A Cruel and Shocking Act by Philip Shenon

Author:Philip Shenon [Shenon, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2013-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

35

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

MAY 1964

At their late-night staff dinners, Specter and some of the other young lawyers began to mock the commissioners. They joked about “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” with Warren and the other commissioners in the role of the dwarfs. “Snow White was alternatively Marina or Jacqueline Kennedy,” Specter said. “Warren was Grumpy,” while Congressman Boggs of Louisiana was “Happy” because he sometimes arrived in the commission’s office after “having had several cocktails late in the afternoon.” Specter thought that Dulles qualified either as “Sleepy” or “Dopey,” given the former spymaster’s strange, sometimes barely coherent presence.

Slawson, the staff lawyer who worked with Dulles most closely, was increasingly convinced that Dulles, seventy-one years old, was demonstrating signs of senility, perhaps brought on by his humiliating public ouster from the CIA after the Bay of Pigs debacle. Dulles often dozed off at commission hearings, and his gout seemed to get no better over the months of the investigation. When Malcolm Perry, the emergency-room doctor from Parkland Hospital in Dallas, arrived in the commission’s offices to give testimony in March, he was pulled aside by Dulles, who asked if Perry had any suggestions for his painful feet. “Sorry, it’s not my field,” the startled Perry told him.

Over time, Specter came to agree with Slawson that Dulles may have forgotten much of what he knew about American intelligence operations directed against Castro and other foreign adversaries who might have wanted to see Kennedy dead. And it was possible, he thought, that Dulles never knew some of the agency’s most closely held secrets; his deputies could have kept the information from him, maybe even at his request, to allow him plausible deniability. When Dulles joined the commission, “everybody thought he was really smart,” Specter said. “He turned out to be a nit.”

Dulles did, unintentionally, bring lighthearted moments to some of the commission’s otherwise most somber hearings. Specter recalled having to struggle to avoid laughing when, during an examination of vials that contained two metal fragments removed from Kennedy’s body, Dulles stopped the proceedings with the startling announcement that actually the vial contained four fragments, not two. The FBI agent who attended the session “raced from one end of the table to the other to inspect the contents of the vials,” Specter recalled. “The agent took two of the fragments and crushed them between his fingers.”

“No, Mr. Dulles,” the agent said in exasperation. “These are two flakes of tobacco that fell out of your pipe.”

Specter was not the only one to snicker, he recalled, when Dulles became confused during the testimony of Dr. James Humes, the Bethesda pathologist. In discussing what became of Kennedy’s clothes in Dallas, Humes explained how the president’s tie had been cut off at Parkland Hospital to help him breathe. Following procedure, the fabric was cut to the left of the loop. “Dulles may have been distracted, or maybe he’d dozed off,” Specter said, because when Humes held up the two pieces of the obviously expensive blue-pattered

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