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Earl Warren, 72, undertook the assignment with great reluctance. In the past, Supreme Court Justices occasionally have accepted extrajudicial chores: Justice Robert Jackson was chief U.S. prosecutor at the Niirnberg trials; Owen Roberts was head of the Pearl Harbor investigating commission. But Warren held the .traditional view that the federal judiciary—especially the Supreme Court—ought not to move out of its well-defined limits. In 1958 War ren had turned down a suggestion that he, or any member of the Court, join a committee to study the question of presidential disability. Moreover, he knew that litigation arising from the November events in Dallas—the Jack Ruby case, for one—might some day come before the Supreme Court. If that happened, he would almost certainly have to disqualify himself.
Nevertheless, in a White House meeting, President Johnson insisted that the national interest required a man in Warren's position and with his reputation to head the investigation. Warren finally agreed, but when he left Johnson's office there were tears in his eyes.
Other members of the commission are Georgia's Democratic Senator Richard B. Russell, 66, who chaired the 1951 congressional investigation into President Truman's dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur; Kentucky's Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper, 62, a former state judge and Ambassador to India; Louisiana's Democratic Congressman Hale Boggs, 50, a lawyer and the House Democratic whip; Michigan's Republican Congressman Gerald Ford, 50, Yale Law School graduate and one of the G.O.P.'s most respected House members; Allen W. Dulles, 70, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency; and John J. McCloy, 68, retired chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, onetime U.S. High Commissioner in West Germany and John Kennedy's disarmament adviser.
Named chief counsel to the commission was James Lee Rankin, 56, a Manhattan attorney who was Eisenhower's Solicitor General. Rankin ranks high in Supreme Court circles, argued for the Government in the 1953 school desegregation cases, in the Little Rock high school litigation, defended Ike's right to invoke the Taft-Hartley law in the 1959 steel strike.
Month's Rent. Using a rented suite of offices in Washington's Veterans of Foreign Wars Building, the commission last week led Marina Oswald through the story of her life—and her days with
Lee Oswald. During her appearances, Marina became especially fond of gracious Earl Warren and pipe-puffing Allen Dulles. Warren, she later confided, reminded her of her grandfather; Dulles was "sympathique."
Yet for all the commission's kindliness towards Marina, her testimony, totaling 20 nerve-rasping hours, was an ordeal, made more grueling by the necessity to translate questions into Russian and replies into English. She refused to speculate on Lee Oswald's motives, gave only those answers of which she was certain. Counsel Rankin was interested in a rumor that Oswald had returned from a quick trip to Mexico City with $5,000. Was that so?
A. No.
Q. How much did he have when he returned?
A. $50 or $70.
Q. That's all? Only $50 or $70?
A. That may not seem much to you, but to us that was a month's rent.