The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  Goodwin began pushing a variety of measures, which, by the standards of the pro-business Eisenhower era, were decidedly radical, including providing equipment for nationalized mines in Bolivia and offering U.S. government financing to state-run oil companies—“even if Standard Oil and David Rockefeller objected,” added Kennedy’s young Turk. Soon enough, the corporate pushback—along with the inevitable Republican Party and media fireworks—did come. “Neither U.S. nor Latin American businessmen took kindly to indications by Richard Goodwin, the president’s chief Latin American adviser, that he thought private enterprise had a bad connotation in Latin America because it is associated with U.S. imperialism,” harrumphed a business newsletter specializing in coverage of south-of-the-border investments.

  Under increasing political pressure, JFK finally caved on Goodwin, transferring him from the Alliance for Progress to the Peace Corps. But Kennedy continued to resist efforts to privatize the alliance led by David Rockefeller. America’s reputation in Latin America as an imperial bully mortified Kennedy. He was sick of the U.S. government being seen “as the representative of private business,” he told Goodwin. He was tired of Washington propping up “tinhorn dictators” and corrupt regimes in countries like Chile where “American copper companies control about 80 percent of all the foreign exchange. We wouldn’t stand for that here. And there’s no reason they should stand for it. . . . There’s a revolution going on down there, and I want to be on the right side of it.”

  Kennedy’s Latin American policies continued to be a point of contention between the Rockefeller brothers and him for the rest of his presidency. Even after JFK’s death, his brother continued to fight the battle. During a 1965 tour of Latin America, Robert Kennedy—by then a senator from New York—found himself in a heated discussion about Rockefeller influence in Latin America, during an evening at the home of a Peruvian artist that had been arranged by Goodwin. When Bobby brashly suggested to the gathering that Peru should “assert [its] nationhood” and nationalize its oil industry, the group was stunned. “Why, David Rockefeller has just been down here,” one guest said. “And he told us there wouldn’t be any aid if anyone acted against International Petroleum [a local Standard Oil subsidiary].”

  “Oh come on, David Rockefeller isn’t the government,” Bobby shot back, still playing the role of Kennedy family tough guy. “We Kennedys eat Rockefellers for breakfast.”

  The Kennedys were indeed more successful at the rough-and-tumble of politics than the Rockefellers. But, as JFK had understood, that was not the full story when it came to evaluating a family’s power. He fully appreciated that the Rockefellers held a unique place in the pantheon of American power, one rooted not so much within the democratic system as within what scholars would later refer to as “the deep state”—that subterranean network of financial, intelligence, and military interests that guided national policy no matter who occupied the White House. The Kennedys had risen from saloonkeepers and ward heelers to the top of American politics. But they were still overshadowed by the imperial power of the Rockefellers.

  JFK always displayed a sharp curiosity about the much wealthier family, pumping mutual friends—like presidential adviser Adolf Berle—for inside information about the Rockefellers. Jack and David had been contemporaries at Harvard, but as David was quick to point out, “we moved in very different circles.” As Kennedy pursued his own career, he always kept one wary eye on the politically ambitious Nelson, who had openly proclaimed his desire to occupy the White House. It was an ambition he nursed “ever since I was a kid,” he once said. “After all, when you think of what I had, what else was there to aspire to?”

  Nelson let slip his cheery facade only when contemplating looming threats to his family’s wealth. He had long fretted about “losing our property” to nationalist movements overseas. When Castro gave a bearded face to these fears, expropriating the Standard Oil refinery and other Rockefeller properties in Cuba, Nelson was outraged. He grew increasingly frustrated with Kennedy as he sidestepped opportunities to invade Cuba, becoming convinced that the president had cut a deal with the Russians to leave Castro alone.

  It was Nelson’s growing sense of Kennedy as a Cold War “appeaser” that drove him to begin mounting a presidential challenge for 1964. In his final political speeches before the Kennedy assassination, Rockefeller lashed into the president for his “indecision, vacillation and weakness” in foreign policy. The Kennedy administration’s dynamic image was a public relations myth, Rockefeller insisted. In truth, he charged, JFK’s unassertive leadership had encouraged our enemies and demoralized our allies, and had made the world more dangerous.

