The Man Who Saw Too Much
Hugh Aynesworth can’t escape what he witnessed in 1963.
(Page 5 of 5)
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have made investigative reporters famous; Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman will turn them into legends. A few weeks after Aynesworth came to the Times Herald in 1975, he and a young reporter named Bob Dudney teamed up to work on a story about the abuses in the narcotics division of the Department of Public Safety. They have been together ever since. Aynesworth and Dudney take double bylines, they share a small office apart from the rest of the reporters, and they work their own schedule, backed up by a unique sort of laissez-faire from their editors. As investigative reporters they are a breed apart. They must become accustomed to the editorial writer who walks up as they are waiting for the elevator and says, “You two been on vacation? Haven’t seen your bylines recently.” Deromanticized, the investigative reporter has a life remarkably like that of a spy or a detective. The result may seem dramatic; the work leading up to it generally is not. The Hoffa story took days, weeks, of waiting, not to mention fruitless trips to Newark, New Jersey, hardly the garden spot of the western hemisphere, where the two spent days in a motel. The night before he was going to lead them to the body, their source bragged he knew about Hoffa, and happened to be in a mob bar when he did it. He hasn’t been seen since. That story—for all its travel, expense, and time—never made it into print.
Their biggest collaboration has also been a non-story. When CBS ran a widely praised series on assassination last fall, one of the most effective segments was the statement of a former FBI man that five days before Kennedy was killed, a message on the FBI teletype warned of an attempt to be made on the President’s life by a radical group in Dallas on November 22. The ex-FBI man, William Walter, claimed to have a coy of that telex, which he said the FBI has suppressed. “He was so convincing,” Dudney says, with a note of wonder, Aynesworth listens to Dudney’s recounting with the sort of benign grin of an expert seeing an apprentice master the craft. “He’s a successful banker now, and has that trustworthy look bankers have. Very neat. Very straight. Very uncrazy. Hell, we wanted to believe him. Any reporter would kill to get that story. He had come to us first; we talked to him twenty times, did everything we could to get him to come up with the copy of the message. We even got with the FBI and set up a conference call where they guaranteed him immunity against the crime of having a classified document in his possession—if he would only come forward with it. He wouldn’t. We set up a lie-detector test, which he didn’t pass. We compared the language of the message to the standard FBI style—it didn’t match. We talked to everyone who might have had anything to do with FBI messages or with Walter—about 60 people. It took us weeks. We finally decided we just didn’t have it, that unless he could come up with the actual message then he was a phony. It was hard, really hard. It would have been so much easier just to throw it out—you know, say he claims to have it—and get the scoop. When we gave it to CBS we told them all this. We were amazed they went with it so seriously.”
While Aynesworth and Dudney complement each other well, personally they are a study in contrasts. Aynesworth, 44, parted with his crew cut with great reluctance, and now sports an expensive razor cut, which he occasionally still sets off with medium-loud sport coats and white shoes. He drives a white Mercury; before that he drove a white Continental. Dudney, 25, looks like an Anglo Geraldo Rivera: flared pants, beard, long hair. He drives a beat-up Volkswagon. Together they could pass for an insurance salesman and his college dropout son. Aynesworth is a man whose die is cast; Dudney is just on his way up. Aynesworth’s charm is contagious. Everyone on the paper seeks him out, from editors to cub reporters. Dudney, on the other hand, is something of a loner. There is a poignancy to it, this tale of a good young reporter and a good middle-aged reporter, working together. The age gap is not ignored; it is there, in fact, as a constant foil. Stories Aynesworth tells invariably happened when “Dudney here was in grade school.” Aynesworth, the old investigative reporter, the man who is supposed to know Dallas like the back of his hand, gets lost whenever he drives in the city: turns up one way streets, can’t find common landmarks, muddles through. Dudney’s stock comment is something like, “Well, Hugh, after you’ve lived here for a few years maybe you’ll learn your way around.”
They work well together. Aynesworth calls Dudney “one of the best reporters I’ve ever seen.” Dudney’s admiration for Aynesworth is obvious, even more obvious than the fact he is learning everything from Aynesworth he can. Each has his own strengths. Dudney is the organizer, Aynesworth the improviser. Aynesworth’s true genius comes through best on the telephone. Even on stories Dudney has been developing on his own he will sometimes brief Aynesworth so he can handle the tricky telephone interviews. “My technique,” Dudney says, “is to call someone up and say, ”Hello, I’m Bob Dudney from the Dallas Times Herald. Is it true you’re a Russian spy?’ Aynesworth would have the guy trying to recruit him as an agent before he got off the phone.“
Dudney has now been caught in the assassination vortex. One of their first collaborations was on the legwork and follow-up to Times Herald publisher Tom Johnson’s story about Oswald leaving a threatening note with the FBI and the subsequent FBI cover-up. Aynesworth has told Dudney all the assassination stories, played him the tapes, walked him through the Garrison artifacts in New Orleans, and now Dudney has his antennae up as well. If any new ground is broken on the assassination, it will most likely be by them. The trail, after Garrison’s thrashings about, is almost hopelessly muddled. It is still, however, well traveled. Besides McDonald’s Saul, there is now a theory of several Oswalds, based in large part on the discrepancies in Oswald’s height supposedly discovered from close examination of photographs and documents. Movie fans will remember a similar recent controversy over the height of Robert Redford. Gore Vidal has put forward the theory that E. Howard Hunt wrote the Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and Arthur Bremer diaries. Another assassinationist claims that Oswald was really Jack Ruby’s illegitimate son. And so on, stretching as far into the furure as one might care to look. Like the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs and parapsychology, the Kennedy assassination seems to have tapped a growing reservoir of irrationality. Almost any theory about it will find some fervent believers.
”You know,” says Aynesworth, as he rummages through his desk in yet another unsuccessful search after some assassination document, “nothing would please me better than to find a conspiracy. The trouble is, in spite of it’s having some holes and having been put together too quickly, the Warren Commission Report still holds together better than any other story that’s come out. For twelve years now I’ve tried to disprove it. I’ve looked forward to each new piece of evidence, I’ve read all the books, talked to every one who ever claimed to know anything about it. On top of everything, Oswald was the kind of guy who would be easy to set up. All someone had to do was offer to be his friend—hell, no one ever had. He had a mother you wouldn’t believe, a wife who made fun of him, he’d ruined his life running off to Russia. If someone had befriended him, he would have done anything for ’em—maybe even kill a president. That’s a very plausible theory. So far, I’m still trying to find some plausible facts to go with it. When I do, I’ll be there with it, right on the front page. Until then, I can only believe he acted alone. Isn’t that reasonable?”
Aynesworth has another call. A reporter in Houston has heard that Oswald had a CIA agent number.
“The only thing wrong with that,” Aynesworth is saying into the phone, with infinite talmudic patience, “is that I made that number up myself. I read it off a telex one day when I was joking with a reporter looking for a hot assassination scoop. I made up an FBI number too, in case you come across it. By the time I discovered people were taking it seriously, it had become part of the basic theory.” Aynesworth listens to the receiver. “Well, keep trying. Maybe you’ll turn something up.”
Aynesworth and his visitor are back in Dealey Plaza for a last look. It is after sunset and the light is failing fast. Across the street a young man is pointing out the sights to his girl friend. They are bundled up close; then he frees one hand to point up toward the Depository building, clearly meaning to indicate the window from where Oswald fired his shots. Aynesworth glances at the tourists and says, almost without thinking, “He’s pointing at the wrong window.”
And he and his visitor, bent against the wind, head back up Elm, the same way Oswald had gone, twelve years before.
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