A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  “That is correct,” Shobe said.

  Shobe also revealed that Sheridan had attempted to intimidate a Hoffa co-defendant named Thomas E. Parks, a funeral home employee. Sheridan’s aim was to force Parks to testify against Hoffa. Unless Parks agreed, Sheridan told him, he would be implicated in a bribery attempt.

  In a Sheridan-inspired scam, worthy of his later antics in New Orleans, a fake arrest of Parks would be orchestrated. Parks would be carried off into the woods. His abductors would be identified as Hoffa’s strongmen. They would dig a hole . . . only for Parks to be rescued at the penultimate moment.

  Shobe provided this testimony to the judge out of the hearing of the jury. He testified that he knew that the penalty for kidnapping in Tennessee was death. The prosecution did not even bother to challenge Shobe’s testimony. It was Sheridan’s modus operandi, the use of bribery, blackmail, and the intimidation of witnesses.

  Eventually, even Partin had enough. Sick and tired of the whole Hoffa matter, he had been ready to tell everything he knew. Later, one Donald L. George swore under oath that F. Lee Bailey told him in New Orleans on June 12, 1968, that he planned to file a suit just before the Democratic Convention claiming that “Robert F. Kennedy paid Edward Grady Partin and Judge William Hawk Daniels $200,000 out of his own personal fortune to testify against James Hoffa.” The purpose of the suit would be “to attempt to publicly ruin Mr. Kennedy before the Democratic Convention.” George’s sympathy, after working for Bailey, was with Partin and Judge Daniels.

  After the Otepka case, not to mention Sheridan’s obstruction of justice in New Orleans, for neither of which he suffered any consequences, Sheridan was impeachable. It is barely conceivable that even Robert Kennedy, as president, would have dared turn this character loose to lead an investigation into his brother’s death.

  ROBERT F. KENNEDY, WIRETAPPER EXTRAORDINAIRE

  After the death of his brother, Robert Kennedy persistently lied about his having encouraged unauthorized and illegal wire tapping. A telling set of documents exposing RFK’s attempt to conceal his knowledge about and sanction of illegal wire taps resides at the LBJ library in Austin, Texas. The file opens with a 1964 letter from J. Edgar Hoover to Bill Moyers, then working for Lyndon Johnson.

  A deputy attorney general had requested a name check and an Internal Revenue Service check “concerning Walter James Sheridan, who needed to be cleared for re-employment as ‘confidential assistant’ to Robert Kennedy,” Hoover writes. He notes that on November 13, 1964, the House Judiciary Committee had approved a resolution inquiring into the Justice Department’s handling of “individual rights and liberties as guaranteed by the Constitution.” The Otepka case hovers just below the surface of this sentence, along with the implication that it was Walter Sheridan who, in masterminding the surveillance of Otto Otepka, had violated his rights.

  Courtney A. Evans, an assistant FBI director, had been responsible for handling “liaison with the office of the Attorney General.” Evans had established a “close relationship” with Robert Kennedy, with whom he met on several occasions to discuss “the use of microphones [wire tapping] by the FBI” and “microphone surveillances in criminal-type as well as security-type investigations.” Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams remarked, matterof-factly, “Bobby Kennedy has an ace in the hole . . . this ace is Courtney Evans.” The suggestion was that Evans would cover for Robert Kennedy regarding his “authorization and insistence on the usage of microphones as an investigative technique.”

  Evans presented Kennedy with written information about wire taps, documents that met with Kennedy’s “enthusiastic approval,” Evans recounted. The rights of citizens under the law were of small moment as the FBI and Robert Kennedy pooled their knowledge of the most up-to-date technology in illegal wire taps. Another example reveals CIA wiretapping reporters Robert Allen and Paul Scott, an effort that had been approved by DCI John McCone “after discussions with then Attorney General Robert Kennedy and then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.”

  Robert Kennedy was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York in November 1964.

  One day at Bureau headquarters Courtney Evans shared with two fellow FBI agents details of the contacts he had with Robert Kennedy. He had furnished written information to Robert Kennedy “and other Justice Department officials” who served under Kennedy, Evans admitted. The subject of the conversation was the FBI’s use of microphone surveillances.

