Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  To McGinnis, Kennedy’s parting gesture “showed an awful lot of class.” But it was surely more than that. It was Kennedy’s way of acknowledging that the reporter was not out of line. The press, and the public, had the right to know more about his brother’s death. He simply could not help them yet.

  AMONG THOSE ELECTRIFIED BY the Garrison investigation in New Orleans was a maverick man of letters named Chandler Brossard, a self-educated literateur and journalist who wrote hipster novels like Who Walk in Darkness, which was set in bohemian Greenwich Village, but paid the rent by working as an editor at magazines like The New Yorker, Time, and Coronet. In 1967, Brossard, who was working as a Look magazine senior editor at the time, convinced his boss—William Attwood, who had been hired as Look’s editor-in-chief the year before—to meet with Garrison in the magazine’s New York office. Attwood, JFK’s old prep school mate and secret liaison with Castro in the administration’s final days, had begun to have his own suspicions about the events in Dallas by then. He agreed to meet with the New Orleans prosecutor and Brossard, and the three men’s discussion of the case spilled into the evening, through dinner and drinks, not ending until one in the morning. After finally bidding goodnight to Garrison, Attwood was so fired up about the prosecutor’s case for a conspiracy that he phoned Bobby Kennedy from the New York Press Club, where he had dined that night.

  Like everyone else in the Kennedy circle, Bill Attwood was waiting for Bobby Kennedy to do something to finally solve his brother’s murder. “Bill thought that Bobby was a real tough guy,” recalled his widow, Simone. “One of the things he thought about the assassination was that, if anybody knew what was going on, Bobby did. That Bobby was very much on top of things and not about to just lie down and say, ‘That’s the way it is’ and just accept the official story.”

  Attwood, a man whom Bobby respected for his diplomatic service during the Kennedy administration, urgently told the senator that Garrison was on to something. The editor intended to throw the weight of Look, a lively written picture magazine second only to Life in national influence at the time, behind Garrison’s investigation. He strongly encouraged Kennedy to commit himself to reopening the case. In response, Bobby told Attwood that he agreed his brother had been the victim of a conspiracy. “But I can’t do anything until we get control of the White House,” Kennedy told him. Soon after hanging up the phone, Attwood suffered a major heart attack and was rushed in the early morning hours to St. Vincent’s Hospital. It took him three months to recover enough to return to work. Look magazine never jumped on Jim Garrison’s bandwagon.

  “I can’t do anything until we get control of the White House.” It became Bobby’s standard reply whenever those in his circle pushed him to take a stand on the assassination controversy. But as the Warren Report became increasingly besieged in 1966 and ’67, it grew more and more difficult for Kennedy to hold to this position. Public opinion was racing ahead of his presidential timetable.

  By this time, dissension over the Warren Report was even starting to embroil elite circles. In February 1966, an independent New York researcher named Charles E. Stanton took it upon himself to mail a rudimentary survey about the assassination to a sprawling spectrum of prominent personalities in the United States and abroad. The questionnaire—which asked whether or not respondents believed the Warren Report and whether or not they suspected that the government was suppressing evidence of a conspiracy—was accompanied by a heartfelt letter, appealing to the illustrious recipients’ sense of history. One “Kennedy intimate” had chided Stanton, he confessed in his letter, criticizing his survey for being “in bad taste, if not actually morbid.” But “would it not be provocative to read the reactions of Abraham Lincoln’s contemporaries—Disraeli, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Garibaldi, Oscar Wilde—and what they thought of the disastrous assassination?” Stanton pleaded.

  The researcher sent out more than three hundred questionnaires between February 1966 and January 1968, addressing them to a politically diverse group that spanned from Fidel Castro to Francisco Franco. Many—including U.S. media luminaries like Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid and political potentates like J. Edgar Hoover, Senators Barry Goldwater and William Fulbright, and lawyer Roy Cohn—predictably dodged Stanton’s questions. But the responses Stanton did receive provide an illuminating snapshot of an elite class in turmoil over the Kennedy assassination. He never published the results of his work, but the handwritten scrawls of these famous Kennedy contemporaries—now stored at the Kennedy Library—are fascinating to read.

