by Jim Marrs
Both Kennedy brothers eventually supported King and the civil rights program as they came to realize that its adoption as official policy was inevitable. As Kennedy biographer John H. Davis pointed out, “The most potentially dangerous enemy to emerge from Kennedy’s civil rights policy was the FBI and its director.”
From the ranks of angered segregationists came one man with a prophetic vision of Kennedy’s death.
The Miami Prophet
On November 9, 1963, a Miami police informant named William Somersett met with Joseph A. Milteer, a wealthy right-wing extremist who promptly began to outline the assassination of President Kennedy.
Milteer was a leader of the archconservative National States Rights Party as well as a member of other groups such as the Congress of Freedom and the White Citizens’ Council of Atlanta. Somersett had infiltrated the States Rights’ Party and secretly recorded Milteer’s conversation.
The tape, later turned over to Miami police, recorded Milteer stating during Kennedy’s impending visit to Miami, “You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans, there are so many of them here. . . . The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him . . . from an office building with a high-powered rifle. . . . He knows he’s a marked man.”
Somersett said, “They are really going to try to kill him?” Milteer responded, “Oh, yeah, it’s in the works. . . . (An investigation) wouldn’t leave any stone unturned there, no way. They will pick up somebody within hours afterward . . . just to throw the public off.” Captain Charles Sapp, head of Miami’s Police Intelligence Bureau, was concerned enough with Milteer’s remarks to alert both the FBI and the Secret Service.
Again, apparently no word of this right-wing plot reached Secret Service agents involved in Kennedy’s Dallas trip. In later years, however, Sapp recalled that plans for a Miami motorcade were scrapped and the president instead flew to a scheduled speech by helicopter.
On the day of the assassination, Milteer telephoned Somersett, saying he was in Dallas and that Kennedy was due there shortly. Milteer commented that Kennedy would never be seen in Miami again.
While the House Select Committee on Assassinations was unable to confirm Milteer’s presence in Dallas during the assassination, it also failed to prove he was elsewhere. Texas researcher Jack White claimed to have located a photograph of a man bearing a striking resemblance to Milteer standing in the crowd near the Texas School Book Depository.
Back in Miami after the assassination, Milteer again met with Somersett and said, “Everything ran true to form. I guess you thought I was kidding you when I said he would be killed from a window with a high-powered rifle. . . . I don’t do any guessing.” Milteer said not to worry about the capture of Oswald, “because he doesn’t know anything.” “The right-wing is in the clear,” added Milteer. “The patriots have outsmarted the communist group in order that the communists would carry out the plan without the right wing becoming involved.”
The FBI questioned Milteer on November 27 and he denied making any such statements. And while some information of the Milteer incident was belatedly turned over to the Warren Commission, there is no mention of Milteer in its report or twenty-six volumes. Before the prophetic Milteer could be questioned further about his apparent foreknowledge of Kennedy’s assassination, he died after receiving burns when a heater exploded in a vacation cabin.
The Milteer episode raises a number of questions, not the least of which is why his specific knowledge of a threat against the president—tape-recorded by a police agency—was not passed along to FBI and Secret Service personnel in Dallas.
But the racial unrest that rocked the United States in the 1960s was not President Kennedy’s only domestic problem. He was being verbally attacked not only by poor minorities with rising expectations, but also by wealthy businessmen who felt threatened by his announced social reforms.
Big business was already leery of Kennedy, who as a senator had opposed the Taft-Hartley law, aimed at curbing the power of labor unions, and who as president had failed to consult the business world before making certain appointments. The fears of big business increased in the spring of 1962 when Kennedy used the power of the presidency to force US steel manufacturers to roll back recent price increases.
Kennedy already had served notice on the giant steel companies in September 1961, when he sent a letter to industry leaders warning them against any price increases. In his letter, Kennedy rationalized:
The steel industry, in short, can look forward to good profits without an increase in prices. Since 1947, iron and steel common stocks prices have risen 397 percent; this is a much better performance than common stock prices in general.
On April 6, 1962, at the request of the federal government, the Steelworkers Union agreed to limit its wage demands to a ten-cent hourly increase beginning that summer. Then on April 11, US Steel and five other major steel companies announced a 3.5 percent hike in the cost of steel. Incensed, Kennedy told the news media:
The American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives, whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility, can show such utter contempt for the interest of 185 million Americans.
