Face the Nation transcripts October 27, 2013: Issa, Shaheen, Shedon

(CBS News) Below is a transcript of "Face the Nation" on October 27, 2013, hosted by CBS News' Bob Schieffer. Guests include: Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Philip Shenon, Tom Johnson, Peggy Noonan, and Bob Woodward.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Good morning, again. And we welcome California Congressman Darrell Issa. He is the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Friday, Mister Chairman, your committee along with the Senate Committee, announced you'd start issuing subpoenas soon if you didn't get the documents that you had requested from Secretary Sebelius' department. What exactly are you looking for now and what is it you hope to find out?

REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA (Oversight Committee Chairman): Bob, we're looking for quick answers so that we can on behalf of the American people straighten out as much as can be straightened out that's above the water--which is the website--and the ninety percent that's below the water like an iceberg that are the other problems in Obamacare. And, just quickly, twenty-five hundred counties, almost sixty-eight or almost sixty percent, fifty-eight percent of those counties only have two or one companies bidding for health care. So it's not just the website, it's a question of cost and benefit to the American people.

BOB SCHIEFFER: The White House is saying and they told me again last night that they believe they can get this thing fixed by the end of November. And if they do, they say they'll be back on schedule and people will be able to buy this insurance before the deadline.

REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Well, I hope so. I hope for the American people that they can fix this and fix it quickly. But let's understand, your next guest, Jeanne Shaheen, Senator Shaheen, she is talking about extending, or in some way recognizing that the American people don't just have a right to get on and make a quick selection, they have a right to a competitive opportunity that was promised to them. They have a right to find out who the doctors are because, in fact, they were promised they'd get to keep the doctor they have, and under bronze plans and some of these plans, there's no way they're going to get to keep them. And it's one of the reasons that I'm trying to push to the original goal which was make health care affordable, something that is so far not happening in this act.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, what is it you think you will have to subpoena the administration for the in-- information that you want? I mean what-- what do you specifically want?

REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Well, a lot of it has to do with the contractors have already told us that, in fact, people representing-- represented that the White House was telling them they needed these changes, including instead of a simple "let me shop for a program then decide to register," they were forced to register and go through all the things that have slowed down the website before they could find out about a price. The American people have a right, even if they don't need to use the exchange, to be able to find out what those prices are and look at them competitively against other opportunities.

BOB SCHIEFFER: The White House, the President, his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, both have said that they stand by Secretary Sebelius, that the President still enjoys full confidence in her. Do you think she should lead?

REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Well, you know, you've had me on before asking about full confidence in Eric Holder. This President has to understand this was his signature legislation. They had-- they voted it on a purely partisan basis, but they had unlimited money, six hundred million dollars, just to do this part, and billions to do the other part. The President has been poorly served in the implementation of his own signature legislation. So if somebody doesn't leave and if there isn't a real restructuring, not just a sixty-day somebody come in and-- and try to fix it, then he's missing the point of management one-o-one, which is these people are to serve him well and they haven't.

BOB SCHIEFFER: So you're basically saying it would be best if she went.

REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: If she cannot reorganize to get the kind of a team in consistently to meet his agenda, then she shouldn't be there. And right now when she says she didn't know, why didn't she know that the President's signature legislation was, in fact, in trouble?

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me also ask you about something else, and this is this brouhaha that's grown up since the German Chancellor Merkel revealed that the NSA had been tapping in and listening to her phone calls. Did we go too far?

REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Well, remember, the NSA works for the President. So it's a question of, did the President want to hear what Chancellor Merkel was saying, because through his National Security Advisor he knew or should have known. The question of whether or not the four eyes, whether or not our key allies are being listened to is an easy one. No, we have an agreement not to do it.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And that is with Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada.

REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Yes.

BOB SCHIEFFER: We have an agreement. We don't spy on them. But isn't it fair to say we spy on everybody else and everybody else spies on us?

REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: We have a good Central Intelligence Agency and NSA whose job it is to look at open source, to interview people, to try to not only for ourselves have situational awareness but for our allies. If what you do in Germany helps the Germans and us, that's fine. But I don't believe ever listening to a head of state of an ally would be appropriate. And I would hope if it's happened that the President is just as upset as all of us are in Congress.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. Thank you so much, Mister Chairman.

REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Thank you.

BOB SCHIEFFER: I want to go now to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Senator, thank you for joining us. The person who has been--

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN (D-New Hampshire): Good morning.

