Washington Post Review of Shenon's Book

Book review: ‘A Cruel and Shocking Act’ by Philip Shenon

By Beverly Gage October 25, 2013

The promotional material for Philip Shenon’s rollicking new book, “A Cruel and Shocking Act,” reminds us that three questions have “haunted our nation” for the past 50 years: “Was the President killed by a single gunman? Was Lee Harvey Oswald part of a conspiracy? Did the Warren Commission discover the whole truth of what happened on November 22, 1963?”

Shenon does not definitively answer the first two questions; as he acknowledges, we may never have the final word on whatever conspiracy did or did not exist. On the third matter, however, his judgment is unequivocal. The Warren Commission, he writes, was “flawed from the start” because of bureaucratic infighting, political manipulation, destruction of evidence, tight deadlines, understaffing, deception by intelligence agencies and a host of other ills. Rather than attempting to offer the Ultimate Truth of the Kennedy Assassination, Shenon presents a persuasive, deeply researched account of why, 50 years out, that truth still seems so hard to find.

He began his project with what seemed like a genuinely new angle on a familiar topic. Rather than join the legions of historians and journalists reexamining the Kennedy assassination for the 50th anniversary, he planned to focus on the Warren Commission and on the back-office wrangling that went into producing its conclusions. For Shenon, this was a natural fit. His first book, “The Commission,” dissected the 9/11 Commission, showing how political considerations and bureaucratic battles distorted its famed report. In 2008, when a former staff investigator offered to help with a “similar history” of the Warren Commission, Shenon signed on.

The story must be told.

Something happened along the way. The final book stays true to Shenon’s original plan to write the story of the Warren Commission as told by its junior lawyers, the only members still alive to describe their experiences. Grafted onto this, though, is a spy drama involving Cuban diplomats, alluring young women and the secret love affairs of Oswald. Despite his best intentions, Shenon found himself drawn into the world of spycraft, intrigue and conspiracy that makes up both the best and the worst of the Kennedy assassination literature. The result is a book that’s one part “Mad Men” and one part James Bond.

“A Cruel and Shocking Act” takes its name from the first sentence of the Warren Commission’s report: “The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a cruel and shocking act of violence directed against a man, a family, a nation, and against all mankind.” And it is the commission — not the assassination — that provides the book’s basic narrative arc. The first chapter begins on the day after the president’s death, with the naval pathologist who conducted Kennedy’s autopsy burning his original notes in his home fireplace. Ostensibly, the good doctor hoped to keep the bloodstained pages out of the hands of trophy-seekers and maudlin “ghouls.” But as Shenon notes, the effect was no different than if he had been deliberately covering up a hidden truth: The notes were gone forever.

The pages that follow are filled with similarly jaw-dropping scenes involving the destruction and manipulation of evidence. Some will be familiar to Kennedy assassination devotees (here, once again, is FBI agent James Hosty crouched over a toilet in the Dallas field office, flushing a handwritten note from Oswald). Others are less well-known, such as the State Department’s apparent ostracism of diplomat Charles William Thomas for his insistence on investigating Oswald’s Cuba ties. (Thomas committed suicide in 1971.) In compiling this record, Shenon takes full advantage of the vast assassination-related material released in the past few decades, including the full run of Lyndon Johnson’s secret presidential tapes and the transcripts of the Warren Commission’s executive sessions.

The heroes of Shenon’s story are the Warren Commission’s midlevel lawyers and investigators, who in his view tried valiantly but failed to get to the bottom of the assassination mystery. As individual characters, these men can be hard to differentiate: Which one was the Yale lawyer from Ohio? Which was the Harvard man from Michigan? Shenon’s tendency toward uncritical praise of their efforts does little to help. “I am left with nothing but admiration for most of the then young staff lawyers on the commission,” he writes. It is no coincidence that these men were also his chief first-person sources, some of them opening up for the first time. Shenon’s access makes for a valuable addition to the historical record, but it does not engender much critical distance.

The book’s villains, by contrast, are the peevish old men of the intelligence establishment, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. In Shenon’s telling, these men manipulated the Warren Commission for selfish, misguided reasons, withholding information to protect their agencies from criticism and thus condemning the nation to decades of frustration and conspiracy-mongering. The FBI comes in for especially harsh treatment as a “sclerotic bureaucracy” led by a tyrannical, small-minded, rapidly aging boss.

