepted the conclusions of the Warren Report. After it was released, only 31 percent of the public still believed that JFK had been the victim of a conspiracy, exactly half of what the percentage had been in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Remarkably, although it would not be known for many years, Senator Russell and the new president of the United States were two of the remaining skeptics, as they admitted during a recorded phone conversation: JOHNSON: Well, what difference does it make which bullet got Connally?

RUSSELL: Well, it don't make much difference. But ... the commission believes that the same bullet that hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well, I don't believe it!

JOHNSON: I don't either.20 Ironically, in its rush to tamp down the rumors surrounding the assassination, the Warren Commission guaranteed the perpetuation of conspiracy theories for years to come. In the early 1960s, the public was thought incapable of handling the truth. Rather, it had to be spoonfed a convenient, calming version of events. Americans were never told about the government's efforts to murder Fidel Castro and other world leaders, which many might have seen as sufficient motive for a revenge killing. Nor did the public know about Washington's relationships with the Mafia, Oswald's full history, or many other things that might have had a direct bearing on the events of November 22, 1963.

Instead, the Warren Commission gave everyone a sanitized, abbreviated version of the assassination. The public was condescendingly told to accept the official account without subversive, unpatriotic questioning. The commission laid the groundwork for the cynicism that became deeply rooted in the late 1960s and the 1970s-a profound distrust of the "official" government story about anything. Instead of being viewed as authoritative, government pronouncements became mocked as deceitful propaganda from the Ministry of Truth. The pattern became unmistakable. Assassinations, which became frighteningly common, were always carried out by lone gunmen, according to the government. The bloody Vietnam conflict, sold by Washington as a winnable war against international Communism, unfolded in a fog of deception, with leaders knowing privately that the war was likely to be lost. The Watergate scandal and resulting investigations revealed the treachery of many at the top as nothing had done before. The effective suspension of the Bill of Rights by the CIA and the FBI became apparent. The Warren Commission was their prologue, the first damaging government whitewash of the 1960s. In the movie Men in Black, Tommy Lee Jones's character explains to his partner that the MIB division is above the law, and its purpose is to protect the public from knowing that Earth is constantly threatened by alien life forms. "There's always an Arquillian battle cruiser or a Korilian death ray or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out life on this miserable planet," Jones says. "The only way these people get on with their happy lives is they do not know about it." This is not so far removed from the motivation that spawned and shaped the Warren Commission.21 The inadequacies of the Warren Commission left the door wide open for conspiracy theories of all sorts, and they have flourished in the half century since November 22, 1963. The proportion of Americans who believe in a JFK assassination conspiracy has skyrocketed. In 2003 an ABC News poll showed that a whopping 70 percent of Americans reject the Warren Commission's basic finding of a lone gunman.22 The same survey found that 68 percent think Washington orchestrated a cover-up.23 This number is not merely composed of the predictable antiestablishment crowd from the hinterlands; Americans who are suspicious of the Warren Report include representatives of the Beltway powerful. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that she "read the Warren Commission report, every analysis of it, every challenge to it as time passed ... I even took the opportunity to ask Senator Specter about it."24 Countless books, television specials, newspaper articles, and Internet sites claim to know the truth about the assassination. The Mafia, the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, pro-Castro Cubans, LBJ, the Secret Service, the Soviets, Texas oil millionaires-all have been implicated. Kennedy scholar William Lester recently unearthed a letter from JFK to the CIA, written ten days before the assassination, requesting information on UFOs. The Daily Mail in Great Britain asked, "Was JFK killed because of his interest in aliens?"25 Americans are understandably confused by the flood of contradictory information and disinformation. Many have thrown up their hands in despair and decided we will never know the truth about the events in Dallas. Even some honest experts who have devoted many years of their life to studying the Kennedy assassination are puzzled. They keep putting the pieces together, but always find some that don't fit. Dallas's own Jerry Dealey, a lifelong assassination researcher and descendant of Dealey Plaza's namesake, can rattle off every detail of that day. At the end of a long tour of key Dallas sites and an intense discussion, Dealey sighed, then admitted, "I know everything about the assassination, except what really happened."26 And yet we do understand a good part of the story. For example, any fairminded observer can conclude that both the Dallas police and, far more important, the federal government botched the most important murder investigation of the twentieth century. Anyone who had watched a few episodes of Perry Mason by 1963 knew that the authorities were supposed to cordon off the crime scene and restrict the handling of evidence, even for everyday crimes. Yet in response to the shooting of the president of the United States, the Dallas police kept Elm Street open and allowed the general public to roam freely across Dealey Plaza, taking pictures and potentially hunting for souvenirs. Billy Harper, a young medical college student, found a piece of JFK's skull lying in the grass between Elm and Main Streets. (Fortunately, Harper reported his gruesome discovery to the authorities.) The Dallas police removed a bag that Oswald had allegedly used to conceal his rifle before it could be photographed. The cartridge cases found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository were carelessly tossed into a single envelope without identifying the precise location where each was picked up.

And why was the chief suspect in the president's murder paraded in front of the press? Journalists in 1963 were sometimes allowed to interview murder suspects before they went to trial, but this wasn't a garden variety homicide. A good many people swarming police headquarters in the forty-eight hours after the assassination were not required to show press credentials. Any determined person could have smuggled in a gun and shot Oswald. While carried out openly at the request of the news media to prove Oswald wasn't being mistreated (as rampant rumors had wrongly suggested), the accused assassin's transfer from the city to county jail in a crowded basement was just one of many opportunities for the disaster that happened on Sunday, November 24.27 Some Dallas police officers and supervisors seemed more like Keystone Kops than well-trained law enforcement professionals.28 A police division in a midsized city might be excused some inability to handle unexpected world-class mayhem. The White House and its investigatory agencies had no such defense in the months following the assassination. The new president made it clear from the start that he wanted a short, superficial inquiry that neatly buttoned up the messy matter of how he had become chief executive. The FBI and the CIA appeared to be more determined to cover their tracks and make sure they weren't blamed for missteps than to get to the bottom of what happened in Dallas.

The Warren Commission became the focus of these hidden agendas, and the resulting commission blunders undermined its claim to have conducted a thorough inquiry. Chief among them was the failure to interview significant eyewitnesses. On the morning of the assassination, Bill and Gayle Newman and their two boys, Billy and Clayton, were waiting at Love Field for Air Force One to arrive. But the size of the crowd convinced Bill to take the family downtown to watch the parade instead. They found a good viewing spot on a patch of grass inside Dealey Plaza at the end of the long motorcade route (soon to be renamed forever "the grassy knoll"). Bill could hear crowds cheering in the distance as the motorcade grew closer. He remembers seeing a well-dressed man, Abraham Zapruder, standing on a concrete pedestal holding a movie camera. When the president's car turned onto Elm Street and drove down the center lane, Bill heard two loud booms. "I thought somebody had thrown a couple of firecrackers or something beside the president's car," he told an interviewer, "and I can remember the thought of, you know, that's a pretty poor joke, somebody to do something like that." Bill realized that it was no prank when he saw the president come up out of his seat with his arms in the air. He also noticed that Governor Connally's eyes were "protruding" and that his shirt was covered in blood. When the presidential limousine pulled directly in front of the Newmans, who were standing on the curb, they heard a third shot. "And I saw the side of the president's head blow off and saw the flash of white and the red," Bill recalls, "and he went across the seat ... into Mrs. Kennedy's arms. And she hollered out, 'Oh my God, no! They've shot Jack!' " Bill and Gayle instinctively threw themselves on top of their children to shield them from danger. When they were certain that the threat had passed, they got up and began climbing the grassy knoll. Gayle could see a crowd of people "rushing towards the railroad tracks behind the concrete wall." Bill noticed some men running in the same direction who were carrying what he thinks might have been Thompson submachine guns. To this day, he is not sure if the men he saw were FBI or Secret Service or other law enforcement officers, but he believes that they jumped off one of the cars in the presidential motorcade and ran toward the rail yard (not the School Book Depository) in search of the assassin.29 Bill and Gayle were curious to see what was happening on the other side of the fence, but they were buttonholed by two reporters from WFAA-TV who wanted to interview them.m A short time later, the Newmans found themselves sitting inside WFAA's main studio fielding questions from the station's program director, Jay Watson. "You ... think the shot came from up on top of the viaduct [the so-called triple underpass at Dealey Plaza] toward the president, is that correct?" asked Watson. "Yes, sir," Bill replied before correcting himself, "no, not on the viaduct itself, but up on top of the hill, a little mound of ground with a garden."30 Gayle Newman told Watson that she heard three shots-the first caused Kennedy to rise "up in his seat"; the second caused Governor Connally to grab "his stomach" and topple "over to the side"; and the third hit the president in the head.31 The Warren Commission concluded that only two bullets struck Kennedy and Connally. Although the Newmans gave statements to the sheriff's office and were visited by two FBI agents on the Sunday after the assassination, the two witnesses closest to the limousine at the time of Kennedy's murder, and positioned perfectly to take in the entire scene of the crime, were never formally interviewed by the Warren Commission. "I'm really surprised that they did not interview us," Bill Newman said, "but I guess they didn't see the need to." He admits that it may have been because the family could not confirm the preferred theory, that the shots had come from the Book Depository.32 One of the country's acknowledged experts on the assassination, Gary Mack, who has personally interviewed many of those connected to the events in Dallas in his role as curator of the Sixth Floor Museum (located in the old School Book Depository), estimates that "about fifty people thought at least one of the shots came from [JFK's] front [and] not the Depository."33 The Warren Commission also overlooked H. B. McLain, a Dallas motorcycle cop who was part of the presidential motorcade. McLain was on Houston Street when he heard a single shot and saw pigeons flying off the roof of the Depository. At first he assumed it was someone in the building firing a gun to scare off the birds. That is, until he heard Dallas police chief Jesse Curry's voice come over the radio. "Chief said, 'go to Parkland Hospital,'" McLain recalls, "And it was already set up if anything went wrong ... So when he said 'go to Parkland,' we went to Parkland." When he arrived at the hospital, he found a nearly immobilized Mrs. Kennedy, in a state of shock, sitting in the back of the presidential limousine: When the president's car pulled in, I pulled in beside of it. And she was laid over his head. And she wouldn't raise up to take his body out of the car. And I finally reached over and caught her by the shoulder. And I said, 'Come on. Let them take him inside.' She didn't make a sound. And I walked her inside, turned around and come back out.

McLain says he did not linger long inside the hospital because, "I just knew I didn't have no business in there." That the Warren Commission would fail to interview someone so well placed in the motorcade-a law enforcement official who had carefully noted key details and closely observed the as-yet-undisturbed crime scene in the limousine before almost anyone else-is difficult to understand. It is true that McLain failed to fill out a police report on his actions that day, as requested by his Dallas department, but the Warren Commission had a list of the officers in the motorcade-where McLain was prominently positioned. Aggressive investigators would have contacted him.

Underlining the Warren Commission's error, H. B. McLain would later become a significant figure during the reopening of the assassination investigation in the 1970s. McLain was linked to the now-famous "Dictabelt recording." In the early 1960s, police departments routinely recorded conversations between officers and headquarters on Dictaphone brand dictation devices. In 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), tasked with reinvestigating the deaths of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., learned that a Dallas police officer with a radio microphone stuck in the "on" position might have inadvertently helped to record the key minutes of the assassination-potentially a match for the soundless Zapruder film. The Dictabelt contained sounds that acoustic experts identified as gunshots. The committee then examined photographic evidence and determined that McLain had been the officer with the stuck microphone. McLain himself always denied this claim and wondered how he could have heard Chief Curry's voice if his mike had been stuck in the "on" position. Of course, it is possible the microphone was stuck for a while, and the jostling of the travelling cycle "unstuck" it.34 In any event, the recording presumably came from McLain or one of the other motorcycle policemen in the motorcade, and the Dictabelt recording caused the HSCA to rewrite history. Based largely on this extraordinary piece of evidence, indicating that too many shots had been fired from too many locations for the assassination to have been the work of Oswald alone, the HSCA decided that the Warren Report was wrong, and concluded instead that JFK had probably been killed by more than one person-the definition of a conspiracy. We will return to the Dictabelt later.

The Newmans and H. B. McLain were among dozens of well-placed witnesses never interviewed by the Warren Commission. When asked why the commission ignored her, grassy knoll onlooker Marilyn Sitzman gave a pithy reply: "Because it was [the 1960s], I was female and I was young. And I was irrelevant." In reality, Sitzman was an important eyewitness. Her boss, Abraham Zapruder, the owner of a Dallas clothing business, brought his 8-millimeter camera to the parade so that he could capture Kennedy's visit on film. Sitzman steadied Zapruder, who had vertigo, as he stood on a wall on the grassy knoll and filmed JFK during the final moments of his life. When the shots rang out, she kept her boss in place so he could record some of the most infamous seconds in history. Thanks to Sitzman's presence of mind, we have reasonably clear footage of the president's assassination.n Sitzman remembered hearing shots coming from the School Book Depository, but she did not turn her head. "We kept our attention on what was happening exactly in front of us," she recalled, "and if you look at his film, there's very little jumping. It's very steady considering what was going on, and that's why I'm saying the sound we heard ... the third sound still sounded a distance [away] because if it had been as close as everybody's trying to tell us, you know, twenty feet behind us [over the picket fence] ... we would have jumped sky high." This is an important firsthand account that argues against a grassy knoll or picket fence shooter.o Zapruder and Sitzman could not have kept the camera steady if a second gunman had been firing in very close proximity. In that case, as Sitzman said, "That film would have been bounced all over the place."

