A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Read Online Free

the commission’s physical exhibits are there, including Oswald’s 6.5-millimeter Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, the murder weapon found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, as well as the nearly intact three-centimeter copper-jacketed, lead-core bullet that was discovered near a stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas on the afternoon of the assassination. The commission’s staff—although significantly, not the commission itself—concluded that the bullet, fired from Oswald’s $21 mail-order rifle, passed through the bodies of both President Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally in a scenario that became known as “the single-bullet theory.”
    The rose-pink suit worn by Jacqueline Kennedy in the motorcade is also stored in the modern, fortresslike complex in suburban Maryland. The suit, an American-made Chanel knockoff that was a favorite of the president’s (Mrs. Kennedy “looks ravishing in it,” he told a friend) is preserved in an acid-free container in a windowless vault. The vault is kept at a temperature of between 65 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit (between 18.3 and 20 degrees Celsius), the humidity set at 40 percent. The filtered air in the vault is changed at least six times every hour in order to help preserve the delicate wool fabric, which remains stained with the president’s blood. The whereabouts of Mrs. Kennedy’s iconic pink pillbox hat is a mystery; it was last known to be in the custody of her former personal secretary. A separate vault, kept at a constant temperature of 25 degrees Fahrenheit (−4 degrees Celsius), is used for the storage and preservation of a small strip of celluloid that is believed, by the National Archives, to be the most watched piece of film in the history of motion pictures. It was on those 486 frames of Kodachrome-brand 8mm color film that a Dallas women’s wear manufacturer, Abraham Zapruder, captured the terrible images of the assassination on his Bell & Howell home-movie camera.
    Much of Warren’s personal paperwork from the commission that bore his name is stored at the Library of Congress, just a few minutes’ walk down First Street from his former chambers at the Supreme Court. Warren, who died in 1974, might be startled to know that millions of Americans know of him principally because of the commission, not because of his history-making sixteen-year tenure as chief justice.
    The decision to preserve the vast library of investigative reports and physical evidence gathered by the Warren Commission, and now retained at the National Archives and the Library of Congress, was meant to be reassuring to the public—proof of the commission’s transparency and of its diligence. At the National Archives alone, there are more than five million pages of documents related to the assassination. But the truth about the Warren Commission, as most serious historians and other scholars will acknowledge, even those who fully support its findings, is that its investigation was flawed from the start. The commission made grievous errors. It failed to pursue important evidence and witnesses because of limitations imposed on the investigation by the man who ran it, Chief Justice Warren. Often, Warren seemed more interested in protecting the legacy of his beloved friend President Kennedy, and of the Kennedy family, than in getting to the full facts about the president’s murder.
    On the subject of the assassination, history will be far kinder to the commission’s surviving staff lawyers, as well as its former in-house historian, who reveal in this book what really happened inside the Warren Commission. Much of this book is their story, told through their eyes. The lawyers, mostly in their twenties and thirties at the time of the investigation, were recruited from prestigious law firms, law schools, and prosecutors’ offices around the country. Most are now at the end of long careers in law or public service. For several, being interviewed for