by R. G. Belsky
He was right, of course. But just for the hell of it I paged through the Reyes file again after I got off the phone with Lawton. There were some other leads there I could follow. More calls I could even make that night. But that would take time. And the only thing I wanted to do was reread the Oswald manuscript. That’s the story I cared about. Not Victor Reyes. Like Lawton had said, Reyes sure paled in comparison to what Eric Mathis had done—and might still be doing out there.
I closed the Victor Reyes file and stuck it back in my desk drawer.
I grabbed the Oswald manuscript and headed for home.
I had a long night of reading ahead of me.
Chapter 31
IT WAS A SWELTERING August night in New York City. The temperature hit 100° at one point in the afternoon. It had dropped a bit in the early evening, but was still in the 90s. By the time I got to my apartment, the place was like a sauna.
Just for the hell of it, I made one more try to see if the air conditioner might miraculously come back to life. It didn’t. I wasn’t sure that it would help much, but I opened the big window in my living room as far as I could. Then I opened all the other windows in the place, in the hope of getting some kind of cross ventilation going.
But all that accomplished was convincing me again how much I needed to move. When my job at the Daily News had been on the line, I’d been reluctant to spend money on a better place. But I didn’t have to worry about losing my job anymore. I resolved to go apartment hunting as soon as this story was over and I had some free time.
The first time I’d read Lee Mathis’s Oswald book I’d been in a hurry to get to the stuff I thought was the most important. About his father and the new evidence on the JFK assassination. So I skipped over lots of sections in the manuscript. This time I decided to read it all. Maybe I’d find some answers there.
Before I started on it, I checked my email for messages. There were a lot, including one from Carrie asking if I’d gotten anything good from Lee Mathis. I didn’t answer any of them. Instead, I went into the kitchen, opened a bottle of Amstel Lite, and took it back to the living room.
Then I picked up the TV remote and surfed around the cable channels until I came to a reality show of some sort. It involved a bunch of people living in a house who were trying to lose weight and also trying to find someone to date or something like that. Perfect. I wanted something so forgettable in the background that I wouldn’t pay attention to it—but at the same time I wanted to feel as though I wasn’t sitting alone in an empty house.
As I picked up the manuscript and took a sip of the Amstel, I was struck by the incongruity of it all. A half century ago, when JFK died, there was no email. There were no reality TV shows. There was barely even color TV. But here I was, reading a book about a crime that happened in 1963 and trying to find some clue as to how it could possibly relate to what was going on in my current world.
A lot of the stuff I’d skipped through the first time was the material Lee Mathis—or Lee Harvey Oswald Jr., as he now called himself—had written about the Kennedy presidency, the so-called Camelot era in American politics when people were inspired by politicians like John Kennedy and thought they could change the world. I read it all now, as he argued against the Camelot myth, using all the things we’ve found out about JFK since then and saying that nothing in the Kennedy presidency was what it seemed to be.
There were the sexual escapades, of course, which had all gone unreported at the time as the American people bought the fairy tale of Jack and Jackie’s idyllic marriage. He talked about Judith Exner, Marilyn Monroe, and all the rest of Kennedy’s affairs.
There were the mob connections to some of these women, as well as the Kennedy family’s connections in the past with unsavory characters from the underworld. His family’s money and financial tactics, not always completely ethical and aboveboard. The debate over whether he was simply a rich kid whose father had bought him the presidency. His nepotism—appointing Bobby attorney general over more-qualified candidates and helping Teddy get elected to the Senate as well as all the other Kennedy family members and cronies who advanced in the so-called New Frontier.
And, most of all, the book talked about the failures of Kennedy’s policies and actions, focusing a lot on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. But that was just the most notable failure, he argued. He said that despite his lofty speeches and promises to the American people, Kennedy had accomplished very little during his years in office—while at the same time engaging in numerous dubious activities, some of which might have been illegal.
He even speculated that if Kennedy had lived and been reelected in 1964, he might have become immersed in scandal during his second term the way Richard Nixon was. Nixon left the presidency in disgrace, Kennedy left as a legend—all because he got himself shot before any of the sordid details came out, Oswald wrote in the manuscript.
The Vietnam stuff too was damning to the feel-good image of the Camelot presidency, although less so. The line we always hear about the JFK presidency is, “If Kennedy had lived, he never would have gotten us bogged down in Vietnam the way Lyndon Johnson did. It would have changed everything about the history of the ’60s.”
Oswald Jr. attempted to dismantle that theory by detailing the Kennedy policies that resulted in a continued buildup of U.S. forces in Vietnam through “military advisers”—a buildup of military presence there even greater than his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had dared attempt.
Particularly troublesome was Kennedy’s role in the coup against and subsequent assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in the fall of 1963, just weeks before JFK’s own assassination. There was no credible evidence that he sanctioned the killing of Diem as part of the coup. But it was evident that Kennedy’s actions played a role in the events that led to Diem’s assassination just before the events in Dallas.
