Assassination researchers insist that it is not too late, even at this remote date, to revive the JFK investigation. Most people who could have shed light on the crime are now dead, researchers acknowledge, but the trail has not receded entirely into history’s far horizons. Researchers list a variety of actions that can still be taken. The government should be compelled to release the JFK files it is still withholding—including the 1,100 documents related to George Joannides that the CIA has admitted it still has locked away. The CIA should also be required to disclose the phone and travel records of other agents suspected of involvement in the JFK—and RFK—assassinations, such as David Morales. Washington should follow this by making a formal request to the Cuban and Mexican governments to release all their secret files on the case. The Justice Department should offer amnesty and waive government secrecy pledges for all those who step forward with relevant testimony. Lingering technical disputes about the events in Dealey Plaza—such as the hotly debated “acoustic fingerprints” on the Dallas police motorcycle Dictabelt that apparently indicated that as many as five shots were fired that day—should be resolved by utilizing the most sophisticated forensic resources, including those of the federal Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which has oddly refused to take on the case. Finally, the Kennedy family should be persuaded to completely open the papers under their control—including those of John and Robert Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—which are still subject to frustrating restrictions.
The assassination researchers are, of course, indefatigable by nature. That’s what has allowed them to carry on, through years of government obstruction, media ridicule, and the bewilderment of family and friends. But outside this shrinking community of hardy souls, a malaise hangs over the JFK crusade.
Some of those with a long history of involvement in the case are deeply pessimistic. When I visited Bob Blakey in November 2003, the week before the fortieth anniversary of the JFK assassination, he seemed resigned to the idea that the crime would never be solved. We spoke in his home near the University of Notre Dame campus, where he teaches law, sitting in over-stuffed chairs in his dimly lit study, where the flickering flames in the fireplace warded off the chill of an overcast afternoon. Near the end of the interview, Blakey told me that the Kennedys no longer seem important, at least not to those Americans who were born after JFK was shot. “The Kennedys are not part of this generation,” he said. “I teach this generation. [The assassination] is not a big deal for them. They grew up in a different world.”
So how will history resolve the Kennedy mystery? I asked him. “My guess is that the Warren Commission will carry the day,” said the man whose congressional investigation offered the first—and last—official challenge to the Warren Report. The lone gunman theory has the virtue of simplicity, Blakey explained. It was a dreary place to circle back to, after forty long years of exploration.
A couple of years later, I found myself at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, sitting in a quiet cubicle and reeling through Bobby Kennedy’s life in video. Maybe Blakey is right, and the Kennedy story is no longer relevant for many Americans. But the black and white footage flashing before me that day seemed to be loaded with painful meaning, even now.
The last reel I looked at was Bobby in 1968, and it included his appearance on a San Francisco public TV talk show called Kaleidoscope as he geared up for his final campaign. The interviewer asked pointed but polite questions, in a public television kind of way. But Bobby seemed pained and the interview took on the strained intensity of a psychodrama. In close-ups, the camera captured his raw, weather-ravaged face and scabbed lips. The country was angry and demoralized, the interviewer observed. He could also have pointed out that it was suffering a kind of moral rot and vacancy of the soul because of the ugly, no-exit war that had begun seeping into every corner of American life. In these brutal circumstances, why would he commit himself to the political arena? Kennedy was asked. Working for the public good was “no sacrifice,” Bobby replied. “The most unhappy people in the world are those who are involved in just themselves.”
But, even though he was on the eve of the political adventure of his life, Bobby did not seem happy. There was never a mask with Bobby. On camera that day, he was quiet, wistful, ironic. He was constitutionally incapable of the cheerful artifice and empty bravado that is required of American politicians. And yet, he really did believe in America—he simply refused to give in to what it was becoming.
After a long discussion of the country’s woes, the interviewer asked Bobby, “But you are an optimist?” Kennedy nodded and smiled his weary-eyed smile. “Just because you can’t live any other way, can you?” he replied. He was America’s first and last existential leader.
We live in a dark age of clashing fundamentalisms. The country is ruled by an administration that has made a cult of secrecy and obedience. We are caught up in another endless war, this time on “terror”—or perhaps it’s a struggle with fear itself. But in this bleakest of times, Bobby Kennedy’s message seems more compelling than ever. We can’t go on, we must go on. Do Americans still want the truth—starting with Dallas and going all the way to Guantánamo? Do they want to take back their country? I don’t know for certain. But I have to be optimistic. Just because there really is no other way, is there?
NOTES
1: NOVEMBER 22, 1963
1
was eating lunch: William Manchester, The Death of a President, 146.
1
“I have news for you”: Ibid., 195.
2
“told me with pleasure”: Author interview with Nicholas Katzenbach.
2
“on the faculty of Howard University”: Quoted in Anthony Summers, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 364.
2
“amazing computer brain of his”: Author interview with Jack Newfield.