As a generational morality tale, this makes for a compelling read. The problem is that the commission staffers never stood much of a chance. As Shenon points out, most came in with no police or investigative experience. At first, most of them did not even have the proper security clearances. Looking back, one commission staffer admitted that he “had little choice but to trust . . . his colleagues at the CIA. The commission had almost nowhere else to turn for most of the information it would need” on foreign adversaries suspected of playing a role in Kennedy’s death. In Shenon’s view, the young idealists of the Warren Commission were outmatched by an intelligence establishment with a virtual monopoly on secret information and an army of agents to gather it.

This helps to explain how the commission missed out on the evidence that makes up the second major theme of Shenon’s book: the possibility that Oswald was working for or with Cuba’s revolutionary government. As a veteran journalist and former New York Times reporter, Shenon knows to hedge his bets when it comes to conspiracy theories. All the same, he can’t help but engage the strange Cold War netherworld of Soviet defection, repatriation and pro-Castro activism in which Oswald lived during his brief adult life.

Shenon is particularly intrigued by Oswald’s September 1963 trip to Mexico City, where the future assassin tried and failed to gain Soviet and Cuban visas. While in Mexico, Shenon writes, Oswald apparently had a fling with a low-level staffer at the Cuban Consulate, and he was spotted at a Chubby Checker “twist party” attended by a Cuban diplomat deeply hostile to Kennedy. Two months later, back on American soil, Oswald shot and killed the president.

Shenon goes to great lengths to emphasize his new evidence about Oswald’s Mexico trip, and understandably so. When it comes to the most-studied murder of all time, it is no mean feat to turn up even the smallest tidbit. Still, the book stops short of suggesting a Cuban conspiracy, arguing simply that the Warren Commission (along with the FBI and the CIA) should have done more to investigate the available evidence. In the end, “A Cruel and Shocking Act” offers many of the trappings of conspiracy literature — doctored evidence, a mysterious suicide, a secret affair — without quite arguing in favor of a conspiracy.

What the book does show is something at once more sweeping and more banal: To the degree that the Warren Commission overlooked evidence or avoided subjects, the reasons were largely political and bureaucratic. The Kennedy family sought a limited autopsy, for instance, not because they feared the ballistics evidence but because they hoped to avoid exposing Kennedy’s health problems, including Addison’s disease. Similarly, CIA officials held back records on Oswald’s visit to Mexico City not because they intended to cover up a Cuban conspiracy but because they wanted to avoid revealing other wiretapping and surveillance operations. Perhaps most important, Lyndon Johnson and Earl Warren sought to limit the commission’s scope and timeline to get the whole affair out of the way before the next presidential election.

As Shenon points out, the commission’s flawed final report has ended up fueling rather than suppressing public suspicions of a high-level conspiracy — precisely the opposite of what Johnson and Warren intended. And yet one can’t help but feel sympathy for the political leaders charged with managing the assassination crisis. In the “jittery, even apocalyptic” atmosphere of 1963, Shenon writes, it seemed entirely possible that an accusation of Soviet or Cuban involvement could spark a full-blown foreign-policy crisis or even a nuclear war. In that context, the effort to limit the commission’s work may have turned out to be good politics but poor investigative history.

The price is that we may never know exactly what happened on Nov. 22, 1963. Fifty years out, we have hundreds of thousands of pages dedicated to undoing and redoing the work of the Warren Commission. But the more we find out, Shenon suggests, the more we realize how little we know. “In many ways,” he concludes, “this book is an account of my discovery of how much of the truth about the Kennedy assassination has still not been told.”

Beverly Gage is a professor of history at Yale University. She is writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover.

Phil Shenon on NPR Transcript

National Public Radio - Fresh Air

The Final Documents On JFK’s Assassination Are Being Declassified

Read: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=542531879

Listen: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=542531879

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's in New York for her appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." Fifty-four years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, conspiracy theories abound about what happened that day in Dallas. And surprisingly, new information about the assassination and its investigation is still emerging. Hundreds of previously classified documents were made public a couple of weeks ago, and 3,000 more are to be released by October. Though as you'll soon hear, President Trump may have something to say about that.

Our guest is Philip Shenon, a veteran investigative reporter who spent years researching the assassination. His 2013 book "A Cruel and Shocking Act" showed how the FBI and CIA hid important information from the Warren Commission, which was appointed by President Johnson to investigate the crime. And he found there was some reason to believe Lee Harvey Oswald could have gotten encouragement or assistance from Cubans he met in Mexico a few weeks before the assassination.