BOB SCHIEFFER: --brought in to fix Obamacare and the website told reporters Friday that the problems would be fixed by November thirtieth. Do you still want them to extend the time that people have to enroll in this program?

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: Well, let me begin by saying that I support the Affordable Care Act. I voted for it. I think it's important that we make it work for the millions of Americans who haven't been able to get health insurance at a price they can afford. And that's my goal. It's to fix it. And as you said, Jeff Zients, the person who's been brought in to address the website concerns, has indicated that he hopes to have it up and running by the end of November. I hope that's accurate. Because we have-- and we're hearing from lots of constituents in New Hampshire that they want to enroll in health insurance, but they can't because of the problems with the website. The rollout has been a disaster. And so what I am proposing is that we extend the period in which people can enroll, so we can make sure we get as many people who want health insurance able to enroll and be able to be covered.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And what-- as I understand at what ten Democrats have signed on to your proposal. But I guess what I would say is it-- and I talked to the White House yesterday about this, and they-- they would not criticize you, but they said it's really not going to be necessary to extend that deadline. So I guess I'd ask you, do you-- do you have faith in them? Do you believe that that can actually happen?

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: Well, I hope that's accurate because my goal is to fix the Affordable Care Act, to make sure people can get that access to health care. Unlike a lot of the proposals that we have seen from people whose goal is to repeal it to make sure it doesn't work, I want it to work and that's why I think extending the enrollment period. We're already a month in to the marketplaces--

BOB SCHIEFFER: So--

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: --and the website and people are not able to enroll.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. So I mean just to cut to the chase here. So you want to-- you want to go ahead and extend that deadline, whether they're able to meet the current deadline or not? You still think that is necessary.

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: Well.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me-- let me just--

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: Let me.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Am I right or wrong, right? I mean--

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: Well, yes. The law said that people were going to have six months to enroll.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Okay.

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: That they would not have to be subject to penalties until the end of that period, and that's the concern. You know, I-- I've heard from people like Kyle up in Lancaster, New Hampshire, who said he's gone to the website with his wife every day since October the first, and they've still not been able to enroll, and so I don't want them to feel like they have to be penalized if they can't enroll because the system is not working.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Same question I asked Chairman Issa--do you still have faith in Secretary Sebelius? The President says he does.

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: Well, I think our number one goal at this point is to get the marketplaces working, to make sure the website's working, to make sure that the millions of people who want to enroll in health insurance through the Affordable Care Act can do that. And there's going to be plenty of time to place blame on who is responsible for whether it should have worked on day one or didn't work or whatever. But right now, everybody's goal should be, let's get this working. Let's make sure that people can get the health care they want and need.

BOB SCHIEFFER: So you're not ready to say whether or not Secretary Sebelius should leave?

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: I think it's too early to start placing blame. I think we need to-- to get the marketplaces working. We need to get the website working and we all ought to be focused on how we make sure that the people who want health care in this country can get enrolled and be covered.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. One final question, again, the same question I asked Chairman Issa--What about this hubbub over the German chancellor revealing that we have been tapping in and listening to her cell phone. Is it time to rein in the NSA or-- or what's your take on that?

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: You know I'm not on the Intelligence Committee, so I haven't seen the classified information, but I think the revelations from Snowden and the secrets that have been revealed are doing significant damage to our bilateral relationships with Germany, with Mexico, with the other countries where the suggestion is that we've listened in. So I think we have repair work to do. And I think we have hard questions we need to ask of the NSA about what's really happening in this program.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, Senator, thank you so much for joining us this morning.

SENATOR JEANNE SHAHEEN: Thank you.

BOB SCHIEFFER: We want to turn now to a fateful day you're going to be hearing a lot about over the next month because November twenty-second marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy, a day that many believe changed America forever. The first word of it for many of us came from Walter Cronkite.

WALTER CRONKITE: From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 PM Central Standard Time, two o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago.

BOB SCHIEFFER: The nation was plunged into shock. Nothing like this had ever happened. Was it the beginning of World War III? We were terrified. Then came the news that an angry ex-Marine, who had once defected to the Soviet Union, had been arrested.

WALTER CRONKITE: Lee H. Oswald, the twenty-four-year-old man whom Dallas Police say is a prime suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, was questioned for six hours at the Dallas police station this evening. Here is Oswald at the police station. He is saying there, "I did not do it. I did not do it."

