-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
Kilgallen
Lee Israel©1979
Delacorte Press
New York, NY
ISBN 0-440-04522-3
-----
19/ROUGE ET NOIR
"What's My Line?" became a national television institution, a litany
evolved. Standard responses were given to common queries from the press. Many
of those questions concerned the relationship among the permanent cast of the
show: John Daly, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Dorothy specially Arlene
Francis and Dorothy. The group learned to waffle. But, in truth, Dorothy was
rather an outsider.
Mark Goodson theorized about the distance. "There were a lot of things in
back of it," he said. "She did run a gossip column. She did print things
about friends of theirs. And, also, she was not a part of the liberal
establishment in New York-the chic, inside group of people in theater and
communications. People are not religious anymore. But they've substituted for
it patterns of words and beliefs that are similar to religion. Dorothy was a
Catholic. She worked for Hearst. Her children did not go to Dalton. If she
were alive today, she would probably not be boycotting lettuce. The rest of
the panel was keenly aware that she did not fit the pattern." [1]
She was guilty on several counts. Dorothy was not only a Catholic, she was a
practicing, devout Catholic. When Bishop Fulton Sheen, the flamboyant,
wild-eyed prelate who was the only member of his profession to make the cover
of TV Guide, guested on "What's My Line?" she genuflectod and kissed the ring
on his extended hand. She had worked her whole professional life for Hearst.
Jill had gone from the Convent of the Sacred Heart to Miss Hewitt's, where
she was being prepared for her formal debut. She had been taught by Dorothy
that a lady was fully dressed only when she donned her white gloves.
Troublesome, too-bright Dickie, who explained Buxtehude to Dorothy when he
was twelve, was packed off to a series of schools.
Despite all these symptoms of "otherness," Dorothy was not, by a long shot,
the political philistine that her more liberal colleagues presumed her to be.
In the fifties, careless political labeling was rampant in the country.
On June 27, 1950, President Truman ordered armed intervention into the Korean
conflict. During that same month, a booklet called "Red Channels" was
distributed to every radio and television station in the country and to all
advertising agencies that handled broadcasting accounts. Within was a listing
of every prominent liberal in the industry and a dossier of his or her
political history, be it communistic, progressive, prematurely anti-Fascist,
or suspiciously pro-Negro. When the book was issued, Dorothy had been saying,
"And on my left, Louis Untermeyer" for almost five months. She had hit the
nail on the head. Poet and anthologist Untermeyer was among the listees.
Within months of its publication, "Red Channels" became the most effective
blacklist in the history of the entertainment business. A well-organized
consortium of individuals, veterans' groups, columnists, and congressional
committees, using "Red Channels" as a scouting manual, set out to force the
politically tainted to recant, renounce, name names-or be systematically
driven from the media.
Among the activists was a greengrocer from Syracuse, New York, Lawrence
Johnson, and his daughter, Eleanor Buchanan, a widow of the Korean conflict,
who conjoined to galvanize their fellow patriots to action. Buchanan's
standard philippic called for the routing of the likes of Untermeyer. "It
sickens me," she railed, to know of those banquets engineered by Red
sympathizers on radio and television to raise funds for their henchmen, and
those do-nothing patriotic citizens who discuss the wrongs of the world over
a dinner table while my quiet unassuming Jack ate his lunch surrounded by
dead Chinese.[2]
Johnson organized a campaign against Stoppette, the Poof-There-Goes-
Perspiration deodorant, that was one of the program's major sponsors. Stores
that stocked Stoppette were picketed by the American. Legion. The Chicago
advertising agency handling the account was warned to get Untermeyer off the
air or the pressure would increase. Baldish Jules Montinier, the Swiss
chemist who created and owned Stoppette, agonized. He considered himself a
liberal, but he felt compelled to placate the reactionary activists.[3]
In May, 1951, the owlish, avuncular anthologist was replaced by Bennett Cerf,
an owlish, avuncular publisher.
Obviously, from the choice of his successor, Untermeyer had been a perfectly
acceptable panelist. He was well-liked by everyone, including Dorothy. But
what could she do? What could anyone do?
Louis Untermeyer commented on the situation in a letter of October, 1977:
Besides murmurs of personal regret, no one connected with What's My Line?
attempted to do anything on my behalf Intimidated as they all undoubtedly
were by McCarthyism (or sympathetic to it), the feeling must have been: the
less said the better. I can't say Dorothy Kilgallen behaved worse than anyone
else. There was little behavior.[4]
In politics, as in every area of her life, she was first and foremost an
unserious style-junky. It is safe to assume that she considered the
Rosenbergs only somewhat more unattractive than the junior senator from
Wisconsin—and neither one a credit to his race. She was not equipped for
excess of any kind.
