Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  * To their credit, Gary Shaw and Larry Harris, in Cover-Up, did not.

  * The FBI report of the interview on November 27, 1963, says that “Milteer emphatically denies ever making threats to assassinate President Kennedy or participating in any such assassination. He stated he has never heard anyone make such threats…He stated he does not know, nor has he ever been in the presence of Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby” (CD 20, p.1, December 1, 1963).

  * JFK biographer Richard Reeves writes that “more than once the President had chewed out his own people for making fun of Johnson” (Reeves, President Kennedy, p.118). Sam Houston Johnson, LBJ’s brother, wrote in his book that the Kennedy people made his brother’s stay in the vice presidency “the most miserable three years of his life. He wasn’t the number two man in the administration; he was the lowest man on the totem pole…I know him well enough to know he felt humiliated time and time again, that he was openly snubbed by second-echelon White House staffers who snickered at him behind his back and called him ‘Uncle Cornpone’” (Johnson, My Brother Lyndon, p.108). And at the center of it all, LBJ believed, was RFK, whom he disliked not just for Bobby’s notorious brusqueness (LBJ, coarse in his own right, was nonetheless a highly sensitive soul), but for his lack of respect for him. Bobby rarely invited Johnson to the frequent social gatherings of the Kennedy clan and administration at his Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Virginia. Johnson was particularly resentful of Bobby’s access to the president. “Every time they have a conference,” LBJ complained to a reporter for the Associated Press, “don’t tell me about who is the top adviser. It isn’t McNamara, the chief of staff, or anybody like that. Bobby is first in, last out. And Bobby is the boy he [JFK] listens to.” (Shesol, Mutual Contempt, pp.107–110)

  On the other hand, though LBJ’s and RFK’s animus for each other was mutual and well known (“[Robert] Kennedy’s hatred of LBJ was…primitive and unreasoning” [Thomas, Robert Kennedy, p.292]), it is not clear that there was hostility between Johnson and the president himself, as opposed to the president’s staff. Indeed, JFK assistant and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who should know, says, “John Kennedy always had a certain fondness for Lyndon Johnson. He saw his Vice President, with perhaps the merest touch of condescension, as an American original, a figure out of Mark Twain…The President, Ben Bradlee observed in 1963, ‘really likes his roguish qualities, respects him enormously as a political operator.’” And a prominent political analyst at the time, William S. White, said that LBJ “had a cordial relationship with President Kennedy.” How did LBJ feel about Kennedy? Schlesinger says Johnson told Dean Rusk, “He’s done much better by me than I would have done by him under the same circumstances. Kennedy always treated me fairly and considerately.” (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp.621–622; William White observation: NBC News, Seventy Hours and Thirty Minutes, p.107) And LBJ was under the impression that JFK “likes me,” but knew that RFK did not (Thomas, Robert Kennedy, p.278).

  * Conspiracy researcher Vincent Palamara makes the same allegation as Zirbel, stating that Yarborough said that Secret Service agent Rufus W. Youngblood “and LBJ were listening to a walkie-talkie with the volume set too low for the Senator to hear what they were picking up” and that presidential assistant Dave Powers “agreed with Yarborough” (Vince Palamara, “The ‘Breakdown’ of the Infrastructure of the Secret Service on November 22, 1963,” Fourth Decade, September 1997, p.20). And Palamara, as opposed to Zirbel, does give a source, but the source he gives doesn’t support what he says. Palamara’s source, page 166 of The Death of a President by William Manchester, reads, “According to Johnson, Rufus Youngblood hurled him to the floor before the fatal shot. Youngblood himself doubts that he moved that quickly. Ralph Yarborough goes further: he insists that Youngblood never left the front seat. It is the Senator’s recollection that the agent merely leaned over the seat and talked to Johnson in an undertone. He contends that there was insufficient space in the rear for Youngblood. Dave Powers, who glanced back, confirms the Senator.” Where Palamara gets his “listening to a walkie-talkie” from this quote, I don’t know.