BOB SCHIEFFER: Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President and brought Kennedy's body and his widow back to Washington on Air Force One.

LYNDON JOHNSON: I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help and God's.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Two days later a grieving nation was shocked once more, as an unbelievable scene unfolded in the basement of the Dallas police station. On live television, the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was gunned down and killed--

MAN: Oswald has been shot.

BOB SCHIEFFER: --by a Dallas strip joint operator named Jack Ruby.

MAN #1: Here comes Oswald.

BOB SCHIEFFER: The nation was reeling, desperate for answers, had Oswald acted alone or had he been part of a conspiracy? Was a foreign government behind the murder? Could it have been prevented? The new President appointed a high-level commission, headed by the Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren to investigate.

WALTER CRONKITE: As of this moment, the report of the President's commission is public record.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Ten months later, the Warren Commission presented its final report and concluded that Oswald had killed the President, acted alone, and there was no conspiracy.

MAN #2: The commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Over the years there have been thousands of theories and allegations of various conspiracies. But as yet, there has been no conclusive evidence to contradict the commission findings. Yet, questions remain. In his new book, A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, former New York Times investigative reporter Phil Shenon connects the dots that show the FBI and CIA not only withheld information from the Warren Commission, but prior to the assassination, did not tell FBI agents and other law enforcement authorities in Dallas all that they knew about Oswald. Had they done so, Shenon believes the assassination might well have been prevented.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Phil Shenon spent five years investing the Warren-- investigating the Warren Commission and the Kennedy assassination. We have plenty to talk to him about. He's with us this morning. We'll talk to him in one minute.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And we're back now with Phil Shenon. Phil, why do you think the assassination could have been prevented?

PHILIP SHENON (A Cruel and Shocking Act): Well, there is a tremendous amount of material, much of it, that's only been released in recent years. It shows that both the FBI and the CIA were very aware of the threat that Lee Harvey Oswald posed. And, you know, I am not the only one who believes that. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley, when he was at the FBI in the 1970s, he was perplexed by the Kennedy assassination as anybody else. He went into the raw files and found that there was plenty of evidence that had somebody just connected the dots in those few days before President Kennedy arrived in Dallas. The-- the assassination was preventable, perhaps, easily preventable.

BOB SCHIEFFER: One of the-- some of those thoughts have to do with Oswald going to Mexico City. And that part is well known, but what he did there is not so well known. And, as you have gone back, you have found out how much the CIA especially knew about what he was doing down there. One of the things you uncovered was a memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover written to the Warren Commission back in June of 1964 that somehow never ever got to the commission. Tell us about that memo, where you found it, and how you came to know about it.

PHILIP SHENON: It's sitting in the national archives. It was classified for years and years and years after the assassination. But it turns out that in June 1964, right in the middle of the Warren Commission investigation, J. Edgar Hoover writes a letter to the Warren Commission saying the FBI has learned from a reliable source that Oswald marched into a Communist embassy in Mexico City, almost certainly the Cuban embassy, and announced he was going to kill President Kennedy. And this document from the Warren Commission then disappears. So the Warren Commission never knows that Oswald was, apparently, talking openly weeks before the assassination about killing the President. If the commission had seen this document, it would have raised a million questions that-- that should have been addressed in Mexico.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And had the FBI known about it, the people in Dallas at that time had known what the CIA knew about this, they certainly would have alerted the people on the ground.

PHILIP SHENON: Well, that's the thing that-- that there was-- there was-- there was knowledge, especially about this mysterious trip that Oswald takes to Mexico City, that was sitting in the FBI files in Washington, and at-- at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. And, again, if somebody had just shared any of that with the FBI office in Dallas, those-- those people would have gone and questioned Oswald and-- and the world would probably be a very different place.

BOB SCHIEFFER: One of the reasons there's been so many thoughts about was there or not a conspiracy, is the fact that after they conducted the autopsy-- well, tell us what happened to the notes that the doctor who conducted the autopsy--what became of them?