  These views of Kennedy were widely echoed in the pages of the business press, where JFK was portrayed as a soft-spined commander in chief who was putting the country at risk and, in the estimation of The Wall Street Journal, an incompetent economic manager with a pronounced hostility to “the philosophy of freedom.” Like the Luce press, the Journal became increasingly vitriolic in its descriptions of the president, describing him as an enemy of big business and as a hopeless left-wing romantic “living in a dream world” and laboring under the spell of “deep and damaging delusion.” In short, Kennedy was seen as an aberrant president in elite circles—an unqualified man who, it was broadly hinted, had barely squeezed into office thanks to the underhanded dealings of his Mafia-connected father.

  The attitudes toward Kennedy were even more rabid in national security chambers, where men like Angleton and LeMay regarded the president as a degenerate, and very likely a traitor. If the Soviets launched a sneak nuclear attack on America, Angleton brooded, the Kennedys would be safely cocooned “in their luxury bunker, presumably watching World War III on television, [while] the rest of us . . . burned in hell.”

  Angleton seemed obsessed with Kennedy’s sex life. He reportedly bugged JFK’s White House trysts with Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of his deputy, Cord Meyer—an artistic blond beauty with whom Angleton himself was enamored. He told friends and family that Kennedy’s rule was marked by sexual decadence, as well as criminality—a particularly ironic twist, since Angleton himself was later revealed to have been connected to the Mafia ever since his wartime days in Rome.

  Over the final months of JFK’s presidency, a clear consensus took shape within America’s deep state: Kennedy was a national security threat. For the good of the country, he must be removed. And Dulles was the only man with the stature, connections, and decisive will to make something of this enormity happen. He had already assembled a killing machine to operate overseas. Now he prepared to bring it home to Dallas. All that his establishment colleagues had to do was to look the other way—as they always did when Dulles took executive action.

  In the case of Doug Dillon—who oversaw Kennedy’s Secret Service apparatus—it simply meant making sure that he was out of town. At the end of October, Dillon notified the president that he planned to take a “deferred summer vacation” in November, abandoning his Washington post for Hobe Sound until the eighteenth of the month. After that, Dillon informed Kennedy, he planned to fly to Tokyo with other cabinet members on an official visit that would keep him out of the country from November 21 to November 27. If he was later asked to account for himself, Dillon would have a ready explanation. The tragic events in Dallas had not occurred on his watch; he was airborne over the Pacific at the time.

  There is no evidence that reigning corporate figures like David Rockefeller were part of the plot against President Kennedy or had foreknowledge of the crime. But there is ample evidence of the overwhelming hostility to Kennedy in these corporate circles—a surging antagonism that certainly emboldened Dulles and other national security enemies of the president. And if the assassination of President Kennedy was indeed an “establishment crime,” as University of Pittsburgh sociology professor Donald Gibson has suggested, there is even more reason to see the official investigation as an establishment cover-up.

  Oswald was still alive, and that was a problem. He
was supposed to be killed as he left the Texas School Book Depository. That’s what G. Robert Blakey, the former Kennedy Justice Department attorney who served as chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, later concluded about the man authorities rushed to designate the lone assassin. But Oswald escaped, and after being taken alive by Dallas police in a movie theater, he became a major conundrum for those trying to pin the crime on him.

  To begin with, Oswald did not act like most assassins. Those who decapitated heads of state generally crowed about their history-making deeds (Sic semper tyrannis! ). In contrast, Oswald repeatedly denied his guilt while in custody, emphatically telling reporters as he was hustled from one room to the next in the Dallas police station, “I don’t know what this is all about. . . . I’m just a patsy!” And the accused assassin seemed strangely cool and collected, according to the police detectives who questioned him. “He was real calm,” recalled one detective. “He was extra calm. He wasn’t a bit excited or nervous or anything.” In fact, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry and district attorney William Alexander thought Oswald was so composed that he seemed trained to handle a stressful interrogation. “I was amazed that a person so young would have had the self-control he had,” Alexander later told Irish investigative journalist Anthony Summers. “It was almost as if he had been rehearsed or programmed to meet the situation he found himself in.”