  * On June 18, 1987, the son, Steven Mark Brown, filed a $10.5 million lawsuit against Lady Bird Johnson, claiming, “My legal birthrights have been violated and a conspiracy was formed to deprive me of my legal heirship.” The suit was dismissed in 1989 when Steven, then a naval operations specialist, “failed to appear in court.” (Dave Perry, “Texas in the Imagination,” self-published article, October 26, 2002, pp.10–11; Dallas Morning News, June 19, 1987, p.34A; Dallas Morning News, October 3, 1990, p.A33, obituary of Steven Mark Brown)

  * Brown says LBJ invited her to attend the victory party at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, which she did. “He had an apartment in the Driskill,” she said, “and we routinely started having an affair.” (Brown, Texas in the Morning, pp.9, 14; affair at Driskill: Affidavit by Madeleine Brown in lawsuit filed by her son against Mrs. Johnson, Dallas Morning News, June 19, 1987, p.34A) She said the affair continued until 1969 (Dallas Morning News, October 3, 1990, p.A33).

  * “I was there,” says Jack Valenti, a former top aide to LBJ, “when President Johnson ruminated about the assassination, and the urgency to enlist the most prestigious citizens within the Republic to inspect this murder carefully, objectively, swiftly” (Bernard Weinraub, “Valenti Calls [movie] ‘J.F.K.’ ‘Hoax’ and ‘Smear,’” New York Times, April 2, 1992, pp.C15, C24).

  * Though LBJ blamed Castro for Kennedy’s murder, if the Kennedy family ever entertained such thoughts, the sentiment was never picked up by JFK Jr., an extreme unlikelihood if the family had such beliefs. JFK Jr. sought out and had a social dinner with Castro at the Council of Ministers in Havana on the evening of October 27, 1997. And at the end of the very long evening, during which the Bearded One delivered one of his rambling but eloquent multi-hour performances, for which he is famous, JFK Jr. thanked Castro for the evening and said, “I’ll bring my wife the next time I come.” Does one have such a dinner and conversation with someone he suspects of having had his father murdered? The only reference to the assassination Castro made to JFK Jr. came at the end, when they were leaving the dining room. “You know, Lee Harvey Oswald was trying to come here,” Castro said, half a question, half declaration. (As we know, in late September 1963 Oswald had applied for a visa at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, but his request had been denied.) “Yes, I did know that,” JFK Jr. replied. Castro paused, then said, “It was a difficult time, and you know we didn’t let many Americans into Cuba.” “Yes,” JFK Jr. said quietly. It would clearly appear that Castro was offering a veiled apology. He knew that if Oswald had been allowed into Cuba when he applied for the visa, almost assuredly he would not have been in Dallas less than two months later. (George Magazine, October 1999, p.158 et seq.)

  † “What was your reaction to [being asked to kill] President Castro?” Trafficante was asked in his testimony before the HSCA. Trafficante: “Well, at that time I think it was a good thing because he had established a Communistic base ninety miles from the United States, and being that the government of the United States wanted it done, I’d go along with it, the same thing as a war. I figure it was like war.” (5 HSCA 358)

  There are many, like Johnny Roselli, who believe that Trafficante never made any attempt to kill Castro. Another who held this belief was Trafficante’s lawyer, Frank Ragano. Ragano says that when the CIA asked Trafficante to kill Castro, he just played along, believing it would be impossible to kill Castro without the killer or killers getting killed themselves. Even though Castro had caused Trafficante and the mob to lose millions of dollars when he closed down the mob-run casinos in Havana, and the mob had every desire to regain control and ownership of its very profitable gambling empire, Trafficante, Ragano said, was “realistic and philosophical,” viewing it as a “lost cause, especially after the Bay of Pigs,” and had no intention of going after Castro for the CIA. “It was just a big scam. There was no intention, no effort whatsoever to
assassinate Fidel Castro.” Ragano said Trafficante told him he lied to the HSCA in 1978 when he testified he had tried to kill Castro. (Interview of Frank Ragano, “JFK, Hoffa and the Mob,” Frontline, PBS, November 17, 1992; see also a long endnote to the section “Cover-Up by the CIA and FBI in the Warren Commission’s Investigation of the Assassination,” on whether JFK authorized the CIA plots to kill Castro)

