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

by Talbot, David

  I pushed him again. “In retrospect,” I asked, “do you think the Post should have taken a harder look at the assassination?” And then Bradlee, who surely finds it hard to bullshit other journalists, gave me a brutally honest reply. He didn’t do more to investigate his friend’s death, Bradlee told me, because he was concerned about his career. “I think I probably felt that since I had been a friend of Kennedy’s that—you know, this is just [two] years later, and the first thing that he does is come over to the paper that he’s hopefully going to run for a while—and he concentrates on that?” He was afraid, Bradlee continued, “that I would be discredited for taking the efforts [of the Post newsroom] down that path.”

  And then he added a wistful little kicker that was stunning in its understatement. If his newspaper had solved the monstrous crime, “it would have been fantastic.”

  Yes, I nodded. “It would have been an amazing story.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Bradlee.

  And that was it. No angst about the way he had put his ambition ahead of his loyalty to a friend, no moaning about what letting a crime of this magnitude go unsolved does to the soul of a nation. I knew Bradlee was old school—journalists don’t blubber, and all that. You cut your losses and move on. But his attitude was still weirdly emotionless, even by his hard-bitten standards.

  I later spoke with Don Hewitt, another prominent journalist who knew the Kennedys. As we have seen, the 60 Minutes creator has long harbored suspicions about Dallas, wondering whether “disgruntled CIA types” were behind JFK’s assassination. Like Ben Bradlee, Hewitt—as the long-reigning executive producer of the most successful and esteemed investigative news show in television history—was in a position to dig deeply into the case. And that’s just what he did, Hewitt insists today.

  I talked to Hewitt in 2005, the year after he stepped down as the 60 Minutes mastermind. During his thirty-seven years at the helm of the CBS program, the show did not break one major investigative story on the assassination. But, Hewitt told me, it was not for lack of trying.

  “We tried and tried and tried,” Hewitt said. “We went to Dallas, had marksmen shoot bullets out the window [of the Texas School Book Depository], tried to figure the trajectory of where it would have come from…I sat in that window and looked out that window for an hour, trying to figure out—I just never believed [the official story] for one second. And it’s the biggest mystery of my life, [why the real] story has never surfaced.”

  Hewitt talked more about the obvious falsity of the official version of Dallas and how major political figures of the sixties like Richard Nixon privately rejected it. A top Republican once told Hewitt he had asked Nixon what he knew about JFK’s assassination. “You don’t want to know,” Nixon had replied. Even in retirement, Hewitt was clearly vexed by the dark crime.

  Later, bidding me farewell, the broadcast news legend wished me luck in my attempt to shed more light on the case. “Well, go, man—because it’s the mystery of my life,” he repeated, adding that he was mystified why more journalists had not devoted their “all-consuming” energy to the story. “Go man,” he said one last time. “Big story.”

  It did not sound like a brush-off. It sounded more like Hewitt was passing the baton than passing the buck.

  I know the criticisms of 60 Minutes-style investigative reporting—that Hewitt made a great show of dramatic confrontations, but lacked the guts to take on the most potent forces in American life. (Just ask ex-producer Lowell Bergman about the show’s surrender to Big Tobacco and network politics.) But Hewitt’s parting words sounded like they were from the heart. And I took them to heart. He had failed to crack the political crime of the twentieth century, but at least he had tried. So far, my generation of journalists has done no better.

  FOR OVER A DECADE, the JFK case remained stuck where the House Select Committee on Assassinations had left it. Then Hollywood stepped in, as the dream factory sometimes does when the country is gripped by a nightmare and is unable to wake itself. In response to the long paralysis of the political and media establishments came the shock therapy of Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie, JFK.

  The film, a glorified account of Jim Garrison’s bold carnival of criminal pursuit, burrowed deeply into America’s most hidden fears, suggesting that Kennedy was killed by a national security cabal intent on driving the country to war. The political and media elites denounced the film, calling it “paranoid,” “twisted history,” a “big lie” of Hitlerian proportion, and wondering whatever possessed Warner Brothers to release it.