Philip Shenon spent more than 20 years reporting for The New York Times. He's also the author of "The Commission: The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation." He recently wrote about the newly released assassination files for Politico.

Well, Philip Shenon, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Why now, 54 years after the assassination, are more documents about this now becoming available?

PHILIP SHENON: This is a story that actually goes back to Hollywood in 1991 when Oliver Stone, the filmmaker and a very prominent conspiracy theorist, released his film "JFK." And you'll recall that "JFK" - the movie, which was a hit at the time - really shaped the thinking of a new generation about the Kennedy assassination and raised a million conspiracy theories about how Kennedy had died.

And as a result of the furor created by that film, Congress reacted the following year by passing a bill that forced the release of every document in the government's files that might even be tangentially related to the Kennedy assassination. And as a result of that, millions of pages of documents were made public in the 1990s that really in many ways did reshape our thinking about the assassination.

But at that time in the 1990s, about 3,600 documents were held back entirely, most of them from the CIA and the FBI because those agencies argued they somehow endangered national security. Now, under this 1992 law, everything has to be released by the 25-year deadline. And that 25-year deadline is reached in October of this year.

DAVIES: Wow, lest anyone doubt the importance or impact of popular culture. So now, some documents were released this summer, right? That was, like - what? - 3,600. Is that right?

SHENON: That's right. There had been about 3,600 documents held back. About 400 of them were released early. They were released a couple of weeks ago. The National Archives wants to release these in batches over the course of the period between now and October if they can, if the agencies don't issue a final appeal to prevent them from being public. So we got 400 last week, but that's still about 3,100 that are still held back entirely but must be released by October.

DAVIES: Right, and there's a review board that was set up by the law that governs this. And the one person who could prevent their release is the president, right?

SHENON: The irony upon ironies that the president, President Donald Trump, who is no stranger to conspiracy theories, is the guy who has the final decision here. Under the law, only the president of the United States can block the release of some of these documents. And he has until October to do that. We - I understand with a colleague of mine who - Larry Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia. We've learned that indeed a couple of agencies will appeal, and they will urge President Trump not to release some of these documents.

DAVIES: And do we have any idea of his thinking on this?

SHENON: We don't. He seems to be otherwise occupied these days. We have been told by the White House that indeed the review is underway, and they hope to have a smooth rollout through October.

DAVIES: You know, it's hard to talk about this without recalling that during the presidential 

campaign, President Trump promoted the idea that Senator Ted Cruz's father, Rafael, who was a Cuban immigrant, was associated with Oswald. Do we have any idea whether there would be information about that or whether it would affect the president's thinking?

SHENON: Well, I can tell you that a lot of people are going to be searching for that. But you know, President Trump during the course of the campaign promoted this article in The National Enquirer based on a single photograph from 1963 that suggested that Oswald was somehow in contact with Ted Cruz's father. Trump promoted this as proof or at least evidence that Ted Cruz's father was somehow in cahoots with Oswald. There seems to be no other evidence of this. But it is, again, irony upon ironies that our conspiracy theorist in chief will make the decision through October as to whether or not these documents go public.

DAVIES: And is there any index or other information that tells us what some of these documents might focus on or who we might learn about?

SHENON: We have a good idea of what's in there. The stuff that's most interesting to me are the files from the Central Intelligence Agency office in Mexico City. There is, to my mind, this whole mysterious chapter in the saga of the Kennedy assassination that involves Mexico City and a six-day trip that Lee Harvey Oswald pays to Mexico City just several weeks before the assassination, where we know he's meeting with Cuban spies and Russian spies and apparently may have talked openly about his intention to kill the president. And the files from the CIA officers in Mexico City are among the group of files that have to be released by October.

DAVIES: And in the book, you write about some information - not all of it confirmed - that he may have met with people who talked about killing Kennedy. He may have spoken about killing Kennedy. Just remind us what the book - what you found about what Oswald may have done and said in that six-day trip to Mexico City before the assassination.

SHENON: Well, again, the official story told by the Warren Commission and other government investigators was that Oswald was this delusional misfit, this lone wolf whose plot to kill Kennedy could never have been foiled. But in fact it looks like Oswald, at least in Mexico City, told people that he was thinking about killing Kennedy.

And these documents released over the last couple of weeks offer a fascinating theory and a really logical theory about what may have motivated Oswald directly to kill Kennedy. And the Warren Commission really ducked entirely the question of Oswald's motives. It said it just - they thought he hated America, and that might have been the explanation for the assassination.