Administration officials suggested an FBI investigation and on April 13, the Defense Department awarded a $5 million contract to a smaller steel firm that had not raised prices. The next day, the six major firms announced their price increase had been rescinded.
Kennedy’s denunciation of the steel executives sent shock waves through the business community. He had demonstrated that a proactive president could influence major corporate decisions. A US News and World Report editor wrote, “What happened is frightening not only to steel people but to industry generally. . . . President Kennedy had the public interest at heart in acting as he did, but the results may not in the long run be what he intended them to be.”
Other results of the Kennedy administration were infuriating corporate executives. Mergers were becoming widespread in the business world and Attorney General Kennedy and his trust busters were taking a dim view of them.
During 1963, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division won forty-five of forty-six cases; asked a federal court to force General Motors Corporation to dispose of its locomotive business while charging the firm with monopolizing the manufacture and sale of intercity buses; and ordered General Dynamics to drop a division dealing with industrial gases.
Business and political leaders began to regret that the winner of the 1960 presidential election had not been Richard M. Nixon.
Nixon and the JFK Assassination
Most Americans remember Richard Milhous Nixon as the only US president to resign his office under the threat of certain impeachment.
Few know of or recall Nixon’s connection with the Kennedy assassination, including that Nixon was in Dallas the day Kennedy died but couldn’t recall that fact when interviewed by the FBI on February 28, 1964. United Press International reported the day after the assassination, “Richard Nixon, the former vice president who lost the presidential election to President Kennedy in 1960, is shown Friday after he arrived at Idlewild Airport [now John F. Kennedy International] in New York following a flight from Dallas, Tex., where he had been on a business trip.”
Born January 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, California, Nixon was a self-made man who reached the pinnacles of power after struggling up from a background of meager financial circumstances.
Nixon wanted to attend Harvard like young Kennedy, but was forced to settle for California’s Whittier College, where he honed his skills as a debater. He went on to graduate from Duke University Law School in Durham, North Carolina, then unsuccessfully tried to join the FBI.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Nixon took a job with the tire-rationing department of the Office of Price Administration in Washington. It is interesting that Nixon’s lifelong friend, Florida entrepreneur Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, beg
an his profitable career selling recapped tires. Although Nixon claimed he did not meet Rebozo until 1948 while vacationing in Florida after the Alger Hiss spy case, some researchers say the pair were in contact during the war.
Later in the war, Nixon enlisted in the Navy and served in the South Pacific, where on one island he built a small shack used for high-stakes gambling and drinking.
In 1946, Nixon successfully ran for Congress after labeling his opponent, incumbent congressman Jerry Voorhis, a “friend of the communists.” With his anticommunist credentials, Nixon was immediately named to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where his name became nationally known due to his part in the case of Alger Hiss, a government official accused of being a Soviet spy.
By 1950, the ambitious Nixon was ready to run for a Senate seat. His opponent was a liberal former Hollywood actress named Helen Douglas. Nixon painted Douglas as a friend of communism and dubbed her the “pink lady.” He accused her of voting with a “notorious communist-line congressman” from New York, failing to mention that Nixon himself had voted with this same congressman 112 times. Such campaign tactics earned Nixon the epithet “Tricky Dick.” But they also proved effective. Nixon beat Douglas by nearly 700,000 votes.
The man most responsible for Nixon’s smear tactics was his close friend and campaign manager Murray Chotiner, a lawyer who represented ranking mobsters and who had connections leading back to reputed New Orleans Mafia chief Carlos Marcello and Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa.
In 1952, after only six years in politics, Nixon became vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, thanks to the support of his political mentor, former New York governor Thomas Dewey, and his undermining of the favorite-son candidacy of fellow Californian Earl Warren.
Throughout the Eisenhower years, the war-hero president snubbed Nixon both politically and socially. In 1960, when Eisenhower was asked what major decisions Nixon had participated in, he caustically replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”
But Nixon was busy building up his own power base with men of dubious backgrounds.
In his memoirs, mobster Mickey Cohen wrote that he gave Chotiner $5,000 for Nixon’s 1946 congressional campaign and raised $75,000 from Las Vegas gamblers for Nixon’s 1950 Senate race.
Furthermore, Ed Partin, a former aide to Jimmy Hoffa turned government informant, detailed a meeting between Hoffa and New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello at the height of the 1960 presidential campaign: “I was right there, listening to the conversation. Marcello had a suitcase filled with $500,000 cash which was going to Nixon. It was a half-million-dollar contribution. The other half [of a promised $1 million] was coming from the mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.”