  But one former Kennedy confidant risked his reputation to support Stone—Frank Mankiewicz. He shocked the Beltway crowd—including the Kennedy family—by going to work as the Washington publicist for JFK. “Every American owes [Oliver Stone] a debt of gratitude,” Mankiewicz announced. “He kicked open a door that had been closed too long.”

  Mankiewicz took an aggressive media strategy, returning the pundits’ fire with equal scorn. “The political writers, the Establishment writers, the editorialists, and the thumb suckers were almost unanimous in attacking JFK, because it challenged the work they had done in the 1960s—which was very little,” he acidly remarked. Guided by an aggressive Mankiewicz media playbook, Stone sharply responded to the numerous attacks on him in the New York Times and Washington Post. “History may be too important to leave to newsmen,” the director opined in a New York Times op-ed piece. In January 1992, Stone went before the National Press Club in Washington, armed with a two-fisted, Mankiewicz-written speech. How could plush-salaried press sages like Tom Wicker, Dan Rather, and Anthony Lewis pooh-pooh the idea of a conspiracy, he declared, when they had never roused themselves to investigate the dark possibility—and when they worked in a capital city replete with conspiracies, from Watergate to Iran-Contra to the 1980 Reagan campaign’s “October Surprise”?

  The Kennedy family passed word to Mankiewicz that they did not approve of his high-profile advocacy of JFK. They had decided years before to follow Bobby’s public vow to focus on the future instead of the past, even though—as some family members certainly knew—RFK was privately following a very different path. Mankiewicz stopped receiving invitations to family events. But the former Kennedy aide was undeterred. What he was doing was in the spirit of his old boss, Bobby, who years earlier had given him the assignment of digging into the assassination.

  “I worked on the film’s behalf because I believed in it,” he says today. “Oliver was the first serious player to tackle the subject. The Washington Post and the rest of the media could sort of piss on the people who came before him and insult them. But Oliver had two Academy Awards and he had a $40 million budget for JFK. He could take them on.”

  In the end, Oliver Stone did not prevail in the media arena, where he is still a figure of ridicule. But the director did succeed in the marketplace, where the public swarmed into movie theaters and made JFK a box office hit. The controversial movie also succeeded in shaking loose an avalanche of secret government documents about the assassination. Stone had been persuaded by researchers Kevin Walsh and James Lesar to add a crawl at the end of the film, stating that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations had been sealed until the year 2029. When Capitol Hill offices were promptly flooded by thousands of angry letters, a heroic Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana—later co-chair of the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq study panel—ushered the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act through Congress, which resulted in the declassification of thousands of revealing documents.

  Stone had accomplished overnight what hard-working assassination critics—and a passive Washington press corps—could not in decades. There were no smoking gun memos in this paper flood—and it is wishful thinking to believe that if there ever was such clear documentation of a conspiracy buried somewhere in government files, it would not have been shredded years ago. Nonetheless, the documents released under the JFK Act helped researchers fill in a subterranean picture of the Kennedy administration, with its heated schism
s and scheming over Cuba and other Cold War flashpoints. The records provide more context for why Bobby Kennedy, among others, immediately suspected his brother was the victim of “a large political conspiracy.”

  Like the congressional investigations of the 1970s, the Oliver Stone movie opened up a new spirit of inquiry in the nation, one that affected even presidential contender Bill Clinton. On the 1992 campaign trail, Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, responded to questions about JFK by saying all relevant government documents should be released.

  When Clinton moved into the Oval Office, one of his first directives to Webster Hubbell—the Arkansas golfing buddy he named associate attorney general—was to find out “who killed JFK.” There was a touching innocence to the young president’s query, a naïve optimism that presidents could easily get to the bottom of such a deep, dark hole—something that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could have set straight for him. Hubbell, who was later driven from office in scandal, looked into the Kennedy case but reported that he “wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting.”