But in fact, these CIA documents from a couple weeks ago show that there was a real theory offered within the CIA that Oswald had read a particular newspaper article. He was living at the time in New Orleans. He was an avid newspaper reader. He was an avid reader. He spent a lot of his free time in the public libraries in Dallas and New Orleans in the final - in 1963 - that he would have seen a remarkable interview that Fidel Castro had given to the Associated Press in early September 1963, a story republished in The Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans, that - in which Castro made clear that he thought he was under threat of assassination by the Kennedy administration and that the Kennedy administration might face reprisals as a result of this assassination threat - the theory being that Oswald would have read that article, would have become enraged on Castro's behalf and then set out to get vengeance for Castro - to kill Kennedy before Kennedy could kill Castro. That is not to be shorthanded as Castro ordered Kennedy's assassination - no, not at all. It's just that Oswald felt he was acting in Castro's behalf by setting out to kill Kennedy.

DAVIES: Maybe we should just review. What is the evidence that suggests Oswald spoke about wanting to kill the president or that people - you know, Cubans in Mexico City talked to him about the subject?

SHENON: It's an amazing story because the source of that information - that Oswald had openly talked about killing Kennedy - was Fidel Castro himself, that the FBI had a plant that turned out to be a senior leader of the American Communist Party who went to Havana after the assassination and talked to Castro and that Castro had openly acknowledged that he knew that Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City had talked about killing Kennedy.

DAVIES: And there were people who remembered seeing Oswald at the time - this woman Silvia Duran, who may or may not have had a romantic relationship with Oswald. And there was a story of him going to a party at which there were these mysterious people there also - but that there was talk at some of those encounters about killing the president, right?

SHENON: Well, there is this amazing story about what is described as the twist party, you know, Chubby Checker's "Twist" was very popular in Mexico City, too. And there were witnesses after the assassination who come forward to say that they remembered seeing Oswald at a party - a twist party, that he had been invited there by this vivacious, young Mexican woman who worked in the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City, a woman named Sylvia Duran, who had apparently given Oswald his help in preparing the visa application for Cuba and that people at this party had in the past talked openly about wanting to see President Kennedy dead.

DAVIES: Yeah, and we should say that for the book, you've tracked Sylvia Duran down in Mexico. She's still alive. And...

SHENON: She is remarkably available to some journalists that she adamantly denies she had a romantic relationship with Oswald although there is evidence to the contrary. But she acknowledges that she helped them with the visa application. She says he was not at this twist party. But there's a lot of evidence from other witnesses, including members of her own family, who will tell you differently.

DAVIES: And of course Sylvia Duran, the woman in Mexico whose memory would have been very fresh in 1964, agreed to be interviewed. And Earl Warren himself, the director of the commission, declined to take advantage of that.

SHENON: So this woman Silvia Duran, whatever her actual interactions with Oswald, she was the employee at the Cuban Consulate who met with Oswald, who helped him prepare his visa application. She apparently was a very sympathetic character towards him, that she's trying to be encouraging. And you know, she was a socialist, so she and Oswald might have had a lot to talk about in terms of their shared political views.

And Silvia Duran, after much hemming and hawing, agrees to come to Washington, agrees to be interviewed by the Warren Commission. But Chief Justice Warren refuses to allow her to come. His statement is, you know, she's a communist, and we don't talk to communists. Now, Sylvia Duran is still alive. Maybe she still has more to tell us.

DAVIES: Among the information that may be released in October, declassified and released is a file about an American woman named June Cobb. Who what she? What's her connection?

SHENON: She's fascinating, and I'm delighted that people can pay attention to her story because she's this apparently very brave American woman spy who finds herself on the staff of Fidel Castro in Cuba in the very earliest days of Castro's government in Havana. She's actually gone to work for the CIA. She's feeding information back to Langley. And she really puts her life on the line to do that. We - you know, there were other - there was another prominent American who was working in Castro's government who was executed. And she must have known that if her cover was blown, she would be executed as well.

She turns up later in this story because eventually she leaves Havana. She goes to Mexico City. And she's among the people who learns about the twist party, this party that Oswald shows up at where Cuban diplomats and Mexicans sympathetic to Castro's government have been invited. And people apparently may be talking openly about the need for Kennedy to be killed. And she tells the CIA about this twist party, and this leads to a lot of second guessing within the CIA about whether or not the agency had missed important clues to possible co-conspirators in the assassination.