PHILIP SHENON: I mean there are so many jaw-dropping events just in the first few hours after the assassination in terms of the destruction of evidence, it is just a big theme of my book is how much vital evidence disappears about the assassination and about Lee Harvey Oswald. The night after the assassination, the autopsy-- the pathologist who carried out the autopsy of President Kennedy is actually in his home in Bethesda, Maryland, pushing into his fireplace the original autopsy report and all of his notes from the morgue. Several hours later in Dallas you have a handwritten note from Oswald that had been left-- that he had left there, torn up and flushed down the toilet. Hours after that, you have Marina Oswald putting a match to a photograph that shows her husband holding the assassination rifle. So this is just the first weekend, and that-- and the story thereafter is destruction, destruction, destruction of evidence.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And as you recount in your book, the reason the doctor decided to destroy the original report, he had had blood on it and he decided to recopy it.

PHILIP SHENON: That's what he said. He said that he-- that he noticed that his notes and the original autopsy report had the president's blood on them. He was concerned that this would become sort of-- some sort of grisly souvenir. And so he pushes them into his fireplace. No, of course, we don't really know. Maybe there was some error he was trying to hide or there was some-- something else that he'd been ordered to leave out of the final autopsy report.

BOB SCHIEFFER: One of the most interesting parts of the book is how Lyndon Johnson convinced Earl Warren to be the chairman of this committee. Warren wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

PHILIP SHENON: You've got to feel bad for Chief Justice Warren. He did not want to run this investigation, and he initially turned it down flat. He said, "I won't do it. It's a terrible conflict of interest." Then, of course, a few minutes later the phone rings at his chambers at the Supreme Court and he's ordered to go to the Oval Office immediately. And he encounters a man he doesn't know, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who is literally in his face telling him he has to take this job and that if he doesn't the nation faces nuclear war.

BOB SCHIEFFER: He actually left the Oval Office in tears, you report.

PHILIP SHENON: Apparently. Apparently, Warren is in tears. And Johnson takes a certain pride in that.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Warren seemed to think, as I read your book, that it-- it was his job more to protect the Kennedy legacy in many ways than it was to get to the bottom of this. He seemed to just want to get it over with.

PHILIP SHENON: He-- he clearly loved President Kennedy and the Kennedy family. And, you know, he was as shocked as anybody about what had happened in Dallas. And, repeatedly, in the history of the Warren Commission, you see the chief justice making decisions that are designed to protect the privacy of the Kennedy family, and-- and the legacy of President Kennedy.

BOB SCHIEFFER: The result was that the autopsy photos were never seen by the investigators on the Warren Commission.

PHILIP SHENON: There was huge turmoil in-- on the staff of the Warren Commission because Chief Justice Warren, he-- he saw the awful, gruesome autopsy photos, and he made the decision that nobody would see them, none of the other commissioners, none of the staff. They would never be seen, even though, they were the most important evidence, the medical evidence, that was needed by the staff and there's a big fight on the part of the staff to try to get the chief justice to change his mind.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Whatever happened to him?

PHILIP SHENON: They were retained by Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department. And Robert Kennedy was also very insistent that they not be released.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. We'll hear more from Phil Shenon in Part Two of FACE THE NATION. I'll be back in a moment with some personal thoughts about that day.

BOB SCHIEFFER: There are not many of us left who covered the assassination of John Kennedy, but only those of us who were alive before that awful weekend can really know how much it changed America. We have been a confident nation. We had won World War II. We believed in our leaders. We came to see our Presidents as all but invincible. Because of television, we had come to know John Kennedy and his family more intimately than any of his predecessors. Then in a matter of seconds, he was killed by a mad man. As the entire nation watched in horror and shock as the events of the weekend unfolded on television in real time, the first time that it ever happened, our national confidence was shaken to the core. That weekend began one of the most violent decades in our country's history--more assassinations, Vietnam, the beginnings of Watergate--a time that Americans came to question almost everything we had once taken for granted. As it always had, the nation rebounded from those dark days, but it was never quite the same. It was the weekend America lost its innocence. Back in a minute.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Some of our stations are leaving us now, but for most of you we'll be right back with a lot more FACE THE NATION, including more with author Phil Shenon, plus former LBJ Press Secretary Tom Johnson, Peggy Noonan, and Bob Woodward. Stay with us.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Welcome back to FACE THE NATION. We are going to continue our conversation with Phil Shenon. It is well known that Lee Harvey Oswald went to Mexico City in the weeks before the assassination. The Warren Commission concluded the trip didn't figure in the killing of President Kennedy. But this man thought otherwise. He is Winston Scott, seen here in a 1962 home movie taken in Mexico City where he was the CIA station chief. Though he and others told the Commission that the CIA had limited knowledge of Oswald's visit, he later wrote that he knew and suspected much more. When he died in 1971, a top CIA official flew to Mexico City and removed several boxes of documents from Scott's house. One of those documents quietly declassified in the mid-1990s was a section of Scott's unpublished memoirs, a section devoted to Oswald's trip to Mexico. Lee Harvey Oswald became a person of great interest to us. Wrote Scott, "Oswald's visits at both the Communist Cuban Embassy and the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City during his brief five-day stay in September-October, 1963, are, together with what is known of what took place during these visits sufficient to make him a suspect agent acting on behalf of the Soviets in several things, possibly including the assassination of President Kennedy." So I have to ask you, Phil, is-- is Winston Scott and what he wrote in this diary to be taken seriously? Was that conjecture on his part? We have any information that he might have had evidence to back that up.