Of course, in the Kennedy assassination mystery, few things are clear-cut and definitive. Sitzman, who passed away in 1993, also believed that the second gunman could have been using a silencer. "I have no qualms saying that I'm almost sure that there was someone behind the fence or in that area up there [near the fence]," she asserted, "but I'm just as sure that they had silencers because there was no sound." Over the years, Sitzman was occasionally approached by researchers who she claimed were trying to coach her. Mark Lane, author of the conspiratorial bestseller Rush to Judgment, conducted a phone interview with her as he was finishing his manuscript. "Last words he said were, 'Now, you did hear those six shots behind you?'" she recalled. "I said, 'No, I never heard anything behind me.' 'Oh.' You know, I never heard from that man again." In addition, she described Oliver Stone's movie JFK as a "comic book type thing" even while acknowledging that it contains a number of truths.35 The Warren Commission should also have interviewed Elsie Dorman and Robert Croft, two amateur photographers who captured images of the president's motorcade as it drove through Dealey Plaza. Dorman filmed JFK from the fourth floor of the School Book Depository with "her husband's Kodak Brownie, Model 2 home movie camera." Although Dorman's footage is brief and shaky (she did not have any experience operating a movie camera), it clearly shows the president's car as well as people who were standing in vital Dealey Plaza spots. Robert Croft captured photos of JFK seconds before he died. In recent years, Dorman's and Croft's images have provided valuable clues to assassination researchers. The Dorman film helped one investigator discredit a story by the reporter Travis Lynn, who claimed he had left a tape recorder in Dealey Plaza on November 22. Dorman's film shows that there was no equipment anywhere near that location. Croft's still photos convinced the HSCA that Kennedy's suit jacket was bunched up at the neck at the time of his death-a key piece of evidence that might explain why the holes in his shirt and jacket weren't logically aligned with the bullet hole in his back.36 No one from the commission talked to Jim and Patricia Towner and their daughter Tina, either.37 The Towners were taking film and photos in Dealey Plaza seconds before the assassination. While talking to a policeman and waiting for the motorcade, Jim Towner noticed a man in a "white coat" peering out of the sixth floor window of the School Book Depository. "And I didn't know who it was," he recalled. "And I told the patrolman, I said, 'That nut. He doesn't know that he can come down and watch it from the street.' " The policeman didn't bat an eye. Plenty of other people were hanging out of their office windows, he replied nonchalantly. Jim conceded the point and forgot about the man in the window, who was presumably Lee Oswald.

As the presidential motorcade passed, the Towners began walking back toward their car, parked near the railroad tracks on the other side of the picket fence, when they heard a loud popping noise. "Oh mercy, some fool is shooting firecrackers," said Mrs. Towner. "That's no firecracker," replied Jim, who had served in the military and was familiar with gunfire. "That's a thirty-[aught]-six rifle." He heard a total of three shots, which he thought had come from the Book Depository. Swept up in the nervous energy of the moment, he followed a crowd of "spectators" and "policemen" behind the picket fence and into the railroad yard, where he encountered "a white-uniformed black man with a cap" standing on the back of a Pullman dining car. "Did you see anybody coming this way?" someone in the crowd hollered. "No sir, I haven't seen anybody back here," said the porter, "and I've been back here watching the whole thing." Jim then proceeded to the grassy knoll, where he came across a man who was "shaking and crying." "Oh, he's dead. He's dead," the unidentified man sobbed. "The whole side of his head blew off."

Although the FBI eventually requisitioned the Towners' film and photos, no one from the bureau or the Warren Commission ever interviewed the family, even though they had important firsthand observations about several critical aspects of the assassination. "Well, I thought it was pretty stupid," Jim Towner commented in 1996 about the failure to reach out to the porter or his own family.38 The porter, Carl Desroe, was not identified or interviewed by the commission, and before his death, he shared his story only with his pastor, Bishop Mark Herbener. Bishop Herbener was the first to identify Desroe in 2006. Desroe and his wife had been on the overpass before Kennedy's motorcade approached, but had been ordered off by unknown "officials." Desroe's wife, Amelia, told Herbener, "I saw some things ... I'm afraid to tell anybody. I'll never tell anybody. I'm afraid for my life." Herbener knew the couple well. Desroe was the personal porter to the president of Katy Railroad. As for Amelia, Herbener said, "What she saw or thinks she saw, I have no idea. She wasn't a screwball. She was a pretty genuine person." Both Desroes are long deceased.39 These credible accounts show that the Warren Commission missed key witnesses who might have been able to clear up some of the confusion emerging from that day. But for whatever reason, the commission appears to have been particularly uninterested in strategically placed onlookers who believed that shots came from the picket fence area. Mary Woodward, Maggie Brown, Aurelia Lorenzo, and Anne Donaldson all worked for the Dallas Morning News in 1963 and all of them were standing on the north curb of Elm Street. They told the press that they heard shots coming from behind them, "a little to our right," and none ever heard from the Warren Commission. Neither did A. J. Millican, who had been standing near Woodward and her colleagues when he heard what he said were a total of eight shots coming from various directions, including two "from the arcade between the bookstore and the underpass" and three more "from the same direction, only farther back." John and Faye Chism also believed they heard shots coming from behind them; they were ignored.40 Nor did the Warren Commission thoroughly investigate a story told by Victoria Adams, a young woman who watched the president die from the fourth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Adams said that after the shots were fired, she fled down the Depository's back stairwell, supposedly the same stairwell that Oswald used to make his escape from the sixth floor. Adams testified that she did not see or hear Oswald in the stairwell immediately after the assassination. The staff of the Warren Commission seemed to view Adams not as a vital witness but as a threat to their preferred timeline of events, and they alternately ignored and defamed her.41 Had the Warren Commission enlisted Dallas police and citizens to identify more of those present in the Plaza and Depository while their memories were fresh, they might have secured many more reliable accounts from every perspective that could have enabled the commission and the public to weigh the preponderance of the evidence. One result of a contemporaneous and vigorous search for witnesses in 1963 and 1964 would have been to diminish the credibility of some individuals who turned up years later with dramatic but questionable narratives about the assassination.

Gordon Arnold, like Jim Towner, said that he saw a man on the grassy knoll who was shaking and crying. In Arnold's version of the story, however, the weeping man pointed a gun at him and demanded his camera. "And he used some expletives to explain to me that he was going to have the camera, and I pitched it to him," he recalled. After ripping out the film, the man tossed the empty camera back to Arnold before he (and another unidentified person accompanying him) disappeared behind the picket fence. Arnold says that the crying man was wearing yellow-tinted shooter's goggles and what "looked like a Dallas police officer's uniform." He also claims that he heard shots whistling over his head that had originated from behind the picket fence, which caused him to lie flat on the ground. "It's not a noise," Arnold said in 1989, "You feel something go past you ... You'll hear a noise following behind it, and to me, I knew I was dead because that was a bullet that just went over me." However, Arnold did not come forward until fifteen years after the assassination, in 1978. His son and widow confirmed in 2006 that they had heard him recount this story over the years, but families are sometimes told tall tales by a loved one. One anticonspiracy author, Gerald Posner, has claimed that Arnold is not visible in any photos, and that he probably wasn't present at all in Dealey Plaza.42 But others who have closely studied the Arnold case strongly disagree. It is impossible to know for certain, but some aspects of Arnold's story match verified eyewitness anecdotes that Arnold could not have known about simply by reading published reports.43 Like Arnold, other apparent witnesses with blood-chilling tales popped up years later. A deaf-mute named Ed Hoffman claimed that he saw shady characters behind the picket fence on the day of the assassination. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the president, Hoffman positioned himself on the shoulder of Stemmons Freeway, "two hundred yards west of the parking lot behind the picket fence at an elevation of about the height of the first floor of the Texas School Book Depository." From this vantage point, he supposedly saw a man with a rifle running along the back side of the fence dressed in a suit, tie, and overcoat. According to Hoffman, the man tossed his rifle to a second man wearing a railroad worker's uniform; the second man hastily disassembled the weapon and crammed it into what looked like a railroad brakeman's tool bag. Both men then disappeared. Hoffman insists that he tried to report what he had seen to the authorities, but his communications handicap hindered him, and police never followed up on his story. Hoffman did not go public with his account until 1967. Are his observations accurate or did he invent them? Again, one cannot say for certain and experts on the assassination disagree, but Hoffman-who has been prominently featured in TV shows questioning the Warren Commission-has altered his tale when challenged, and his reported line of sight may not fit what he said he witnessed.44 Other late-emerging accounts seem largely unsubstantiated and highly improbable, but at this late date it is difficult to separate truth from fiction. Ken Duvall, a truck driver who occasionally made deliveries to the Book Depository, described a man in the grassy knoll area who was, or resembled, a railroad worker. Duvall says that he was sitting on the front steps of the Depository on the day of the assassination when he noticed a suspicious-looking vehicle. "[T]here was a black car, on our left side, parked parallel with the School Book Depository ... When Kennedy's [car] came down Main Street to turn right, to come up to the School Book Depository ... this guy was sitting here in the black car, he was waiting for [Kennedy] and them to turn right. And when he did, well he came up right by us-we're sitting on the third step-and we look down in the car, and ... he has a pair of coveralls on, and he went down to the building there at the end of the [picket] fence, and got out, and was holding something under his coveralls." Duvall believes that the object was a rifle. "And it evidently had a silencer," he says, "because nobody ... heard the [man's] shot." Duvall also says that he encountered Lee Oswald in a lunchroom on the second floor of the Book Depository thirty minutes before the presidential motorcade arrived. "We're gonna go out here and watch the president come by, you gonna go see him?" he supposedly asked Oswald. "Yeah, I'm gonna go see him." Duvall accepts the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald shot JFK from the Depository, but he thinks the fatal head wound was caused by the mystery man wearing coveralls.45 Contrary to Duvall's account, though, no films or photos show a black car in the location he described, and no one who had wanted to catch a glimpse of Kennedy's limousine would have been sitting on the steps of the Depository behind a crowd of standing spectators.

Victoria Rodriguez's story seems equally suspect, both because of its very tardy telling and the lack of confirming testimony from others on scene. In 2010-forty-seven years after the assassination-Rodriguez came forward with an elaborate story about three suspicious-looking men who she says were milling around behind the picket fence right before the assassination. Rodriguez was thirteen years old in 1963. On November 22, she and several of her schoolmates were in a car parked near the Book Depository waiting for their chaperone, who was chatting with another adult. That's when she says she saw a man in a cap and coveralls who looked "like one of those Saturday ... matinee kind of characters that you would immediately identify as a railroad man." He was standing on the railroad bridge overlooking Dealey Plaza. One of Rodriguez's friends insisted that the man wasn't supposed to be on the bridge. When someone asked why, the girl replied, "Because my father is a manager in that railroad yard over there ... and he told us at breakfast this morning that we could not go over there because government men had come and said that ... not even any of the employees could be up on the bridges or anywhere where they had any kind of sightline to the motorcade route."46 Rodriguez claims that the railroad man signaled to a second man who was lurking near a tree, and that the second man was dressed in a bomber jacket, a "hunter's plaid shirt," casual slacks, and a bolo tie. A third man arrived shortly afterwards in "a blue ... nondescript Chevrolet." He was in his twenties, Rodriguez says, and was wearing a dark blue outfit that looked like a gas station attendant's uniform (she has since nicknamed these three men "tall-blue," "railroad-man," and "bolotie"). Tall-blue was wearing a blank name patch on his uniform. She heard him say, "I'm sorry I was held up, you know I couldn't help it." "[A]nd so anyway as bolo-tie comes up he looks over at me," Rodriguez recalls, "and he gives me a calculating glance ... to kind of assess the threat ... and I of course quickly ... looked away, but I knew my timing and I looked back at them. When they came up and [tall-blue] was apologizing [but] bolo-tie shushed him immediately." Bolo-tie supposedly said, "We don't have time for that now" before speaking in hushed tones. Rodriguez then saw bolo-tie hand tall-blue a package in a strange spinning motion that reminded her of a marching band maneuver. After that, both men got in their cars and drove away, while railroad-man hustled down the track "lickity split" and disappeared. Although suspicious, Rodriguez says she put the incident out of her mind until she saw a young man in a sporting goods store one day buying a firearm. Right then, she says, a lightbulb went off. "[A]nd here was this package-looking thing, the same dimensions, the same shape, about as long as a man's thigh, and flat rectanguplar ... And bam, it put me right there looking at that package change hands with these fellows." Rodriguez says she suddenly realized that bolo-tie had given tall-blue a rifle.47 There is no shortage of strange tales from Dealey Plaza, some told by law enforcement personnel who were present for the assassination or its aftermath. For example, Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig claims that he was standing in front of the courthouse on Main Street when he heard the shots. Trained to respond in a crisis, Craig made the short trip over to Dealey Plaza. While questioning witnesses and searching for clues, he heard someone whistle. "I turned and saw a white male in his twenties running down the grassy knoll from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository building," he later recalled. "A light green Rambler station wagon was coming slowly west on Elm Street.48 The driver of the station wagon was a husky looking Latin, with dark wavy hair, wearing a tan windbreaker type jacket. He was looking up at the man running toward him. He pulled over to the north curb and picked up the man coming down the hill." Craig says that heavy traffic prevented him from stopping the vehicle and that it sped away traveling west on Elm Street. He says he then walked over to the Depository and asked to speak with someone in charge. A man in a gray suit identified himself as a Secret Service agent. At first, the man seemed uninterested in Craig's story, but then started taking notes when Craig mentioned the station wagon. Later that day, Craig stopped by Dallas police headquarters. When he saw Lee Oswald, he identified him as the man he had seen running down the grassy knoll. Craig also says that he asked Oswald about the Rambler. "That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine," Oswald supposedly replied, "Don't try to drag her into this."49 Oswald then allegedly added, "Everybody will know who I am now." Dallas police captain Fritz did not believe Craig's story and said that the officer never set foot inside Oswald's interrogation room and therefore had no opportunity for a conversation. Whose testimony should we believe?50 Although there are problems with Craig's account, where you stand on this one, like so many other aspects of November 22, depends on where you sit-with the lone gunman conclusion or a conspiracy theory.