DAVIES: She's no longer around.

SHENON: She died a few years ago. She was living - I went in search of her. She apparently died just recently in New York City.

DAVIES: We're speaking with veteran investigative reporter Philip Shenon. His 2013 book about the Kennedy assassination is "A Cruel And Shocking Act." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with investigative reporter Philip Shenon. He wrote a book about the Kennedy assassination called "A Cruel And Shocking Act" and has been reviewing recently declassified documents about the assassination. He wrote about them in Politico.

Now, you wrote in your book four years ago "A Cruel And Shocking Act" - you wrote a lot about the Warren Commission. You talked to a lot of the investigators who worked on that commission which was appointed by President Johnson to look into what happened in the assassination and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone without co-conspirators.

One of the things you write about is that the FBI and the CIA were very reluctant to share everything they knew and all of their information. How much did they hide?

SHENON: They withheld a tremendous amount of information. And I think it's quite clear that many senior officials of the CIA and the FBI really perjured themselves before the Warren Commission because they did have something to hide. They had something important to hide, which is that they had known a lot about Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination, that both of those agencies, the CIA and the FBI, both had him under surveillance and sometimes pretty aggressive surveillance in the weeks before the assassination.

And had they simply acted on the information in their own files, Lee Harvey Oswald might well have been rounded up before the assassination, and the world would be a different place today. And they wanted to hide just how much they had known about Oswald from the commission. And as a result, the commission couldn't act on a lot of evidence that might have pointed to other people who knew what Oswald was going to do.

DAVIES: And you do write that there was this remarkable letter that the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, wrote to the Warren Commission that vanished that bears on this.

SHENON: I think in my years of reporting on my book, that was the bombshell document that I just couldn't quite believe people hadn't paid more attention to it. But in June 1964, in the middle of the Warren Commission investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, sends this amazing letter to the Warren Commission saying that the FBI has learned that Oswald was apparently bragging openly in Mexico City about his plans to kill Kennedy.

I have taken this document to the surviving staff members of the Warren Commission, and they are all convinced they never saw this thing. They never saw this letter. And of course if they had seen this letter in 1964, it would've raised a million questions as to who else knew that Oswald was talking openly about killing Kennedy and what they had done with that information. Did any of those people encourage Oswald to do this? It would have raised the question of coconspirators. But again, the Warren Commission staffers, at least most of the ones I talked with, are convinced they never saw this document.

DAVIES: Wow, and we just don't know what happened to it.

SHENON: Well, it turns up many years later at the National Archives. And it turns up in the files of the CIA. And copies of it do appear eventually in the digital records of the Warren Commission. But as somebody who spent weeks of my life at the National Archives reviewing the paper documents of the Warren Commission, I could tell you I never saw that document. And I - I'm quite convinced that most staff members of the Warren Commission never saw that document either.

DAVIES: You recently wrote about a - an internal CIA history written by an - by a CIA historian about this episode. What did it conclude about the CIA's conduct at the time?

SHENON: Well, it's a - it's remarkable to discover that the CIA itself describes what happened after the Kennedy assassination as being a cover-up, that lots of clues in Mexico City, especially, were never pursued. And if they had been pursued, it might have pointed to other people who at least knew what Oswald was going to do. And one thing I've always tried to make clear is that you cannot shorthand this as, Castro did it. I don't think there's any credible evidence that Fidel Castro, personally, was involved in ordering Kennedy's assassination.

But people around Mexico City who Oswald was dealing with may have felt very differently about, you know - at the height of the Cold War, some of those people may have wanted to see John Kennedy dead, if only to save the revolution in Cuba that Kennedy seemed to want to crush. And isn't it possible that some of those people encouraged Oswald to do what he was going to do? Isn't it possible that some of those people offered help for him to escape afterwards?

DAVIES: Right, in which case, they would be accomplices, of a sort.

SHENON: Absolutely. Absolutely.

DAVIES: We've been talking about the CIA. The FBI also was not exactly cooperative with the Warren Commission. You - it actually destroyed some evidence, you write in the book. What did they have to hide?

SHENON: (Laughter) Well, again, they had plenty to hide because it turned out that the FBI had Lee Harvey Oswald under aggressive surveillance and the - in the weeks and months before the assassination - not something they wanted to admit to the Warren Commission because, of course, the question would be for the FBI, why didn't you detect the threat this man posed. And it's quite clear from the record that the FBI set out after the assassination to destroy some critical evidence about what they had known about Oswald.

