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

by Talbot, David

  Sprague resigned as the Assassinations Committee chief counsel in March 1977, returning to Philadelphia to practice law. Soon after, Tanenbaum followed him out the door, moving to California, where he branched out from law to serve as mayor of Beverly Hills and to pursue a successful new career as the writer of best-selling legal thrillers. Corruption of Blood, his 1996 novel, would tell the dark tale of what happened when Manhattan prosecutor Butch Karp went to Washington and tried to solve the Kennedy assassination.

  Sprague was replaced as chief counsel by G. Robert Blakey, a Cornell law professor and organized crime expert who had written the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, the 1970 law that would finally bring the powerful Mafia families to their knees. There was a poetic justice to Blakey’s role in creating RICO—he was, in effect, finishing the crime-busting crusade he had begun under Bobby Kennedy as a young Justice Department lawyer. And, by taking on the Assassinations Committee job, he was continuing Bobby’s mission to crack the murder of JFK. Blakey was a Kennedy loyalist and he was dedicated to getting to the bottom of the mystery that still haunted America. But, unlike Sprague and Tanenbaum, he was also experienced in the Byzantine ways of Washington bureaucracy and he was determined to save the besieged investigation by steering clear of explosive confrontations.

  To do this, Blakey made a fateful decision—in effect, he accepted the investigative limits that his predecessors had stormily challenged, choosing to take the CIA’s word that it was fully cooperating with his probe and handing over all relevant documents. After the Assassinations Committee released its final report in 1979, Blakey crowed that his strategy of voluntary cooperation had worked: “In point of fact, the committee ultimately obtained from the CIA every single document that it wanted. No limitations were put on it. We got deeper and wider in the agency files than any other congressional committee in the history of Congress—bar none.”

  But the young staff investigators who had been given the job of prying information out of the CIA knew differently. They had been stonewalled by the agency every step of the way. One of these investigators was Dan Hardway, a long-haired Cornell law student from West Virginia whom Blakey had brought with him to Washington. Hardway would roll into the CIA headquarters’ parking lot every day in a chopped, circus-red VW dune buggy blasting Talking Heads out of oversized speakers, accompanied by his equally energized fellow investigator Eddie Lopez, a Puerto Rican New Yorker also from Cornell Law School.

  “We were not popular in Langley,” chuckled Hardway years later. The two youthful Blakey aides were investigating Oswald’s links to the CIA and his murky visits to Mexico City. But as they tried to track down relevant documents in the agency’s labyrinthine citadel, a veteran agent named George Joannides—the former Helms man who had been brought out of retirement to serve as the CIA’s liaison with the Assassinations Committee—suddenly appeared to block them. “They brought him in to shut us down,” says Hardway flatly today.

  Hardway and Lopez complained to their law professor that Joannides was obstructing their investigation. But when Blakey took their grievances to the CIA, intelligence officials assured him that they were fully cooperating, telling him that his investigators were just hot-headed kids. Blakey chose to believe the agency.

  Hardway felt that Joannides was hiding evidence of a conspiracy that involved CIA officers. Like Tanenbaum, he came to suspect David Phillips, who he believed had run the disinformation aspect of the assassination. Immediately after JFK was shot, Phillips’s operation began to spread bogus stories linking Oswald to Castro—with a speed that made the propaganda campaign seem preplanned. When the retired spy was finally brought back before the committee, it was the law student—wearing a red cotton plaid shirt and faded jeans—who grilled Phillips this time. If Phillips thought the long-haired coal miner’s son with the West Virginia twang could be easily brushed off, he soon found out he was wrong. As Hardway bore down on Phillips, the retired spook fidgeted and chain-smoked his way through the interrogation. At one point, Phillips had three or four cigarettes going at once. “The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him. That’s what got him very upset. He knew the whole thing could unravel.”

  But in the end, the House Select Committee on Assassinations chose not to pursue Phillips or other suspicious CIA figures and its final report let the agency off the hook. The study found that President Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”—an historic break from the federal government’s lone gunman dogma. And it pointed a finger at the Mafia and Cuban exiles, declaring that the conspiracy might have involved members of those groups. But the report cleared the intelligence agency, even though a number of the committee’s own staff members—including Hardway and Fonzi—believed that some CIA officials were deeply implicated.

  Though the committee’s final report was circumspect about the principal source of the plot, Blakey himself pulled no punches. “I think the mob did it,” he bluntly told the press. Over the years, Blakey would be sharply criticized by Fonzi and other assassination researchers for his single-minded focus on the Mafia. Some of them, including Hardway, argued that the Mafia vs. the CIA debate about the assassination was a false dichotomy. At the operational level, the two organizations had merged in shadowy enterprises like the Castro murder plots. And Hardway was convinced that rogue agents had joined with gangsters and anti-Castro militants to kill JFK.

  Hardway—who through the years kept in touch with his old professor, for whom he still felt great respect and affection—would continue to thrash out this old debate with Blakey whenever they talked. “I don’t know how many times since 1978 that Bob and I have had this conversation,” said Hardway, who is now a small-town lawyer in North Carolina. “I will tell him, ‘Bob, you’re right—the mob was involved. But Bill Harvey, David Phillips, and some of the people from the CIA were also involved.’ He’ll say, ‘No, they weren’t, Dan.’ I’ll say, ‘Yes, they were, Bob.’”