Bob Bach recalled Dorothy's timidity vis-a-vis Untermeyer. It was no
different from that of her more liberal colleagues:
There was no discussion of Louis Untermeyer. Martin Gabel was blacklisted
too, and I know that she thought that was laughable. But she was right in the
middle and she didn't want to take a stand. She couldn't afford to become too
involved or to speak out. When it eased up in the late fifties, she was more
ready to say, 'Thank God it's over." But she was more likely to laugh or
change the subject or talk about who was playing the Paladium.[5]
On their radio program, the Kollmars discussed the Russian movies,
sympathetic to the Soviet Union, that were featured at a theater in New York.
DOROTHY: I have another theory about the Stanley and the Russians. This is
strictly my own theory and unofficial. But it certainly wouldn't surprise me
to hear that this has been permitted to go on, that this little advertisement
for the Soviet Union has been allowed to continue all these years, simply
through courtesy of the FBI; who might have a little operation going
themselves-might be taking little snaps of the people going in and out.
DICK: You mean they're taking movies while the Stanley is showing them?
DOROTHY: I wouldn't be a bit surprised, you know. Those boys don't miss much
I don't think. And, of course, well, I think we went there once to see a
Russian musical, didn't we, years ago? Because we'd heard it was so
hysterical and it was. The whole love story was based on the fact that this
boy was terribly attracted to the girl because she'd managed to . . .
DICK: Oh, she won a prize at the state fair because she grew the biggest pigs.
DOROTHY: Yes, and he'd ploughed more acres of something so he was pretty
alluring to her. And they wore fur hats all the way through and we almost
died laughing.
Later on in the broadcast, Dick theorized that most communist-front
organizations were permitted to operate so that the FBI could more
effectively finger subversives. After a meeting of such an organization,
Richard speculated that, "in about an hour, when the place is empty, the FBI
comes back in and they pick up every little scrap of paper, cigarette butts,
anything that could ever be used as evidence."
Dorothy concluded: "They probably take little candid snaps. Now they have
cameras the size of cigarette lighters. They can take pictures under all
circumstances."
The Kollmars had been parsing the modus operandi of counterespionage for less
than ten minutes when an FBI informer telephoned the bureau's New York office
to report on the nature of the conversation. She characterized Dorothy and
Richard as "idiot-type people" whose program consisted of "chatter and
comments." Hoover was, nonetheless, sent a complete transcript of the
discussion, printed under the description: Kollmars Tell How F.B.I. Operates
at Radical Meetings.[6]
Dorothy's dossier does not indicate which tale told by what idiot signified
anything, or whether or not the FBI came in, after the broadcasting room was
empty, to collect Richard's cigarette butts. But the very fact that they were
surveilled while surveilling the subject of surveillance indicates that she
was not, ipso facto, the political basketcase that the bureau thought her to
be.
She did run occasional items during the McCarthy era that smacked of the
trendy philistinism of the right, as in:
Friends of the late John Garfield are desperately trying to halt the plans of
a leftist group to stage a memorial to him and Canada Lee. The pinkos would
take the opportunity to extol Garfield and Lee as "martyrs" to the current
"witch hunt" against Communists.[7]
Dorothy had never been a friend or fan of Josephine Baker, the black singer
whose charges against the Stork Club in October, 1951, split the city into
two warring factions. Miss Baker and a group of friends arrived one night at
the chic Cub Room, ordered drinks, and waited inordinately long for the
arrival of their supper. The group left the Stork angrily, alleging racial
discrimination. Liberals honored the picket lines that were subsequently
formed. Conservatives maintained that the service accorded. Josephine Baker
was no slower than usual and that the incident had been ignited and fanned by
subversives.
Billingsley implored Dorothy to ignore the episode. She acceded, in spirit,
to his request. But she buried in her VOB this seemingly innocuous,
insidiously clever line: "The Stork Club has a new fall dress-dark red and
black velvet."[8]
With the exception of one column that she wrote in 1951, Dorothy never used
The Voice of Broadway to separate anyone from gainful employment in show
business because of his or her political persuasion. In this regard, she
towered above the pygmies at the Journal-American who were engaged in a
concerted campaign to cleanse the State Department, the Executive, the
teaching profession, and the Morosco Theatre of the scourge of the Phantom.
According to Adela Rogers St. Johns, a confidante of and emissary for the old
man, William Randolph Hearst was a prime political mover. She told Joseph G.