  Then something entirely unprecedented occurred. After this meeting, Courtney Evans furnished Robert Kennedy with a letter denying that the two had ever had any discussions about wire taps. Evans said he had never provided RFK with written material about the FBI’s use of microphone wire taps, another lie.

  Confident that Evans’ letter would protect him and help him defend himself in the press against persistent charges that he had sanctioned wire taps—which he had—Robert Kennedy denied publicly that he knew anything about the FBI’s use of surveillance microphones. As proof of his veracity, RFK released to the press the fraudulent letter that Courtney Evans had written obligingly for him.

  Evans’ letter is dated February 17, 1966, after Evans had retired from the Bureau and joined the law firm of Robert Kennedy’s former chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Herbert J. Miller, Jr. (It was Miller who rushed to Dallas on the weekend of the assassination to inform Texas law enforcement that they were not to investigate the crime.) Evans states, falsely, that he “did not discuss the use of microphones by the FBI with Robert Kennedy during his tenure as Attorney General.” Evans also denied he knew of any written material that was sent to Robert Kennedy “at any time” concerning microphone surveillances.

  Yet, as if Robert Kennedy sensed that this letter alone would not exonerate him, he sent Herbert J. Miller, Jr. to testify before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Senate Judiciary Committee. There Miller argued that wire taps should be permitted, that legislation should be passed to authorize “limited and controlled interception and disclosure of telephone conversations.” Miller went on to request that the FBI monitor and tape record a meeting between three people, one a former lieutenant governor of Nevada.

  The FBI denied the request in those palmier days before the government would violate the privacy rights of citizens with impunity and with no probable cause. The entire episode makes a mockery of Robert Kennedy’s claim to civil libertarian views.

  Kennedy had done his best to surround himself with loyalists, people like Sheridan who would lie for him. But in J. Edgar Hoover he had a tireless adversary. Hoover went on to expose Kennedy’s history of wire tapping. On September 26, 1966, Hoover wrote to Marvin Watson, Lyndon Johnson’s Special Assistant. The FBI had written evidence not only of Robert Kennedy’s authorization of wire taps, but of his “insistence on the usage of microphones as an investigative technique,” Hoover reported.

  Kennedy had lobbied for a wider and more extensive use of wire taps, even as he denied being knowledgeable on the subject. It was another example of the contradictory policies characteristic of the Kennedys. Just as President Kennedy authorized sabotage against Cuba at the same time as his emissary William Attwood was pursuing rapprochement with Fidel Castro, so Attorney General Robert Kennedy talked about civil liberties while making inroads into the rights of American citizens. If the Kennedys were no worse than other politicians, they were no better.

  On December 11, 1966, the FBI released to the press two memoranda on the subject of wire taps which had been personally prepared by Courtney Evans in 1961 for then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. RFK at once ceased to speak to Courtney Evans as if Evans had betrayed him. Assigned to damage control, Herbert J. Miller, Jr. dashed off a letter to Judiciary Committee chairman Sam Ervin.

  He doubted, Miller wrote, that anyone in the Justice Department knew about the FBI surveillances. “I did not know and I wager that the Attorney General did not know there was trespass,” Miller wrote. The ambiguous word, “wager,” tells it al
l. Herbert J. Miller, Jr. was nothing if not clever.

  It is true that the FBI had tapped Martin Luther King’s telephones for years, long before Robert Kennedy approved a Hoover request for the FBI to wiretap King’s telephones. RFK’s excuse for agreeing to the King taps, King’s continuing association with a “Communist agent,” Stanley Levison, was shameful.

  As for Robert Kennedy’s motive in spearheading his destruction, Otto Otepka never went beyond the statement that he believed that Kennedy was involved in keeping Lee Oswald’s activities secret.

  In 1968, Richard Nixon appointed Otto Otepka, still a government employee, to a “Subversive Activities Control Board.” This was not an active body; the gesture was an attempt to offer Otepka employment. Still, Otepka’s confirmation by the U. S. Senate did not come easily.

  Falsely, Otepka was labeled a Birchite because some Birchites supported his cause. He was accused of being an anti-Semite. Otepka was neither of these. Leading the attack against Otepka’s confirmation in committee was a fierce Edward M. Kennedy, fighting like a tiger to consign his brother Robert’s aging victim to oblivion. Kennedy lost. The full U.S. Senate approved Otepka’s confirmation 67-21.