PHILIP SHENON: Well, apparently, he-- in his-- in his memoirs, he describes photographs, CIA photographs that were taken of Oswald in Mexico City. And he describes tapes of wiretapped conversations in which Oswald was involved, and all of that disappeared. We-- those-- certainly none of that material was ever provided to the Warren Commission.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Was he the one that came up with the-- the story about that Oswald actually had some sort of a relationship with a woman, a Cuban woman in Mexico City? That was new to me when I read your book.

PHILIP SHENON: There is some evidence to suggest he had a brief relationship with a young Mexican woman who worked at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. The Warren Commission actually wanted to interview that woman. But Chief Justice Warren-- Chief Justice Warren made the decision she would not be interviewed because he said she was a communist and we don't interview communists.

BOB SCHIEFFER: But this information was not passed on to the Warren Commission and was not passed on to the agents in Dallas in those days before President Kennedy came to Dallas?

PHILIP SHENON: Absolutely. And Win Scott told the Warren Commission that he did not believe there was a conspiracy. Apparently, in his memoirs, he says exactly the opposite.

BOB SCHIEFFER: So he, deliberately, for whatever the reasons, didn't shoot straight with the Warren Commission.

PHILIP SHENON: I think that's very clear.

BOB SCHIEFFER: You know there was another incident, one uncovered years later by Tom Johnson who had worked for President Johnson in the White House, was his press secretary as he left the White House. And in the 1970s, was the publisher of the Dallas Times Herald and later then the head of CNN. We want to bring Tom in now. He's with us this morning. Tell us what you discovered, when was it, 1975, about some information that came-- that you came to know about.

TOM JOHNSON (Former Dallas Times Herald Publisher/Former LBJ Press Secretary): Bob, it was 1975. I was sitting by an agent of the FBI that I have come to know over time. We were talking about the Warren Commission. We were talking about whether there had been any new information that had been discovered. He told me that Oswald had come to the Dallas office of the FBI, had left a threatening note several days before the assassination, and that that note had been flushed, that is to say, had been destroyed.

BOB SCHIEFFER: How did that come about? What did-- how did you-- what did you find out about how the note came to be destroyed and did you-- do you know what was on the note?

TOM JOHNSON: I did not know precisely what was on the note. The work that I did with a great deal of cooperation, incidentally, from then-FBI director Clarence Kelley showed that the note had been a threatening note, threatening to blow up the Dallas office of the FBI, the building, if the agents did not cease trying to interview Oswald's wife, Marina.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And we-- we know, of course, that they had been in contact with both Marina and with Lee Harvey Oswald because he had defected to the Soviet Union and she was, of course, a Russian national.

TOM JOHNSON: Yes. And the fact that she spoke no English at the time and two agents, Hosty and (INDISTINCT), were showing up at the residence to try to interview her as a matter of some routine for those citizens of Russia who were living in the United States. But she was terribly frightened and thought perhaps that these men were even KGB.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And you do-- were not about to publish something like this, though you checked it out. So, if I remember, you flew to Washington and met with the then-head of the FBI Clarence Kelley.

TOM JOHNSON: I had heard so many rumors over the years, so many conspiracy theories, and here I was as the publisher of the Dallas paper that I felt this information had to be checked every possible way. So I asked for an emergency meeting with the then-FBI director Clarence Kelley. He and assistant director James Adams agreed to see me the following day. I flew to Washington and I described to them what I-- I had learned. I also asked them to confirm it or deny it for me with one condition that they would advise me of their findings and that we could then go forward with publication if it was true.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And--

TOM JOHNSON: And--

BOB SCHIEFFER: --later told you it was.