Goulden, author of The Best Years, that her boss had spurred the
congressional pillaging of Hollywood by Parnell Thomas and his committee in
1947:
Hearst had spent millions of dollars of his own money before Congress moved
in with that committee. Everybody in Congress, in those early days, got all
their material from us [the Hearst organization]. We had two floors of the
Hearst magazine building on Eighth Avenue in New York devoted entirely to the
testimony and investigative answers we had gotten. The Hearst crew put all
the material together-chiefly through a man named Jack Clements, who knew
more about communism than anybody else, and J. B. Matthews-and then the
committee got into it. Hearst forced that. . . . Out of this, of course, came
the Hiss case and the breakup of the group in the State Department. We made
one fatal mistake-and how could anybody have known it? We were looking for a
senator to carry the ball. I went down and tried to get Millard Tydings. . .
. He said, "Nooooo, noooooo, they'd beat you to death before you were
through."
The only guy who would go was [Joseph] McCarthy. We didn't know he was a
drunk. if McCarthy hadn't been an alcoholic, the whole story would have been
different, because he had the material, but he kept blowing it.[9]
The Journal-American columnists carried on intrepidly what their employer had
initiated. Igor Cassini and Westbrook Pegler, in 1948, allied themselves with
a Connecticut housewife, Mrs. Hester McCullough, who endeavored to deny any
and all gainful employment to Larry Adler and Paul Draper. When the
entertainers sued Mrs. McCullough for libel, Pegler called their legal
redress "a new communist bully tactic" and suggested the institution of a
legal slush fund for the likes of Mrs. McCullough and Senator McCarthy. After
Adler and Draper were compelled to seek work in Toronto, Cassini expressed
regrets that his column was not syndicated there so that he might fully
inform Canadians of their dangerous political leanings.
Paul Draper was booked finally on Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town." The
Journal-American consequently ran a story about an American Legion commander
in Jackson Heights, quoting him: "We will be very careful in the future about
watching CBS shows." E. J. Kahn wrote, in The New Yorker, that the paper
carried on "as if Draper had been caught practicing vivisection on Louella 0.
Parsons."[10]
Television columnist Jack O'Brian lambasted that network for permitting Lena
Home to appear. "Amazing, isn't it," he wrote, "that so many of these pink
teas seem to 'just happen' to the Columbia Broadcasting System?"[11]
The journal's entertainment editor joined the rout. Gene Knight did a body
count in 1950, swaggering:
On October 7, I announced in this column that a bandleader in a midtown
restaurant is listed in "Red Channels" as being associated with more than a
dozen organizations listed as Communist front by the Attorney General. The
band leader is no longer there.
On October 14, I reported that a singing act in a swank East Side spot loves
to perform at pink rallies. The act is no longer there.
On October 19, I stated that a singer in a downtown nightclub is listed in
"Red Channels" as being associated with five organizations labeled Communist
fronts by the US Attorney -General. The singer is no longer there.[12]
When Judy Holliday was listed in "Red Channels," she sat petrified for almost
an hour outside the office of Journal columnist George Sokolsky, who was in
conference with Westbrook Pegler. Sokolsky acted as an unofficial "clearance
expert" for various congressional committess. She did not recant
satisfactorily and was called before Senator Pat McCarran's Sub-Committee on
Subversive Infiltration in the Entertainment Media. Victor Riesel, another
Journal columnist, found her performance wanting there,. so he composed "An
Open Letter to Judy Holliday," reminding her that she still owed "the world
of decency a debt."[13]
Dorothy avoided the red baiters at The Journal-American. Riesel doesn't
remember that she came to their parties.[14] Cassini, mellowed with age and
travail, reflected:
She did not express too many political opinions in her column. I went much
more after the Drapers and the Adlers. I think that Dorothy Kilgallen, being
a woman, was not as impregnated with politics as I was.[15]
Dorothy, however, was no Lillian Hellman. She wrote one full column, just
after the release of "Red Channels," on the subject of blacklisting,
communism, Korea, and the state of her own offended intelligence. She
reaffirmed her love for show people, declaimed "the unthinking boycott and
the casual blacklist." She maintained that the inclusion of a performer's
name in "Red Channels" or any publication like it was insufficient "to create
the general inference that he is guilty of anything, including beating his
wife or liking garlic." [16]
But Dorothy would not permit the inference that she could be hoodwinked by
anyone. In a kind of come-on-now! spirit, she blinded several paragraphs
about performers who were sanctimoniously pretending that they were not now
nor had they ever been. Dorothy knew better.
There was a "Miss A," currently professing innocence, whose political history
Dorothy knew intimately. Way back when it was fashionable and fun, Dorothy
had been present in Miss A's glamorous drawing room one evening when she
[Miss A] told about going to a Communist school. I tell you she had us all in
stitches as she described the 'cell' to which she belonged.
Then there was an actor in South Pacific, a director, and a prominent radio
actress. Dorothy implied that they had all come to their senses since Korea,
but that she knew there was a time when each had flirted with the party line.