One aspect of Craig's testimony is especially noteworthy: his alleged encounter with a Secret Service agent. Other witnesses, many reliable, claim to have seen or talked to one or more Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza that day. But the Secret Service-whose agents are trained to stay with the president and other protectees in the event of an emergency-has always insisted that none of its employees was on the ground at Dealey Plaza in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The Warren Commission confirmed this fact by tracing the movements of all agents assigned to the Dallas motorcade.51 However, Dallas officer Joe Marshall Smith was one of the first policemen to climb the grassy knoll to the parking lot behind the picket fence.52 Told by a witness that the shots had come from the bushes, Smith drew his revolver. "He was beginning to feel, as he put it, 'damn silly' when he came across a man standing by a car. The man reacted quickly to the sight of Smith and an accompanying deputy. As Smith remembered it, 'The man, this character, produces credentials from his hip pocket which showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before, and they satisfied me and the deputy sheriff [who was with Smith]. So I immediately accepted that and let him go and continued our search around the cars.' "53 According to Smith, the man was wearing casual clothes and had grime under his fingernails. Gordon Arnold also reported the law enforcement officer who took his camera film was a man with dirty fingernails. Without any explanation or additional investigation,54 the Warren Commission accepted the Secret Service's recommendation that it disregard Smith's story.55 Smith was a dependable, low-key officer, and no one has suggested he was given to embellishment. This is one of the nagging examples of credible testimony that makes a reasonable person question the conclusions of the Warren Commission. Who was the individual with Secret Service credentials, when those who should know insist no real Secret Service agents could have been at that location?56 Perhaps more disturbing was the official handling of Smith's statement. It suggests an ostrichlike approach to the evidence: Clues that may have strengthened the case for conspiracy were set aside or downplayed by the commission.

Robert Blakey, the former chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, believes that Smith was telling the truth. "He met somebody coming, and the guy identified himself as a Secret Service agent. There were no Secret Service agents up there. And when they got behind the picket fence, it had been raining that day, and the ground was damp. There were footprints where the person [on] the grassy knoll was supposed to [have been] and ... he had wiped mud off his feet [on] one of the cars that was there. This is testimony that's consistent with somebody being there." In addition, Blakey theorizes that the person behind the fence might have been a Mafia hit man sent to kill Oswald after he assassinated the president. "It's a standard mob format," he says. "Somebody always kills the assassin. And then you kill the people who killed the assassin."57 In addition to Smith, another completely believable eyewitness is Pierce Allman, the program director for WFAA radio. Allman chose the critical corner of Elm and Houston to observe the motorcade. Just seconds before the shots, Kennedy passed within a few feet of him, and Allman reports having shouted, "Welcome to Dallas, Mr. President," among the last words the president likely heard. Allman was also one of the first to reach the Newmans as they lay sprawled across the lower grassy knoll, asking them, "Are you all right?" And then Allman's journalistic instincts came to the fore, and he realized he needed to find a telephone. The Depository was logically the closest place, and at the door he asked a young man who was exiting the building where he could make a call. The man helpfully pointed out a place inside. That man was Lee Oswald as he was leaving the Depository. Oswald told police about the encounter with Allman as he attempted to account for his whereabouts after the shooting. The Secret Service eventually figured out it was Allman and discussed the incident with him later. Allman told them the timing and gave a general description of Oswald-but he also told them something interesting. After Allman had been on the telephone in the Depository for a few minutes, a man identifying himself as belonging to "Army Intelligence" told Allman to hang up the phone and leave. The Secret Service told Allman he must have been mistaken because no one from Army Intelligence was on the scene. But Allman is certain of what he heard. The man may have been James Powell, a specialist from the Army Intelligence Corps, who was at Love Field and then the corner of Elm and Houston to observe the motorcade, apparently as just an interested bystander. Powell snapped a photo of the Depository about thirty seconds after the shooting, when a bystander pointed to it as the source of some or all of the shots.58 Another eyewitness, Malcolm Summers, claims to have seen a strange man on the grassy knoll. Summers says he was standing in the middle of Dealey Plaza, opposite the knoll, when he saw the president struck by a bullet. A motorcycle cop who had been escorting the motorcade immediately threw down his bike and stood directly in front of Summers. "[He] looked straight in my direction like he was going to pull his gun," the Dallas native remembered. "[H]e was looking at me, and I knew he wasn't looking at me, but I mean, in my direction. I thought, well, somebody behind me was doing the firing, and because I thought that ... I fell down, I hit the ground." Summers eventually got up and followed a crowd across the street toward the picket fence. There he encountered a clean-shaven, well-dressed man with a coat over his arm. Summers spotted a gun underneath the man's coat. "You better not come up here," the man warned. "You could get shot."59 Declining to argue with an armed man, Summers retreated back across the street to his office on Houston Street. A short time later, he departed work. "When I was leaving, I noticed ... three Spanish-looking guys jump in their car, and they were leaving from the front of the post office where they were parked," Summers recalled, adding that the three men seemed like they were "in a hurry" and "left at a great speed." They drove in the direction of Oak Cliff, a neighborhood suburb of Dallas. Summers says he did not think much of the incident until he later learned that Lee Harvey Oswald had allegedly headed for Oak Cliff, Officer J. D. Tippit was shot there, and Jack Ruby had once lived in the neighborhood.60 The armed man Summers saw on the grassy knoll might have been a co-conspirator in the president's death, or he just as easily could have been a Dallas County sheriff. In 1963 the sheriff's office stood on the corner of Main and Houston Streets. Houston connects Main with Elm, and thus was very near Dealey Plaza. Law enforcement personnel apparently poured out of the building after the shots were fired. The "Spanish-looking guys" could have been anti-Castro Cubans who had taken part in the assassination as revenge for the Bay of Pigs and were on their way to meet Oswald or Ruby-or the whole episode could have been innocent and unrelated to JFK's killing. Even though Summers gave a prompt statement to the sheriff's office and the Secret Service interviewed him on two separate occasions, the authorities apparently made no comprehensive efforts to identify the men Summers saw while the trail was hot.61 Then there is the seemingly trustworthy account of Earlene Roberts, the woman who ran the Dallas boarding house where Oswald stayed most of the time, and who told the Warren Commission that she had been watching television in the living room at around one P.M. on November 22 when Oswald rushed in and went straight to his room. That is when Roberts supposedly saw a police cruiser: WARREN COMMISSION STAFFER: Did this police car stop directly in front of your house?

MRS. ROBERTS: Yes-it stopped directly in front of my house and it just [went] "tip-tip" [the sound of the horn being tapped twice] and that's the way Officer Alexander and Charles Burnely would do when they stopped, and I went to the door and looked and saw it wasn't their [squad car] number.62 Why did an unidentified police car honk twice in front of Oswald's boarding house while he was inside, just after the assassination? Was it a prearranged signal from his coconspirators or handlers, or just another coincidence? Is it possible that Roberts's police friends were riding in a different cruiser that day and drove off when they were ordered by radio to another location? Or is conspiracy author James Douglass right to conjecture that "the horn signal to Oswald came from two uniformed men in a counterfeit police car" who were part of a clandestine group of assassins?63 Douglass's assertion seems fantastic, yet so many peculiar things happened that cruel day in Dallas-things that were unexplained and, unfortunately, unexplored at a time when they might have been clarified.

Dallas officer Marvin Wise told another odd but ultimately truthful story that has been elucidated only in recent years. Shortly after the shots were fired, Wise learned that three men (later known as "the three tramps") had been seen climbing into a boxcar in the rail yard behind the Book Depository. By acting quickly, he managed to apprehend the suspects before they could escape and turned them over to the Dallas County sheriff's office.64 Photos taken in November 1963 (which were not made available to the public until the 1970s) as well as police records released in 1989 show that a trio of men were taken into custody but released a short time later. For years, conspiracy theorists claimed that one of the men was Charles Harrelson, the father of actor Woody Harrelson.65 Frank Sturgis and Howard Hunt, both key figures in the 1972 Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, were also named from time to time as suspected members of the "tramp" group (they were not). But the least convincing source for the Harrelson-did-it theory was Harrelson himself. Harrelson had ties to organized crime and was convicted in 1982 of murdering a federal judge in Texas. Looking for a way out of a long jail sentence, the newly arrested and cocaine-high Harrelson "confessed" to being part of a team of Kennedy assassins and offered the prosecutors a deal: He would identify the other team members if he could walk free. The authorities were not foolish enough to buy Harrel-son's story, and he later admitted he invented it. In 1989 the Dallas Police finally released files that showed the "three tramps" were actually unfortunate unknowns named Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle, and John Gedney-drifters who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.66p While some of the witness accounts are disquieting because of their implications for possible conspiracy, there are also pro-conspiracy testimonies that are as doubtful as Harrelson's and Hunt's assertions. Jean Hill is one Dealey Plaza witness who saw her opportunities and took them, making it up as she went along and fooling many. Hill and her friend Mary Moorman were standing in the center of Dealey Plaza (opposite the grassy knoll) when they saw Kennedy's motorcade pass by. "Hey, Mr. President," Hill shouted, "we want to take your picture." When she heard the shots ring out, Moorman urged her friend to take cover. But Hill says that she was oblivious to the danger and kept her eyes focused on the surrounding area. "I looked up and saw a flash of light, a puff of smoke from the knoll," she said, "And I knew a shot had come from there and I kept looking ..." Hill maintained she saw a man in a brown hat and overcoat "walking faster than ... normal" from the Book Depository toward the rail yard. His name? According to Hill, it was Jack Ruby. Suspicious, Hill followed Ruby (she says she didn't know his name at the time), and that's when she reported being stopped by another man who flashed a badge and identified himself as a Secret Service agent. He allegedly confiscated a set of Polaroid pictures that Hill had been holding for Moorman. "You are coming with me," the man supposedly told her. Hill says that when she refused, the man put her neck in a Vulcan death grip and was soon joined by another man, who helped escort her to a room on "about the fourth or fifth floor in the Courts Building." Other shadowy figures in the room asked her how many shots she had heard. "Four to six," Hill replied. No, she had only heard three, they insisted. Hill also claimed to have seen a patrolman on the grassy knoll holding a rifle instead of a standard issue police shotgun.

However, in her original police statement on November 22, Hill said that she was turned back by officers when she got to the grassy knoll and that a "Mr. Featherstone" escorted her to the Dallas County sheriff's office. Jim Featherston, a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, and Mary Moorman both confirmed this initial version of Hill's experience. Hill also gave a widely seen interview to a local TV station shortly after the assassination, but did not mention the flash of light, the puff of smoke, the man in the brown overcoat, the men on the grassy knoll, or the interrogation in the Courts Building. Therefore, we can reasonably assume that Hill, now deceased, fabricated parts of her story.

In 2011, Mary Moorman gave her most extensive interview since the assassination. Moorman, not Hill, took the most famous still photograph of the moment the fatal bullet struck John Kennedy-a photo that may or may not show a man in a uniform behind the picket fence, and an apparent puff of white smoke that may or may not have been the aftermath of a gunshot. More recently, Moorman told me that she does not recall seeing anything out of the ordinary behind the fence, and she is not at all convinced that her famous photograph reveals a second shooter.67 Interestingly, Moorman's sightline positioning and exceptionally important snapshot won her an actual invitation to give testimony to the Warren Commission staff, but she injured her ankle and asked for a postponement. She never heard from the commission again, despite having taken the photo that is perhaps the most revealing supplement to the Zapruder film.68 Jean Hill's creativity may only be outdone by a U.S. Air Force sergeant named Robert Vinson. Vinson says that he boarded a C-54 cargo plane at Andrews Air Force Base on November 22 that he assumed, or was told, was traveling to Denver. Vinson and his wife lived in Colorado at the time. The sergeant says that the aircraft "bore no military markings or serial numbers" and that two men wearing "olive drab coveralls" (also with "no markings") got on board with him. Instead of flying to Colorado, though, the plane "landed abruptly in a rough, sandy area alongside the Trinity River" in Dallas at three P.M. CST and picked up two men-a Latino and a Caucasian man Vinson identified as a Lee Harvey Oswald look-alike. The plane then took off and landed at Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico. From there, Vinson says, he hopped a bus to Colorado. Beyond a complete lack of corroborating evidence, Vinson's story contains at least one major flaw: The section of the Trinity River that cuts through Dallas is bordered by two major roadways, the Stemmons Freeway and Industrial Boulevard. Therefore, it seems somewhat unlikely that a C-54, a propeller plane with a wingspan of 117 feet, could have made a safe sand landing next to dual thoroughfares in the middle of the afternoon without anyone's noticing, especially on a day when police and reporters were swarming.69 Why would Vinson make up such a story? In his case and others, no one can say with certainty, but a desire for money or attention-often granted to almost anyone who has "new information" or a novel theory about the assassination-might be one reason. More than a few have cashed in over the previous half century. While there are many legitimate researchers who have spent much of their own time and money to investigate the assassination, there are others who have sought treasure from the tragedy.