  Among those who endorsed the government’s version of the assassination were Pierre Salinger (who would change his mind later in life), journalists Harrison Salisbury and Stewart Alsop, movie mogul Dore Schary, poets Richard Wilbur and Carl Sandburg, historian James MacGregor Burns, politically divergent intellectuals William F. Buckley and Dwight Macdonald, and socialist leader Norman Thomas. The researcher also heard back from the two principal architects of Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs disaster, former CIA officials Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell. Unsurprisingly, Dulles expressed his unswerving confidence in the government investigation that he had assiduously guided to its foregone conclusion. But the assassination survey clearly got under Bissell’s skin and he could not stop himself from scrawling in large, bold script in the “Comments” section: “Who cares? Let’s get our minds—if we have any—on something else.”

  Ironically, adding his Warren Report endorsement to those of the two CIA men with whom he and his brother had bitterly clashed, was Senator Robert F. Kennedy. “The Warren Report was prepared by highly competent and respected people after intensive study, and there is every reason to have confidence in their findings,” read the reply on Kennedy’s Senate stationery. Adding to the irony, Bobby’s response was penned for him by his aide Joe Dolan, a man who harbored even more explosive suspicions about Dallas than RFK.

  The list of those who believed Kennedy was the victim of a plot was equally impressive: poets Robert Graves, Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Merton, and Kenneth Rexroth; novelists Katherine Anne Porter, Terry Southern, Irving Wallace, and Ray Bradbury; dramatist Paddy Chayevsky; sociologist Andrew Hacker; journalist and Kennedy peace emissary Norman Cousins; Norwegian seafaring adventurer Thor Heyerdahl of Kon-Tiki fame; British scholars Arnold Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Among the more passionate hand-written comments came from Southern, whose screenplay for Dr. Strangelove had been inspired by the doomsday militarists with whom JFK had dueled. “The absurdity of the Warren Report is patent and overwhelming,” he angrily scrawled at the bottom of the survey. “One has only to browse through any of the 26 volumes to know at once what a complete farce, charade and incredible piece of bullshit it is. The impressive thing about it is its insulting artlessness. It is as though they imagined that not ONE SINGLE PERSON in America would take the trouble to look at the unabridged version.”

  With the country’s political leadership and news media refusing to exhume the JFK case, it fell to a few intrepid celebrities to speak out about the mystery that was haunting America. In June 1967, onstage at the now legendary Monterey Pop Festival, David Crosby of the Byrds stunned the audience, as well as his fellow band members, by making a shocking statement about JFK’s assassination: “President Kennedy wasn’t killed by one man—he was shot from several directions. The truth has been suppressed. You should know that. This is your country.”

  Comedian Mort Sahl emerged as the most prominent critic of the Warren Report in the entertainment industry, putting his career on the line by turning his popular nightclub act into a running critique of the official investigation and charging that JFK was the victim of a government plot. Kennedy was “the only president that ever went up against” the country’s national security complex, Sahl told an alternative newspaper in March 1968. “And see what happened to him for his pains.” Onstage, he would poke holes in the government’s cover-up, reading in scathing tones from the twenty-six Warren Report volumes piled around hi
m as props.

  Sahl’s once lucrative career began to suffer, with his income plummeting from $1 million a year to $13,000. “Working on the Kennedy assassination caused people to accuse me of not being funny or beloved anymore. In the eyes of show business, those are the greatest crimes of all,” he said. Sahl had avoided the obscenity legal battles and drug woes that had brought down fellow comedian Lenny Bruce, who broke in with him in the early sixties in San Francisco nightclubs like the hungry i. But now his friends warned him that his “obsession” with the Kennedy case would be his own demise. He could not bring himself to stop.

