The Man Kennedy Fired Ended Up Investigating His Murder

On a scratchy White House tape, President Lyndon Johnson is trying to stop the House and Senate from opening their own probes into the murder of President John F. Kennedy, and Johnson wants one investigation he can control.

On the other end of the line is J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI. Hoover says it would be “very, very bad to have a rash” of investigations. Johnson agrees, warning that televised hearings would become “a three ring circus.”

What they settle on changes the history of the case. On the tape, Johnson and Hoover discuss Allen Dulles, the longtime spy chief, for the blue ribbon panel that will decide what happened in Dallas. That panel was the Warren Commission, the group charged with evaluating all the facts around the assassination. A voice on the recording says, “I think he would be a good man.”

The choice mattered because Kennedy had fired Dulles after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Kennedy had also reputedly threatened to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces,” and then he was murdered. Now the fired director would help decide whether his former boss was killed by a lone gunman.

Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court leader Johnson picked to head the commission, did not want the job. He initially said no, but Johnson pressed him by warning that global conflict was at stake. Warren agreed. He later described accepting the post as a mistake.

There was no public debate over putting Dulles on the commission. David Talbot, the founder of Salon magazine who wrote a book about Dulles called The Devil’s Chessboard, says that was no accident. He says Dulles lobbied for the seat, and that “there is no better figure from a cover up point of view to have on that commission than” Dulles. In Talbot’s account, Dulles leaked material to the press and the CIA, and “essentially led them down the primrose path” to the conclusion that Oswald had been the sole shooter.

Investigators later found how direct that guidance was. Dulles briefed commission members on what to ask CIA witnesses, and separately coached the witnesses in advance on how to answer. John McCone, who led the CIA during the Warren inquiry, admitted lying to shield the CIA in the inquiry.

In 2015, Politico described a declassified CIA report which found that McCone and other senior officials had withheld explosive information from the Warren Commission, with McCone at the heart of a benign cover-up inside the agency.

The result was the official verdict Americans lived with for years, that Oswald acted alone. What investigators later documented was the coaching role behind it, with briefings in which the man Kennedy had fired prepared both the members and the witnesses on questions and answers.