There's this incredible scene just a couple of days after the assassination where the decision is made at the FBI office in Dallas to destroy a note - a handwritten note that Oswald had left for them just a few weeks earlier - in which he protested the way the FBI was surveilling him, the degree of surveillance. He may have apparently threatened some sort of violent act, at least according to some FBI officials. But that document was shredded and flushed down the toilet.

DAVIES: Wow. Clarence Kelley, who was the FBI director after J. Edgar Hoover, reviewed all this material when he came in - reviewed this material about the surveillance and Oswald's visit to Mexico. What did he conclude?

SHENON: Well, Clarence Kelley is a - I think it's a remarkable testament to how much of the official story about the assassination's really never been told. But Clarence Kelley considers himself sort of an armchair detective on the question of the Kennedy assassination. And after he replaced J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, he'd made it a task to go back and read through the raw material about the assassination and about Oswald.

And his conclusion was that, in fact, there had been a cover-up within the FBI, that this handwritten note that Oswald had left for the FBI had indeed been destroyed - he would confess that publicly later - and that the story about Mexico City - the story about the encounters with Cuban spies, and Soviet spies and others who might've encouraged Oswald to kill Kennedy - that nobody'd ever gotten to the bottom of it.

And Clarence Kelley's big conclusion, at the end of his life, was that the Kennedy assassination could have been prevented - and easily prevented - if the FBI and CIA had just acted on the information in its own files in November 1963.

DAVIES: Philip Shenon is an investigative reporter. His 2013 book about the Kennedy assassination is "A Cruel And Shocking Act." We'll hear more from Shenon after a break. And we'll meet actress Aubrey Plaza from "Parks and Recreation." She plays a woman obsessed with an Instagram star in the new film "Ingrid Goes West." I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's in New York for her appearance on "The Tonight Show." We're speaking with investigative reporter Philip Shenon. His 2013 book about the Kennedy assassination, "A Cruel And Shocking Act," deals in part with how the FBI and CIA hid information from the Warren Commission, which investigated the crime. Shenon recently wrote about newly declassified files on the assassination in Politico.

In looking at things that the Warren Commission didn't know, the name Robert Kennedy comes up, of course. He was the president's brother and was the attorney general who had, you know, prosecuted the mafia. And he publicly said he accepted the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone - privately told people that he thought there was some kind of conspiracy. I'm wondering what we know about his interaction with the Warren Commission and whether there's new information in any of these documents.

SHENON: I've always been very troubled by Robert Kennedy's actions in the months after his brother's death, in the sense that it's quite clear that he knew much more than he was ever going to tell the Warren Commission. He is the highest-ranking government official who never submitted to questioning by the Warren Commission. He, apparently, was eager not to be questioned by them.

We know from his friends and associates that he went to his death believing that there had been, or there might well have been, some sort of conspiracy in his brother's death. And he worried that it might have been - that his brother's assassination might have been somehow blowback for the anti-Castro plots that Bobby Kennedy himself had known all about during the course of the Kennedy administration.

DAVIES: Right, so he never actually gave a sworn statement at all, and the Commission didn't insist upon it.

SHENON: They only insisted - well, he sent word to the Warren Commission that he did not want to be interviewed. He instead submitted a very brief letter in which he said he had no evidence of a conspiracy. But if you go back and read that letter, you can see it's evasive, if not untruthful, about what Bobby Kennedy really knew and what he really suspected.

DAVIES: So as you've looked at more, and more and more material about the assassination, are you pretty certain that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only gunman in Dallas that day?

SHENON: I think all the most credible, scientific evidence available to us shows that Oswald was the gunman in Dealey Plaza. We'll never be able, totally, to rule out the idea that there was a second gunman because this scientific analysis is really much more art than science. But all of the most credible, technical, scientific research suggests that Oswald was the gunman in Dealey Plaza.

DAVIES: Right, and the widely ridiculed single-bullet theory, that one bullet went through Kennedy's throat - right? - and then through John Connally's body, and into his leg and wrist - best explanation?

SHENON: The best explanation - and a lot of scientific research has gone on in the years since the assassination - a lot of scientific technique that was not available in the 1960s that supports the single-bullet theory, even though it is easily the most controversial finding of the Warren Commission and easily the one I hear the most about every time I suggest that it might be true.

DAVIES: What do we know about Jack Ruby, the guy who killed Oswald the Sunday after the Friday assassination?

