16

WHO ACTUALLY PULLED the triggers had never interested me as much as who organized, paid for, and benefited from the assassination of John Kennedy. But the fact that so many suspects in and around Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, had been allowed to go free by the Dallas authorities interested me a great deal. If those suspects had been properly detained and questioned, I felt, one of them might well have led authorities to the planners behind the assassination.

From Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig and other witnesses I already knew about the exodus of three suspicious men from the Book Depository shortly after the fatal shots were fired. The vehicle they departed in was a Nash Rambler station wagon, light in color, with a luggage rack on top. During the shooting it was parked on Houston Street, adjacent to the back entrance of the Depository and facing north—the wrong direction for traffic on Houston. No one observed a driver sitting in it while it was parked.

After the shooting was over, the three men came running out of the back entrance of the Depository and poured into the station wagon. It headed north on Houston so fast that one door still was flapping open. From Craig I knew that it circled back, pausing right in front of the Depository to pick up another young man. This young man jumped into the station wagon, which quickly sped off.

The astonishing thing about this brief trip was not that law enforcement officials did not interfere but that the station wagon’s movements were so bold. They suggested that the driver virtually anticipated no interference. In fact, the average American encounters more trouble driving downtown on an ordinary mid-afternoon than this driver encountered driving rapidly in the wrong direction on a one-way street at the scene of the murder of the President of the United States. Roger Craig’s report of this incident to Dallas Homicide Chief Will Fritz, it will be recalled, got nowhere. No one even bothered to check on who owned the station wagon.

Witnesses behind the presidential motorcade heard shooting not only from the Book Depository but also from the Dal-Tex Building near Houston and Elm. At least one man arrested immediately after the shooting had come running out of the Dal-Tex Building and offered no explanation for his presence there. Local authorities hardly could avoid arresting him because of the clamor of the onlookers. He was taken to the Sheriff’s office, where he was held for questioning. However, the Sheriff’s office made no record of the questions asked this suspect, if any were asked; nor did it have a record of his name. Later two uniformed police officers escorted him out of the building to the jeers of the waiting crowd. They put him in the police car, and he was driven away. Apparently this was his farewell to Dallas, for he simply disappeared forever.

Another man was arrested at the Dal-Tex Building. According to Dallas law enforcement authorities, he gave his name as Jim Braden and was released after being checked out. Astonishingly, this time the federal government offered a considerable amount of information about the suspect. His real name, it was said, was Eugene Hale Brading, and he was an ex-convict with a history of several dozen arrests. In the several months before the assassination he had begun using the name Jim Braden, under which his oil business in Los Angeles was listed. He explained to authorities that he had been in Dallas on business, with the approval of his parole officer. Only a few days earlier, he had had an appointment with one of the sons of H.L. Hunt, the oil billionaire. Braden had been in the Dal-Tex Building at the time of the assassination, he claimed, because he wanted to make a phone call. When he discovered the pay phone there was out of order, he walked out to find himself arrested.

This story contained several provocative leads to what I now recognized as “false sponsors”[59] of the assassination. Not only had the man’s explanation for being in the Dal-Tex Building been vague, but he had a long arrest record with connections evocative of “organized crime,” the number one false sponsor that the media vaguely alluded to; and his trail led to H.L. Hunt, a representative of the “Southwest oil magnates,” the number two false sponsor that always seemed to come up. After sustained analysis, however, it was clear that Braden’s contribution to the assassination was a large zero. This, I concluded, was probably the reason why his name—and his alone of all the suspects—was made available to the public.

I was aware that the local authorities also had ignored suspects on the grassy knoll in front of the presidential motorcade. Long before, I had learned that Julia Ann Mercer had seen a man carrying a rifle case up the grassy knoll an hour before the assassination. Police officers standing on the nearby overpass observed what was happening and made no move to interfere. (See Chapters 2 and 17.)

Only much later did I learn of yet another suspect who got away immediately after the shooting by literally sliding down the back side of the grassy knoll to his car. Tom Tilson, an off-duty police officer, had heard about the shooting over his car radio and had seen the President’s car moving at high speed. As he drove near the overpass, he saw a man “slipping and sliding” down the slope west of the overpass, which was the far side from the Book Depository. This was the only man Officer Tilson could see running away from the shooting, so he watched him. The man came down against the side of a car parked there, threw something in the back seat, then jumped in the front seat and took off at high speed.