  * Giancana, age sixty-six, was shot twice in the head, once in the region of the mouth, and six times in the neck on June 19, 1975, while he was preparing a late-night snack of his favorite dish, Italian sausage and escarole, in the basement kitchen of his home in the Oak Park area of Chicago. A June 21, 1975, headline story in the Chicago Tribune reported that the Oak Park Police Department had been “watching” Giancana’s home at the time of the murder and “the killer who shot Giancana may have passed directly under the gaze of lawmen.” Earlier on the day of the murder, staff members of the Church Committee had arrived in Chicago to make arrangements with Giancana for his scheduled appearance before the committee in Washington, D.C., on June 24, five days away. That morning’s Chicago Tribune captioned an article “Report CIA Scheme to Poison Castro” that said “the assassination plot…was directed by Sam Giancana and John Roselli.”

  At the time of Giancana’s execution-style murder, he no longer controlled the Chicago mob, having lived in exile in Mexico from 1966 to July 18, 1974, when Mexico deported him, and the Chicago “Outfit” had excluded him from all its activities, “believing that the investigations he had inspired had crimped mob business in Chicago.” However, a federal grand jury in Chicago had recently questioned Giancana about mob activities there, and although he hadn’t yet told the grand jury anything of value, the Chicago mob may have feared he eventually would. Time magazine said that “the gang-slaying theory was lent credence by a shadowy report that on hearing of the shooting, the Mafia’s boss of bosses, Carlo Gambino, promptly passed word that Giancana’s killer was to be executed…a frequent Mafia precaution after a major ‘hit.’” (“Demise of a Don,” p.26; Washington Post, June 21, 1975, p.1; Giancana, Hughes, and Jobe, JFK and Sam, pp.65–66; Blakey and Billings, Plot to Kill the President, pp.390–391)

  * What a terrible irony that the person (Castro) whom Oswald may have killed Kennedy for (see discussion under “Motive”) was at that moment in time, unbeknownst to Oswald, wanting to establish a rapprochement with Kennedy, not murder him.

  * Castro himself, who took a law degree from the University of Havana in 1950 and briefly practiced law in Havana, almost exclusively representing the poor, often without fee, in cases with social and political implications, did not come from the poor of Cuba he sought to help. Born in 1926 in the eastern Cuban province of Oriente, his Spanish-born father fought in Cuba for the Spanish army during the War of Independence in 1898, and stayed on to become a sugar plantation owner of some means, leaving an estate of more than $500,000 when he died in 1956. (NARA Record 176-10011-100189, “Psychiatric Personality Study of Fidel Castro,” Central Intelligence Agency, December 1, 1961, pp.7, 9, 12, 34; Meneses, Fidel Castro, pp.32–33, 37)

  * Bolivar was the Venezuelan revolutionary leader of the early nineteenth century (1783–1830) who led several Spanish colonies in South America in their fight for independence from Spain. The region of northern South America in which he fought now comprises the countries of Bolivia (named in honor of Bolivar), Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia.

  † That the U.S. government supported Batista and had a friendly relationship with him right up to (but not during or beyond) the point where Batista’s government was about to fall to Castro’s rebels in late 1958 cannot be disputed. See, for instance, Smith (U.S. ambassador to Batista’s Cuba), Fourth Floor, pp.168–176.

  * Che Guevara’s biographer, Jorge G. Castañeda, writes that the firing squad executions (mostly at Havana’s La Cabaña fortress) have to be seen “within the context of the time. There was no bloodbath…After the excesses of Batista, and the unleashing of passions during those winter months, it is surprising that there were so few abuses and executions” (Castañeda, Compañero, pp.143–144). The chief person in charge of the executions was Castro’s younger brother, Raul, described in a 1961 CIA psychiatric study on his brother, Fidel, as “sadistic” (“Cuba: Raul Castro Directly Responsible for 550 Executions,” Truth Recovery Archive on Cuba, undated; NARA Record 176-10011-10189, “Psychiatric Personality Study of Fidel Castro,” Central Intelligence Agency, December 1, 1961, p.5). The United States publicly deplored the mass executions of Batista’s lieutenants, and Castro charged back that the United States had never voiced objections to killing and torture by Batista (HSCA Report, p.104).