SHENON: Ruby was a very troubled man. You know, people in Dallas knew him well before the assassination. He was really considered sort of a misfit, a loser. And Ruby explained later that he killed Oswald because he wanted to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the need to return to Dallas to testify in a trial if Oswald was put on trial.

And people who knew Jack Ruby said that made sense, that he loved President Kennedy. He was shattered by the assassination. And he, indeed, did want to protect Jacqueline Kennedy. That - there's no evidence, they felt, that Ruby was acting under anybody's instructions. And knowing what we know about Jack Ruby, that makes sense. He was a very troubled misfit, who - you can't imagine him - that right-minded people in American organized crime would choose that guy to carry out, you know, what would've been the crime of the century.

DAVIES: And yet, again, coming back to the Warren Commission, I believe there was a point at which Jack Ruby in prison said he wanted to go to Washington and tell the true - tell the real story that he wouldn't tell in a Dallas jail, right? And then the Warren Commission didn't bring him up.

SHENON: Well, that's a confusing bit of testimony from Ruby. Chief Justice Warren goes to Dallas to interview Jack Ruby. Now, we should be clear that psychiatrists for both the defense and for the government had interviewed Ruby in the weeks previous and found him to be seriously mentally ill and delusional.

And at one point during the deposition by Chief Justice Warren, Ruby makes the comment that he can't tell the story in Dallas, he can only tell it in Washington - won't the chief justice please take him to Washington so he could tell his story? - suggesting that there might be some other conspiracy that Ruby is going to expose. Chief Justice Warren turns him down. But I will tell you, if you look at the whole body of that deposition, this is Ruby saying over, and over and over again that he acted alone.

He's later interviewed a second time, this time on a polygraph machine, and makes the same claim, that there is - that he acted alone. There's no evidence of a conspiracy. And I don't think any credible evidence of a conspiracy involving Ruby has ever emerged.

DAVIES: So we may have another 3,000-odd documents coming from the archives about the Kennedy assassination. Are you prepared to dive into them?

SHENON: (Laughter) I'm a little concerned, actually. It's so - it's about 3,100 documents that nobody's - in the public has ever seen before. And then, on top of that, there are something like 30,000 other documents that we've seen before in part that are supposedly going to be released in full. And I should tell you that these documents that were released a couple of weeks ago - I don't think anybody's been through all of them yet.

And many of them are very confusing. Some of them are illegible. You can't make out what is on them. Others are in foreign languages. Others are filled with, you know, CIA code names, and pseudonyms and the - and identify secret informants we've not been acquainted with before. I think people are going to be poring over these documents to make sense of them. Just these - the small handful from a couple of weeks ago, that - we're not going to know, really, what's in there for months, if not years. And again, they represent only a fraction of what is still hidden at the National Archives.

DAVIES: And how does the release occur? Are they posted online?

SHENON: The National Archives put them on its website early one morning a couple weeks ago without any advance notice. And it turned out that their servers were overwhelmed, and it became impossible to download those documents for the first day or two. And again, we have many, many, many more documents that are supposed to be released by October. I think the logistics of this are kind of nightmarish.

DAVIES: Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of citizens that would love to just spend their late hours looking at this stuff. I suspect that there's a community of serious Kennedy assassination researchers, and you probably know each other. Do you communicate about this stuff?

SHENON: Sure. And there is indeed this army of researchers and just private citizens who have become knowledgeable if not obsessed with this subject for years and years, and they're poring over the documents. I will say that they all fall into camps. There are people who fall into the Mafia camp. There are people in the Castro camp. There are people who fall into, you know, rogue CIA agent camp. And I think if there's really a bombshell hidden in these documents, that army of investigators and researchers will find it eventually.

DAVIES: And so you wait for them to pop it up on social media or - they don't give you a call and say, oh, my god, Philip, did you see this?

SHENON: Well, unfortunately I have sort of a difficult relationship with so many of them because I've not embraced their conspiracy theories. But I - you know, whatever information they find, I welcome it. And I try to be as open-minded as I can about what they're finding and what the implications of it may be.

DAVIES: Do you think you'll be doing this the rest of your life?

SHENON: You know, I desperately don't want to fall down the rabbit hole of the Kennedy assassination. You know, people do become obsessed with this. It is fascinating. I think it's - you know, it is the event in my lifetime that changed the way Americans think about their government and about truth.