Tilson followed the car in a wild chase. When he got close enough, he called out the license number and the make and model of the car to his daughter riding with him. She wrote the information down, and after the car got away, he called it in to the Dallas homicide squad. But there was no response from homicide. Officer Tilson never heard another word about the suspect he had chased.

At the time I was looking into the matter of the escaped suspects, a computer consultant from New York named Richard E. Sprague contacted me. Sprague had collected and studied extensively many of the approximately 500 still photographs and motion pictures taken at Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination. He was particularly excited about several news photos that showed three men arrested in the railroad yard, behind the grassy knoll, being marched away by police armed with shotguns.

By studying many photos taken of the grassy knoll area to President Kennedy’s right front, Sprague had traced the flight of these three men to the empty boxcar in the railroad yard, in which they were caught after running from the knoll. I recalled these men from the testimony of Sergeant Harkness before the Warren Commission. (See Chapter 2.) The “tramps and hoboes,” as Harkness described them, had been taken from a boxcar just as the freight train, by luck or planning, was starting to pull out of the railroad yard. The moving train had been stopped by the switchman, Lee Bowers, with controls in his 14-foot tower, allowing pursuing police to climb aboard the boxcar. According to Harkness, the three suspects “were taken down to the station and questioned.” Yet no record of these suspects existed—no names, no mug shots, no fingerprints, no nitrate tests. Somewhere along the line, they too had been set free by Dallas authorities.

The photos of the “tramps” had been taken by news photographers William Allen of the Dallas Times Herald and Joe Smith of the Fort Worth Star[60] as the suspects were marched by the Book Depository, presumably on their way to be questioned. Sprague believed that these photos, which amazingly enough had never been published, might help unlock some mysteries about the assassination. If either the “tramps” or the officers escorting them could be identified, new avenues for investigation would be opened.

I said that I wanted copies and asked Sprague to send me some immediately. It so happened that I was about to fly to New York to appear on the Johnny Carson show. This would be a rare opportunity for me to speak directly to the American public about our investigation, and I wanted the photos with me as documentation. So Sprague arranged for them to be delivered to me at the New Orleans Airport.

The chance to appear on the Carson show had arisen unexpectedly through the efforts of Mort Sahl. The articulate satirist, who was spending an extended period of time in New Orleans helping the office in a variety of ways, was well aware of my problems communicating with the public through the news media. Even the simplest press conference involved a process of “translation,” so that what came out in the media never seemed to be precisely what I had said. Sahl, being in show business, had access to places I did not, like the Johnny Carson show. One night when he was on the program, the conversation drifted to the subject of the assassination and my investigation. Suddenly Sahl turned toward the audience and asked if they did not think Carson should invite me to be a guest on the show so that I could explain my side of the case. The response was so demonstrably affirmative that it left Carson and the network with no alternative. A few days later I received a telegram of invitation, which I promptly accepted.

On the plane to New York, I opened the package of photographs Sprague had sent. There were about a half dozen of them. I studied the figures in the photos carefully. One of the three men under arrest was medium tall, big-shouldered, with tousled blondish hair and a half smile on his face. The other two were both short, and their faces showed no serious concern. One of the short men wore a crumpled felt hat, but it was on the back of his head, revealing trimmed hair on the sides.

This detail immediately raised questions in my mind. As far as I knew, the hoboes and tramps who used to ride the rails in bygone days wore their hair shaggy and overgrown, an inevitable result of life on the road. But each of these men had a noticeably short and recent haircut. And the 8" × 10" pictures left no doubt that each was clean shaven as well.

The three men had on rough, shabby clothing, but it appeared to be quite clean. And while real hoboes invariably had thin, worn-out soles on their shoes, befitting their precarious economic status, there were no thin soles in these photos.

Several details raised questions about the police officers too. First of all, the arrested men were not handcuffed. This was strange. For offenses much less serious than murdering a President, police officers handcuff their prisoners every day. Certainly if these men were dangerous enough to be marched away under shotgun guard, they were dangerous enough to be handcuffed as well. Yet for some reason, the suspects in the photos were spared the customary discomforts of having been caught fleeing the scene of a murder.