  † Remarkably, the United States did not object to the confiscation of property, per se, U.S. Ambassador Bonsal telling the Cuban minister of state on June 1, 1959, that the United States supported the Agrarian Reform Law “provided just and prompt compensation” was made. On June 11, the U.S. government told the Cuban government that the Reform Law “gives serious concern to the Government of the United States with regard to the adequacy of provision for compensation” to those whose property was expropriated. (HSCA Record 180-10075-10138, Sklar, U.S. Cuban Relations, 1959–1964, p.CRS-9)

  * In March of 1959, the Cuban government took over the United States–owned Cuban Telephone Company. In May, in the first large-scale nationalization of foreign-owned companies and industries, the Cuban government began appropriating U.S. companies. By the summer of 1960, Castro had seized more than $700 million in U.S. property. (HSCA Report, p.104)

  * The letter contains fatherly asides to each one of his beloved children. To Sylvia he writes, “Do not abandon your literature. Persevere. Write a good book even though it takes you years.”

  * Jeannine Ewing was the secretary to Harry Lane, the executive vice president of sales at National Chemsearch at the time of the assassination. She thinks that Sylvia Odio worked at the company, which had close to 150 employees, for “less than a year.” She went out to lunch several times with Odio and described her as “pleasant and very intelligent.” “Was there anything about her that you would say was goofy or unusual, either in her mannerisms or mentally?” I asked. “Oh, no,” Ewing answered. “But she did say several times that she hated President Kennedy.” Ewing did not personally see Odio faint at work that day, but she knew she did, and heard from others in the office that Odio had said, “I know who did it” just before she fainted. (Telephone interview of Jeannine Ewing by author on February 13, 2006)

  † The FBI learned about the Odio incident through Odio’s friend Lucille Connell (HSCA Record 180-10101-10283, April 5, 1976, pp.1–2), who had learned of the incident from Sylvia’s sister Sarita (10 HSCA 28).

  * In the FBI’s first interview of Odio on December 18, 1963, she said the incident took place in “late September or early October, 1963” (CD 205, p.1).

  † Checking bus, train, and airline schedules and records, the Secret Service and FBI were unable to firmly establish how Oswald got to Houston from New Orleans on the first day of his Mexico City trip, and whether he visited Dallas in between (WR, p.323; CE 2131, 24 H 717; CE 3086, 26 H 694–698; CE 3075, 26 H 675–678). A statement in the Warren Report that Oswald had told passengers on the bus to Laredo that “he had traveled from New Orleans by bus, and made no mention of an intervening trip to Dallas” (WR, p.324), is an overstatement. The main citation given for this is the affidavit of passengers Mr. and Mrs. John McFarland. Question: “Did he [Oswald] mention any names or places either in the United States or Mexico, in any connection whatsoever?” Answer: “Only New Orleans, whence he said he had come. In the course of conversation, we worked out he must have left New Orleans at about the same time we had left Jackson, Mississippi, i.e., 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 25, 1963.” (11 H 214–215, WC affidavit of Mr. and Mrs. John McFarland) The FBI checked with Greyhound and Continental Trailways bus drivers of all trips out of New Orleans on September 25, 1963 (the date it is believed Oswald left
New Orleans), whose destination could have taken Oswald to Laredo, Texas, and none of them were able to recall any passenger resembling Oswald on their trips (CE 2192, 25 H 8).

  * When an interviewer from the HSCA spoke to Odio on January 16, 1976, and asked her about the possibility that the man at her door merely looked very much like Oswald, she replied, “When you see someone as close as I’m seeing you now, even closer because we were standing by my door for about fifteen minutes and the light was…coming down upon their faces, when I saw him on television I recognized him immediately. And this guy had a special grin, a kind of funny smirk” (HSCA Record 180-10101-10280, January 16, 1976, p.1), the smirk being an identifying characteristic of Oswald so many other people had commented on.