  In April 2001, something happened that shook Bob Blakey’s certainty. That month, the weekly Miami New Times published a story on George Joannides—the veteran CIA agent whom Hardway and Lopez had accused of blocking their investigation. The article revealed that Joannides, who was based in Miami in the early 1960s, was the agent in charge of DRE—the CIA-financed Cuban exile student group that had worked hard to implicate Oswald as a Castro stooge, before and after Dallas. In other words, Joannides had played an intriguing role in the Oswald mystery, but had chosen to keep this hidden from Blakey’s committee. Meanwhile, the career spy—who died in 1990—had used his liaison position with the committee to deflect scrutiny from the CIA. The New Times article, which was written by Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley, stunned and outraged Blakey. Over two decades earlier, he had praised the CIA for its cooperation with his investigation. Now the law professor realized his young investigators had been right about the CIA—he had been duped.

  A furious Blakey told the press that if he had known who Joannides was, the agent would not have been his CIA liaison—he would have been sworn in as a witness and forced to testify: “Joannides’s behavior was criminal. He obstructed our investigation.” The CIA had manipulated the Warren Commission, Blakey fumed, and now he knew that it had also deceived the House Select Committee on Assassinations. “Many have told me that the culture of the agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people…I am now in that camp.”

  Blakey’s credulity had allowed Joannides to stonewall the investigation and had helped suspicious CIA figures like David Phillips to slip away from the congressional spotlight. But late in his life, Phillips would become oddly confessional, providing a curious coda to the Assassinations Committee saga.In a July 1986 conversation with a former committee investigator, Phillips remarked, “My private opinion is that JF
K was done in by a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.”

  The former spy—who, in retirement, tried his hand at a literary career—elaborated on this assassination scenario in notes for a novel that he planned to write, but apparently never completed. The novel—whose working title, The AMLASH Legacy, was inspired by the CIA code name for one of its assassination plots against Castro—portrayed the slaying of Kennedy as a hideous, unforeseen offshoot of the agency’s Cuba scheme. In Phillips’s scenario, it was the Soviets—working with a wealthy, CIA-hating American leftist—who subverted the anti-Castro operation, turning it into a JFK assassination plot that would destroy the CIA.

  “I was one of the two case officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald,” Phillips has the CIA official based on himself declare in the book outline. “After working to establish his Marxist bona fides, we gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba. I helped him when he came to Mexico City to obtain a visa, and when he returned to Dallas to wait for it I saw him twice there. We rehearsed the plan many times: In Havana Oswald was to assassinate Castro with a sniper’s rifle from the upper floor window of a building on the route where Castro often drove in an open jeep.

  “Whether Oswald was a double-agent or a psycho I’m not sure, and I don’t know why he killed Kennedy, but I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the President’s assassination but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt.”

  Whether this labyrinthine literary exercise was a partial confession—or one last attempt by the disinformation master to muddy the assassination waters—is not clear. While Phillips felt compelled to at least “share” the guilt for JFK’s murder, he did so in a weirdly cloaked manner. And he still placed the primary blame on the CIA’s old nemeses—Moscow and the American left.

  Shortly before his death in 1988, however, Phillips revealed more. According to the CIA veteran’s nephew, Shawn Phillips, the ailing spy confessed something to Shawn’s father, James, that he could never bring himself to tell Congress. The two brothers had grown estranged after James began to suspect David was involved in the JFK assassination. Suffering from late-stage lung cancer, David phoned his brother to attempt a final reconciliation. “Were you in Dallas on that day?” James asked him. “Yes,” David replied. James hung up the phone and never spoke to his brother again.

  AFTER THE HOUSE SELECT Committee on Assassinations found evidence of a JFK conspiracy, the panel recommended that the Carter Justice Department pursue the numerous tantalizing leads that it had developed. But, predictably, there was no further government action, and as the Reagan administration took power in 1981, the reign of secrecy in Washington only hardened.

  With the government incapable of investigating itself, it fell to the media to shine a light on the dark corners of the Kennedy assassination. There was overwhelming public support for such scrutiny, with polls over the years showing that anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of Americans believed the official version of the JFK assassination was a fraud. But instead of aggressively investigating the many lingering questions about Dallas, the mainstream media continued to discredit conspiracy theories, straining harder with each passing decade to prop up the increasingly moth-eaten Warren Report. The most prestigious news institutions—the ones with the power to unearth new information—put themselves instead at the government’s service. The special reports on the assassination produced with numbing regularity by the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, Time, and Newsweek inevitably rallied to the defense of the lone gunman theory—with editors, reporters, and producers taking their cues in many cases from Warren Commission members, CIA and FBI officials, and media executives close to these government agencies. On some occasions, journalists who were intelligence assets simply funneled the government’s version of Dallas directly into the press. As Carl Bernstein reported in an explosive 1977 Rolling Stone article, the CIA alone had over four hundred American journalists secretly at its service. And declassified documents reveal that some of these journalists did the CIA’s bidding as the agency worked to tilt press coverage of the JFK mystery.