Another odd thing was that the officers in the photos were not carrying their shotguns at port arms as would be customary in most cities. Each was carrying his gun differently, casually, as if he were going bird hunting. And then there was the curious fact that the trousers of one of the officers did not come close to fitting him. The Dallas Police Department, I presumed, had some form of dress code, but this officer’s attire could not have been within its guidelines.

Finally, there was something interesting about the police officer marching in the front—the apparent leader of the arresting officers. A tall, lean man, he was wearing a miniature radio receiver earclip—a plastic device less than half an inch by a quarter of an inch in size.[61] In 1963, I knew, most intelligence agencies possessed these devices, but I knew of no local police force that did.

All of these details together made me wonder not only if the shabbily dressed suspects were actually tramps but also if the uniformed men with the shotguns were actually Dallas police officers.[62] The knowledge that the suspects had been released without any record of their arrest naturally did not reassure me on either of these points.

I was not sure if the Dallas police force had been penetrated, or impersonated, or both. But I did know that a remarkable number of suspects had mysteriously disappeared without a trace left behind and that the photographs Sprague had sent me could help prove that to the American people. As I put the prints of the shotgun arrests in my briefcase, I resolved that anyone watching the Johnny Carson show the following night was going to get to see them.

The next day I went to Carson’s N.B.C. offices as scheduled in the early afternoon. The show was to be that night. Someone explained to me that on special occasions the guest was interviewed before the live appearance so that Carson would have some idea of what the area of discussion would be. I readily agreed to this. Thereupon, three or four well-dressed men, obviously all attorneys, entered the room. They questioned me for several hours on just what my responses would be if I were asked particular questions. I fielded the questions, and my answers were recorded.

Carson himself popped into the room briefly for the obligatory pre-show greeting of a guest. He seemed stiff and ill at ease. To make some small talk, I mentioned that my birthplace had been in western Iowa, a few miles away from his in Nebraska. He glanced at his watch in reply and was gone. I was surprised to discover that someone so jovial, so full of smiles on camera, could be such a cold fish off stage.

That night I arrived early at the network. One hour had been set aside for Carson to interview me. After a brief wait in a small green room, someone brought me out, pulled aside a very large curtain, and there I was, with great bright lights all over the place, standing on the television stage. The audience was applauding so warmly that they made me feel like a million dollars, and I gave them a big smile and waved back at them.

As I sat down next to Carson, I noticed that his desk was covered with typewritten questions and answers. It took but a glance for me to recognize that these were the questions I had been asked earlier in the afternoon, followed by the answers I had given the attorneys. After that there had been typed the suggested responses for him to make to me.

Carson began by reading me a long, rambling question of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” type. It was a gumbo made up of weird and inane crackpot speculations about the assassination—none of which came close to any statement I ever had made.

After a couple of minutes I saw that he had finished and was waiting for me to answer. His small humorless eyes, like a pair of tiny dark marbles, were fixed on me. Apparently he really believed that I had been the source of such intellectual rubbish. Suddenly it was hard for me to keep from laughing, and I know it showed.

“Johnny,” I said, “how long do I have to answer that one?”

When he saw that I had completely dismissed the question, he looked down and began reading the next one. Now it was apparent to me that he was going to parrot each question, read my known response, and come up with some new brain teaser the lawyers had put together for him. This was fine with me. As a lawyer, I was used to adversarial proceedings. On the other hand, I knew Carson was accustomed to guests who smilingly agreed with everything he said.

I had actually looked forward to an open exchange of thoughts with Johnny Carson. But I was not about to play any games with him in which I was the ball. So I promptly changed my whole modus operandi. As casually as you might move from one chair in a courtroom into a nearby chair, I began changing my answers from what I had told the lawyers that afternoon.

Of course, I did not change the substance. I just altered the form or, in some cases, the emphasis. For example, when the answer was in two parts, I now gave the second part first—the opposite of what I had done that afternoon. After a few questions I saw from the up-and-down movement of Carson’s fingers that he had lost his place. He never found it again.

I was not trying to be cute. Nor was I about to try to match wits with a great comic talent like Carson. As an attorney, I simply was doing what I do best. Very gradually, I shifted the emphasis of our colloquy to where I was asking the questions. Naturally he was not prepared to handle a subject as complex as this one. When in frustration he asked me why the government still was concealing evidence, as I had contended, I knew that my moment to show the photographs had arrived.