  The new wave of skepticism inspired by JFK proved to be short-lived. In 1993, a former lawyer named Gerald Posner published a new brief for the Warren Report, Case Closed. The media quickly rallied around the book, making it a best seller. The book—which concluded that “a sociopathic twenty-four-year-old loser in life, armed with a $12 rifle and consumed by his own warped motivation, ended Camelot”—not only had a reassuring simplicity, it let the press off the hook. The journalists who had taken the government’s word about the assassination all along felt vindicated.

  By 2003, Posner himself no longer seemed so certain that the case was closed. After learning of journalist Jefferson Morley’s revelations about CIA agent George Joannides and the Assassinations Committee, Posner wrote an essay for Newsweek calling on the intelligence agency to come clean about Dallas. The CIA’s deception of Congress “is not a performance that inspires public confidence,” Posner wrote. “Needless conspiracy speculation is only fueled by the CIA’s stonewalling. The American public has a right to know everything that its government knows about the president’s murder and Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  But the media continued to insist that the case was closed. Nearly a half century after the assassination of JFK, the story seemed lost in a limbo, caught somewhere in the public consciousness between Stone and Posner. Then, in late 2006, a flurry of events began to shake up the long dormant case.

  IN NOVEMBER 2006, THE BBC program Newsnight aired a provocative report by filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan alleging that three CIA operatives were caught on camera at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of Robert Kennedy’s assassination and suggesting that they were involved in his killing. The BBC report identified the three men as veterans of the CIA’s Miami-based anti-Castro operation: George Joannides, the senior officer who had misled investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978; David Morales, the head of the JM/WAVE station’s paramilitary operation and, like Joannides, long suspected of ties to the JFK conspiracy; and a man whom filmmaker O’Sullivan identified as Gordon Campbell, deputy station chief of JM/WAVE. O’Sullivan presented conflicting testimony about the identities of the three men who were photographed and filmed that night. Some former associates said the men were indeed Joannides, Morales, and Campbell, while others disputed this. Despite the mixed evidence, O’Sullivan concluded, “My gut feeling is that these three senior CIA operatives were behind the assassination of Robert Kennedy.” The CIA, he told the BBC audience, “owes the public an explanation before the truth behind the Robert Kennedy assassination is lost to history.”

  Shortly after the BBC report aired, I joined with the Washington Post’s Jefferson Morley, an expert on Joannides and the CIA’s anti-Castro war, to look into the charges about the spy agency and the Ambassador Hotel. Morley and I traveled widely, interviewing dozens of relatives, friends, and former colleagues of Morales, who died in 1978, and Joannides, who died in 1990. We found that the BBC report was seriously flawed. The real Gordon Campbell turned out to be an Army colonel attached to the JM/WAVE station, and he died in 1962, making it impossible for him to have been filmed in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel. (When asked about this, O’Sullivan suggested that the man caught on camera might have taken the dead man’s name as an alias, since taking false names was a common practice among CIA covert operatives.) In addition, Morley and I found photographic evidence that seemed to disprove that the tall, dark-skinned man filmed by TV news cameras at the Ambassador was Morales. The evidence we gathered on the alleged Joannides photograph was more intriguing, but in the end proved inconclusive. Some people who knew the CIA operative identified the erect, bespectacled man in the photo as Joannides, but other credible sources insisted it was not him.

  While our investigation cast strong doubt on the BBC story, Morley and I unearthed new evidence that tied Morales and other JM/WAVE veterans to the assassination of President Kennedy, and possibly to the killing of Bobby Kennedy as well. In the course of our reporting, Morales—a key link between the CIA and the criminal underworld who died shortly before he was to be interviewed by the House Assassinations Committee—began to loom as a particularly interesting figure. As we talked with people who knew Morales, a picture emerged of the late covert officer as a violent and ruthless man, driven by a supercharged sense of patriotism and a poisonous hatred for anyone he considered a traitor, including the Kennedys.