TOM JOHNSON: --and on a Saturday morning in September of 1975, Director Kelley called me to say that it was true. He was very saddened, I think, to learn of it, and we went forward with the publication.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And-- and Phil, I'm going to get back to your book. As far as you know, this information never got to the Warren Commission.

PHILIP SHENON: No, absolutely not. I mean, the-- the-- the decision was made two days after the assassination to destroy this note. And the truth, we don't-- we'll never know exactly what was in that note. And it's been described in different ways. But, no, the Warren Commission knew absolutely nothing about it.

BOB SCHIEFFER: You know, one of the most fascinating parts of your book to me, because I've worked in Washington for more than forty years now, and I know how hard it is to keep secret around here. I mean you can barely keep one through a twenty-four-hour news cycle. But you revealed something a secret that is held for fifty years and that is that an investigator on the Warren Commission actually interviewed Fidel Castro, never made a record of it, but tell us how that happened.

PHILIP SHENON: Well, this is a gentleman by the name of William Coleman who was then a-- a young lawyer from Philadelphia who's on the staff at the Warren Commission.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And who went on to become Secretary of Transportation in the Ford administration.

PHILIP SHENON: That's correct. And he's-- he's in charge of the conspiracy team on the Warren Commission. And he actually knows Fidel Castro from his days in jazz clubs in Harlem, and, apparently, during his visits to New York, Castro would visit. And he, Coleman, is sent out on a boat to the waters off Cuba, very secretly, to meet with Fidel Castro, to hear what Castro has to say, which is that he insists that he did not have any involvement in President Kennedy's assassination.

BOB SCHIEFFER: You know, Tom, Lyndon Johnson never accepted the Warren Commission report, that there was no conspiracy. He told Joe Califano, one of his senior aides, others in the administration, the Kennedys were trying to get Castro, and Castro got him first. Did he ever have any evidence of that or was that just a suspicion that he had?

TOM JOHNSON: To the best of my knowledge, President Johnson, former President Johnson, never had any hard evidence of that.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And-- and, Phil, did you ever find anything to indicate that Castro did, indeed, have this connection? We know when-- when Oswald went to the Cuban embassy in Mexico--

PHILIP SHENON: Right.

BOB SCHIEFFER: --he tried to get a visa to go to Cuba but the Cubans wouldn't give him one. My sense was that-- that they turned him away. They didn't want to-- want to deal with him.

PHILIP SHENON: That's apparently correct, or at least that-- that is the story we were told at the time. But you know, in-- in Mexico City, Oswald is dealing with Cuban spies and Soviet spies, and Mexicans sympathetic to Castro, who might have had reason to want to see the end of John Kennedy's presidency. And all of those connections were-- went really uninvestigated by the FBI and the CIA. They didn't want to find out what the truth was down there.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Tom, you interviewed Castro yourself many years after that when you were with-- were you with the L.A. Times or the--

TOM JOHNSON I was then with CNN.

BOB SCHIEFFER: With CNN by that time.

TOM JOHNSON: Yes. Yes.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Did you ever get any sense that Castro-- there was a Castro connection here?

TOM JOHNSON: President Castro said to me and my international editor Eason Jordan and our deputy international editor Larry Register that under no conditions that anybody in his government have any connection with the assassination. And I'll never forget his quote as translated to me. He said, "If there were ever any evidence, it would have incinerated my little island."

BOB SCHIEFFER: Phil, in your-- your book you talk about-- and there's no question about this. I mean, there has been, you know, reports about it since there is no question that the administration before that was trying to sabotage Castro in every way they were-- they could. They were trying to topple him. The Bay of Pigs had been, you know, a complete failure. But right up until the assassination, the CIA was still trying to carry out some sort of a move to assassinate Castro.

PHILIP SHENON: They were trying to kill him. And on the day of President Kennedy's assassination, a CIA officer in Paris is handing a poison pen to a man who's apparently assigned to kill-- to kill Castro. No, the Kennedy administration was very clearly trying to oust Castro and almost certainly violently.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And you know from time to time tried to-- came up with these various plots bring in the mafia to see if they could help and that sort of thing. Castro had to know about that.

PHILIP SHENON: He did. He did know about it. In fact, just weeks before the assassination, Castro gave an interview in Havana in which he said he was aware that the Kennedy administration was trying to kill him and, you know, there would be retaliation if that continued.

