Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Though there had not yet been any murders in Dallas directly traceable to the civil rights movement, the city was widely perceived as being a hub of right-wing fanaticism. Among other things, it was the home of oil magnate H. L. Hunt, a Kennedy critic who funded conservative causes, and Major General Edwin A. Walker, a leader of the John Birch Society in Dallas whom Kennedy, as we saw earlier in this book, had relieved of his command in West Germany for distributing right-wing literature to his troops, prompting Walker to resign from the military.* Byron Skelton, a national Democratic committeeman from Texas concerned about the president’s safety, wrote Attorney General Robert Kennedy seeking to dissuade his brother from coming to Texas. Indeed, as noted earlier, a month before the assassination, Adlai Stevenson had spoken in Dallas at a United Nations Day celebration, and leaving the auditorium was confronted by an angry mob of hecklers, one of whom crashed her sign down on top of his head, another expectorating on him. The next day, Stevenson spoke to Kennedy assistant Arthur Schlesinger about the “very ugly and frightening” atmosphere in Dallas and wondered whether the president should travel there.† But political considerations outweighed the fears. As previously indicated, in October, Newsweek reported that Kennedy’s position on civil rights had cost him 3.5 million votes, and that no Democratic president had been so disliked in the South.12

  It was amidst this highly charged and combustible atmosphere that Kennedy, trying to shore up his image in the South, came to Dallas on November 22, 1963, and the Far Right predictably greeted him with its vitriol. It started the previous day and continued throughout the morning of the assassination when five thousand throwaway handbills captioned “Wanted for Treason” were distributed on the streets of Dallas. As set forth in seven numbered paragraphs, among the many “treasonous activities against the United States” that Kennedy was wanted for was “turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations,” giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots,” and appointing “Anti-Christians to Federal office.”13 The author of the handbill was one Robert A. Surrey, a business and political associate of retired General Walker.14 Naturally, when Kennedy was shot, the instinctive reaction of a great many was that it must have been at the hands of his political enemy, the radical Right. Leftist Thomas G. Buchanan, perhaps hyperbolizing a bit, wrote that before Oswald’s arrest, Kennedy’s death “had been universally attributed to southern white-supremacy fanatics.”15

  And the immediate response of the FBI clearly illustrates its belief (before Oswald was arrested) that the Far Right was behind the assassination: agents called H. L. Hunt and told him that his and his family’s lives would probably be threatened “as a result of the president’s death,” and urged him to leave town (Dallas) at once. Although the head-strong Hunt “objected strenuously,” his chief of security, former FBI agent Paul Rothermel, ordered plane tickets for Hunt and his wife and they departed for Washington, D.C., Hunt saying that rather than go into hiding somewhere, “I believe I can do better going to Washington to help Lyndon. He’s gonna need some help.”16 A Teletype from FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., to all FBI field offices just over an hour after the shooting assumed that the right wing was responsible for Kennedy’s murder, directing all field offices to “immediately establish whereabouts of…all known Klan and hate group members, known racial extremists…[who] may possibly have been involved.”17 And the Atlanta FBI office immediately “ascertained the whereabouts” of Joseph Milteer (see later text), J. B. Stoner, and Melvin Bruce, all prominent members of the militant Far Right.18

  But today, even among conspiracy theorists, the belief that the Far Right was behind Kennedy’s murder has not had, to use an entertainment term, legs. It has taken a backseat to the more popular theories about the mob, CIA, and military-industrial complex. In fact, some conspiracy books don’t even bother to mention the right wing. But there continue to be conspiracy books that do mention it as a possible suspect in the assassination, and they usually focus their attention on Dallas multimillionaire H. L. Hunt or Georgia right-wing extremist Joseph Milteer.

  Hunt, the founder and president of the Hunt Oil Company headquartered in Dallas, was the wealthiest and most powerful of all the big Texas oil barons. He was also eccentric, someone who, it was said, brought his lunch to work every day in a brown paper bag so he wouldn’t have to buy it. He was so close with his money that he never left tips for waitresses, even when twelve people were at his table.19 But like most people, he had passions, among which were having more than one wife (at one time), gambling, writing a torrent of letters to the editors of newspapers large and small throughout the country, and supporting conservative causes.

  Terrified of the Communist threat, Hunt funded his pet, “LIFE LINE,” a right-wing organization whose fifteen-minute radio broadcasts of Christian fundamentalism and political conservatism went out six days a week (the Sabbath broadcast was all religion) to 354 stations in the country. Though very conservative, “Hunt remained an independent” throughout the years,20 and there’s no evidence that he ever belonged to radical Right groups like the John Birch Society. His principal attack on Kennedy came during the presidential campaign of 1960 when Hunt, hoping LBJ would get the Democratic nomination, secretly funded the dissemination of two hundred thousand copies of a sermon by the Reverend W. A. Criswell of Dallas’s First Baptist Church in which Criswell said that “the election of a Catholic as president would mean the end of religious freedom in America.”