I went to the kitchen for another Amstel. I took a sip and thought about what Oswald was saying. A lot of it was the truth, of course. Camelot was a choreographed, artificial myth that was sold to the American people, and they bought into the myth wholeheartedly. There were no twenty-four-hour news cycles back then, no countless cable channels, no Internet, no Twitter, no real hard coverage of what was truly going on behind the façade of the Camelot myth. I get that. We all get that now.
But I still believed there was something special about JFK’s presidency, something unique in modern American politics. Maybe he would have had problems in his second term and maybe he would have led us into Vietnam like LBJ did. But a lot of people, and I was one of them, still believed that American history would have been very different if JFK had lived.
Next I read through all the chapters on his father, Lee Harvey Oswald, and why Jr. believed he was innocent. The first time I’d read it was before I’d met Laura Springer. Now I put together what she told me with the book, and the results were pretty clear-cut.
Lee Harvey Oswald had gone to New Orleans on November 21 to see his girlfriend, Emily, who was carrying his unborn son. He spent the night in New Orleans with her. At six the next morning, he went with her to the New Orleans bus station, where he caught the 6:32 bus back to Dallas. It was an eight-hour ride, and he said he had to meet someone in Dallas that afternoon.
The president was shot at 12:30. People claimed they saw Oswald at work that day and also saw him in the lunchroom there soon after the shooting. Except it couldn’t have been Lee Harvey Oswald because he was on a bus. So who did these people see?
There was only one answer: If it wasn’t Oswald at the Book Depository the day Kennedy was shot, it had to be someone posing as Oswald.
Why would anyone go to all that trouble?
To set him up as the fall guy for the murder. A murder that happened while he was still on a bus heading back to Dallas. Ergo, Oswald was innocent. Someone else had killed John F. Kennedy. And gone through elaborate efforts to pin the crime
on Oswald.
The end of the book was an opinionated look at the investigations that had been done into the assassination. The Warren Commission. The congressional subcommittee that conducted its own investigation from 1976 to 1978. The Dallas police. The FBI. He talked about a massive cover-up that allowed the government to keep the secrets of the biggest crime in American history from the people all these years.
He wrote: “Now it is finally time to tell the truth about what happened that day. Time for the government to tell us the truth and tell us how an innocent man, my father, could have been blamed while the real culprits, the people who murdered the president, walked free and were never held accountable for their despicable act.”
I looked at my watch. It was nearly eleven. I’d been reading for hours, but I had no more of a clue to where Eric was or what he was doing than when I started.
I put the manuscript down and went into the kitchen. I was hungry. I took out a wedge of Italian bread, cut it in two, then filled it with salami, Swiss cheese, pickles, mustard, and anything else I could find in the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed another bottle of Amstel.
I took the sandwich and the beer back out into the living room. The reality show was over. I switched around to a bunch of other channels, looking for something to watch. I thought again about how much the world had changed since November 22, 1963. If John F. Kennedy somehow were to come back to life, he wouldn’t recognize America as the same place he knew in the 1960s.
And yet, despite all the changes that had taken place since then, one thing remained the same: We didn’t know any more now than we did then about who murdered JFK—and why.
I walked over to the open window and looked down at the lights of the traffic and the buildings below. Shimmering in the hot summer night air. It had been a hot day in Dallas too. And America may very well have blamed the wrong man for the crime.
“It is finally time for us to find out what happened that day,” Mathis/Oswald Jr. had written at the end of the book. “Time for the government to tell us the truth.”
That’s when it hit me.
I knew what my follow-up story was going to be.
Chapter 32
I WANT TO CALL on the government to reopen the Kennedy assassination investigation,” I said to Marilyn Staley.
“C’mon, Gil.” Staley snorted.
“I’m serious.”
“No, you’re not.”
“It’s really not that crazy.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Just listen to me for a second.”
She put her fingers in her ears.
“That’s pretty immature,” I said.
“But effective.”
“Okay, if you don’t want to hear my idea, just say so.”
“I don’t want to hear your idea,” she said.
I told her anyway. Carrie was in Marilyn’s office too. She had never mentioned anything to me after her drunken bedroom invitation about the incident. Maybe she didn’t remember doing it. Anyway, I’d alerted Carrie to what I was going to say to Staley. I figured I owed her that much at this point in our professional relationship.