BOB SCHIEFFER: But, apparently, as-- as Tom Johnson, came away from it believing he thought that it would-- it would-- the consequences would be disastrous for Cuba if he did try something.

PHILIP SHENON: I think--

BOB SCHIEFFER: And we will never know. Obviously, he's going to deny it, but we'll never know any more than that.

We'll be back in one minute. We're going to bring in Peggy Noonan and Bob Woodward into this discussion.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And we're back now. Joining us at the table are Peggy Noonan, columnist for the Wall Street Journal; and Bob Woodward, our old friend at the Washington Post. Peggy, as you sit here and listen to Phil retell the story, and Tom--

PEGGY NOONAN (Wall Street Journal): Yeah.

BOB SCHIEFFER:--what goes through your mind here?

PEGGY NOONAN: Well, it's a heck of a story. We are over fifty years-- we are half a century into the story, and we are still learning new things about it, which is kind of amazing. But I also wondered, as I mentioned a moment ago, I wonder if we were not as a fully functioning nation lucky not to know all of this at the time. You wonder how destabilizing it would have been to have known of the grave doubts and the mischief and in some cases, the dishonesty of people who were running the United States and who were running the great report of the tragically killed President. So, in a way, I mean it's the opposite of these days where we know everything, and that has its own destabilizing effect.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, you-- you know, Phil writes in his book that at one point, Dean Rusk told the-- who did he tell, the attorney general or somebody to shut down this investigation about trying to find out if it was Castro?

PHILIP SHENON: Well, it's an amazing story, but the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico City, a fellow by the name of Tom Mann, says many years after the assassination, that he was called immediately after President Kennedy's murder, by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and told to shut down any investigation in Mexico City that might point to Cuban involvement in the assassination. And he thought-- he was shocked by that. He said he thought the same order had been given to this CIA and FBI officers in Mexico City. And he thought that was because the CIA was terribly concerned that its covert operations in Mexico might be revealed.

BOB SCHIEFFER: What is so interesting, Bob Woodward, and you know, you and I have been here and seen a lot of these things.

BOB WOODWARD (Washington Post): Too much.

BOB SCHIEFFER: How the first thing that agencies tend to do is trying to make sure they can't be blamed for something. And, clearly, that is why the FBI and the CIA did not come clean with the Warren Commission, and why maybe they didn't even tell the agents in Dallas what was going on.

BOB WOODWARD: Well, initially, in the Watergate cover-up, part of the argument was, oh, you'll expose covert operations in Mexico because they were laundering eighty-nine thousand dollars of money that helped finance Watergate. I think there's a theme here in all of this that you have laid out that connects somewhat to what's going on now. And that is the power of this secret world--

PEGGY NOONAN: Mm.

BOB WOODWARD: --CIA, FBI particularly, in what you've looked at Phil, the assassination plots against Castro. I mean it's stunning, and this information really didn't get to the Warren Commission. And it's not saying that Castro did it but that there's all this secrecy and the people at the top or the people investigating the commission does not get the evidence. We look now at what's going on with all the NSA wiretapping and people saying, well, they didn't know, or they did know. It, clearly, is much more extensive than people expected. You connect this with the drone strikes in Pakistan, and Yemen, which is our government conducting regular assassinations by air. You know what's-- what's going on here? Who is in control of it? And who can find out? And you know, I think-- it's in the New York Times this morning that there is a review that Susan Rice the National Security Adviser for Obama has done on Mid East policy. They need to review the this secret world and its power in their government because you run into this rats nest of concealment and lies time and time again then and now.

BOB SCHIEFFER: I-- I want to go back to just-- because those of us who have seen one commission after another-- and I always had the highest regard for the Warren Commission because of the reputation of the people who were on it. But this thing was just one step away from being totally dysfunctional. Talk a little bit about that.

PHILIP SHENON: But just thinking of, you know, Bob is describing this powerful secret government, and the members of the Warren Commission staff who really did this hard work, did the digging, they were young men who had no experience in government, most of whom had no experience in investigating. They had no idea what they were up against in the CIA and the FBI and these agencies that were determined to hide the full truth.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, I mean and-- and the commission members themselves, though, I mean, you know, here you had Earl Warren who didn't want the job. You had Richard Russell, this distinguished senator from Georgia, who could not stand Earl Warren and told Lyndon Johnson that he wouldn't be on a commission that included Earl Warren, and Johnson said, well, I'm sorry, it's too late. I've already announced that you're on the commission and you're going to have to do it. But he showed up for very few meetings. Some of the other commission members seldom came when they met. You have Gerald Ford who went on to become President who early on called the FBI and say, listen, I'll be glad to be your guy, and I'll keep you informed. I mean these-- these tales are just astonishing to me that how they ever got anything done.