  Oswald further signaled that he was part of an intelligence operation by trying to make an intriguing phone call shortly before midnight East Coast time on Saturday, November 23. The police switchboard operator, who was being closely monitored by two unidentified officials, told Oswald there was no answer, though she actually did not put through the call. It was not until years later that independent researchers traced the phone number that Oswald tried to call to a former U.S. Army intelligence officer in Raleigh, North Carolina. CIA veteran Victor Marchetti, who analyzed the Raleigh call in his book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, surmised that Oswald was likely following his training guidelines and reaching out to his intelligence handler. “[He] was probably calling his cut-out. He was calling somebody who could put him in touch with his case officer.”

  The Raleigh call probably sealed Oswald’s fate, according to Marchetti. By refusing to play the role of the “patsy” and instead following his intelligence protocol, Oswald made clear that he was trouble. What would be the CIA procedure at this point, Marchetti was asked by North Carolina historian Grover Proctor, who has closely studied this episode near the end of Oswald’s life? “I’d kill him,” Marchetti replied. “Was this his death warrant?” Proctor continued. “You betcha,” Marchetti said. “This time, [Oswald] went over the dam, whether he knew it or not. . . . He was over the dam. At this point it was executive action.”

  Oswald was not just alive on the afternoon of November 22, 1963; he was likely innocent. This was another major problem for the organizers of the assassination. Even close legal observers of the case who continue to believe in Oswald’s guilt—such as Bob Blakey who, after serving on the House Assassinations Committee, became a law professor at Notre Dame University—acknowledge that a “credible” case could have been made for Oswald’s innocence based on the evidence. (The 1979 congressional report found that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy involving Oswald and other unknown parties.) Other legal experts, like San Francisco attorney and Kennedy researcher Bill Simpich, have gone further, arguing that the case against Oswald was riddled with such glaring inconsistencies that it would have quickly unraveled in court.

  As Simpich has detailed, the ballistics evidence alone was a mess. The bullets and shells from the crime scene did not match the murder weapon and were poorly marked by law enforcement officers. The so-called magic bullet that delivered the fatal blow to Kennedy’s skull before proceeding on its improbable course later turned up just as magically, in nearly pristine condition, on a stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital where the fatally wounded president was rushed. Then there was the alleged murder weapon—a $19.95 Italian military surplus rifle from World War II with a faulty sight. Using such a clumsy tool to pull off the crime of the century with rapid-fire precision—especially in the hands of a marksman who had a hard time shooting rabbits—simply defied the imagination. There was also the fact that FBI technicians who tested the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle could find none of Oswald’s prints on the weapon, and the Dallas police failed to detect any trace of gunpowder on the arrested man’s cheek, which indicated that he had not fired a rifle that day.

  In addition, Buell Wesley Frazier, the young Texas School Book Depository employee who drove Oswald to work that morning, insisted that the package the alleged assassin carried into the building that day was not big enough to contain a rifle. The nineteen-year-old Frazier refused to change his story, despite being arrested and subjected to a withering interrogation by Dallas police, including threats to charge him as a co-conspirator. “I was interrogated for many, many hours—interrogators would rotate,” Frazier recalled years later. “The way they treated me that day, I have a hard time understanding that. I was just a rural boy; I had never been in trouble with the law. I was doing my best to answer their questions.” He could never figure out in his own mind whether Oswald was guilty or not. But there was one thing he knew for certain, he told a newspaper reporter fifty years later: the brown paper package that Oswald put on the backseat of his car on the morning of November 22, 1963, did not hold a rifle. “There is no way it would fit in that package.”