  The American media’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination will certainly go down in history as one of its most shameful performances, along with its tragically supine acceptance of the government’s fraudulent case for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Assassination critics have long railed at the media’s obedient embrace of the Warren Report, a credulousness that grows more and more bizarre with the passage of time and accumulation of contrary evidence. But even more confounding is the failure of JFK’s close friends in the press to investigate the monumental crime. Some of these Kennedy intimates occupied influential positions high on the media ladder. Critics see their failure to look into JFK’s murder as not only a dereliction of professional duty but a personal betrayal.

  The legendary newspaperman Benjamin Bradlee—who reigned for years as the executive editor of the Washington Post, including during its Watergate-era investigative glory days—comes immediately to mind in this regard. As I researched this book, I began to wonder why the man who was JFK’s closest friend in the Washington press corps—a man who had the power to help bring down the Nixon presidency—apparently did nothing to reveal the truth behind Kennedy’s murder.

  Bradlee’s deep affection for JFK shines through his 1975 memoir, Conversations with Kennedy—a book, along with Red Fay’s The Pleasure of His Company, that offers the most intimate view of JFK, and is, essentially, a love story. Bradlee and his second wife, Tony, Mary Meyer’s sister, socialized regularly with the Kennedys at the White House, Camp David, Palm Beach, and Newport. Late at night, after one champagne-carbonated soiree, Jackie drew Bradlee aside to tearfully confide that “you two really are our best friends.” Unashamed of his unique relationship with the president, the journalist later wrote that his friendship with JFK “dominated my life.” Kennedy, he gushed, was “graceful, gay, funny, witty, teasing and teasable, forgiving, hungry, incapable of being corny, restless, interesting, interested, exuberant, blunt, profane, and loving. He was all of those…and more.” And yet, under Bradlee, the Washington Post showed little curiosity about how his extraordinary friend had died.

  The same year Bradlee published his Kennedy memoir, journalist Robert B. Kaiser—writing in Rolling Stone—explored the media’s disturbing lack of interest in the JFK assassination. The Washington Post’s failure to commit investigative resources to the case was “especially puzzling,” Kaiser observed, because of the newspaper’s “courageous handling of Watergate and the intimate friendship Bradlee had with President Kennedy.” When the Rolling Stone journalist asked Bradlee to explain his lack of interest in the case, he snarled, “I’ve been up to my ass in lunatics”—a reply that revealed not only his contempt for conspiracy researchers but his oddly passive view that the Post’s role was simply to sift through the “lunatics” instead of directing its own investigative firepower at the story. “Unless you can find someone who wants to devote his life to [the case], forget it,” Bradlee added. This comment also struck me as strangely resigned, especially for the man who had famously declared that reporters should be willing to “give their left nut” for a great story.

  There must be other reasons for Bradlee’s inaction, I concluded, after reading the Rolling Stone article years later. So I decided to visit the man himself—the man whom I, like the rest of those inspired by Watergate to enter journalism, had long regarded as a craggy icon of Fourth Estate integrity. Bradlee was long retired as the Post’s executive editor when I spoke with him in 2004. But, at age eighty-three, he retained emeritus status at the paper—as well as a small, unassuming office, which is where he agreed to meet with me. Dressed informally in a buttoned sweater and slacks, the legendary editor still exuded the feisty energy that had driven him to the top of his profession.

  We began by talking about Bradlee’s memories of Bobby Kennedy, with whom he had a somewhat prickly relationship.
“I think that he maybe resented my relationship with Jack,” Bradlee said. I told him about my book, and how my research showed that, after the shots rang out in Dallas, Bobby immediately suspected the CIA and its henchmen in the Mafia and Cuban exile world. Bradlee did not seem surprised. “Jesus,” he said, in his trademark growl, “if it were your brother…I mean if I were Bobby, I would certainly have taken a look at that possibility.” Then Bradlee made a truncated, but revealing remark. “I’ve always wondered whether my reaction to all of that was not influenced by sort of a total distaste for the possibility that [Jack] had been assassinated by…” He did not finish the sentence, but the rest was clear: “by his own government.”

  I pursued this angle with Bradlee. He had been the brother-in-law of CIA golden boy Cord Meyer; he socialized, like other Cold War liberals in the Washington press, with the agency’s top men at Georgetown salons. Did he ever make discreet inquiries in these CIA circles, I asked Bradlee, about what happened in Dallas?

  “I’m sure I talked to Helms about it privately, but as usual he dusted me off,” he answered.

  “He was good at that, wasn’t he?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, he’d ask you to have lunch with him and you’d think, ‘Oh, God, we’re going to get a real good juicy pearl’—and you got nothing.”

  Then I asked Bradlee the question that had been looming throughout the interview. Why didn’t he do more as the editor of the Post to get at the truth? “It was the fall of ’65 when I became managing editor here,” he replied, “and I’ve got to tell you that…I was so busy with trying to, in the first place, trying to build a staff…. And so I spent an enormous amount of time trying to decide who to hire.” It was a weak explanation, and we both knew it.