And it's really made so much of our - you know, I think you can look back to the Kennedy assassination as the event that turned so much of our public conversation toxic and full of conspiracy theories and full of the assumption that we're not being told the truth by our government. And trying to bring as much truth as possible to what can be determined about this, I think there's real value to that today.

DAVIES: Well, Philip Shenon, thanks for speaking with us again.

SHENON: Thank you.

DAVIES: Philip Shenon recently wrote about newly declassified documents in Politico. His 2013 book about the Kennedy assassination is "A Cruel And Shocking Act." Coming up, actress Aubrey Plaza talks about "Parks And Recreation" and her new film "Ingrid Goes West." 

This is FRESH AIR.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Dear Professor Sabato - Continuing Correspondence w/ Dr. Wecht Updated

Dear Professor Sabato:

In the article you wrote with Philip Shenon (“How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK Murder” – Politico, August 3), there is the following statement –“21st century forensic science demonstrates that Oswald was almost certainly the lone gunman in Dallas”.

Would you be so kind as to send me your information regarding this reference.

Thank you.

Very truly yours,

Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D. 

Dear Cyril,

Thank you for the note. Prof. Sabato discusses this subject at some length in his book, “The Kennedy Half-Century.”

I have not read Mr. Shenon’s book but I would imagine he addresses the issue in his book ( “A Cruel and Shocking Act” ) as well.

Kyle Kondik
Managing Editor, Sabato’s Crystal Ball

University of Virginia Center for Politics

Dear Kyle,

Thank you for your prompt response to my recent inquiry.

I have checked the reference you gave me to Professor Sabato’s book.

The only “scientific” discussion I note therin deals with the acoustics analysis that the HSCA relied upon.

I would like to receive a more specific response to my question re: “21st century forensic science demonstrates that Oswald was almost certainly the lone gunman in Dallas.”

I am certain you can appreciate the fact that as a forensic scientist deeply involved and interested in the JFK assassination for more than 50 years, such an important reference has great significance to me.

I have had no hesitation or problem in relating to major WCR defender – proponents over the years. Indeed, I developed good relationships with Specter, Bugliosi, and Posner.

I am not seeking to engage in a personal dispute with Professor Sabato. However, I cannot ignore the statement made by him and Mr. Shenon in a widely disseminated article that will be given much weight by thousands of readers.

Their comment is quite specific. Accordingly, the basis for that comment must be quite specific, also.

Just exactly what are the 21st century forensic scientific studies that buttress and validate the WCR’s conclusion re: Oswald as a lone gunman?

I believe this is a fair and logical question to be addressed to a high level academic entity.

I look forward to your response.

Thank you,

Best Wishes,

Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D. 

Dear Dr. Wecht –

I would direct you to Prof. Sabato’s and Mr. Shenon’s books.

Best, Kyle

Kyle Kondik

Managing Editor, Sabato’s Crystal Ball

University of Virginia Center for Politics

434-987-6894

kondik@virginia.edu 

Dear Kyle:

I would appreciate a definitive response to the inquiry I set forth in an e-mail I sent to you on August 10.

I am certain that Professor Sabato agrees with me that forensic scientific analyses of the physical medical evidence is extremely important in studying the JFK assassination.

Thank you.

Sincerely, Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D.

Dear Mr. Kondik:

               I am extremely disappointed by your response to my inquiry, directing me once again to “Prof. Sabato’s and Mr. Shenon’s books”.

               The hard fact of the matter is that neither book documents any specific reference to any new  “21st century forensic science” studies, techniques, or tests that prove that Oswald was the lone gunman in the JFK assassination.

               Professor Sabato must know this, and so do you.

               To slough me off as if I were some unknown simpleton is highly insulting, especially since Professor Sabato was an invited speaker at the JFK Conference in 2013, sponsored by the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law.

               More importantly is the harsh fact that Professor Sabato and Mr. Shenon have publicly expressed a statement that is untrue.  Millions of people who have read their article are now misinformed.

               If Professor Sabato disagrees with my comments and does in fact have specific references to “21st century forensic science” tests that confirm the WCR’s conclusion re LHO as the sole gunman,  I assume he will so inform me. (And please don’t tell me he is too busy). I did six autopsies yesterday along with numerous other professional endeavors, atypical day for me.

               I am bringing this matter to the attention of numerous individuals who have been deeply involved in the study of the JFK assassination.  I am certain that they will be anxious to learn what Professor Sabato’s response is to this letter.

               Very truly yours,

Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D.