She concluded:
"Red channels" may have made some mistakes in linking innocent persons with
communism. And this, if so, is deplorable. But never let anyone tell you that
it didn't hit a great many nails on the head.[17]
Something about Dorothy's priorities was revealed in the first important
encounter with the Central Intelligence Agency. The agency was interested in
an item that appeared in VOB on March 7, 1951:
Radio Free Europe, which operates along lines similar to the Voice of
America, but is privately controlled, has suffered the disappearance of
important documents. Some believe a subversive has infiltrated the
organization despite painstaking loyalty checks.
The CIA left a telephone message with Myrtle Verne. Dorothy did not return
the call. On March 12, an agent appeared at the house. Dorothy was
unavailable. Myrtle warned him that her boss would never reveal the source of
a story. He tried intermediaries.
His delection-riddled report follows. Released under the Freedom of
Information Act, the blanks indicate omissions of names withheld under
subsection (b6) of the law, which relates to "unwarranted invasion of the
personal privacy of other individuals." if one has in hand a copy of the
original report, it is possible, by counting missing letters and inferring
from context, to fill in the blanks. The first two references are undoubtedly
to Myrtle Verne. The next, up the ladder, is probably Paul Scboenstein, her
editor-in-chief, and the last probably Richard Berlin, by this time president
of the Hearst Corporation and chairman of the board of Hearst Magazines.
The report reveals that Dorothy was less than free with her information and
more an ardent protector of sources than a patriot.
We tried diligently to get Miss Kilgallen's _____ to arrange a meeting for us
with Miss Kilgallen, but _____ procrastinated until we lost all patience with
her. We called who is attached to the Hearst Publications and he informed us
that he knew Miss Kilgallen very well indeed, and would see her just as soon
as she came in the office, to arrange the necessary interview with her for
us. When we did not hear from ______ we called his office and found that he
was not present. We left our name and number, and later in the morning-
called us from the hospital, where he had been sent by reason of a sudden
heart attack. Despite his condition, he called _____ for Hearst Magazines,
and asked him to arrange the meeting with Miss Kilgallen which _____ had
promised for us.
A very short time after our conversation with _____ called, and said that he
had immediately talked with Miss Kilgallen in her office, and that, while she
was entirely willing to have me come over and call, she wanted to warn in
advance that if we still were endeavoring to find out the source of her
information on which her item of March 8th was based, she would not, under
any circumstances, make a further disclosure. She was polite about it, but
very firm. ______ told us that Miss Kilgallen and _____ are two persons who
absolutely refuse to disclose the sources of their information. He said that
Miss Kilgallen would be willing to publish a retraction in her column, if
someone in authority at the National Committee for a Free Europe would write
her a letter, saying that there was no truth in the item that appeared in her
column of March 8th insofar as it pertained to the affairs of N.C.F.E.
We explained to ______ that we respected Miss Kilgallen's desire to keep her
sources of confidential information undisclosed, but we thought that in view
of the fact that the security of an important organization was involved, she
might be persuaded to tell us—off the record and in confidence—what we wanted
to know, if we gave our assurance that there would be no repercussion. _____
said he would do everything in his power to get Miss Kilgallen to change her
mind, but he despaired of any success.
Dorothy had her old-time religion to fall back on in the CIA matter. No
appeal to patriotism, no promise of confidentiality, would extract from her
the name of a source. She would have had no such orthodox out in the matter
of "Miss A" and the Communist school, though. There was no source to protect
here. Dorothy had made it very clear, in her column, that she herself was
there: "She was a Communist at one time, all right—and I don't mean just a
partyliner. I have it on the most splendid and unimpeachable anthority: the
lady herself."
Dorothy's FBI dossier indicates that the FBI considered questioning her about
the "Miss A" column, but, despairing of success, let the matter drop.
However, another cohort of patriots took up the cudgel. The McCarran
Committee began holding hearings in Executive Session on April 27, 1951.
Senator Pat McCarran, in an attempt to strengthen 'his pending bill that
would limit the emigration of eastern Europeans, was looking to establish a
connection between susceptibility to communism among entertainers and a
background that was foreign, preferably Jewish. Among those he interrogated
were Judy Holliday, Philip Loeb of "The Goldbergs," Sam Levenson, and, to
preclude any ugly conjectures, the all-American Burl Ives.
Dorothy was, at some point, slated to appear before McCarran in Executive
Session as a "friendly witness," meaning that she was not charged with
anything except a patriotic duty to reveal the identity of "Miss A" and other
subversive types to the committee. An FBI memo of April 27, 1951, explained:
[Blank] advised me that they started holding hearings in Executive Session
before the McCarran Committee today. They are being furnished a lot of
information collected by writers regarding Communist influence in the radio
and television mfield. He handed me the attached memorandum which lists as
friendly witnesses the following individuals
Dorothy's name was listed.