“Don’t ask me, John,” I said opening my briefcase. “Ask Lyndon Johnson. You know he has to have the answer.”

He stared at me blankly, without responding.

“Maybe I’d better show you pictures,” I said, reaching into the briefcase.

Before anyone could stop me, I was holding in front of the camera one of the big photographs showing the three men being marched off by the Dallas police with their shotguns. It took Carson a moment to recognize the scene, but when he realized what it was, he lunged at my arm like a cobra, pulling it down violently so that the pictures were out of the camera’s view.

“Photographs like this don’t show up on television,” he said sharply.

I held the picture up again for display in front of the camera. “Sure they do,” I replied. “The camera can pick this up.”

This time he yanked my arm down even harder. “No, it can’t,” he snapped.

Nevertheless, I swung the picture up for the third time. This time, however, I saw the red light blink off and realized that the director of the show had cut the camera off. Another camera—probably panning the audience—was now beaming its more comforting picture out across America.

Then, before anyone could change the subject, I said loudly, “Those arrested men you just saw were never seen again. They all got away.”

At that moment, I knew I had communicated what I wanted. Of course, I had an angry host on my hands the rest of the show. But that was his problem, not mine.

During my flight back to New Orleans I found myself reflecting on the mind-set of Carson and the N.B.C. attorneys who had debriefed me. They were unnerved by my viewpoint, I realized, not so much because it differed from their own but because I was explicitly advocating the existence of a conspiracy in President Kennedy’s assassination. I recalled the thinly veiled contempt of the attorneys whenever they touched upon the concept of a conspiracy. I felt as if I were a German citizen back in the mid-1930s who had publicly questioned Adolf Hitler’s sanity and was being given the obligatory questioning before being shipped away to a mental institution. I remembered that Carson himself had nearly come unglued during the heat of our argument as I zeroed in on the idea that a conspiracy had occurred.

Why was it, I asked myself, that these people at the very heart of the New York media industry were so allergic to the very concept of conspiracy? What was it that was so inconceivable, that was so utterly unthinkable about the idea of a conspiracy?

Then, perhaps for the first time, I realized what it was that petrified these people, that froze their brains into gridlock. To acknowledge that an organized conspiracy had occurred was to recognize that it had been done for a purpose—to change government policy. Having told the world for so many years how wonderful we all were, here in the greatest country in the world, the media people were not willing to admit that our national leader could be removed in such brutal fashion in order to change government policy. That would put the lie to American democracy. That just could not be. Therefore, in their minds, the assassination had to be a random event, the work of a deranged loner.

I found myself, once again, thumbing through the photographs of the men under shotgun arrest. The journalists who had taken these photographs certainly had not tried to conceal anything. Plainly, they had arrived at the scene as soon as possible and taken as many pictures as they could. They had rushed back to their editors with the results.

Any one of these photographs was a potential Pulitzer Prize winner a hundred times over. Collectively, they were among the most important photographs ever taken. Why, then, had the editors and the publishers of the newspapers involved not seized the opportunity to be the first into print with these great photographs?

The idea of a gigantic, highly organized media conspiracy I found unacceptable. It was simply too unwieldy. Yet something had caused the photos never to see the light of day.

And something had happened to me in New York City as well. Why had I been debriefed in advance so that Carson could be apprised of my likely answers? Why had Carson pulled my arm away so that the photographs were out of camera range? And why had the director and the control room switched off the cameras so that the photographs could not be seen?

The only reasonable, realistic explanation, I found myself concluding, was control. It was not the kind where a small cabal in Washington or New York called all the shots about what could get into print and on the air. It was control of a looser sort: here a call from a high-ranking federal intelligence official explaining to a newspaper publisher the overwhelming national security consequences that might result from irresponsible publication of pictures before the government had studied them; there a call from a Texas politician, a lifetime friend of Lyndon Johnson’s, to a network president explaining the great harm that could befall the republic if such photographs were shown to the public.

It was difficult for me to accept, because if I had been a publisher and received such a call, I would have made sure not only that the photograph was on the front page but that it was as large as possible so no one could miss it. However, I had to admit that I did not think like most publishers, and most publishers did not seem to think like me.

It was tragic, but in the final analysis, the mainstream media had somehow been persuaded to go along with the official story. Whether out of incompetence or intention, they, as much as the Dallas authorities who let so many suspects escape, had also ratified the assassination.