PHILIP SHENON: Well, you see of the seven commissioners, really only two or three were ever involved in this investigation at all.

PEGGY NOONAN: I think in part what we're talking about is the deep state, even then, even fifty years ago, there were so many key agencies, and they had so much going on and there was so much information coming in, and there were humans who were mishandling it. And I mean some innocent people such as I think the agent in Dallas who was doing his best with Lee Harvey Oswald but didn't think he should be-- should be followed in the days before the assassination but it was an honest judgment. But my point is in governments, which are living organisms, there can be so much stimuli coming in that you lose it, but also people realize they're kind of powerful on mid levels. And we see the same thing today when there's even more information coming in. There's opportunities for even more mischief, things that get lost, but also things that get bottled-- bottlenecked. Bureaucracy can have a profound effect in being powerful but can also lose a million threads.

BOB WOODWARD: Well, it's-- it's-- it's for a good purpose. We want to stop terrorism in this country and the world. And so all of this power has gone to the intelligence agencies. It's absolutely-- it's astounding what we spend on it, tens of billions of dollars. The problem is-- and the people who do lots of this work do it in good faith, but it's on automatic pilot. Kill this person because we think he might be a terrorist. Or I mean in some cases, they have these signature strikes. Well, it looks like terrorists. They are doing things like terrorists do so let's kill them or let's get Chancellor Merkel's--

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah.

BOB WOODWARD: --conversations on the cell phone. Now, the, what's-- what's interesting here is the technology that gives us the information about the terrorists is very similar, essentially, to the technology that allows us to get conversations of world leaders on cell phones. And-- and-- and somebody's got to look at this and see where it's going.

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah.

BOB WOODWARD: And, you know, I mean-- I mean it is-- you-- you get to a point where what do you worry about? Secret governments.

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me ask both of you. Tell me what your take is now on this whole roll out of Obamacare? Where does this go, Peggy?

PEGGY NOONAN: Oh, it has been, I believe, a political disaster for the White House. It has made people in America nervous, anxious, and confused. There has, look, bottom line, it seems to me, this whole thing should be delayed but deep inside myself, I really think, look, they can probably get this tech end to work in a certain amount of time, but the internals of the law, the content of the law is already causing problems. I wish we could stop the whole thing, go back to point one, and say let's try this again. I think it's not working.

BOB WOODWARD: It-- it, clearly, isn't working. And, you know, we'll see. They've-- they've put a lot of people on it. And-- and they promised to deliver. But, again, this connects to this theme of--

PEGGY NOONAN: Mm.

BOB WOODWARD: --we've got an incredibly powerful government that gets on automatic pilot and you have people with inexperience who don't know about nuts and bolts questions. People who don't go in and say, well, now is this going to work? Let's test it. We were talking earlier about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. That was run by Leon Panetta who was CIA director, who knew to make sure you checked all of the boxes, and they literally had a place where it-- it was a compound that they reconstructed and they-- they practiced. And we didn't even practice Obamacare.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, we have to end it there. Tom Johnson, thank you. You did some greet reporting back there--

TOM JOHNSON: Yeah.

BOB SCHIEFFER: --back when you did honest work, being a real shoe-leather reporter.

TOM JOHNSON: Thank you, Bob.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And Phil Shenon, congratulations.

PHILIP SHENON: Thank you.

BOB SCHIEFFER: It's a remarkable book.

PHILIP SHENON: Thank you.

BOB SCHIEFFER: We'll be right back.

BOB SCHIEFFER: CBS News has special coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination planned for next month. I will be hosting a prime-time special, As It Happened: John F. Kennedy 50 Years at 9 PM Eastern on Saturday, November sixteenth. That will be followed by a live broadcast of FACE THE NATION from the site of the school book depository, which is now the six-floor museum in Dallas, the next morning, November seventeenth. Plus, there will be coverage all that week on CBS THIS MORNING and the CBS EVENING NEWS with Scott Pelley. Back in a minute.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And we'll see you next week. Bye for now.