Occasionally, a central figure in the November 22 saga will shift his or her story. Motives can only be guessed at, but the conspiracy pot is usually stirred as a result. One need look no further than Lee Harvey Oswald's widow, Marina, who remarried two years after the assassination to a Texas Instruments employee, Kenneth Jess Porter, and is still living in the suburbs of Dallas.70 Marina told the Warren Commission that she believed her first husband shot JFK, but she later recanted-without any specific evidence being presented to support her change.71 Retired Dallas policeman Jim Leavelle, best remembered as the detective in a beige cowboy hat standing next to Oswald as Ruby pulled the trigger, has had meals from time to time with Marina and her husband, and also with Lee's brother, Robert Oswald.72 This previously undisclosed bond will startle most people. It seems odd but it is compelling. After all, these individuals had their lives forever and involuntarily transformed by the actions of Lee Oswald, and together they were caught up in a maelstrom only the participants could fully comprehend. At one such dinner years after the assassination, Leavelle remembers that Marina was "sounding him out" to see if he had changed or would change his opinion about Oswald's guilt. The crusty, plain-spoken Leavelle thinks that assassination researchers had told Oswald's widow that, " '[Lee] didn't shoot anybody, he was a patsy, somebody else done the shooting and they were putting it on [Lee].'73 And then so I said, 'Well, that's hogwash, of course. It just didn't happen that way.' "74 In time, Marina Oswald Porter not only changed her story but began insisting on payment for interviews. Henry Hurt, a seasoned reporter who penned stories for Readers' Digest and wrote a bestseller on the Kennedy assassination, said, "Every time I talked to her, it was off the record because we wouldn't pay. [Once] we talked theoretically and I said, 'Well, what would you give me for [several thousand dollars]?' She replied, 'I'll just say anything you want for that much.' " Hurt researched the Kennedy murder for many years, and kept up with Oswald's widow. "Marina told her story forty different ways," he reports.75 Another Oswald who frequently changed her story and demanded money for interviews was Lee's mother, Marguerite. On the day of the assassination, she called the Fort Worth Star Telegram looking for a ride into Dallas. CBS's Bob Schieffer was then a cub reporter for the Star Telegram and just happened to pick up the phone when Marguerite called. "And I said, 'Lady, we're not running a taxi service here. Besides, the president's been shot,'" Schieffer recalls. "So she says, 'Yes, I heard it on the radio, I think my son is the one they have arrested.' Well, I immediately dropped this business about not running a taxi service and I said, 'Where are you? I'll come out and get you.' " Schieffer quickly roped in a co-worker and his car, and they chauffeured Marguerite from Fort Worth to Dallas police headquarters. "I interviewed her on the way, and it was obviously the biggest story I'd ever gotten. She was truly an evil person. She was a lunatic. She was obsessed with money. She had actually worked for a time as a governess or au pair for the publisher of the Star Telegram, Amon Carter, Jr., and Mrs. Carter had let her go because she had tried to extort money from the children, trying to get their allowance money, selling them little carved soap [figures] and things like that. I mean she was truly obsessed and on the way to Dallas she kept saying to me that everybody will be sympathetic to [her son's] wife and 'nobody will remember momma' and 'I'll die, I won't have any means of income and what's going to happen to me?' And the things that she was saying were so harsh that I didn't put some of them in the paper." In the years that followed, Schieffer says, Marguerite occasionally contacted him to see if CBS would pay her for an interview. "And I said, 'No, we don't do that.' And she would say, 'Well, I really need some money and I know some things.' Well, she didn't know anything by that time. I guess she got paid for a couple of interviews and she basically lived out her life selling [her son's] clothes and things of that nature to souvenir hunters [until] she finally passed away."76 Exposure to the truth about Oswald's very unusual mother, upbringing, and life make it easier to understand why Oswald may have undertaken the assassination-although the word "why" presumes an underlying rationality that might not have existed in this deeply troubled individual. Thus, the glaring inadequacies of the Warren Commission inquiry do not automatically mean that the commission erred in fingering Oswald as the lone gunman.77 Much testimony supports the commission viewpoint. Tom Dillard, a photographer for the Dallas Morning News in 1963, has long accepted the conclusions of the Warren Commission report. On the day of the parade, he had hoped to be able to ride directly in front of the president's limousine on a flatbed truck, but the Secret Service, concerned about evacuating Kennedy in an emergency, nixed the idea. Instead, Dillard was placed in a convertible several cars behind the presidential limousine. Dillard was on Houston Street, passing the Dallas County sheriff's office, when he heard the shots. He dismissed the first one as a "torpedo" (a large firecracker that can explode underwater). But when he heard the second shot, he realized it was rifle fire. At the third shot, Dillard says he exclaimed, "My God, they've killed him."

Bob Jackson, a photographer for the Dallas Times Herald who was in the car with Dillard, said, "There's a guy with a rifle up in that window." "I said, 'Where?'" Dillard recalled during a 1993 interview, "Bob says, 'In that window up on that building right there'... And by that time, I shot a picture with the wide-angle camera." His photo captured Bonnie Ray Williams and Harold Norman peering out of the fifth floor corner window of the Book Depository; above their heads can be seen some of the boxes from the "sniper's nest"-but no Oswald. Dillard has lost sleep over the years thinking about what might have been. If he had only "shot it a little quicker," he might have captured Oswald in the window. But Dillard firmly believes the shots came from the Depository's sixth floor window.78 Mal Couch, a WFAA-TV cameraman, was also in the car with Dillard. He confirmed that Jackson said he saw a rifleman in the Book Depository. "And I looked up in the window and saw about a foot of the rifle going back in the window."79 Just after the shots, Couch and the other journalists ordered the driver to stop their car, and they jumped out. As Couch moved down the street toward the grassy knoll, he noted that "There were guys there, and I'm sure they were Secret Service men or FBI ... And one of them reached down, and he picked up something. And I walked past him. It was a piece of brain matter that had been in the street." According to Couch, the man was dressed in a gray suit or a coat and tie and simply walked away with what appeared to be a piece of Kennedy's brain or skull that was "probably around three or four inches long."

No one has ever conclusively identified this individual. However, it is possible he was the person who handed Dallas County deputy Seymour Weitzman a skull fragment.80 Weitzman testified to the Warren Commission that, within ten minutes of the assassination, "[S]omebody brought me a piece of what he thought to be a firecracker ... but I turned it over to one of the Secret Service men and I told them it should go to the lab because it looked to me like human bone. I later found out it was supposedly a portion of the president's skull."81 Weitzman himself had been standing at the corner of Main and Houston, just a few dozen yards from the presidential limousine when the shots were fired. As befits his law enforcement training, he ran toward the limo in time to see it speed away, then immediately scaled the wall at the top of the grassy knoll, next to the picket fence, because that's where a bystander told him the shots had come from. He saw the rail yards behind the knoll before just about anyone, and reported to the Warren Commission, "We noticed numerous kinds of footprints that did not make sense because they were going [in] different directions." The commission interrogator asked Weitzman, "Were there other people there besides you?" "Yes, sir, other officers, Secret Service as well." Here is more reliable testimony that Secret Service officers, or people impersonating them, were present in Dealey Plaza at the time of, or immediately after, the shooting. The Warren Commission staff did not further question Weitzman about this, asked him for no names, and never bothered to reconcile Weitzman's testimony (and the statements of others we have cited) with the commission's firm conclusion that no Secret Service personnel were present in Dealey Plaza.82 As these conflicting examples demonstrate, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction when dealing with eyewitness accounts of events on November 22, 1963. Human beings notice different things during a crisis, and they see only a small part of the whole. They also tend to confuse media reports and the stories of other eyewitnesses with what they actually saw or heard.83 And of course, some people will make wild statements to garner attention. The result is a hodgepodge of truths, half-truths, blatant falsehoods, and sensational embellishments. Decades after the assassination, people pop up who claim to have been in Dealey Plaza or on the grassy knoll at precisely the moment of the assassination.84 Because the local police and then the Warren Commission did not catalog and contact many key Dealey Plaza witnesses, it is very difficult to verify or disprove new accounts. Maybe the individuals coming forward are honest, or perhaps they wanted to be at a seismic historical event so badly that they invented a personal association. Retired Dallas officer Leavelle notes that if everyone who claims to have been on the grassy knoll on November 22 had actually been there, "You couldn't put them in the Rose Bowl."85 One theory that explains all, or even a preponderance, of the testimony is impossible to achieve-unless one approaches the explosive subject with a predetermined answer. This has been the path chosen by most authors and filmmakers. Naturally, potentially fallible judgments must be made by any researcher. Some witnesses' statements ring true. Others are a mixture of accurate and inaccurate observations by people sincerely trying to recall the most dramatic moments of their lives-a few seconds of chaos in a large, noisy crowd, with only fragments recollected about what happened before and after the shots. The memories have also been infected by an avalanche of news coverage that continued for years, as well as hundreds of personal conversations about this seminal event with family and friends. Inevitably, some witnesses have been mistaken, and a few have made up their versions. One thing is certain: They cannot all be right, given the inherent contradictions.

A fair investigation can only reach a truthful conclusion once all the relevant testimony has been considered and compared. That the Warren Commission failed to do so is obvious to any unbiased investigator. In the days, weeks, and months following November 22, the trail was hot and memories were at their sharpest. The commission had the strong backing of Congress and the country, and whatever money and staff were needed to produce a thorough report would have been forthcoming. While impatient, the public would have been willing to give the investigators the time they required to produce complete answers. Instead, many critical witnesses were overlooked, many paths were not taken and tips not pursued, and a political schedule-not an investigator's timetable-determined the release date. Those responsible for these decisions would say the nation needed to move on. Yet the irony of the commission's rushed and predigested report is that the nation was caught in a time warp for years. Instead of shutting the door on cynical and destructive assassination speculation, the Warren Commission maximized the opportunities for it.

mLive television reporting has always been a dangerous business, and inaccurate information was aired almost immediately on November 22. In the first minutes after he began his CBS broadcast, Walter Cronkite actually suggested that the Newmans could be the assassins. (They were not named, but Cronkite said Secret Service agents and others had surrounded them on the grassy knoll.) See "Two Hours of Uncut 11/22/63 CBS-TV Coverage, Starting at 1:30 P.M.," YouTube,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Ry9-bpixM

[accessed April 23, 2013.]

nYou can see the footage for yourself at

http://emuseum.jfk.org/view/objects/asitem/items@:32274.

oThe picket fence is actually a stockade fence without the openings of a picket fence, but almost everyone refers to this element of Dealey Plaza as "the picket fence," so we will, too.

pOn his deathbed, E. Howard Hunt told his son, on videotape no less, that he had been one of the tramps, and this dramatic "revelation" has been widely circulated. Perhaps he was seeking one last historically significant dose of villainy for his obituary, or maybe he was playing a final macabre trick. But Hunt had not been one of the Dallas tramps, proving once and for all that deathbed confessions are not always truthful.

8.

11/22/63: Questions, Answers, Mysteries

Hugh Aynesworth, a journalist who covered the Kennedy assassination for the Dallas Morning News and has followed the attendant controversies for decades, is unable to reconcile all the disparate accounts of the chaotic assassination scene, yet he's skeptical that they add up to a conspiracy. "There's never been a homicide investigated to this extent in the history of the world," Aynesworth remarked. "There are people who believe this, believe that, want to believe it, need to believe it. But it isn't there." Like many, Aynesworth initially thought that the Russians might have been behind 11/22.1 But today he is convinced that Oswald acted alone, and he suspects that a domestic argument between Oswald and his wife could have been the tipping point that sent him over the edge.2 "She [Marina] ridiculed him constantly," says Aynesworth. "And rightfully so, I would say. Here's a guy that would spend money on having things printed up for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and would run around here, there, and everywhere spending money that he didn't have, living off neighbors, living in wretched places, not eating well. I would have been pissed at him, too." Aynesworth is astonished that his fellow Americans continue to believe in an 11/22 conspiracy. "It's just weird," he says.3 Maybe Hugh Aynesworth and others who believe as he does are right; maybe there was no conspiracy. Maybe Oswald committed the crime of the century without any help. But fifty years later, some things still do not add up, and it is unlikely this murder will ever be solved to the satisfaction of many, if not most, Americans. I do not presume to know for certain what happened on November 22, 1963, and we are long past the point when all the mysteries can be cleared up. But what is still possible after the passage of fifty years is to present the evidence most acknowledge to be true, and from there to offer the most reasonable explanations that can be mustered-and also eliminate the least plausible hypotheses. Naturally, not all the questions in this untidy murder can be answered fully. There are leftover paradoxes galore.

An understanding of Lee Harvey Oswald is essential to unraveling the events that unfolded on November 22. He was born on October 18, 1939, in New Orleans and endured a tumultuous childhood. He never knew his father, Robert Oswald, Sr., who had died of a heart attack before Lee was born. As Lee's brother Robert once commented, their mother made it quite clear on numerous occasions that her children were a burden to her.4 At one point, Oswald's mother, Marguerite, decided that she could no longer work and rear children at the same time, and so she placed Lee and his two brothers in an orphanage. One sibling was Lee's half brother from Marguerite's first unsuccessful marriage, in the mid-1930s. In 1944 she moved the family to Dallas and married for a third time the next year, to Edwin Ekdahl. The marriage quickly fell apart, however, and Marguerite returned to New Orleans. A few years later, she took Lee to New York City.