  And so it should not be surprising that Edward M. Kennedy would offer a fulsome eulogy at Walter Sheridan’s 1995 funeral. Kennedy termed Sheridan an “extraordinary human being” with “a heart as large as his ability, and his courage and dedication to justice.” The most telling line in Edward Kennedy’s eulogy is this one: “When Walter Sheridan surfaced with his catch, all the networks and reporters were there, ready to record it at our hearings.” Manipulation of the press was the least of Sheridan’s skullduggery.

  AN INTERVIEW WITH OTTO OTEPKA

  In April 2006, I drove three hours over the barren swampland of Alligator Alley in central Florida in search of Otto Otepka. His ordeal now forty years lost in the fog of history, Mr. Otepka was about to celebrate his ninety-first birthday. He had retired from government service in 1972.

  His directions were impeccable, as one would expect. Without incident, I drove into a sleepy Florida town and up to the door of a modest stucco cottage. I peered through the screen door, and Mr. Otepka greeted me from a leather recliner. His voice clear and booming, he apologized for not rising to his feet. He had recently suffered a pulled muscle that made walking painful.

  His hair was black, his back broad and muscular. His stature remained as it must have been in the days when he was driven from his position by enemies whose motive would elude him for years. Otto Otepka remained the same man described by a colleague to the New York Times the day after he was demoted by the State Department, “calm, deliberate, articulate and cautious.”

  He ushered me into this study, a small room crammed with books and filing cabinets. Boxes crammed with overflowing paper stretched to the ceiling. All this material bore on his case, he said, not least the boxes of transcripts of the hearings that resulted in Otto Otepka’s complete vindication.

  Prominently displayed in Mr. Otepka’s study was a commendation for meritorious service awarded to him by President Eisenhower. On the wall was a sign reading, “This job is so secret I don’t know what I’m doing.” Self-deprecating irony had not deserted him. A photograph of Bill Clinton and the White House bore this legend: “No Enemy Would Dare Bomb This Place And End The Chaos.”

  Mr. Otepka removed a bulging file devoted entirely to the career of Walter Sheridan. There was no doubt in Mr. Otepka’s mind now that Robert Kennedy and Walter Sheridan had been behind the theft of the defector files from his office safe. On a rickety copier, page by page, Mr. Otepka reproduced for me his Sheridan file. It included the issue of Sidney Goldberg’s newsletter in which Sheridan is identified conclusively as the person behind the destruction of Otto Otepka. Mr. Otepka began to keep his Sheridan file, he said, when he realized that Robert Kennedy’s secret connection to Oswald lay “at the root of my troubles.”

  Mr. Otepka had no doubt that Sheridan’s role in his ruin was connected to some problem that Robert Kennedy had with Oswald. As Warren Commission documents began to trickle into the National Archives, Otepka had begun a file on Oswald and his defection.

  It was important to him that I understand how he had handled his work with the State Department, the integrity with which he operated. He had made no copies of the Oswald documents that he had collected when he investigated Oswald for the Department of State security office. Those he now had in his possession had come from the Archives and had been released to the public. For Otto Otepka, based on his life experience, the resort to illegal methods to accomplish political ends began not with Richard Nixon and the Watergate conspiracy, but with the Kennedys.

  What sounded alarms for him, Mr. Otepka told me, what motivated Robert Kennedy to drive him from his position, was that he had requested of the CIA that it look into the defectors to the Soviet Union whose names sat in his office safe. It had been a routine request, he said, and, as we now know, a naïve one: CIA was well aware of these men both before they traveled to the USSR and after.

  For Mr. Otepka at the time, consulting CIA was what you did when a name raised flags, as “Lee Oswald, tourist,” with quotation marks, did. The interview confirmed for me the truth of Angelo Murgado’s statements to me. Working for Robert F. Kennedy, as I wrote in A Farewell to Justice, Murgado had been dispatched to New Orleans during the summer of 1963 and later discussed Oswald with the Attorney General. Angelo’s activities had led him then to the Dallas home of Mrs. Sylvia Odio, to which Murgado had traveled in the company of a fellow Bay of Pigs veteran, Bernardo de Torres.