  Sahl had supplied JFK with gags during the 1960 campaign but had fallen out with the Kennedy camp after the election, when he switched back to his role as political satirist and began tweaking the new president. Old Joe Kennedy thought you were either with the family or against it. He didn’t laugh when Sahl sent him a congratulatory telegram: “You haven’t lost a son. You’ve gained a country.” But Jack was different. He knew how to laugh at himself. Sahl admired his grace and humor. He thought his American University peace speech should be taught in schools. He thought his murder was “the foulest event of our lives.” That sort of thing was not supposed to happen in America. And where were the watchdogs of the American press? He was revolted by the sentimentalization of Kennedy’s death, the way that Walter Cronkite led the nation in an orgy of “communal crying.” He took a savage view of the news media’s supine acceptance of the Warren Report: “Hitler said that he always knew you could buy the press. What he didn’t know was you could get them cheap.” When Jim Garrison announced he was reopening the case, Sahl flew to New Orleans and volunteered to help him. Finally, someone was doing something to solve the crime of the century.

  By late 1966, it was becoming impossible for the establishment media to stick with the official story. Shamed by the growing cultural ferment around the Kennedy assassination—and prodded by best-selling conspiracy books by authors like Mark Lane, Edward Jay Epstein, and Josiah Thompson, a Haverford College philosophy professor whose Six Seconds in Dallas presented a carefully constructed case for three assassins and at least four bullets in Dealey Plaza—the media began to finally take a skeptical attitude towards the Warren Report.

  On November 25, 1966, Life magazine questioned, “Did Oswald Act Alone?” in a remarkable cover story that suggested he did not. The report was the work of a team that included Haverford’s Professor Thompson. It marked a stunning shift for the Luce publication, which had played a key role in the crime’s cover-up by buying the original Zapruder film and locking it away. This outrageous action—which was ordered by Life’s publisher, C. D. Jackson, who, like his boss Henry Luce, was a fervid anticommunist with strong ties to the CIA—allowed the magazine to repeatedly distort what the Zapruder film actually depicted, publishing frames and captions that misled the public into believing JFK was struck only by shots from the rear. But by late 1966, Jackson was dead and Luce near the end of his life, and the growing cracks in the Warren Report forced even Life to shift direction.

  The next month, the New York Times quietly announced that it was forming a special task force to investigate the assassination. The team was headed by Harrison Salisbury, then the editor of the Times’ op-ed page, who announced that his reporters would “go over all the areas of doubt and hope to eliminate them.” Even the Saturday Evening Post—showcase of all-American, Norman Rockwell values—was moved to declare that there was “something rotten” about Dallas, running a major excerpt from Thompson’s book on its cover with the blaring headline: “Three Assassins Killed Kennedy.” An accompanying editorial declared, “We believe the Kennedy mystery has not been solved, that the case is not closed.”

  All these ripples of activity around the Kennedy assassination would be swallowed in 1967 by the tidal wave of Jim Garrison’s investigation. It was a roaring media spectacle that swept everything before it. The probe dredged up a florid cast of characters—including CIA mercenaries, violent Cuban refugees, street hustlers, and of course Clay Shaw, the elegant gay business leader with murky intelligence affiliations who became the central focus of Garrison’s case.

  Robert Kennedy had been quietly waiting until he was able to win the White House—a race he was planning to make, at this point, in 1972 after Lyndon Johnson completed his second full term. Then RFK would enlist the powers of the federal government in his hunt for his brother’s killers. But he had not counted on Jim Garrison. The prosecutor’s raucous investigation would force Bobby out of the shell where he was biding his time, compelling him to try to make sense of the Garrison cavalcade—and to take steps to avoid being run over by it.