As the Warren Commission noted, "The ensuing year and one-half in New York was marked by Lee's refusals to attend school and by emotional and psychological problems of a seemingly serious nature." He was sent to Youth House, a public treatment facility for juvenile delinquents. A social worker there described Lee as an "emotionally starved, affectionless youngster" who liked to keep to himself. When he continued to get in trouble at school, a New York court recommended that he receive additional psychotherapy. But before that could happen, Marguerite abruptly moved the family back to New Orleans in 1954. Oswald soon dropped out of school and worked a series of odd jobs. "It was during this period that he started to read Communist literature," reported the Warren Commission. "Occasionally, in conversations with others, he praised Communism and expressed to his fellow employees a desire to join the Communist Party. At about this time, when he was not yet seventeen, he wrote to the Socialist Party of America, professing his belief in Marxism." Oswald briefly returned to school when his mother moved to Fort Worth, but he left for good and joined the Marine Corps in October 1956.5 Oswald had a checkered career in the Marines. Two months after he enlisted, he shot a score of 212 with an M-1 rifle, a full "two points over the score required for a 'sharpshooter' qualification, the second highest in the Marine Corps."6 In 1957 he received radar and aircraft surveillance training before receiving a transfer to a Marine air base in Atsugi, Japan (close to Tokyo). At the time, Atsugi served as an operational base for the U-2 spy plane, America's most sophisticated military aircraft. The U-2 could take pictures, jam enemy radar, and avoid missiles by flying at an eye-popping altitude of 90,000 feet. Oswald worked in a radar unit that kept track of U-2 flights, though he did not have direct access to the plane itself. He had barely gotten settled in Japan when he learned that he was being sent to the Philippines for additional training. Upset by the news, Oswald shot himself in the arm with a .22-caliber pistol. He was sent to the Philippines anyway and court-martialed for possession of an illegal firearm. The military fined Oswald and sentenced him to twenty days of hard labor.

Oswald's military career went further downhill after that. In June 1958 he poured a drink over the head of a sergeant whom he blamed for assigning him extra kitchen duties. This led to a second court martial and twenty-eight days in the brig at hard labor. Oswald was then transferred to a Marine base located near El Toro, California. All the while, he was growing more and more interested in Communism. At the El Toro base, Oswald immersed himself in the Russian language by reading Russian books and blaring Russian records-much to the chagrin of his fellow Marines. He also tried and failed to pass a Marine proficiency exam in spoken and written Russian. He preached the merits of socialism so often that some of his acquaintances began referring to him as "Comrade Oswaldskovich," a nickname that Oswald relished. He and another Marine, Nelson Delgado, spoke in glowing terms about the revolution in Cuba and toyed with the idea of traveling to Havana to join the fight.7 Delgado advised Oswald to write to the Cuban embassy in Washington, and Oswald would later say that he got in touch with Cuban diplomats. Delgado began noticing letters addressed to Oswald that were affixed with the Cuban official seal and heard his friend say that he had visited the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles. One night, Delgado saw Oswald at the front gates of the El Toro base talking to a stranger, possibly Cuban (in Delgado's estimation), wearing an overcoat. Delgado also claimed that Oswald asked him to put a duffel bag in a locker at the Los Angeles bus station. Intrigued by his friend's request, Delgado rummaged through the duffel bag and found pictures of U.S. fighter jets, raising the question of whether Oswald was spying for the Cuban government.8 Why the U.S. Marine Corps allowed Oswald to promulgate Communist propaganda among its soldiers at the height of the Cold War, when anticommunist witch hunts were all the rage, is puzzling to say the least. A captain named Robert Block seems to be the only one who confronted Oswald about his leftist leanings after Block found out that the private was reading magazines such as The Worker. Oswald told Block that he was simply trying to learn more about the enemy, a flimsy excuse the captain reluctantly accepted. In August 1959 Oswald applied for a hardship discharge, claiming that his mother had injured herself at work and needed his support; in reality, Marguerite was fine. At the same time, he applied for a passport, listing Switzerland, Finland, England, France, Germany, Russia, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic as the places he intended to visit. Both applications were approved. Oswald told the passport office that he planned on attending Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland and Turku University in Finland. Oswald's application to Schweitzer shows his manipulative character. In the "remarks" section, he wrote, "Please inform me of the amount of the deposit (if required) so I can forward it and confirm my reservation, and show my sincerity of purpose. Thank you." Oswald could not have been more insincere. He had no intention of enrolling at Schweitzer. This was his way of getting to Europe so that he could defect to the Soviet Union.9 In September 1959, Oswald took a bus to Forth Worth to visit his mother. Marguerite was surprised when her son told her that he was leaving to sail to Europe in order to take a job with an import-export business. She did not know that her son had decided to defect. By appearances, at least, Oswald was convinced that Communism was the wave of the future and that the Soviets might recognize his talents and put him in charge of something important. On September 20, 1959, Oswald boarded a freighter bound for France. From there he traveled to England and then to Helsinki, Finland, where he rented rooms in two pricey hotels, the Torni and the Klaus Kurki. On October 12, Oswald applied for a tourist visa at the local Soviet consulate. His application was approved two days later and he left for Moscow. At the time, friends said Oswald was careful with his money. It seems strange that he could have afforded meals, first-class hotels, and airfare on a Marine private's salary, suggesting either that he had saved up the cash or someone else was covering his expenses.10 The CIA claims that it first became aware of Oswald when he tried to renounce his citizenship at the U.S. embassy in Moscow on October 31, 1959. "I've thought this thing over very carefully and I know what I'm doing," he told the consul. "I was just discharged from the Marine Corps on September eleventh and I have been planning to do this for two years." Oswald went on to explain that he had been a radar operator for the Marines and that he planned on sharing what he knew with Soviet officials. When the consul informed the ex-Marine that he needed to wait a few days before he could fill out the necessary paperwork, Oswald left in a huff and never went back. Embassy staff immediately cabled the CIA at Langley about the incident.11 The news didn't stay confidential for long. The following day, the Washington Post ran a story entitled "Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship," which quoted Oswald as saying that he would "never return to the United States for any reason." The paper also reported that Oswald was the "third American to have sought to renounce his citizenship and stay in Russia in recent months." The other two defectors were Nichols Petrulli, a sheet metal worker from Valley Stream, New York, and Robert Webster, a plastics expert from Cleveland, Ohio, who had gone to Moscow in connection with the American National Exhibition-the site where Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev engaged in their famous "kitchen debate" during a Nixon trip to the USSR.12 The article did not mention that Oswald's request for Soviet citizenship had already been denied-or that Oswald had melodramatically attempted suicide shortly after receiving the news. On October 21, 1959, Oswald wrote in his diary, "I am shocked!! My dreams!... I have waited for 2 year[s] to be accepted. My fondes[t] dreams are shattered because of a petty [Soviet] official ... I decide to end it. Soak fist in cold water to numb the pain, Th[e]n slash my left wrist. Th[e]n plaug [plunge] wrist into bathtub of hot water ... Somewhere, a violin plays, as I watch my life whirl away. I think to myself 'How easy to Die' and 'A Sweet Death, (to violins)..." This had all the markings of a genuine try at suicide, which lends credence to those who say Oswald was not put up to the defection by the U.S. government. (The CIA might have wanted to plant an agent who could provide the Soviets with misinformation about the U-2 spy plane.) Oswald could have succeeded in killing himself had an Intourist guide (basically, a Soviet minder) not found him lying in a pool of his own blood. He was rushed to nearby Botkinskaya Hospital, where he received blood transfusions and a psychiatric evaluation. According to a Soviet official who defected to the United States, Yuri Nosenko, two Russian psychiatrists diagnosed Oswald as "mentally unstable." Nosenko supposedly handled Oswald's case for the KGB.13 Nosenko claimed that the KGB dismissed Oswald as disturbed and deranged and then left him alone after the diagnosis, but this explanation is dubious. Why the authorities would willingly take on a problem like Oswald-an individual they had diagnosed as unstable-when they could easily have had him delivered to the U.S. embassy begs an answer. As it developed, Oswald did not formally defect, since he never filled out the paperwork to renounce his American citizenship; instead, he was granted temporary residence in the USSR, with guaranteed employment and housing.14 However, if he was worth the trouble to accept and settle in the Soviet Union, the KGB would hardly have ignored a Marine who had worked with U-2 planes. The Nosenko story seems even less plausible when the events of May 1, 1960, are taken into account. On that day, the Soviets shot down a U-2 flying over their airspace and captured a U.S. Air Force pilot, Francis Gary Powers. At first, the United States pretended that Powers had been collecting weather data. But when Khrushchev produced damning evidence that showed otherwise, President Eisenhower admitted that the government had lied and the U-2 had been sent to spy on the Russians.

Oswald was living in the Soviet Union at the time, and he could have provided the Soviets with information that helped them target the plane. Gary Powers certainly thought he had. In his later years, Powers theorized that intelligence provided by Oswald had helped the Soviets figure out how to use their missiles at higher altitudes. Powers's son, Gary Powers, Jr., has continued his father's quest for an answer: "It makes sense Oswald ... would have given the Soviets information on the U-2. He was privy to the altitudes the U-2s were flying. And it's interesting that he defected in 1959. Dad was shot down in May of 1960. The Soviets were starting to improve their SA-1 and SA-2 missiles during that time frame." Powers's plane was downed by an SA-2, also known as an S-75 Dvina.15 The younger Powers remembers a story his father told about his time in captivity. "There was some guy dressed in a Russian uniform that looked American and spoke with an American accent," he says. "He would have been considered an American for all intents and purposes if he had been in the States. But he was dumber-my dad would have said 'dumber than a doorknob'-asking the wrong questions, and just didn't know what to ask." Powers Sr. came to believe that person was Lee Oswald. When Captain Powers returned home-he regained his freedom in a spy swap in February 1962-he went to the family farm in Pound, Virginia. While watching television one day in 1962 or 1963, prior to JFK's assassination, Powers saw a news story on Oswald. "My dad got very agitated and said, 'I've got to tell someone about him.' That's what I've heard from my Aunt Joanne."16 Powers does not know if his father followed through.17 The Gary Powers saga leads to a logical question: Did Oswald cooperate with, or work for, the Soviet authorities during his time in the USSR? According to Nosenko, the answer is no. "The KGB didn't want Oswald from day one," he insisted during a 1992 interview. And yet Soviet officials were willing to provide Oswald with an identity card, a rent-free apartment, and a job at a radio and television factory in Minsk. He was living better than most Soviet citizens, who were paid low salaries and forced to live in ramshackle housing. Oswald's extra income also made him a more attractive marriage prospect, and in April 1961, he wed a young pharmacology student named Marina Prusakova. The couple had met at a trade union dance held at the Palace of Culture in Minsk. Oswald's accent convinced Marina that he was from one of the Baltic states.18 When the former Marine fell ill, she visited him in the hospital. They married less than two months after they met. Marina's uncle (also her guardian) was a high-ranking member of the Communist Party and a lieutenant colonel in the MVD, the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs.

On the surface, Oswald seemed to have a good life in the USSR-a beautiful wife, a decent job, and privileges above the average. In reality, ever the malcontent, Oswald was chafing under the Soviet system. In the late summer of 1961, he made the following entry in his diary: As my Russian improves I become increasingly conscious of just what sort of a society I live in. Mass gymnastics, compulsory after-work meeting, usually political information meeting. Compulsory attendance at lectures and the sending of the entire shop collective (except me) to pick potatoes on a Sunday, at a state collective farm: A "patriotic duty" to bring in the harvest. The opinions of the workers (unvoiced) are that it's a great pain in the neck ... [Misspellings corrected here].

Convinced that the Soviets had perverted the teachings of Karl Marx, Oswald began searching for a way to get back to the United States, the nation he had loudly denounced a couple of years earlier. He contacted the U.S. embassy in Moscow and explained that his decision to defect had been a big mistake. He also encouraged Marina to apply for a visa. Lee and Marina's applications were approved in a little over a year by both American and Soviet officials. The State Department helpfully provided him with a loan to cover his travel expenses.19 In June 1962, the family arrived in the United States.20 Thus, an ex-Marine defector-in those days, they were openly referred to as traitors-who might have provided the Soviets with vital information about U.S. military assets received relatively easy clearance back into the United States, with financial help from the taxpayers. Not surprisingly, some people find this suspicious and wonder whether Oswald was sent back to the United States for a reason-by either superpower. The CIA says that it did not keep track of Oswald while he was in the USSR because its spies were busy working other cases. But the agency admits that it did "read the FBI reports on him" and "watched as the State Department did its job of screening him for repatriation."21 It is also possible that Oswald was part of a top secret "fake defector" program. The CIA has never admitted that such a program existed, but congressional documents show that one of Langley's operatives who went by the pseudonym "Thomas Casasin" had at one time "run an agent into the USSR."22 "Casasin" acknowledged an awareness of Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union and his job at a radio factory in Minsk, but he said no more than that. We may never know whether the agency ever approached Oswald, in or out of Russia, but this little-known anecdote adds a modicum of credibility to the idea that the CIA may have had designs on Oswald at some point before, during, or after his defection.23 The FBI began tracking Oswald ten days after his defection "to evaluate him as a security risk in the event [that] he returned" to the United States. When the Oswalds arrived in Texas, the bureau decided to interview Lee to find out if he had ever been approached by the KGB. Oswald said no, but also refused to take a lie detector test. Apparently satisfied despite the lack of full cooperation from Oswald, the FBI put the Oswald case on the back burner. The CIA claims that it never debriefed the former Marine, even though he had once bragged about sharing military secrets with the KGB.24 Only a handful of Americans were recorded as defecting to the Soviet Union during the 1950s and early 1960s. This was an extraordinarily rare event, and the overall lack of urgent interest in Oswald's case by the FBI and especially the CIA is remarkable, assuming it is true.

Law enforcement agencies and assassination researchers have focused on Oswald's connections since he was arrested in 1963. There is no absolute proof of any conspiratorial association-whether with the CIA, FBI, Mafia, or Communists-but there are hints that Oswald could potentially have been in league with one or more groups.