Dorothy might have actually gone to Washington, D.C. Martha Rountree, who was
based there, remembered that Dorothy was in town and telephoned her. It was
mid-June, 1951.[18]
A great deal had happened in the year between the "Miss A" column, which
whetted McCarran's appetite, and Dorothy's scheduled appearance before the
committee. She knew of and eventually reported on the "quiet depression" of
actress Mady Christians, following her listing in "Red Channels." [19] Miss
Christians, who had originated the role of Mama in I Remember Mama, had been
rendered unemployable. She suffered a massive attack of hypertension and died
in October, 1951, after writing to a friend, "I cannot bear yet to think of
the things which led to my breakdown. One day I shall put them down as a
record of something unbelievable." [20] Lena Home, a close friend of
Dorothy's, had also been listed, and was compelled to explain her opposition
to Jim Crow to the publisher of the crimson pamphlet. Before she was somehow
cleared, her career was jeopardized. Only a month before Dorothy's slated
appearance, Louis Untermeyer was dismissed from "What's My Line?" And her own
newspaper was daily demanding the cashiering from their profession of talents
whom Dorothy knew and respected.
If, indeed, she got as far as Washington, she might have met or lunched with
Pat McCarran. She had agreed even to talk to the CIA. That did not mean that
she was about to tell anything. With the CIA, it was a matter of principle.
With McCarran, there was a change of heart.
The Boscowitzes do not remember that she appeared before the committee. A
close associate of the late senator, Jay Sourwine, does not remember any
connection between the committee and Dorothy.[21] The Office of the General
Counsel, which has a declassified Master List of everyone who ever appeared
before a Senate judiciary Committee in Executive Session, has no record of an
appearance by Dorothy.
It was one thing to tap out a pettish reminder to certain entertainers that
they weren't fooling her. It was quite another, a year later, to depose and
name names. Dorothy was not made for such stern stuff.
She was at her best with half a bottle of champagne under her belt,
surrounded by attractive people, feeling attractive herself, listening to
something tasteful and rhythmic.
There was a party once, during the early fifties, at the Greenwich Village
apartment of Bob and jean Bach. Adlai Stevenson was running for president.
Lena Horne was standing in front of the piano. To the tune of "I Love to
Love," Lena sang:
I love the Guv ,The Guv-naw of Illinois.
As she was singing, she looked at Dorothy and said, "Hope I'm not offending
you."
Dorothy raised her glass and replied in a shy, slightly inebriated voice,
"That's all right. It's a better song than 'I Like Ike.'"[22]
pps. 224-236
=====
A trial of somewhat greater importance was taking place in Dallas, where Jack
Ruby was charged with the televised murder of accused assassin Lee Harvey
Oswald. Dorothy left for Texas in mid-February to look in on the spectacle.
She was not assigned the running story; Bob Considine got it. Perhaps she was
not feeling well enough to take on the grueling extra work load. It is
possible. More likely, however, her editors were becoming somewhat
distrustful of Dorothy's ability to endure the long-distance run.
Back in November, she had reacted like most Americans to the assassination of
JFK—with horror, incredulity, and ineffable sadness. On the Friday night of
the murder, she watched the muted, keening coverage of the tragedy with
Johnnie and Bill Franklin. Before she left for home, she talked about the
column she would have to write for the Sunday paper and wondered what she
could possibly say.[34]
She instructed her driver to weave around the East Side. Shelley Winters
flagged her down on Fifth Avenue and asked if she would pray with her at St.
Patrick's. She stopped at the Stork Club, where Billingsley and Winchell sat
by themselves in front of the television set; at a darkened Jim Downey's,
where the owner was scrutinizing would-be patrons from behind a locked door
and admitting only cronies; and finally at Clarke's, where a No Music sign
had been placed over the jukebox.
Back at the Cloop, she tapped out the story of her trip to Washington with
Kerry, ending the column with a description of the President's enthusiastic
search for her boy's essay paper:
The picture that stays in my mind is the one of this tall young man bending
over a tall small boy, carefully scrutinizing envelopes until he came to the
name "Kerry Ardan Kollmar—Grade 3B." This is the man who was assassinated in
Dallas.[35]
Kerry was in the Black Room by himself very early the next morning as
Dorothy, in her nightgown, eased open the sliding door and sat down beside
him. They stared silently at the television screen. Dorothy took him in her
arms and began to cry. Kerry cried with her.[36]
In Dallas, fledgling reporter Jim Lehrer of the Times Herald, which carried
the VOB, was assigned to make her welcome and show her around the courthouse.