  There being no evidence that Hunt had anything to do with the assassination,* the fringe conspiracy theorists postulate he had a motive, and to their way of thinking, if he had a motive this alone means he’s guilty of the murder.

  Hunt’s motive, per the conspiracy theorists? In addition to Kennedy’s pro–civil rights stance,† mainly his alleged desire to reduce the oil-depletion allowance.21

  The oil-depletion allowance, dating in this country to the Revenue Act of 1916, was a recognition by Congress of the uniqueness of “extractive” industries, whose business literally requires the sale of its primary asset (in this case, oil). Other businesses, like manufacturing, obviously don’t require this. Because their capital asset is depleted with every sale, Congress gave the oil and gas industries a substantial tax break. Since 1926, and through Kennedy’s term of office, the tax break (oil-depletion allowance) exempted from taxation the first 27.5 percent of the gross income of oil and gas producers, with a limit of 50 percent of net income. Originally being at 5 percent, it was increased to 12.5, then 25, and finally, in 1926, to 27.5 percent. Indicative of the power of the oil and gas lobby, in 1963 the depletion allowance was 23 percent for sulfur and 15 percent for metal.22

  What was Kennedy’s position on the oil-depletion allowance? In response to an inquiry by Gerald C. Mann, the director of the Kennedy-Johnson 1960 Texas Democratic Campaign, on Kennedy’s position vis-à-vis the allowance, Kennedy wrote in an October 13, 1960, letter to Mann that “I have consistently…made clear my recognition of the value and importance of the oil-depletion allowance. [It] has served us well…A healthy domestic oil industry is essential to national security.”

  Although there were unsuccessful congressional efforts to reduce the oil-depletion allowance in 1950, 1951, 1954, 1957, 1958, and 1960, at no time during Kennedy’s term of office was there any publicized proposal or legislative effort to repeal or reduce the allowance. In the January 24, 1963, tax reduction ($13.6 billion) and reform package Kennedy presented to Congress, as the New York Times said, Kennedy “avoided a head-on fight over the controversial 27½ per cent depletion allowance for oil and gas producers.” However, Kennedy, who had come to believe that the oil and gas titans had become too greedy, proposed changes in the capital gains tax as a part of his reform package that would generate an additional $300 million a year from the oil and gas people.23 But by September 1963, seeing how the reform features of his tax bill were being diluted and eviscerated in the House Ways and Mean
s Committee by congressmen beholden to big oil and other corporate interests that contributed to their campaigns, Kennedy told his secretary of the Treasury, C. Douglas Dillon, that he was dropping his reforms.24

  But even if Kennedy had reduced or even eliminated the oil-depletion allowance, the notion that Hunt (and, per the conspiracy theorists, other big oilmen like Clint Murchison) would hire someone to kill Kennedy because of it is really too ridiculous to talk about—unless, of course, there is some evidence, which there is not.

  Interestingly, in 1975 a copy of a handwritten letter dated November 8, 1963, and presumably signed by Oswald, was mailed anonymously from Mexico City to Texas conspiracy theorist Penn Jones.* The letter, to “Mr. Hunt,” read as follows:

  I would like information concerding [sic] my position.

  I am asking only for information. I am suggesting that we discussed the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else.

  Thank you.

  Lee Harvey Oswald25

  If legitimate, which it was not, the letter would indeed be some evidence connecting Hunt to the assassination. In March of 1977, Jones turned a copy of the letter over to the Dallas Morning News for analysis. Three handwriting experts employed by the News concluded that the writing belonged to Oswald.26 In 1978, the first hint of forgery emerged when handwriting experts from the HSCA said that although the “writing pattern” was “consistent” with other documents known to have been written by Oswald, the writing in this letter was suspicious because it was “much more precisely and much more carefully written.” Also, the “H” in Harvey differed “significantly” from Oswald’s handwriting. In other words, if it were a forgery, the forgers weren’t real pros. The HSCA concluded that “we were unable to come to any firm conclusion regarding this particular document. It is suspicion [sic], although we are not able to accurately determine that it is specifically a forgery.”27

  For years no one knew for sure whether the letter was a forgery or not, and who “Mr. Hunt” was, although most of the conspiracy community assumed he was the Texas oil magnate. Both mysteries were cleared up in 1999 with the publication of the book The Sword and the Shield by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. As indicated earlier, Mitrokhin was the former KGB agent who worked in the foreign intelligence archives of the KGB for almost thirty years and defected to Britain in 1992, taking a decade’s accumulation of notes and transcripts with him. It turns out that the KGB, naturally eager to deflect the continuing suspicion of some that it was behind the assassination, and to promote the more popular theory that the CIA was responsible for Kennedy’s murder, forged the letter, its addressee referring to E. Howard Hunt, the shadowy CIA officer who seemed to be part of so many CIA intrigues and whose name, in conspiracy literature, is sometimes confused with H. L. Hunt. Mitrokhin said that before the letter was sent to “three of the most active conspiracy buffs,…the forgery was twice checked for authenticity by the Third Department of the KGB’s OTU (Operational Technical) Directorate.”28