Since the 1970s the public has known of the Kennedy administration's energetic, highly classified efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro. The Marxist dictator of Cuba had seized power from a corrupt despot, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959. During the Batista years, powerful crime figures from the United States turned Cuba into the Las Vegas of the Caribbean. They set up casinos and brothels, bribed Cuban officials, and used the country as an entrept for the narcotics trade. Most Cubans were disgusted with Batista's crime and vice, and many rejoiced when Castro came to power. Others fled to the United States, especially south Florida, and immediately began plotting to overthrow the new left-wing dictator, who declared his regime socialist and chose to associate it with the Soviet Union.

At the height of the Cold War, most Americans were instinctively anti-Castro, recognizing the dangers of a Communist state just ninety miles from America's southernmost shore. The military and CIA had begun extensive planning to oust Castro during the Eisenhower administration, and one of President Kennedy's first major decisions was to go forward with the U.S.-backed invasion of Cuban exiles in April 1961. After the Bay of Pigs, a chastened JFK and his brother Robert became obsessed with deposing Castro. RFK created a major program of subterfuge and disruption known as Operation Mongoose to bring about Castro's downfall, and the Kennedys authorized the CIA to do whatever was necessary to engineer a coup d'etat in Cuba. This led to serious assassination efforts but also cartoonish schemes such as exploding cigars since Castro was addicted to the tobacco leaf. The CIA even worked with Mafia chieftains to arrange for Castro's demise; political bedfellows were rarely stranger, but La Cosa Nostra (another name for the Mafia)25 had lost many millions of dollars when Batista fell. The Cuban expatriates in south Florida were willing partners, too.26 Meanwhile, despite his disillusionment with the Soviet Union and return to the United States, Oswald made contact with the local Russian diaspora in Fort Worth, Texas. Oswald had personal reasons for doing so. Marina was homesick and did not speak much English, and Lee was now used to Slavic people and their ways. Soon Oswald became friends with a peripatetic baron named George de Mohrenschildt, whose life sounds like something out of a James Bond novel. His father, a wealthy Russian nobleman, managed to escape from a Soviet prison where he was sent after denouncing the Bolshevik Revolution. He then moved his family from Minsk to a posh estate in Poland, where George spent his youth. While still in his twenties, George left Europe to tour the United States and managed to become friendly with some of America's East Coast elites, including a family named Bouvier, whose daughter Jacqueline would one day become First Lady, and another family named Bush. George H. W. Bush's nephew roomed with de Mohrenschildt at Phillips Academy.27 In the years that followed, de Mohrenschildt became involved in intelligence operations. During World War II he gathered information on pro-German activity in the United States for the French government; there are allegations that he was spying for the Nazis at the same time, but these have never been proven. In 1942 he shared a house with a senior naval officer and a British intelligence agent in Washington and offered his services to the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA), which turned him down because of the double-agent rumor. During the 1950s, de Mohrenschildt worked for the International Cooperation Administration, a CIA-sponsored subsidiary of the Agency for International Development. In the early 1960s, while touring Central America and the Caribbean, he was photographed with the American ambassador to Costa Rica. In addition, de Mohrenschildt and his wife visited Guatemala, which was a strategic launching site for CIA-backed Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs.

Some think the CIA, which at times almost certainly had some sort of relationship with de Mohrenschildt, used him to make contact with Oswald. The baron himself, however, denied the connection, insisting that no "government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important."28 The full truth is especially elusive, but de Mohrenschildt's acquaintance with Lee Oswald is curious. For someone dismissed as an obvious loser of little consequence, Oswald kept popping up in the company of well-connected individuals such as de Mohrenschildt.29 De Mohrenschildt introduced Oswald to Michael and Ruth Paine, two political leftists who were out of place in Texas's conservative milieu. Although separated, the Paines took an interest in Marina and Lee and began inviting them to social functions.30 Michael Paine worked as an engineer for Bell Helicopter, a job that required a security clearance; his stepfather, Arthur Young, had designed the first Bell helicopter. His estranged wife was a Quaker pacifist who had reached out to Dallas's Russian community in order to practice her language skills. The Paines were initially enthusiastic about their relationship with the Oswalds. Michael was keen to meet an American defector perhaps because his father was a devoted Trotskyite. Ruth was excited about conversing in Russian with a native speaker.

But the Paines soon realized the Oswalds were a family in crisis. Lee had a hard time keeping a job, and Marina began complaining to Ruth about her husband's meager salary and low sex drive. Even worse, it became apparent that Oswald mistreated his wife to the point of physical abuse. Ruth felt sorry for Marina and did all she could to help.31 In early 1963 the mercurial Oswald went on a gun-buying spree. Using an alias (A. Hidell), he ordered a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver from a Los Angeles mail order company and a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from another mail order outfit in Chicago. Both guns arrived in March. One sunny afternoon, Oswald asked his wife to take a picture of him with his weapons. Although bemused and a little frightened by the request, Marina agreed and snapped at least three photos that have since become iconic images.32 Oswald is dressed in black, holding the rifle in one hand and two left-wing magazines in the other with the Smith & Wesson hanging from his hip. Over the years, conspiracy theorists have claimed that the photos were faked by someone attempting to frame Oswald. But in the late 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, assisted by photography experts, verified their legitimacy. By any measure, this is a disturbing picture: a troubled man who had perhaps already decided to promote his ideology, as Mao had argued, with the power that comes from the barrel of a gun.33 The same week that Oswald asked Marina to take the photograph, he learned that he had been fired from his job at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, a Dallas cartography company that occasionally did classified work for the U.S. government. Unemployed, unhappily married, and at odds with American society and values, Oswald decided to act in dramatic fashion. On April 10, 1963, he left his apartment shortly after dinner without telling his wife where he was going. When he failed to return at a reasonable hour, Marina went to his room and found a note that contained a list of grim instructions.

"Send the information as to what has happened to me to the [Soviet] Embassy and include newspaper clippings," the note read. "I believe that the Embassy will come quickly to your assistance on learning everything." The note also said that she could "throw out" or give away his clothing, but requested that she hang on to his "personal papers." Oswald had decided to end his life in a blaze of glory: "If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located ... right in the beginning of the city after crossing the bridge." Where had he gone? Marina told the Warren Commission that Lee came home that night looking "very pale." "And he told me not to ask him any questions," she testified. "He only told me he had shot at General Walker."34 Major General Edwin A. Walker was a member of the extremist John Birch Society, which had declared at one point that President Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander during World War II, was a "Communist" or a "stooge."35 Walker had retired from the army after being accused of indoctrinating his troops with right-wing propaganda. After leaving the military, he moved to Dallas and settled in a large house in an upscale area. In the spring of 1962, he challenged Governor John Connally in the Democratic gubernatorial primary and received around 10 percent of the vote. Not to put too fine a point on it, Walker was a racist and arch-segregationist, and he called for thousands of civilian volunteers to march on Oxford when the African American James Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962. In the wake of the violence at Ole Miss, he was arrested and charged with instigating a riot. The authorities eventually released Walker on a $50,000 bond.

Volkmar Schmidt, a friend of George de Mohrenschildt's who also associated with the Russian expatriates, believes a conversation he had with Lee Oswald one night may have convinced him to take a potshot at Walker and later, JFK. Schmidt says that an academic acquaintance had told him that showing empathy toward troubled individuals sometimes brought them back to reality. Schmidt says he employed this tactic during a conversation with Oswald because he considered him to be a "very disturbed man" and "totally desperate." "When I heard how hateful he was towards Kennedy and Cuba ... I tried to say 'hey, there's something much more real to be concerned about, because I don't know about Castro, but I know about this Walker, he's kind of a Nazi, yeah?' " Schmidt said during a 1995 interview.36 "Not so bad as those Nazis in Germany, but I had specifically mentioned to ... Oswald that Walker had given a speech to the students at the Mississippi campus and those guys went off and killed a couple of journalists." Schmidt says that he encouraged Oswald to "think about" the Walker incident and the importance of bringing "justice to the minorities" in a "constructive" fashion. Schmidt thinks Oswald may have decided then and there to assassinate Walker: "Actually, a few days after I talked with him, he bought his weapons," Schmidt says.37 On April 10, 1963, the available evidence suggests that Oswald used his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to shoot at Walker while the general was sitting at his desk at home. Aiming from a nearby parking lot, Oswald fired a bullet that passed through a wooden window cross strip as well as a masonry wall, and it fell harmlessly onto some papers. Marina testified that Lee wasn't sure if he had hit Walker and seemed disappointed the next day when he learned from newspapers that the general was unharmed. Some assassination researchers do not believe that Oswald ever attempted to kill Walker. Mark Lane, for example, points to a photograph of Walker's house, later found in Oswald's belongings, which allegedly changed over the course of the JFK investigation. Marina said that when she first saw the photograph, it included an image of a license plate that was later covered over with a "black spot," which raises the question of whether the FBI, which at one point gained possession of the photo, tried to hide the identity of the true assassin.38 In the unlikely event the FBI undertook such a deception, we would be forced to discount a good deal of Marina's other testimony about the Walker matter-much of it compelling and accompanied by circumstantial evidence such as Oswald's note to his wife.39 Marina claimed that Oswald had told her that, contrary to Volkmar Schmidt's belief that he had planted the idea in Lee's mind, he (Lee) had been planning the Walker murder for two months and that he had waited until a church next door to Walker held services so that his comings and goings would attract less attention. Further, while the FBI could not absolutely say that the bullet found in Walker's home came from Oswald's rifle, the grooves on the bullet were consistent with Oswald's rifle.40 Marina shared a second tale with the Warren Commission that is quite revealing. Several days after the Walker incident, she said, Lee was reading the morning newspaper when he suddenly decided to change into a "good suit." When Marina saw him tucking a pistol into his belt, she asked him where he was going. "Nixon is coming," Lee replied, indicating that the former vice president was going to be in Dallas. "I want to go and have a look." Marina immediately called her husband into the bathroom and tearfully "told him that he shouldn't do this, that he had promised me." "I remember that I held him. We actually struggled for several minutes and then he quieted down. I remember that I told him that if he goes out it would be better for him to kill me than to go out."41 Actually, Nixon was not in Dallas, and the reasons for Oswald's bizarre behavior remain unclear. Marina guessed he staged the incident to torment her.

This episode suggests again that Oswald had entered a violence-prone phase, with his deep-seated personal anger being directed at political figures from General Walker to former vice president Nixon. These were two conservatives, while Kennedy was-in the context of the times-a moderate to liberal Democrat, and possibly more acceptable to Oswald ideologically, though the Kennedy administration's posture toward Castro may have negated any advantage JFK had. Over the next six months, it is not much of a stretch to imagine that Oswald's inner fury about the course of his life, and the threatening resentment he was manifesting toward those in positions of influence, could have expanded to include anyone at society's pinnacle, certainly a president.42 It is difficult to get a good read on Oswald's views and state of mind, especially in his final months, because he mainly kept to himself. Wesley Buell Frazier, Oswald's co-worker at the Book Depository and car pool companion, never noticed anything unusual about his friend's behavior at the office. "Lee was a very professional guy," Frazier told me. "[But] he wasn't the type of person to come up and initiate a conversation. If you asked him something, he would answer you. The only time he would initiate something at work was when he was reading the invoice and he wasn't quite sure about the book or where it was. Then he'd come ask me." Frazier also noted that some co-workers made fun of Oswald's chilly demeanor, and that his occasional attempts to fit in, by playing cards or the like, often fell flat.43 The Nixon incident and the attempt on Walker's life, however, are two of the most convincing indicators that Oswald was capable of considering or trying to carry out high-level political murder. Yet such a conclusion does not address the larger concern about possible accomplices for Oswald from governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations in more than one city. New Orleans, as well as Dallas, has provided tales of JFK assassination conspiracies. Not long after the attempted Walker murder, Oswald traveled to the Crescent City, planning to move his family there. While looking for a job and residence in New Orleans, Oswald moved in with his uncle, Charles "Dutz" Murret, a small-time hustler and bookie for Carlos Marcello, New Orleans's premier Mafia boss. According to an FBI informant (a businessman code-named SV T-1), Oswald received money from a man who was later identified as Joseph Poretto, one of Marcello's chief lieutenants. Had the informant misidentified, or correctly recognized, Poretto and Oswald? Was SV T-1 even telling the truth?44 Murret testified before the Warren Commission that he was the only one who had lent his nephew money. In any case, we know that Oswald had enough to rent a $65-per-month apartment shortly after arriving in New Orleans. He also found a job at the William B. Reily Coffee Co., which paid him $1.50 per hour to grease the fittings on its machinery.