He conducted a short interview with her in which she absolved the city: "I
don't see why Dallas should feel guilty for what one man, or even three or
five in a conspiracy have done."[37] She indicated to Lehrer that she would
be in town only until the weekend. The young Texan, who would become a
prominent and prestigious television journalist, liked Dorothy enormously. "I
was just a little dip-shit reporter," he recalled, "and she made me feel
important."[38]
When she appeared in court on Thursday, during the selection of jurors,
presiding judge Joe B. Brown effervesced at the sight of her. judge Brown,
who was referred to as "Necessity" by the local lawyers because "Necessity
knows no law, invited her into his chambers. He declined to discuss the case,
but went on at some length about his history of heart attacks. He preferred
them to head colds.
She lunched with Ruby's two attorneys-flashy Melvin Belli of San Francisco,
and mountainous Joe Tonahill of jasper, Texas. When she returned to the
courtroom late in the afternoon, Tonahill was thundering at a prospective
juror about the prejudicial coverage of the Dallas Morning News. Dorothy
whispered to Considine, "This is where I left off at the Sam Sheppard trial
nine years ago, only then it was the Cleveland Press they weren't supposed to
read."[39]
What Dorothy thought about the character of the assassination, she had not
yet made clear in either her writing or her conversations with friends.
During this first trip to Dallas, she began to nurture doubts about the
commitment of the federal government to full disclosure.
It began with Joe Tonahill, who, apparently impressed with Dorothy, showed
her an exchange of correspondence between the defense and the Department of
justice. On January 9, 1964, the lawyer had written a ten-page letter to J.
Edgar Hoover, to each member of the Warren Commission, including Chief
Council J. Lee Rankin, and to Attorney General Robert Kennedy.[40] According
to the story that Dorothy filed-her first assassination exclusive, which ran
under a banner headline in the Journal-American of February 21 and was
reprinted in the American Mercury—the letter requested "all of the reports
and minutes and evidence in the possession of the Warren Commission." Hoover
refused to cooperate; so did Rankin.[41] The assistant attorney general,
Herbert Miller, at the behest presumably of Robert Kennedy, directed his
staff to turn over to the Ruby defense team reams of material digested from
over fifteen hundred witnesses. All the material had been gathered by the FBI
and the Warren Commission.
The material was an unexpected boon to the defense lawyers, who had expected
no more than a polite rebuff. According to Dorothy's story, Miller informed
Tonahill that (although it was unusual to be sure) the FBI would be
instructed to turn over to the defense 'the names and present addresses of
persons who knew Ruby, or had met him at some time in his life, or who had
expressed opinions about his personality or recalled incidents which might
be important to the case. The "kicker"—the punchline? Mr. Miller's sentence:
"information concerning Oswald's assassination of the President will not be
available as it does not appear to be relevant."
Say that again, slowly. information concerning Oswald's assassination of the
President will not be available. Perhaps it is dramatizing to say that there
is an Orwellian note in that line.
But it does make you think, doesn't it? . . .
It appears that Washington knows or suspects something about Lee Harvey
Oswald that it does not want Dallas and the rest of the world to know or
suspect . . . Lee Harvey Oswald
has passed on not only to his shuddery reward, but to the mysterious realm of
"classified" persons whose whole story is known only to a few government
agents. . . .
Why is Oswald being kept in the shadows, as dim a figure as they can make
him, while the defense tries to rescue his alleged killer with the help of
information from the FBI? Who was Oswald, anyway?[42]
On the day her Oswald story appeared in the journal, Dorothy was summoned to
the defense table by Joe Tonahill during a noon recess. He told her that Jack
Ruby wanted to talk with her. This may not have been the first meeting
between the New York columnist and the accused murderer of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Tonahill received the impression that they seemed to know each other, that
they related in a way that bespoke previous acquaintanceship. [43]
Dorothy and Jack Ruby shook hands at the defense table. She tried to cheer
him by complimenting him on his com
posure. He said that he would welcome the chance to go to a hospital, get
well, and perhaps do something "worthwhile." It occurred to her that anything
Ruby might choose to do would be a step up from his former life in Dallas.[44]
Dorothy asked him whether he was prepared to face the questions about his
sexuality, which would undoubtedly be raised at the trial. He replied that he
was expecting the issue to be broached. He was, after all, a bachelor who
referred to his pet dachshund as his wife. After a couple of minutes, Dorothy
returned him to his lawyers. She wrote that she left the courtroom and "went
out into the almost empty lunchtime corridor wondering what I really believed
about this man." [45]
She was in and out of Dallas between that first publicized meeting and the
close of the first Ruby trial on March 14, when he was found guilty and
sentenced to death. But the columns she filed reflected only her first
four-day visit there. "Doe" Quigg, of the Hearst chain, recalled that she was
there "sometime in the middle of the trial," and called out to him, "My
father says to say hello."[46] She was there during Belli's summation, at
which time she attended a press party sponsored by the wife of a local
publisher. One of the Texas women present beleaguered Dorothy by telling her
how much "prettier" she was in person. At that same gathering, another woman
said to Bob Considine, "Isn't it awful about the assassination!" Considine
muttered, "Yes, such a young man." Dorothy riposted, "Oh, not that. What's
awful is that it had to happen in Dallas." Bob whispered to Theo Wilson,
"We'd better get Dorothy the hell out of here, she's going absolutely crazy."