  The allegation of right-wing responsibility for the assassination that has always carried the most serious implications is that involving Joseph Milteer, a sixty-one-year-old right-wing extremist. Having inherited enough money to make him independent, Milteer lived in a rundown mansion in Quitman, Georgia. He belonged to militantly conservative groups like the National States Rights Party, the White Citizens’ Council, and the Dixie Klan. In October of 1963 he formed his own party, the obscure Constitutional American Parties of the U.S. in Valdosta, Georgia.

  On November 9, 1963, William Somersett, a union organizer and former Ku Klux Klansman who had become a paid informant for the Intelligence Division of the Miami Police Department in 1962, but still retained close ties to the right-wing community, allowed the Miami police to set up a recorder in the broom closet of his Miami apartment and secretly tape a conversation with his old friend Milteer. If one selectively excerpts from the transcript of the conversation, as most conspiracy theorists have done,* it reads as if Milteer was definitely part of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy or had intimate knowledge of it, right down to the details. Here’s an example, from Henry Hurt’s Reasonable Doubt: “Milteer informed a ‘friend’ that the assassination of JFK was in the works. Milteer explained that Kennedy would be killed ‘from an office building with a high-powered rifle.’ He stated that ‘they will pick up somebody within hours afterwards…just to throw the public off.’”29 Sounds pretty cut and dried, right? But when we look at the entire portion of the transcript dealing with Kennedy, it’s clear that Milteer really had no advance knowledge of any plot at all and was merely engaging in loose talk.

  Somersett: “I don’t know. I think Kennedy is coming here [Miami] on the 18th [November 18, 1963], or something like that, to make some kind of speech. I don’t know what it is, but I imagine it will be on the TV and you can be on the look[out] for that. I think it is the 18th that he is supposed to be here for a speech. I don’t know [what] it’s supposed to be about.”

  Milteer: “You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans. There are so many of them here.”

  Somersett: “Yes. Well, he will have a thousand bodyguards. Don’t worry about that.”

  Milteer: “The more bodyguards he has, the more easier it is to get him.”

  (It should be noted that when anyone, in conversation, makes a reference to bodyguards, this frequently causes the person to whom he or she is talking to speculate about how effective the bodyguards can be in protecting the subject person. Indeed, the idea for the tape-recording session originated with an assistant to the local Florida state attorney, and as indicated, Miami police set the tape-recording up. So it seems clear that Somersett brought up the subject of bodyguards confident it would elicit a response from Milteer similar to what Milteer ended up saying. But that doesn’t necessarily make Milteer’s response incriminating.)

  Somersett: “What?”

  Milteer: “The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.”

  Somersett: “Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?”

  Milteer: “From an office building with a high-powered rifle.”

  (So we see that Somersett has asked Milteer how Kennedy could be killed, and Milteer is simply answering how it could be done. Yet Henry Hurt, who read the same words you have just read, told his readers that Milteer informed Somersett “that Kennedy would be killed from an office building with a high-powered rifle.”30 It should be further noted that Milteer’s observation as to how Kennedy could easily be killed by a high-powered rifle from an office building is one that many people had made, including the president himself. “[Kennedy] often talked about how easy it would be for somebody to shoot at him with a rifle from a high building.”31 Indeed, Forest Sorrels, head of the Dallas Secret Service office, said that when he was discussing with local authorities the route the president’s motorcade should take through Dallas, he made the remark “that if someone wanted to get the president of the United States, he could do it with a high-powered rifle…from some building.”)32

  Milteer: “How many people does he have going around looking just like him? Do you know about that?”

  Somersett: “No, I never heard he had anybody.”

  Milteer: “He sure has got them.”

  Somersett: “He has?”

  Milteer: “He has about fifteen. Whenever he goes anyplace…he knows he is a marked man.”

  (No one has ever said that as part of Kennedy’s security there were Kennedy doubles wherever he went, much less fifteen of them. The fact that Milteer said this indicates that even if there were a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, Milteer was not an integral part of it.)

  Somersett: “You think he knows he’s a marked man?”

  Milteer: “Sure he does. Sure does—yeah.”

  Somersett: “They are really going to try to kill him?”

  Milteer: “Oh yeah, it is in the working. Brown, himself. Brown is just as likely t
o get him as anybody. He didn’t say so, but he tried to get Martin Luther King.”