3
“riding into an ambush”: Quoted in Lamar Waldron, with Thom Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK, 15.
4
inscribed a picture, Edward Guthman, We Band of Brothers, 7.
4
“so much bitterness”: Ibid., 244.
4
“He distinctly said ‘they’”: Author interview with Guthman.
4
encircled Kennedy’s estate: Ibid.
5
“built like a tank”: Quoted in William Doyle, An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford Mississippi, 1962, 68.
6
Bobby was “president”: Quoted in Waldron, 69.
6
a stunning outburst: Seymour Freidin and George Bailey, The Experts, 85. The authors did not cite a source for this revealing account. But co-author Freidin, the former foreign affairs editor of the New York Herald Tribune, was later revealed by columnist Jack Anderson as a paid informant for the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s. According to Anderson, Freidin also spied on the Humphrey and McGovern presidential campaigns for Richard Nixon). So presumably Freidin got his scoop about the Kennedy phone call directly from his CIA contacts.
6
“seized with the horror of it”: William Manchester interview with John McCone, CIA-DCI file, declassified October 9, 1998.
6
“if they had killed my brother”: Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 616.
7
blessed by the pope: McCone letter to Robert Kennedy, Attorney General papers, December 20, 1962, JFK Library.
7
two shooters in Dallas: Schlesinger, 616.
8
“no such thing as organized crime”: Author interview with Guthman
8
“open some doors”: Quoted in Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, 450.
8
“numerous federal marshals”: Author interview with Walter Sheridan, Jr.9 “in any foxhole”: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s eulogy for Walter Sheridan, JFK
Library.
9
“a news flash”: Quoted in Walter Sheridan, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, 299.
9
“One of your guys did it”: Quoted in Washington Post, April 17, 1981.
10
“passionate parish priest”: Author interview with Haynes Johnson.
10
“it was a shocking thing”: Ibid. This is the way Johnson originally reported the phone conversation in a April 17, 1981 article for the Washington Post. But in a November 20, 1983 story in the Post, Johnson implied that Kennedy told him, not Ruiz-Williams. The two different accounts have led to some confusion over the years. Today Johnson insists that the original version is accurate: Kennedy was talking to Ruiz-Williams when he said, “One of your guys did it.”
10
shuttled in and out of Cuba: Gerald D. McKnight, Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, 10.
11
“they make me crazy”: Quoted in Waldron, 139.
11
“expecting to see a very impressive guy”: Quoted in Haynes Johnson, The Bay of Pigs, 290.
11
“an old-fashioned buccaneer type”: Author interview with Johnson.
11
[RFK] sent Harry to Miami: Waldron, 131.
11
Miami had already been ruled out: Newsweek, May 13, 1963.
11
“keep a sharp look on our Cubans”: Author interview with Angelo Murgado.
12
like a Welsh collie: New York Times Magazine, May 28, 1961.
13
“I don’t have any recollection”: Author interview with Robert McNamara.
13
“Let them see what they’ve done”: Quoted in Manchester, 348.
13
“I want his friends to carry him down”: Ibid, 386.
14
the hot, bright streets of Dallas: Ibid, 392.
14
“You do that”: Ibid., 391.
14
“accepted that there was a conspiracy: Vincent Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect the President (self-published manuscript).
15
an organized plot more powerful than the presidency: James Hepburn, Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK, 10.
15
“looking burned alive”: Quoted in Manchester, 406.
15
“three-ring circus”: Quoted in McKnight, 154.
16
“you just follow orders”: Quoted in Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, 248.
16
he also discussed taking possession of JFK’s death limousine: Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy phone logs, February 24, 1964, JFK Library.
17
JFK was the target of a conspiracy: Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, 49. Burkley had avoided the subject years earlier when an oral historian from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library asked him about the autopsy evidence used by the Warren Report. “I would not care to be quoted on that,” Burkley, who died in 1991, told the library interviewer—a cryptic remark that was nonetheless revealing.
17
“the greatest treasure in my life”: Quoted in Manchester, 428.
17
“I just heard him sobbing”: Charles Spalding oral history, JFK Library.
18
“in the White House with the president of the United States”: Research associate Karen Croft interview with Milt Ebbins.
18
[Kennedy said] they were facing a formidable enemy: The source for this story is a Los Angeles man named Andy Harland, a movie props supplier who became friends with Lawford later in his life. Since Lawford became a notorious alcoholic and drug addict in the years after the assassination, this account must be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion. But in an interview for this book, Harland insisted that Lawford was sober when he related this story. And the statements attributed to Bobby correspond with the views he was expressing that week. According to Harland, Bobby told Lawford that the plot against JFK had grown out of a secret anti-Castro operation codenamed “Project Freedom.”
19
blatant show of disrespect for McNamara: Manchester, 494.
