A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination by Philip Shenon Page B

court should stick to their knitting and not assume extra-curricular duties.” Warren knew his colleagues were right to be angry with him. He was, he admitted, angry with himself.

Frame #371 from the Zapruder film, November 22, 1963

6
    THE CHAMBERS OF THE CHIEF JUSTICE
    THE SUPREME COURT
    WASHINGTON, DC
    DECEMBER 1963
    The chief justice feared it would be a miserable Christmas—and a terrible new year. Warren’s children said the Kennedy assassination had shaken him and their mother like no other event in their parents’ lives. “The assassination was just unbelievable to both of them,” said Robert, the youngest of their six children. “It changed them.” Another son, Earl Jr., said that for the first time in his father’s life, the “strain really, really showed.” By agreeing to run the commission, “he was living that tragic event over every moment.… It was really quite cruel for him to have to go through it again and again.”
    That year especially, the chief justice would have welcomed the chance to escape the capital and spend the holidays back home in Northern California, surrounded by his children and grandchildren and his old friends, enjoying the sunny, sometimes warm December weather of the San Francisco Bay Area; the harshness of winters in Washington could still startle him. Traveling to California for the holidays had been his routine since joining the court, but now, having yielded to President Johnson, he suspected that he would be forced to remain in Washington. He needed to organize the commission, even as he prepared himself for a busy winter docket at the Supreme Court. The cases to be decided the following year included a momentous First Amendment case, The New York Times v. Sullivan , that was scheduled for argument on January 6. Several other major cases argued in late 1963 were set for rulings. Just nine days before the assassination, the court heard arguments in a landmark voting-rights case, Reynolds v. Sims ; that case would allow the court to force all fifty states to adopt one-man, one-vote rules for elections of their state legislatures.
    Luckily for Warren, he was still in good health at the age of seventy-two. He was proud that he was still vigorous, still hard at work at the court, even as so many of his old colleagues from the district attorney’s office in Oakland and at the governor’s offices in Sacramento were heading into retirement. Sadly, a few of his old California friends had recently gone to their graves.
    By agreeing to run the commission, Warren had assumed two full-time jobs. He decided he would try not to limit, in any way, his activities on the court. After a decade on the bench—in October, he had marked his tenth anniversary as chief justice—Warren could see that the court under his leadership was remaking the country, pushing the United States into the future, making it fairer and freer. The court was defeating the bigots and the reactionaries who, he sensed, had somehow created the atmosphere that had resulted in Kennedy’s murder. His legacy as chief justice might be far greater than anything he could have achieved had he realized his earlier dreams of winning the White House.
    Johnson and his aides had pledged to Warren that he would have unlimited resources to run the commission. He would have all the money he needed to hire a staff, find offices, and pay for whatever investigation was necessary. But somebody had to hire that staff, and somebody had to find those offices, and now all those responsibilities rested on Warren’s shoulders. He was being asked to run the court even as he set up and directed what amounted to a small federal agency to investigate the president’s murder—an agency that, if it did its job poorly, might cause the nation to stumble into war.
    Warren knew he needed help fast, and he immediately reached out to Warren Olney, his most trusted aide throughout his career in county and state government back in California. Olney,