  Morales was raised in a Mexican-American family in Phoenix that was so poor, he and his brother had to share a pair of shoes, so each boy could only attend school on alternate days. After joining the Army at the end of World War II, Morales was recruited by the CIA while serving in post-war Germany, becoming an intensely loyal “Company” man. His impoverished background and dark Indian features contrasted sharply with the elite, Ivy League breeding of the agency’s overseers. But Morales was willing to carry out whatever orders were given him by the organization that had rescued him from his hardscrabble youth and given him a glamorous, high-stakes life of international adventure.

  Though he rose to a position of prominence in the CIA, Morales was the agency’s “peon,” said one family member, who asked to remain anonymous. “He did whatever he was told. They gave him a lifestyle that he would never have had under any circumstances…He did everything for the Company. His family wasn’t his life—the Company was his life.”

  Wayne Smith, a twenty-five-year veteran of the foreign service who worked with Morales at the U.S. embassy in Havana before Castro took power, said, “Dave Morales did dirty work for the agency. If he were in the mob, he’d be called a hit man.”

  After running the CIA’s anti-Castro paramilitary program in Miami—where he was closely associated with gangsters like Johnny Rosselli—Morales was stationed in Southeast Asia, where he took part in the agency’s notorious Operation Phoenix program, targeting people suspected of Viet Cong ties for assassination. He has been connected to a bloody trail of CIA exploits, from the 1954 Guatemala coup, to the hunting and execution of Che Guevara in 1967, to the violent overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. (Morales later stated that he was in the palace when Allende was killed.)

  It’s easy to believe that Morales would have participated in the JFK assassination, a relative told me—not on his own, that was not in his character, but if ordered to do so. “When they call him a ‘rogue,’ that’s bullshit. He was extremely loyal [to the agency]. But I can see him being told to do something, and do it. With no questions asked.” One of Morales’s jobs was to consort with the criminal element on behalf of the agency, added the family member. Morales might have been ordered to recruit “those sleazy guys” and “get them to wherever they were supposed to go” for the Dallas operation.

  According to his lawyer, Robert Walton, Morales revealed that he was involved in both Kennedy assassinations. Walton has told this to several researchers over the years, including former congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi, who recounted the
story in his 1993 book, The Last Investigation. Walton repeated the story on camera to Shane O’Sullivan for the BBC report. According to Walton, Morales told him “I was in Dallas when I, when we got that mother fucker, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard. What was said to me was that he was in some way implicated with the death of John Kennedy, and let’s go one step further, and also with Bobby.”

  Ruben “Rocky” Carbajal—who was one of Morales’s closest friends, from childhood until the day the CIA operative died—has told researchers a similar story, but does not directly implicate his old friend in the killings. I visited with Carbajal in Nogales, Arizona, the border town where he has retired, chatting with him for hours in the bar and dining room of his favorite hangout, the Americana Motor Hotel, and at his hillside home overlooking the parched, scrubby terrain of Mexico. Carbajal, who was celebrating his eightieth birthday with a group of his old compadres over beers and glasses of Scotch when I found him, is a blunt-spoken, profane man. Short and spry, with well-groomed white hair and mustache, he was dressed sharply—in tan leather jacket, beige velour pullover, tailored brown slacks, and two showy rings—and carried himself like a scrappy bantamweight despite his advanced years. He and Morales grew up together in the tough streets of Phoenix, fighting with “the Okies” and playing together on the Phoenix Union High School football team, where Carbajal was the quarterback and Morales was his wide end. The two boys were closer than they were to their own brothers; they went everywhere together, with the bigger Morales acting as his friend’s bodyguard. Morales’s father abandoned the family when he was only four, and the Carbajal family—which owned a popular Mexican restaurant named El Molino that was frequented by Barry Goldwater and other Arizona VIPs—embraced Morales as one of their own.

  Nearly three decades after Morales’s death, Carbajal is still intensely loyal to the memory of the man he calls “Didi.” Carbajal regards his late friend’s covert assignments for the CIA as courageous missions that bestowed on him heroic stature. “When some asshole needed to be killed, Didi was the man to do it,” Carbajal told me, drinking Bud Lites and chain-smoking Marlboros in the Americana dining room. “You got that right. That was his job.”