In early May, Marina and the Oswalds' infant daughter joined Lee. Ruth Paine drove them down from Dallas in her station wagon. After Paine left, Oswald wrote to the national headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro organization, requesting permission to set up an FPCC chapter in New Orleans. Too impatient to wait for an answer, Oswald went to a local print shop and ordered a thousand handbills with the words "Hands Off Cuba! Join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, New Orleans Charter Member Branch" printed on them. Oswald first distributed his handbills on June 16, 1963, but stopped after a policeman ordered him to move on. As his activities continued later in the summer, Oswald became a minor news curiosity in New Orleans, was filmed by New Orleans TV news, and even debated U.S.Cuba policy on a local radio show.45 But gradually, continuing a pattern seen before, Oswald lost interest in the FPCC and his life in the Big Easy. He was unable to hold onto his job at the Reily Coffee Company for long; according to his supervisor, Oswald frequently played hooky at a nearby service station called the Crescent City Garage. In 1978, fifteen years after JFK's assassination, the garage's owner, Adrian Alba, came forward with an account about a man he believed was an FBI agent from Washington. According to Alba, the man flashed bureau credentials and requisitioned a green Studebaker. Alba's garage maintained some of the FBI's unmarked cars. The next day, Alba claimed he saw the Studebaker pull up in front of the coffee company. "Lee Oswald went across the sidewalk," Alba testified, "He bent down as if to look in the window and was handed what appeared to be a good-sized envelope, a white envelope. He turned and bent as if to hold the envelope to his abdomen, and I think he put it under his shirt. Oswald then went back into the building, and the car drove off." Alba also said that the man met Oswald a second time and returned the Studebaker a few days later. When asked why he hadn't come forward with the information earlier, Alba said that he had forgotten about it until he saw a television commercial one day that featured a man leaning in a car window.46 Alba's tardy yarn could be easily dismissed, save for the considerable evidence linking Oswald to the FBI and other secretive organizations. In late July 1963, having lost his coffee job and learning that the Marines had rejected his request to have his honorable discharge reinstated, Oswald resumed his role as a New Orleans street preacher for Fidel Castro.47 At the same time, he made an attempt to infiltrate the enemy camp by posing as an anti-Castro activist. On August 5, 1963, Oswald walked into a store owned by an anti-Castro militant, Carlos Bringuier, and claimed to be a former Marine willing to train anti-Castro Cubans for combat. The next day, Oswald gave Bringuier a copy of a Marine Corps manual as proof of his credentials. A few days later, however, Bringuier learned from a friend about Oswald's previous role in handing out pro-Castro leaflets. Enraged by the deception, Bringuier immediately left his shop and went to confront Oswald. The two men caused a scene on a city sidewalk that drew a crowd. Oswald and Bringuier (and two of Bringuier's fellow Cubans) were arrested for disorderly conduct.

While still in jail, Oswald demanded to speak with the FBI. In what many say is a suspicious response, the agency granted his request and, within a matter of hours, sent Special Agent John Quigley to see him. How Oswald was able to summon an FBI agent and whether he had a "special relationship" with the agency, as some have suggested, are unanswerable questions. Perhaps Quigley was merely conducting a routine interview with a person he knew had defected to the Soviet Union (the FBI admits it kept an extensive file on Oswald prior to 11/22). Though it is much more of a stretch, some JFK assassination conspiracy backers think the confrontation with Bringuier could have been an orchestrated ruse designed to shore up Oswald's Communist bona fides before he murdered Kennedy. The narrative becomes even more complicated because of Bringuier's CIA-tinged background. Bringuier was the New Orleans representative of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE for short), an anti-Castro student group with ties to the CIA.48 Perhaps one could make the argument that Lee Oswald, in an attempt to live up to his imagined importance, sought out exciting figures in society's shadows. Maybe also, by coincidence, the CIA and FBI had a presence everywhere Oswald happened to be in the early 1960s. It could be that Oswald was just a Forrest Gumplike character who popped up at interesting moments wherever he happened to live. But just as conceivably, whether related to the Kennedy assassination or not, Oswald actually had secretive contacts with the CIA, the FBI, or both.49 Consider the address found on some of Oswald's pro-Castro literature-544 Camp Street. According to assassination researcher Jim Marrs, "It was at 544 Camp Street in an old, three-story office building that the paths of Lee Harvey Oswald, the FBI, the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, and organized crime figures all crossed." The Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), another anti-Castro organization sponsored by the CIA, rented an office at 544 Camp Street right before Oswald moved back to New Orleans. Guy Banister, a former FBI agent who kept files on New Orleans's left-wing organizations, rented space at the same location. According to Delphine Roberts, Banister's secretary and mistress, Oswald met with her boss on several occasions in New Orleans. "He seemed to be on familiar terms with Banister and with the office," she said. "As I understood it he had the use of an office on the second floor, above the main office where we worked. I was not greatly surprised when I learned he was going up and down, back and forth. Then, several times, Mr. Banister brought me upstairs, and in the office above I saw various writings stuck up on the wall pertaining to ... Fair Play for Cuba." Roberts may or may not be revealing the full story. She has previously received money for this information and once told an interviewer that she did not consistently tell "all the truth." Yet there are other witnesses who say that Banister and Oswald knew each other. For example, William Gaudet, "a CIA asset in New Orleans of many years," told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he saw Banister and Oswald chatting on a street corner.50 Also stirring Oswald conspiracy talk is Guy Banister's alleged links to an enigmatic, bizarre figure, David Ferrie, a pilot suffering from bipolar disorder who lost his job at Eastern Airlines after being accused of molesting a fifteen-year-old boy. Afflicted with a rare medical condition that causes severe hair loss, Ferrie was sometimes seen wearing a red wig and fake eyebrows. A staunch anticommunist, he trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles for raids against Castro and sometimes even flew missions into Cuba. His anticommunist activities in New Orleans apparently brought him into contact with Guy Banister, Carlos Marcello, and William Gaudet. Ferrie supposedly bought weapons from mob boss Marcello and turned them over to Banister and CIA asset Gaudet, who in turn passed them on to Cuban exiles.

Robert Morrow, the author of a heavily criticized autobiography entitled First Hand Knowledge, claims that he and Ferrie flew to Cuba in 1961 looking for Soviet missile sites. The following year, says Morrow, when Kennedy refused to invade Cuba during the missile crisis, the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans began plotting his assassination, and the mob provided financing for the operation. Morrow also says that the CIA ordered him to buy Mannlicher-Carcano rifles from a surplus store in Maryland that he was told would be used to assassinate a South American dictator. He allegedly gave three of the rifles to David Ferrie. The Dallas police found a Carcano rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Did Ferrie give Oswald one of Morrow's rifles? The claim does not hold up to scrutiny. Morrow says that he purchased 7.35-millimeter rifles, while the weapon found at the Book Depository was a 6.5-millimeter Carcano. To date, Morrow has not produced any documents verifying his story. Robert Blakey, chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, puts little stock in Morrow's version of events. "It's established beyond all reasonable doubt," insists Blakey, "that the Cubans were connected to the mob, and the mob was connected to the CIA, but the president that they were trying to assassinate was Castro, not Kennedy."51 On the other hand, it is a well-established fact that Ferrie and Oswald crossed paths on at least one occasion. In 1993 a photograph surfaced showing a teenaged Oswald and a middle-aged Ferrie together at a 1955 Civil Air Patrol cookout.52 Soon after the Kennedy assassination, Ferrie denied ever knowing Oswald, and the FBI and Warren Commission accepted his statement at face value. In the late 1960s, however, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison interviewed six people who said that they had seen Ferrie and Oswald together at a voter registration office in Clinton, Mississippi. According to these witnesses, Oswald and Ferrie and an unknown third man showed up at the office in September 1963 driving a black Cadillac. The three men were memorable since there were few white faces at the registration drive sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and witnesses testified that one of the men was wearing a curious wig and fake eyebrows. According to Henry Palmer, Clinton's registrar, Lee Oswald handed him a Navy ID card and tried to register to vote, but Palmer turned down the request on the grounds that Oswald had not lived in the area long enough. Oswald thanked Palmer before leaving with the two men. Garrison was known for questionable tactics and highly criticized for his conduct before and during the trial.53 Did he coach these witnesses into telling a lie, or had they actually encountered Oswald et al. two months before the assassination?54 If Oswald and Ferrie really were together in Clinton, then it suggests a closer relationship that the Warren Commission should have examined.

Assassination researchers frequently encounter chronicles that seem promising on the surface but end up leading nowhere or raising a host of unanswerable questions. One of them involves Silvia and Annie Odio, who believe they saw Oswald in the company of anti-Castro Cubans two months before the assassination. The Odio sisters claim that during the last week of September 1963, three men-one Caucasian and two Latinos-visited Silvia's apartment in Dallas. "The taller, more vocal man gave his 'war name,' or Cuban underground alias, as 'Leopoldo.' Silvia recalled the name of the shorter, stockier man with glasses as 'Angelo' or 'Angel.' The third man, their 'gringo American' friend, said little." The two Latino men said that they were members of the Cuban resistance movement and that they were friends with the girls' father, Amador Odio, another anti-Castro activist who was then being held in a Cuban prison. According to Silvia, Leopoldo introduced his white companion as "Leon Oswald" and asked for help in raising money for an organization known as JURE (Junta Revolucionaria Cubana). When Silvia gave a cagey reply, the men departed. A day or two later, she says, Leopoldo called her and asked what she thought of the American. "I don't think anything," Silvia supposedly replied. "You know, our idea is to introduce him to the underground in Cuba because he is great, he is kind of nuts," Leopoldo continued. "He told us we don't have any guts, 'you Cubans,' because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that ..." Unnerved by the conversation, Silvia says she abruptly ended it and never heard from Leopoldo again. After the assassination, however, she said she recognized Lee Oswald as the white man who had visited her apartment.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Silvia's testimony was "essentially credible" and the Caucasian male she saw could have been Oswald. But as usual, it is not a perfect story. Annie Odio says that she did not hear the white man introduced as Leon Oswald. Silvia Odio also wavered when the Warren Commission showed her a photo of Oswald. "I think this man was the one that was in my apartment," she said. "I am not too sure of that picture."55 Unlike the House Committee, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald could not have been in the Odio house hold on the night in question because it was believed Oswald was in Mexico City at the time-although this assumption is disputed by some researchers, a few of whom insist it wasn't even Oswald who appeared in Mexico City.

There is considerable evidence that Oswald did indeed go to Mexico. Just two months before the assassination, Oswald's life was once again in shambles. He and Marina had decided to separate (she moved back in with Ruth Paine), and he was unemployed. The job at the coffee company, for all its shortcomings, had at least put bread on the table for a while. Oswald had become a desperate man. The Warren Commission said he went looking for aid at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City.56 Silvia Duran, a Mexican national who spoke English, worked as a secretary at the embassy and remembered the day (Friday, September 27, 1963) that Oswald walked in the front door. He told her that he was on his way to the Soviet Union, wanted to spend a few weeks in Cuba beforehand, and needed to obtain a transit visa.57 Oswald showed her his American Communist Party and Fair Play for Cuba Committee membership cards, documents from his time in the Soviet Union, and a newspaper clipping of his arrest in New Orleans. Duran informed Oswald that he would still need to fill out an application and submit passport-sized photographs before he would be granted a visa. Oswald left in a huff but returned an hour later with the photos. He then demanded that the embassy immediately issue him a visa. Duran suggested that he talk to the Soviet embassy-if the Soviets gave him permission to visit the USSR, she said, the Cuban government could expedite his request.

Enraged by the delay, Oswald caused a scene that brought the Cuban consul, Eusebio Azcue, out of his office. After a brief shouting match, Azcue asked Oswald to leave. Undeterred, Oswald made the short trip over to the Russian embassy two blocks away and demanded a Soviet visa. When told that it would take at least four months to process his request, the former Marine shouted, "This won't do for me! This is not my case! For me, it's all going to end in tragedy!" He was escorted off the premises, but returned the next day. During an interview with one Soviet official, Oswald claimed that the FBI was after him and that he carried a gun for protection. The official was startled when Oswald suddenly produced a .38-caliber revolver and waved it in the air. "See?" said Oswald, "This is what I must now carry to protect my life." The official was able to seize the revolver and remove its bullets. When Oswald learned that his request for a quick visa had been turned down, he became depressed. He retreated from the Soviet embassy but decided to press the Cubans one last time. After becoming embroiled in another heated argument with Azcue, Oswald left the Cuban embassy and never returned.58 Without question, someone showed up in the Cuban and Russian embassies claiming to be Lee Oswald, but was he actually an Oswald impostor? The CIA may have the answer. In 1963, unsurprisingly, the agency had self-operating surveillance cameras that took photographs of persons coming in and out of the Cuban and Soviet embassies. On October 9, 1963, the Mexico City CIA station received word from "a sensitive source" that a man named Lee Oswald had been in contact with the local Soviet consulate. According to the CIA, the name "Oswald" meant nothing to the Mexico City station, but it forwarded the report to the CIA's Langley headquarters anyway. Langley checked its files and cabled a perfunctory reply that contained only the basic facts of the Oswald case-he had defected to Russia, married a Soviet woman, and returned to the United States after realizing that he had made a mistake.59 On October 10, a memo went out to the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the State Department, and the Navy that described Oswald as a six-foot-tall thirty-five-year-old with an athletic build and a receding hairline. The real-life Oswald was a thin, undernourished twenty-three-year-old who was no taller than five feet nine.60 Supposedly, the bogus description was the result of a clerical error: An agent in Mexico City had mistakenly attached Oswald's name to a photograph of another man.61q CIA's casual handling of the Oswald case and misleading cables convinced the FBI to remove Oswald's name from a security watch list.62 Perhaps the CIA's explanation should be accepted. After all, federal bureaucrats routinely make slipups, put innocent people on no-fly lists, misplace Social Security records, and the like. But the more one studies the possible relationship of Oswald to the CIA, the more legitimate doubts spring forth. First, the CIA was never able to produce an actual photo of Oswald coming in or out of the Soviet or Cuban embassies. The agency's official explanation is that its cameras were not designed to take pictures around the clock and that Oswald must have visited the embassies in between photo sessions. This account is confounding. Oswald went in and out of the two embassies under surveillance at least five times at widely varying hours, and yet we are asked to believe the spy cameras were not able to capture a single image of him. Espionage in the early 1960s wasn't the science that James Bond thrillers would lead us to assume, but automatic cameras were neither rare nor complicated at that time-and these were the top priority diplomatic missions maintained by America's foremost enemies.