  IT TOOK A MAN with the bravura of Jim Garrison to be the first law enforcement official in the country to reopen the Kennedy investigation. Known in New Orleans as “the Jolly Green Giant” for his oversized frame—six feet, seven inches and 240 pounds—and glad-handing personality, he cut a colorful swath in a showy town. As he began his legal career, Garrison brought with him an eccentric résumé, but it was not a liability in the Big Easy. His father was a shady character who had done time for larceny and selling illegal hootch to Indians. During World War II, Garrison served with distinction as a combat pilot in Europe. But when he was called back to active duty during the Korean War, he was beset with anxieties and was discharged for psychiatric reasons. He joined the FBI, but abruptly quit less than four months later. After being elected district attorney, Garrison made a name for himself by strapping on a pistol and leading well-publicized raids on the fleshpots of Bourbon Street. But he himself was a notorious ladies’ man with a strong penchant for the pleasures that the French Quarter offered.

  In March 1962, Garrison worked his Louisiana political connections to finagle an audience with the dazzling young president of the United States. Instead of taking his wife, Liz, with him to Washington, he brought his girlfriend of the moment, a flight attendant named Judy Chambers. The night before his meeting with JFK, the fun-loving district attorney and his mistress partied so exuberantly that he overslept his appointment at the White House. Garrison was able to pull himself together, however, for a Justice Department meeting with Bobby Kennedy at 1:30 that afternoon. If JFK discovered the reason that Garrison stood him up, he was likely amused. But Bobby, who never put pleasure before business, did not hide his irritation with Garrison. When the D.A. returned to New Orleans, a friend asked him how the trip went. “Well, I met Bobby,” Garrison replied. He was then obliged to explain why he had missed his meeting with the president. But he was not the least contrite. “You can always meet a president,” Garrison informed his friend. “But you can’t always get a piece of ass like that!”

  Garrison was “flamboyant,” as he bragged to the press, but he was no buffoon. Like most Americans, he accepted the government’s version of the assassination until one day in November 1966 when venerable Senator Russell Long from Louisiana, with whom he was sharing a flight to New York, made some disturbing remarks about the Warren Report. “Those fellows on the Warren Commission were dead wrong,” Long, the Senate’s majority whip, told Garrison. “There’s no way in the world that one man could have shot up Jack Kennedy that way.” Senator Long’s comments launched Garrison on his mission to find the truth about what had happened to JFK in the streets of Dallas. “For me,” he said, “that was the end of innocence.”

  After plowing through the voluminous Warren Report—a study, he became convinced, designed only to “tranquilize the American public”—and the work of the leading conspiracy researchers, Garrison came to the conclusion that Kennedy was the victim of a well-organized plot with roots in New Orleans, where Lee Harvey Oswald had spent the summer before the assassination. Despite its reputation for a tropical, easygoing tolerance, the city was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy extremism. JFK himself confided to Louisiana congressman Hale Boggs, while waiting out a rain delay in the dugout during an opening day baseball game in April 1962, that he dreaded a forthcoming trip to New Orleans because of
the murderous passions against him there. “I’m not sure about going to New Orleans,” the president told Boggs. “I’ve got reports that it’s so tense down there that something could happen.”

  As Garrison began investigating Oswald’s ties to local Kennedy haters, he zeroed in on the peculiar office building at 544 Camp Street where a former FBI agent and far-right zealot named Guy Banister and his eccentric associate David Ferrie oversaw a buzzing beehive of anti-Castro activity that included the young man later arrested for Kennedy’s murder. The prosecutor came to the conclusion that Oswald was a pawn in a complex plot, framed as a Castro-loving Marxist to take the blame for the assassination. The real masterminds behind the conspiracy, he decided, could be found in the CIA and Pentagon. “President Kennedy was killed for one reason,” Garrison began to tell the press. “Because he was working for reconciliation with the [Soviet Union] and Castro’s Cuba…. President Kennedy died because he wanted peace.”

  The United States, Garrison concluded, had been taken over by the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned about. “In a very real and terrifying sense, our government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society,” he declared in 1968. “I’ve learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in…. I’ve always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my government’s basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I’ve come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, ‘Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.’ I’m afraid, based on my experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.”