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4.2.12
WC: 191694

Holiday services with my family in Brooklyn. The Lyon’s Den, a popular New York gossip column, carried the following vignette: [C] He was close to each clerk in a different way, following our careers, advising us on life choices and encouraging us to “do great things.”

Three months after I started working for Justice Goldberg I was in his secretary’s office while she was talking on the phone to her husband who was an officer in the U.S. armed forces. I think he had something to do with communications, because he told her that shots had been fired in Dallas. We turned on a small television set that had been in my cubicle ever since the World Series a couple of months earlier. Nothing was yet on the news. A few minutes later everyone in the world knew that President Kennedy had been shot. It was a Friday morning and the nine Justices of the Supreme Court were in their weekly private conference, which no one, except for the Justices, was allowed to attend. There were no secretary, clerks or messengers. I had been given strict instructions never to interrupt Justice Goldberg during one of these conferences, but I knew this was an exception. And so I went to the door of the private conference room and knocked. Justice Goldberg, being the junior Justice, answered the door and gave me a dirty look, saying, “I told you not to interrupt me.” I said, “Mr. Justice, you are going to want to know that the President has been shot.” Several of the Justices immediately gathered around my little television set which, it turned out, was the only one in the entire Supreme Court building. We watched, as the news got progressively worse, finally leading to the announcement that the President was dead. The Chief Justice asked all of the Justices to disperse for fear that there might be a conspiracy involving attacks on other institutions. The clerks stayed behind to finish the court’s business.

The following night, right after the Sabbath was over, Justice Goldberg asked me to pick him up and drive him to the White House. He was closely connected both to the Kennedy family and to Lyndon Johnson, and the new President wanted his advice. I picked up the Justice in my old Peugeot, which was filled with children’s toys. I drove him to the White House gate. Goldberg asked me to wait for him, since the meeting would be relatively brief, and drive him home. When the White House guard looked into the car, he immediately flung the back door open and grabbed a toy plastic gun. Nerves were pretty tense. He wouldn’t let me wait inside the White House gate, so I had to wait outside until the Justice returned. I also drove him to the funeral and was with him when the news came over the radio that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot. Goldberg exclaimed angrily, “What kind of a country are we living in!”

Shortly thereafter, Chief Justice Earl Warren told the Supreme Court staff and employees that he was becoming Chairman of the newly formed Warren Commission. I asked Goldberg why he would do that. Goldberg told me something, which only in retrospect became clear. He said that the President had asked him to perform a patriotic duty and to convince the American public that the act was that of a lone gunman, and not a conspiracy by the communists. Warren agreed because he did not want to allow any excuses either for a return of McCarthyism or for military hostilities between the Soviet Union and the United States. I later learned that Lyndon Johnson personally believed that there was a conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination, but handpicked the Warren Commission to assure that even if the evidence pointed in that direction, it would be covered up in the interest of national security.

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