[47]
During one of her visits-sometime in March, before the verdict-she prevailed
upon Joe Tonahill to make arrangements through judge Brown for a private
interview with Jack Ruby. She told Tonahill that she had a message to give to
Ruby from "a mutual friend" of hers and Ruby's. Tonahill recalled that the
common friend was described to him by Dorothy as a San Franciscan who "may
have been some kind of a singer."[48]
There arises some question about the exclusivity of the controversial private
meeting. Melvin Belli wrote:
Dorothy Kilgallen did have several interviews with Jack Ruby. If the reporter
was resourceful enough to arrange the interview, Jack would talk with anyone
and by this time I had resigned myself to this and didn't try to stop him.
Most of what he said, anyhow, was gibberish. He did respect Dorothy very much
and saw in her a very prestigious person who could get him an "audience" with
almost anyone.[49]
Jim Lehrer flatly rebuts:
When Belli says that Ruby was accessible for interviews, he is wrong about
that. I never got an interview with Ruby and neither did anyone else. And I
tried. Yes, indeed. All the time.[50]
Belli may not even have known about this particular meeting. According to
Tonahill, he was "headed back to the hotel. I had remained behind to assist
in working out the arrangements with the sheriff's guards and the Court and
Dorothy."
In any case, Tonahill, who functioned as go-between and guide for Dorothy,
asserted that she had probably a closer relationship with Jack Ruby than many
of the other writers who attended the trial. . . . To my knowledge, she may
have been the first newspaper person to see Jack Ruby alone. At least, from
the moment I got into the case until I left, I think she was. [51]
Joe B. Brown, awestruck by Dorothy, acceded readily to Tonahill's request.
The meeting room in the jailhouse was bugged, and Tonahill suspected that
Brown's chambers were as well. Brown and Tonahill chose a small office off
the courtroom behind the judge's bench. They asked Ruby's ubiquitous flank of
four sheriff's guards to consent to remain outside the room.
Dorothy was standing by the room during a noon recess. Ruby appeared with
Tonahill. The three entered the room
and closed the door. The defendant and Dorothy stood facing each other, spoke
of their mutual friend, and indicated that they wanted to be left alone.
Tonahill withdrew. They were together privately for about eight minutes,[52]
in what may have been the only safe house Ruby had occupied since his arrest.
Dorothy would mention the fact of the interview to close friends, but never
the substance. Not once, in her prolific published writings, did she so much
as refer to the private interview. Whatever notes she took during her time
alone with Jack Ruby in the small office off the judge's bench were included
in a file she began to assemble on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
-----
27/ THE ASSASSINATION
A voluptuous haze hovers around Dorothy's involvement with the assassination.
Fertile imaginations can fathom myriad shapes.
There is a story, for instance, which reached Texas from France, to the
effect that Dorothy was so terrified by the import of what she learned from
Jack Ruby that she ran, with tape recorder in hand, straight to a Catholic
priest in Dallas, leaving the tape with the clergyman. No buttressing data
exist that Dorothy used a tape recorder during the interview. More
significantly, everything in her character, her history, and her behavior
vis-a-vis the assassination would have propelled her toward an editor and not
a priest, an airplane and not a sanctuary. The story and others like it must
be dismissed as unfounded and unlikely.
Paradoxically, in the absence of empirical knowledge of what actually
transpired between Dorothy Kilgallen and Jack Ruby, or what it is she
endeavored eventually to uncover as a result of what Ruby told her or what
she learned independent of Ruby, we must wait for a second veil to form—for
her relationship with a dissembling Out-of-Towner, and for the elaborate
cover-up surrounding her own death in November of 1965—to more tenably
'apprehend substance in shadow.