“We’ve come up with new evidence that shows Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t have done the shooting, that he was on a bus from New Orleans at the time of the assassination,” I said. “So that leaves the obvious question of who really killed JFK. We demand that authorities reopen the investigation all over again. That happens all the time in cold cases, especially murders. Except it won’t happen here because the law enforcement people won’t ever do it. Not on their own. So we do it. Or at least we force them to do it by calling on public opinion. I write—or rather we write,” I said, looking over at the silent Carrie, “a front-page editorial calling for a reopening of the Kennedy investigation. This isn’t just some conspiracy nut calling for it. It’s the New York Daily News. And we’re doing it for a viable reason. We have new evidence that shows the man believed to have been responsible for killing the president couldn’t have done it. So we call on Congress, the president, the FBI, and whoever else to start all over again. To go back to Dallas now and look at the case from a fresh angle.”
Staley looked over at Carrie, who still hadn’t said anything.
“What do you think about all this?” Staley asked her.
“I think it’s a good idea,” Carrie said.
That surprised me a little.
I think it surprised Staley too.
“You do?”
“It makes perfect sense when you think about it.”
“You’re as crazy as he is,” Staley said.
She looked back at me now.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You want the Daily News to run a front-page story asking the U.S. government to reopen the entire Kennedy investigation?”
“Yes.”
“To prove Oswald didn’t do it.”
“That’s right.”
“And to find out who really did.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I don’t know if it’s possible at this point to pin down the real murderer. Or murderers.”
“Why not?”
“It’s been half a century. The trail is cold. It’s not like I think we’re going to be able to parade the perp in front of a TV camera or anything like that. It’s been too long.”
“Then why do this?”
“It’s a helluva story,” I said.
Later, as Carrie and I were walking out, Staley called out to me. She asked if she could have a second with me alone. Carrie gave me a what’s-this-all-about? look, shrugged, and left. I shut the door behind her and sat down again in front of Staley’s desk.
“I understand you’ve stopped going to the appointments with the psychiatrist,” she said.
“That’s right. I don’t need them anymore.”
I wasn’t sure what she was going to do or say next. Was she going to order me to go back to see that damn Landis woman? Now, with all the big stuff happening for us with this story? I needed to devote myself to the story, not waste time sitting in some shrink’s office.
“I’m not going to make you go back,” Staley said.
“Good.”
“You probably wouldn’t listen to me even if I did.”
“Probably.”
“I guess I just want to talk to you about everything that’s been happening recently. I know I was pretty hard on you before about your future as a reporter here. But now . . . well, now things are different. I never thought you could come back like this, but you’ve really surprised me. So I just want to clear the air between us. I gotta be honest with you. When this all started, and you first came to me with the Kennedy letter you got claiming responsibility for the murders and warning of more violence to come . . . well, I wasn’t sure.”
“You thought I might have made it up? Wrote the letter myself to get in on a big story? Done anything to get back on top?”
“I wasn’t sure,” she repeated. “Not then.”
“And now?”
“I’m sure about you.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“Look, I just want you to know that I’ve got your back. You’ve been through an awful lot, you’ve gone through the worst hell that a reporter could go through, and somehow you survived that. And now you’re back on top. I’ve never seen that happen quite like it did for you. But I’m happy for you. You got a second chance. Lots of people don’t get a first chance. You’re a very lucky man. I hope you’re back on the front page for good now.”
“Me too,” I said.
Chapter 33
THE CALL FOR a new investigation into the JFK assassination, based on the new evidence we’d uncovered, succeeded beyond our wildest expectations.
Everyone jumped on it. The TV networks and cable outlets
camped outside the News building, trying to get Carrie and me on camera for interviews. All the other papers in town—and across the country—started to pick up on the story too. Politicians jumped on the bandwagon, demanding a new assassination probe by the Senate, the House of Representatives, and even the White House.
And, of course, the Internet was ablaze with comments, controversy, and speculation. For the conspiracy theorists, it was like a gift from heaven. For everyone else, it was just downright compelling. The bottom line was people were talking about it now.
There was also lots of speculation about suspects, who might have been behind the assassination if you eliminated Oswald from the equation. All the familiar names were hauled out. Jimmy Hoffa, the mob, Fidel Castro, Cuban exiles, J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ, Richard Nixon. One new website sprang up called Who Killed JFK?
Meanwhile, videos related to the assassination—including edited versions of the Zapruder tape and Jack Ruby’s shooting of Oswald—went viral online, getting hundreds of thousands of hits from people who hadn’t seen them the first time.
Half a century after his death, everyone was still obsessed with John F. Kennedy and the story of what happened to Camelot.
And, of course, the bizarre connection to a series of murders in New York City happening now.
On the day after the article appeared, I got another envelope in the mail. It looked the same as the first one I got with the two newspaper clippings about the victims, the threatening letter, and the Kennedy half-dollar. Addressed again to me at the Daily News.
Inside was another Kennedy half-dollar and a list that someone had printed off the Internet of all the mysterious deaths that had occurred over the years to people connected with the JFK investigation. There were more than fifty names on the list. At the bottom, in bright red marker, another name had been written. My name. That was all. But the message was clear.