  All Mr. Otepka knew for certain when his safe was burgled was that someone wanted to know what he had discovered about Lee Oswald. He concluded that John Francis Reilly and David Belisle had been assigned to steal the defector files to help Robert Kennedy cover up his knowledge and use of Oswald. Should that fact have emerged, the scandal ensuing would in all likelihood have ended Robert Kennedy’s political career. There was no question in Mr. Otepka’s mind that Robert Kennedy had selected the people who had suddenly become his superiors.

  The Oswald question remained perplexing to Mr. Otepka. We traversed the subject several times. Oswald was not an applicant for work in the State Department, yet Mr. Otepka was assigned to analyze his record. Why? CIA was on the distribution list for the file listing the “defectors.”

  Mr. Otepka’s role was to correlate the existing files of people whose names were on that list of defectors, “Lee Oswald, tourist” among them. Other files, such as those from the Bureau of Soviet Affairs, needed to be consulted. He had asked himself whether the Oswald file had bearing on any existing security case, either on the file of an applicant for a job or on an already cleared employee. Who was this Oswald?

  Mr. Otepka remarked that much that has been written about him was false. Journalist Sarah McClendon wrote in her memoir, Mr. President, Mr. President, that Otto Otepka had told her he knew who had killed President Kennedy. Mr. Otepka told me that he never said any such thing. All he might have done was reiterate the conclusion of the Warren Report. And he had never provided classified information to anyone.

  “I am at a loss as to why CIA didn’t receive distribution,” he mused, returning to the trajectory of the Oswald file. The answer to that question has emerged. They already knew whatever was in that file. Mr. Otepka concluded that Robert F. Kennedy had enlisted Walter Sheridan and others to conceal that RFK was using Oswald in his anti-Castro activities. Otto Otepka was a threat because he could expose who Oswald was.

  It was at least “plausible,” he said, remaining cautious, that Oswald was a false defector in the Soviet Union. Had Robert Kennedy and Walter Sheridan permitted him to uncover who Oswald was, investigate him as he investigated all those whose names were sent to him in his capacity as Deputy Director, or even as Chief of Evaluations at the State Department Office of Security, history might have turned out differently.

  In the course of his travail, Otto Otepka exposed
Robert Kennedy and Walter Sheridan for their flagrant disregard of the rule of law. Underestimating this man, as overreachers are wont to do, they had not counted on his tenacity or his unbroken record of integrity. In his simple dignity he outlasted them both.

  The Otepka case keeps alive a question that is written within the speculative interstices of the history of the Kennedy assassination. How, if he was, was Robert Kennedy using Oswald? Was he Oswald’s ultimate handler? Was Robert Kennedy protecting and utilizing Oswald at the same time as the CIA, unbeknownst to him, was laying the groundwork for framing Oswald for the murder of his brother? As I wrote in A Farewell to Justice, Angelo Murgado told me that Robert Kennedy never met Oswald “personally.” Yet I am reminded of that moment at Angelo’s small, neat house deep in Miami when I asked him directly whether Robert Kennedy ever met Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Angelo’s eyes did not meet mine. He glanced away, his line of vision now sidelong. He was a man to whom lying was not natural. He was a man to whom lying did not come easily.

  “No,” he said very quietly. When I think back to that moment, I am not so sure that I believe him.

  As I wrote in A Farewell to Justice, Robert Kennedy’s press officer, Edwin Guthman, told me that RFK dispatched Walter Sheridan to Dallas immediately after the assassination, ostensibly to explore the possibility of Mafia involvement in President Kennedy’s death. The absence of Dallas police records of their interrogation of Oswald raises an allied question: Could Walter Sheridan, astonishing as the suggestion seems, have made his presence felt at that scene? As of this writing, approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, the papers of both Robert Kennedy and Walter Sheridan remain closed to historians.

  Otto Otepka died on March 20, 2010, at the age of ninety-four.

  WHAT ROBERT F. KENNEDY HAD TO HIDE: CHARLES FORD/FISCALINI AND FURTHER ATTEMPTS ON THE LIFE OF FIDEL CASTRO

  Robert Kennedy’s “Get Hoffa!” campaign was followed by an equally obsessive effort, to “Get Castro!” In this cause, he forged an alliance with CIA’s executive action component run by William Harvey. The assassination of foreign leaders was as old as the Agency itself. It was George Kennan in his national security directive dated 10/2 that opened the door for CIA to engage in all manner of extra-legal activities, murder among them.