19
“he could stay up there forever”: quoted on Arlington National Cemetery Web site, www.arlingtoncemetery.org/visitor_information/JFK.html.
19
an old Edward G. Robinson gangster movie: Manchester, 526.
19
“some kind of goddam banana republic”: Author interview with Matthew Walton.
19
Eisenhower was put in the same bitter frame of mind: Manchester, 260.
20
“was killed to keep him from talking”: Quoted in McKnight, 22.
20
“Bobby…turned it off”: Croft interview with Ebbins.
21
“Jack Ruby was visiting Syndicate members”: Confidential communication to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and CIA Director Allen Dulles, December 1, 1963, declassified on August 12, 1993, National Archives and Research Administration (NARA) document number 1993.08.12.17:17:16:960005.
21
Sheridan reported…that Ruby “had picked up a bundle of money”: FBI memo, November 24, 1963, declassified October 26, 1992, record number 124-10072-10228. Kennedy assassination researchers Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann supplied further evidence about Hoffa’s payoff to Ruby in their 2005 book, Ultimate Sacrifice. The researchers interviewed a friend of Pierre Salinger, a businessman named Jim Allison, who reported that he had witnessed the payoff at the coffee shop of a Chicago hotel on the weekend of October 27, 1963. According to Allison, the payoff was made by a bagman with ties to Hoffa and the Mafia with whom he was dining. The bagman handed Ruby a business envelope with a stack of $100 bills which the authors estimated to total $7,000.
Herbert “Jack” Miller, chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division, also checked out the story on a trip to Dallas to pursue assassination leads. According to a November 25 FBI memo, Miller determined that two newspapermen—John Mashek of the Dallas Morning News and Tony Weitzel of the Chicago Daily News—were the sources for the story. Miller called off Justice Department attorney Peloquin and terminated the investigation into the payoff after he determined the story was based on speculation of reporters only,” according to the memo. But Waldron and Hartmann suggested that a more compelling reason the Justice Department aborted the Ruby probe was to avoid compromising its ongoing case against Hoffa. As the FBI memo stated, “Miller expressed concern to Peloquin that there would be publicity regarding the Weitzel story which would give Hoffa and the Teamsters an opportunity to criticize the Department by alleging that Department was trying to tie Hoffa in with President’s murder.”
It is unclear whether Bobby approved ending the Ruby payoff probe or whether Miller made this decision on his own. Miller, one of the few Republican holdovers in Kennedy’s top ranks at the Justice Department, would surface again in the assassination saga, during Jim Garrison’s investigation in New Orleans. More on Miller can be found in Chapter Seven.
21
“I do wish Department would mind its own business”: FBI memo from chief of Chicago office to FBI director, November 25, 1963, NARA record number 124-10077-10016, NARA.
21
Draznin…provided further evidence about Ruby’s [mob] background: National Labor Relations Board memo, November 27, 1963, NARA record number 179-40005-10028, declassified October 22, 1993. The report Draznin prepared on the mobbed-up Ruby, with his “wide syndicate contacts,” seems to blatantly contradict what he later told journalist Seymour Hersh. “I picked up nothing at all tying [the assassination] to Chicago mob men,” Draznin told Hersh for his 1994 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, adding, “Ruby thought [killing Oswald] was a patriotic act. I believe it to this day.”
21
[Bobby] quietly asked Daniel Moynihan to explore…whether the Secret Service had been bought off”: William Turner, Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails, 123.
22
Rowley…was adamantly opposed to the bill: Warren Commission hearings, Vol. V, 473.
22
“Clint Hill, he loved us”: from unpublished notes of Theodore H. White interview with Jacqueline Kennedy for Life magazine, released May 26, 1995, JFK Library.
22
all of whom said the order came from Secret Service officials: Palamara, 8.
23
“never interviewed a more tormented man”: Mike Wallace, Between You and Me: A Memoir, 15.
23
But he waved them off: Manchester, 70.
23
“He was never afraid”: Author interview with Guthman.
24
the two knelt and prayed: Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life, 282.
24
“It was a bleak day”: New York Times, November 29, 1963.
24
Bobby and Ethel “were putting up their usual good fronts”: Walter Sheridan oral history, JFK Library.
24
“I remember telling him what Hoffa had said”: Ibid.
25
“he was the most shattered man I had ever seen”: Pierre Salinger oral history, JFK Library.
25
“The key name was Marina Oswald”: Author interview with Richard Goodwin.
25
“Bob…was going to deal with truth”: Author interview with Guthman.
25
“I was even in his bedroom in the White House”: Clay Blair Jr. interview with William Walton, Blair papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
26
“just a wonderful-looking, kooky, young” photographer: Ibid.
26
“can’t resist those Marlboro men!”: Walton papers, JFK Library.
27
“she caught us on his bedroom floor”: Walton oral history, JFK Library, courtesy of Matthew Walton.
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) Page 58