The story becomes stranger still when considering Daniel Watson's testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Watson was the deputy chief of the Mexico City CIA station between 1967 and 1969. He told the House Committee that Winston Scott, Mexico City's station chief in the early 1960s, "had a personal private safe in which he maintained especially sensitive materials." When Scott died in 1971, James Angleton, the controversial director of the CIA's top level counterintelligence unit,63 personally flew to Mexico City in order to clean out Scott's safe. Although the House Committee staff were able to inspect what they were told were the safe's contents seven years after Angleton's trip (and did not find anything incriminating in what they were given), it is highly unusual, to say the least, for someone of Angleton's influence to fly abroad to clean out a station chief's safe.64 Also, it is becoming increasingly clear that the CIA had pertinent records on Oswald at the highest levels by the fall of 1963-information well beyond what the bare-bones memo sent to the Mexico City station suggested the CIA knew about Oswald. According to Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter who has spent years investigating the CIA, agency officials "were deliberately concealing from Win Scott all they knew about Lee Harvey Oswald." Morley and another researcher, the University of Maryland history professor John Newman, who once worked as a military intelligence officer, have spent countless hours piecing together the CIA's paper trail. They interviewed Jane Roman, the CIA officer who had originally signed off on the bland 1963 cable to Mexico City. After showing Roman several routing slips that proved three FBI reports on Oswald had circulated through Langley's offices in 1962 and 1963, Newman asked, "Is this the mark of a person's file who's dull and uninteresting?" "No, we're really trying to zero in on somebody here [Oswald]," Roman admitted. The reports included information on Oswald's interview with the FBI-when he refused to take a lie detector test, his activities on behalf of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and his scuffle with Bringuier and the two other DRE Cubans on the streets of New Orleans. None of this information made it into the memo to Mexico, which was approved by several top CIA officials including Tom Karamessines, the former Athens station chief, and William Hood, chief of covert operations for the Western Hemisphere.65 Other documents seem to have vanished into thin air. Agent Raymond Rocca remembered at least one other Oswald-related cable that came in to Langley from Mexico City that has since gone missing. In 1978, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations showed the agent a cable dated October 9, 1963, Rocca said, "It is my impression that there were earlier cables, that there was an earlier cable."66 In addition, CIA officials undeniably withheld important information on Oswald from the Warren Commission. Under a top secret program known as HT/LINGUAL, agents intercepted Oswald's correspondence during his time in the Soviet Union. When members of the Warren Commission inquired about a letter Marguerite sent to her son in 1961 (which was intercepted and read by Langley), they were told that the letter contained "no information of real significance." CIA's own documents, however, show that the letter was passed along to at least one high-ranking official with the message, "This item will be of interest to Mrs. Egerter, CI/SIG, and also to the FBI." "CI/SIG" refers to CIA's Special Investigations Group, which was part of the agency's counterintelligence division.67 The pieces of the Oswald puzzle stamped CIA may be ill-fitting, but they could reasonably create a portrait of covert action. CIA headquarters might have found a good use for Oswald and would not have wanted to share how much they knew about this particular asset with lower-level employees or foreign country stations.68 This reasonable interpretation of the evidence does not require a belief that a "rogue element" near the top of the CIA was preparing Oswald to assassinate Kennedy. It is more likely that the agency could have viewed Oswald as a malleable potential low-level operative with an unusual combination of background experiences and contacts, including firsthand knowledge of the Soviet Union, pro-Castro elements, and anti-Castro Cubans. At the least, despite his hotheaded nature, he could infiltrate and report about targeted groups. Oswald's shady past, shaky economic situation, and seditious political views meant that the CIA held all the cards. Oswald was needy for money and attention, and he had an insatiable desire to feel important. After Kennedy's assassination, the leadership of the CIA would have had the same motive as J. Edgar Hoover did at the FBI, to cover its tracks lest it be blamed for failing to spot and stop a potential presidential killer in its midst. To this day, the CIA remains tight-lipped about what it knew about Oswald, so much that journalist Morley has been forced to sue to gain access to potentially revealing CIA documents.

At the center of the CIA-Oswald puzzle is a deceased prominent figure in the agency, George Joannides. In the early 1960s, Joannides ran the psychological warfare branch at the CIA station in Miami, where he worked closely with the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE)-the same group Oswald crossed paths with in New Orleans. The CIA's own records show that Joannides paid DRE $18,000 to $25,000 a month while assisting the group in planning its operations. In addition, Joannides traveled to the other key Oswald city, New Orleans, on CIA business in 1963 and '64, although the details are unknown. At the time, DRE did everything it could to brand Oswald as a Communist.69 After the scuffle in New Orleans, Carlos Bringuier challenged Oswald to a radio debate and forwarded a tape of the debate to Joannides. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, DRE released incriminating documents that helped shape public opinion about Oswald. When Jeff Morley asked to see Joannides's reports, the CIA told him they never existed. "When a CIA case officer is running a group like that," the reporter says, "the standard operating procedure was to file what was called a monthly progress report. I've spoken to probably ten former CIA people and asked them, 'Is it possible that he [Joannides] didn't report about this group? And every person I talked to said, 'No, it's not possible. He reported on that group.' " Morley also wonders about Joannides's relationship with Karamessines, a fellow Greek American who approved the boilerplate message that went to Mexico City. All this leads to speculation that in the months leading up to the assassination, Karamessines and Joannides may have been grooming Oswald for an operation that involved DRE.

It is damning that the CIA withheld all information from the Warren Commission about Joannides's Cuban efforts as well as the agency's intense work to overthrow Fidel Castro-an undeniable possible motive for a counterassassination move against a U.S. president. This directly subverted the stated goals of the Warren Commission and denied to it the opportunity to more fully explain the events of November 22. In the 1960s, though, the CIA may have had the backing of President Johnson in its subterfuge. The Cold War was raging, and LBJ feared the American people would favor military retaliation if they suspected that Cuba or Russia was behind the assassination.70 What is far worse is that the CIA continued to refuse to provide this critical information when a new investigation of JFK's murder was organized in the mid-1970s, at a time when political conditions were very different and retaliatory war would have been unthinkable after the Vietnam debacle. Both the public and the Congress were demanding to know the full truth after more than a decade of deceit. However, the House Select Committee on Assassinations had no more luck in prying the truth out of the CIA in the seventies than the Warren Commission had in the sixties. The only reason we know anything at all about Joannides's connection to DRE is because of the Assassination Records Review Board, a federal panel assembled in response to Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK. Stone's incendiary charges of a CIA-led conspiracy to murder the president-however exaggerated or imagined they might have been-generated fierce demands from politicians and citizens for answers at long last.71 "At long last" is a relative term with the CIA. More than twenty years later, we are still awaiting the release of key documents from the agency on matters related to November 22. In 2005 the widely respected chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Robert Blakey, told a room full of assassination researchers in Bethesda, Maryland, that the CIA "set [him] up" in the late 1970s. Blakey revealed that the CIA called George Joannides out of retirement to serve as its liaison with the House Committee to "help it find and review CIA documents during its investigation." This was despite Blakey's agreement with the CIA that no one who had any connection to Oswald or assassination-related matters would be a part of the House Committee's investigation. In 2011 Blakey went further in an interview for this book: "Of course they [the CIA] lied to us. There's a federal statute that says what they did was a felony. Obstruction of a congressional investigation is a felony. They signed an agreement pledging full cooperation, and they broke the contract." "The CIA duped Blakey, and he admits it," commented the reporter Jefferson Morley. "This shows bad faith and [the CIA's] intent to hide something. That's why I don't give them the benefit of the doubt, because they had the chance to come clean [during the House investigation], and instead they created a mechanism where this whole thing would stay hidden for another forty years," until documents are finally released in 2017-assuming they still exist, have not been altered, or are not so heavily redacted as to be useless.72 It is even more outrageous than Morley suggests. Neither Joannides nor anyone else at the CIA ever told the House Committee that Joannides had worked with DRE in Miami and therefore had a clear conflict of interest. No one ever told the committee that within hours of Kennedy's assassination, Joannides gave the green light to Cuban exiles in Miami to unleash a propaganda campaign linking Oswald to Castro, which affected newspaper coverage.73 In addition, according to Blakey, Joannides "frequently blocked the efforts of the House panel's young researchers" when they tried to gain access to relevant CIA files. At the time, Blakey heeded the agency's request that he tighten the reins on his aggressive aides, a decision he now regrets. In a stunning evaluation that speaks volumes about the CIA's suspicious lack of candor throughout decades of investigation, Blakey flatly asserted, "I have no confidence in anything the agency told me."74 He added, "Many have told me that the culture of the agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story. I am now in that camp."75 CIA officials insist that they have been telling the truth all along and in 1981 awarded Joannides the Career Intelligence Medal, one of the agency's highest honors.76 Americans who have followed the CIA's postwar history instinctively suspect Blakey is correct. The paranoia of the nuclear age and the genuine threat posed by foreign enemies gave the CIA enormous and often little-supervised power.77 A Senate investigation headed by Idaho Democrat Frank Church in the 1970s revealed that even presidents did not have full control over what went on at the agency.78 A decade before the Church Committee convened-just a month after the assassination, in fact-former president Harry Truman, the man who oversaw the creation of the CIA, published a knowing editorial in the Washington Post on the agency's lack of accountability. "For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment," Truman revealed. "It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations."79 In a dangerous world, then and now, few serious people question the need for some kinds of counterintelligence and espionage. The CIA has proved its worth countless times, such as in the impressive operation in 2011 to find and kill Osama bin Laden. But Truman's wise words, and the CIA's actions before and after President Kennedy's assassination, are a reminder of the urgent need for close supervision, unceasing vigilance, and in some cases, complete transparency-even from a secret spy division of government.80 Another peculiar story involving the CIA and Oswald concerns audio-tapes made during Lee Oswald's trip to Mexico City. During the Cold War, American and Soviet intelligence agents routinely bugged each other's telephones, and the CIA in Mexico City had tapped the phones at the Cuban and Soviet embassies. The CIA maintains that it does not have any original recordings of the calls Oswald made to the Soviet embassy because it routinely erased low-priority conversations and then reused the tapes.81 Yet at least a couple of the "low-priority" calls involving Oswald (or an individual identified as Oswald) were important enough for the CIA to transcribe. On September 28, 1963, at 11:51 A.M., the CIA eavesdropped on a call made to the Soviet embassy in which Oswald tried to expedite his exit back to a Communist state. The American transcribers were native Russian speakers who described Oswald's attempt at the language as "terrible, hardly recognizable."82 Yet Oswald had studied Russian, spoke it at home, and lived in the Soviet Union for several years. On October 1, Oswald supposedly made another call to the Russian embassy. The same native Russian transcribers (Boris and Anna Tarasoff) testified that the male voice heard on the September 28 and October 1 tapes are from the same person, whether Oswald or someone else. In the wake of the assassination, FBI agents who listened to the tapes were convinced that the voice was not Oswald's. These agents also saw the CIA's photograph of "Oswald" and knew immediately the picture was not of the same man arrested in Dallas. On November 23, 1963, J. Edgar Hoover called the Oval Office: JOHNSON: Have you established anymore about the [Oswald] visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico in September?

HOOVER: No, that's one angle that's very confusing for this reason. We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy, using Oswald's name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man's voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears there was a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy.83 Thus, the director of the FBI flatly contradicted the claim of the CIA that no tapes of the September 1963 events in Mexico City were preserved. J. Edgar Hoover unmistakably acknowledged the existence of at least one tape, and that FBI personnel had listened to it, determining that the voice (and photograph) were not Oswald's. (Hoover's assertion is backed up by two attorneys for the Warren Commission, who say a representative of the CIA played the tapes for them in early 1964.) So who was impersonating Oswald on the phone in Mexico City? Was this a CIA agent fishing for more information about Oswald's intentions? Was it a CIA attempt to further tie Oswald to the Communists prior to an attempt on President Kennedy's life? Or is it something else entirely? In addition, what actually happened to the tapes of Oswald or his impersonator? When were they lost or destroyed, and by whom?

It would also be very useful to know more about the LBJ-Hoover chat, and where it led, but (foreshadowing the infamous 18-minute gap in a key tape of President Nixon during the Watergate scandal84) there is a 14-minute gap in the tape of the conversation. In 1999, the researcher Rex Bradford requested this significant tape from the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. "And then something very funny happened," Bradford says. "[The librarian] said, 'Well, you know, that tape is very poor quality, hard to listen to, you see, he was using his vice presidential taping equipment, you don't really want that tape.' And I said, '... I have audio engineering friends, we can probably do something.' " Bradford says that after the librarian reluctantly sent him the cassette tape, he played it and heard "fourteen minutes of pure hiss" in the middle of the conversation, as though that portion had been erased. Bradford is skeptical of the librarian's explanation because the other phone calls on the tape, presumably recorded with the same vice presidential equipment, were "just fine."85 Other tapes related to the assassination have disappeared altogether or had significant portions erased under mysterious circumstances. Anne Goodpasture, a CIA operative who worked with Win Scott (Mexico City's station chief), told a reporter in 2005 that she thought Scott had made a copy of Oswald's taped conversation with Soviet embassy officials and "squirreled it away in his safe." A subsequent lawsuit filed by Scott's son Michael revealed that his father's safe did indeed contain audiotapes, which further highlights James Angleton's personal visit to Mexico City to clean out Scott's safe shortly after he died, taking the contents with him back to D.C. It was the last anyone outside the CIA would see or hear of that tape-vital evidence that also has significant historical value. The question is why. What was Angleton trying to conceal?86 qThis individual, whose picture is shown on page, has never been identified.

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