It was Penn Jones, a newspaperman from Midlothian, Texas, who first revealed
the meeting between Dorothy and Ruby.[1] Tonabill and Belli, as reported
earlier, have confirmed that the meeting did occur, though there is a
specific and spurious demurral in a book by Lawrence Schiller and Richard
Warren Lewis, The Scavengers and the Critics Of the Warren Report. [2]
When Dorothy met with the shady, frightened, eager-to-please killer, be was
rapidly disintegrating. He liked and trusted her; she symbolized class and
clout. Assuming she was there to extract information in addition to carrying
a message from the San Franciscan, Dorothy might have learned that the sky
was falling, that Jews were being massacred in the streets as a result of his
crime, that he knew Lee Harvey Oswald, that there was more than one gunman in
Dealy Plaza—all of the above or none. Most salient was her failure to print
anything about what transpired between them. Had the exchange been wholly
crazed or nugatory,
Dorothy would have had no motive not to publish. Other reporters were begging
to see Ruby alone; only Dorothy was afforded the opportunity. The staggering
singularity of the situation would have justified a Journal-American banner,
if only to report her exclusive on Ruby's rapid deterioration. That she
withheld suggests strongly that she was either saving the information for her
book, Murder One, a chapter of which she had decided to devote to the Ruby
trial;[3] that he furnished her with a lead which she was actively pursuing;
that he exacted a promise of confidentiality from her; or that she was acting
merely as a courier. Each possibility puts her in the thick of things.
Tracks of Dorothy's were laid down in the clear light of day, independent of
her investigation of a possible conspiracy. She knew from the time she read
the correspondence between Tonahill and the attorney general's office that
the government had more on Lee Harvey Oswald than it was prepared to release.
She did not rush to judgment, but neither did she refrain from publishing all
responsible information that came her way. In her column of March 20, 1964,
after Ruby was first sentenced, she recapitulated her earlier exclusive:
The point to be remembered in this historic case is that the whole truth has
not been told. Neither the state of Texas nor the defense put all of its
evidence before the jury. Perhaps it was not necessary, but it would have
been desirable from the viewpoint of all the American people.
The point to be remembered in any assessment of her evolving skepticism is
that Dorothy was open-minded, acces-sible, and fearless. In this regard, she
was almost unique among heavyweight, establishment journalists in the United
States. What she was publishing has been made tepid by time, but doubting the
official version then verged on apos-tasy.
The mind-set of her colleague and friend Bob Considine was far more
typical. By March 6, only four months after the assassination and a half-year
before the release of the Warren Report, he denigrated the European press for
"still clutching to the long discredited notion that there was a dark
conspir-acy involving JFK's death." He had apparently learned at some point
that Jack Ruby had had the opportunity to shoot Oswald on the day before he
actually did the crime.[4] Using that datum as a kind of sealing wax, he
closed himself her- metically to any and all evidence that challenged the
lone-assassin theory.
In 1967, Considine wrote the introduction to The Scavengers,
characterizing the critics of the Warren Report as "opportunists,"
"crackpots," and "graverobbers." By that time, two years after Dorothy's
death, the merged World-Journal-Tribune concurred, editorializing, "We think
it is time to ask the ghouls, the buckchasers, the sensationmongers, and the
character assassins to desist-to shut up until they can put up."[5]
Many reporters would have doubtless done as Dorothy did, but they imposed
censorship upon themselves, believ-ing, often with justification, that their
papers would not pub-lish the fractious or maverick story. Fortunately for
Dorothy, the Journal-American was in too much trouble during the middle
sixties to turn down an exclusive assassination story or to risk meddling
with her Voice of Broadway.
Of the handful of reporters who had the commitment, the clout, the
predisposition, and the intrepidity to go after what the government wanted
withheld, some were frightened. Thayer Waldo of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
originally furnished to Mark Lane information that Officer Tippitt, Jack
Ruby, and Bernard Weissman (one of the signers of the notorious
black-bordered advertisement that ran in a Dallas newspaper on the day of
Kennedy's fateful visit, charging that the President had abrogated the Monroe
Doctrine and "sold out to Moscow") had met in Ruby's Carousel Club eight days
before the assassination. Waldo would not use the story himself. Waldo also
discovered that the Dallas chief of police had been surprised by the course
finally chosen for the President's motorcade and was unable to fathom why the
procession was instructed to take this more vulnerable route.[6] Nor did he
use this story, though once again he made the information available to Mark
Lane. Thayer Waldo was not minimizing the significance of his information. On
the contrary, he told Lane that if he published what he knew, "there would be
real danger to him [Waldo]."[7] Dorothy eventually published what Waldo had
uncovered but was afraid to run.
When Mark Lane, subsequent to Dorothy's death, invoked her name during his
lectures to college students, there were invariably derisive giggles in the
audience. He told one group:
You're laughing because you think of her as a gossip columnist. Well, I'm
gonna tell you something. She was a very, very serious journalist. You might
say that she was the only serious journalist in America who was concerned
with who killed John Kennedy and getting all the facts about the
assassination.[8]
pps 363-373
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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