I borrowed my father’s Oldsmobile to drive to
Newfane, Vermont. The reason for this trip, which took
nearly five hours, was that I had a 2 PM appointment
with Wesley J. Liebeler. He had spent more time than
any other lawyer on the Warren Commission staff investigating
Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged role in the Kennedy
assassination.
I pulled up to Liebeler’s rustic house just before
2 PM. There was no car in the driveway. I rang the bell
several times, but no one came to the door. So I waited
in my car. Shortly after 3 PM, his wife, Celia, arrived
in a battered pickup truck with their two young sons.
After introducing myself, she said she had not heard
from her husband but expected he would be arriving shortly.
I helped her unload a chainsaw from the back of the
truck, and, after she demonstrated how it worked, I
spent the next three hours sawing off limbs from a fallen
maple tree. I then joined her and the children for dinner
in the kitchen.
It was not until 8 PM that Liebeler arrived. He was
a slightly overweight man in his early thirties. He
was surprised to find me waiting. He explained that
he had forgotten to enter our appointment in his office
calendar. He said he was too exhausted after his trip
from Washington to answer questions about the Warren
Commission. Instead, he invited me to stay over in the
guest room, and said I should read through his “chronological
files,” which were in two large cardboard boxes.
After calling my parents to get permission to keep the
car another night, I stayed up until 5 AM reading through
the documents. They included staff memos, draft chapters,
a Commission symposium on Oswald’s possible motives,
and two blue bound volumes of preliminary FBI reports,
which had not been released to the public.
At breakfast, and until early that afternoon, Liebeler
gave me an eye-opening account of the investigation.
He ridiculed the seven commissioners, saying the staff
called them Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs because
of their refusal to question the claims of Oswald’s
Russian wife, Marina (who was Snow White.) He said Dopey
was Chief Justice Warren, who dismissed any testimony
that impugned Marina’s credibility.
I asked him, “Who was Sleepy”?
He answered Allen Dulles, the former director of central
intelligence. Dulles received this appellation because
he often fell asleep during the testimony of witnesses
and, when awakened, asked inappropriate questions. For
example, an FBI fiber expert was in the midst of describing
the bullet holes in the front of Kennedy’s shirt
when Dulles woke up, looked at the blowup of the bloody
shirt, and said, “He wears ready-made shirts,
huh.” At another point, he spilled a wad of tobacco
on a photograph of three bullets fragments and said,
as if he had discovered new evidence, that he saw four
fragments.
McCloy was dubbed Grumpy. According to Liebeler, he
became angry when staff lawyers did not pay sufficient
attention to his theories about possible foreign involvement.
He was also scathing about the initial FBI investigation,
which he called “a joke.” As for the CIA,
he said one of its theories was that Oswald might have
been “brainwashed” into serving as a “Manchurian
Candidate” assassin. He noted the agency had no
basis for this “ridiculous theory” other
than a decade-old study it had conducted on brainwashing
techniques.
He answered questions for about four hours and gave
me a brief tour of his farm. He then suggested that
I keep the two boxes of documents. So I returned to
New York with FBI reports that no one outside of the
FBI and the Warren Commission had ever seen.
|