  And then there was the inconvenient home movie taken by dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, as Kennedy’s limousine passed by him in Dealey Plaza. The film captured the moments JFK was struck by gunfire in gruesome detail and—along with the testimony of dozens of eyewitnesses—graphically demonstrated that bullets were fired from the front, as well as the rear, of the presidential motorcade. As many as twenty-one law enforcement officers stationed in the plaza—men trained in the use of firearms—said their immediate reaction to the sound of the gunfire was to go search the area looming in front of Kennedy’s advancing limousine, the tree-topped rise that would become famously known as “the grassy knoll.” Even if Oswald did shoot at the president, this meant that there was at least one other gunman and Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy. The CIA’s own state-of-the-art photography analysis unit came to this conclusion after analyzing the Zapruder film. (FBI analysts would later concur.) But the CIA technicians’ report was quickly suppressed.

  The surgeons who labored futilely over the mortally wounded president at Parkland Hospital also saw clear evidence that Kennedy had been struck by gunfire from the front as well as the rear. But the doctors came under severe pressure to remain silent and it would take nearly three decades before two of them mustered the courage to speak out.

  Fortunately for the conspirators, the deeply flawed case against Lee Harvey Oswald never made it to court. The Oswald problem was abruptly eliminated on the morning of Sunday, November 24, when the accused assassin was shot in the stomach in the basement of the Dallas police station while in the process of being transferred to the county jail. He died two hours later in the same emergency room where President Kennedy was pronounced dead.

  Oswald’s shocking murder—broadcast live into America’s homes—solved one dilemma for Dulles, as he monitored the Dallas events that weekend from the Farm, his secure CIA facility in Virginia. But it soon became apparent that Oswald’s murder created another problem—a wave of public suspicion that swept over the nation and beyond. Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer—a stocky, fedora-wearing nightclub operator—looked like a triggerman right out of a B-movie. Ruby even sounded like a Hollywood gangster as he gunned down Oswald, snarling, “You killed my president, you rat!” To many people who watched the horrifying spectacle on TV, the shooting smacked of a gangland hit aimed at silencing Oswald before he could talk.

  In fact, this is precisely what Attorney General Robert Kennedy concluded after his investigators began diggin
g into Ruby’s background. Bobby, who had made his political reputation as a Senate investigator of organized crime, pored over Ruby’s phone records from the days leading up to the Dallas violence. “The list [of names] was almost a duplicate of the people I called before the Rackets Committee,” RFK later remarked. The attorney general’s suspicions about the death of his brother immediately fell not just on the Mafia, but on the CIA—the agency that, as Bobby knew, had been using the mob to do some of its dirtiest work.

  Robert Kennedy was not the only one in Washington who immediately sensed a conspiracy behind the killing of his brother. The nation’s capital was filled with edgy chatter about the assassination. Talking on the phone with Kennedy family confidant Bill Walton, Agnes Meyer, the outspoken mother of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, snapped, “What is this—some kind of goddam banana republic?” Eisenhower, retired on his Gettysburg farm, had the same reaction. He remarked that the bloodshed in Dallas reminded him of his tour of duty in Haiti as a young Army major; when he visited the national palace in Port-au-Prince, he was shocked to realize that two-thirds of the former heads of state whose marble busts were on display had been slain in office.

  Meanwhile, down in Independence, Missouri, another retired president, Harry Truman, was fuming about the CIA. On December 22, 1963, while the country was still reeling from the gunfire in Dallas, Truman published a highly provocative op-ed article in The Washington Post, charging that the CIA had grown alarmingly out of control since he established it. His original purpose, wrote Truman, was to create an agency that simply coordinated the various streams of sensitive information flowing into the White House. “I have never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations,” he continued. But “for some time, I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of Government.” The CIA had grown “so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.” But the increasingly powerful agency did not just menace foreign governments, Truman warned—it now threatened democracy at home. “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position [as a] free and open society,” he concluded ominously, “and I feel that we need to correct it.”