Nixon’s organized-crime contacts apparently continued even after he resigned the presidency in disgrace. During a 1975 golf tournament at La Costa Country Club in California, Nixon’s golfing companions included Allen Dorfman, a mob-Teamster financial coordinator, and Tony Provenzano, a former Teamster official and convicted Mafia killer.
Investigative authors Carl Oglesby, Howard Kohn, David Scheim, and others have revealed that Nixon was a frequent visitor to Cuba during the early 1950s and was in contact with confederates of organized-crime financial wizard Meyer Lansky.
When Fidel Castro gained power in Cuba, Lansky was one of those mob chieftains who wanted him overthrown. An attempt with CIA officers to plan an invasion of Cuba was initiated by Eisenhower’s White House political action officer, Richard Nixon. In his book Six Crises, Nixon wrote, “The covert training of Cuban exiles by the CIA was due in substantial part, at least, to my efforts. This had been adopted as a policy as a result of my direct support.”
Before the invasion could be launched, a serious snag occurred for Nixon and his backers—he lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy.
Rather than bide his time waiting for the next presidential election, Nixon ran against Pat Brown for the California governorship in 1962. He was handily defeated, especially after news broke of a secret $200,000 loan from billionaire Howard Hughes to Nixon’s brother.
Within two years, Nixon was back on the political stage, campaigning for Republican candidates. GOP stalwarts repaid this activity by again nominating Richard Nixon for president in August 1968. By then, of course, both John and Robert Kennedy were dead.
During the Nixon years, his friends in organized crime were not forgotten. The Nixon administration intervened in at least twenty trials of crime figures, ostensibly to protect “intelligence sources and methods.” In 1973, Nixon’s attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, denied an FBI request to continue an electronic surveillance operation that was beginning to penetrate connections between the Mafia and the Teamsters. Neither did Nixon forget his friend Jimmy Hoffa, whom he pardoned in 1971 despite recommendations against such action.
But of all Nixon’s possible crime connections, the most intriguing involves Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1975, Trowbridge Ford, a political science associate professor at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, was poring over a stack of recently released FBI documents. Ford was astonished to discover a memorandum written by a bureau staff assistant to a government panel looking into organized-crime activity in 1947. The memo stated:
It is my sworn statement that one Jack Rubenstein of Chicago, noted as a potential witness for hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, is performing information functions for the staff of congressman Richard Nixon, Republican of California. It is requested Rubenstein not be called for open testimony in the aforementioned hearings.
Later in 1947, Chicago’s Rubenstein moved to Dallas and shortened his name to Jack Ruby.
The idea that Jack Ruby had worked for Nixon should have set off the national news media. Instead, FBI officials told Ford that the document he discovered was a fake and the story was quickly dropped. Here once again we see an FBI statement admitting that fake or phony documents reside in its files.
By the early 1980s, Ford told this author he had studied literally thousands of genuine FBI documents and had slowly come to the conclusion that the Nixon-Ruby memo was probably legitimate. Regardless, the matter raises even more suspicion when viewed with Nixon’s presence in Dallas the day Kennedy died.
On November 20, 1963, Nixon arrived in Dallas, where a convention of the American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages was being held. A newsman from the Dallas Times Herald interviewed Nixon and wrote:
The former Vice President arrived in Dallas Wednesday night to attend a board meeting of Pepsi-Cola Company, which is represented by his New York law partnership. He plans to leave Dallas Friday morning a few hours before the arrival of President Kennedy. Mr. Nixon said that although he planned to talk by telephone to several Dallas Republican leaders, he had no plans for a formal meeting with them.
Interestingly, researcher Richard Sprague examined Pepsi-Cola corporate records and found no board meeting was held in Dallas in 1963.
The connections and politics of Pepsi-Cola deserve serious attention from assassination researchers. The soft-drink company’s advertising was handled by J. Walter Thompson, the giant public relations firm that also worked to sell the Pentagon’s brand of “peace.”
Nixon was longtime friends with Pepsi-Cola president Don Kendall and, later as US president, it was Nixon who opened the lucrative Soviet soft-drink market to Pepsi. A Justice Department investigation into this transaction revealed that a “high government official had all the red tape done away with so Pepsico could obtain the Soviet franchise without any competition.”
Pepsi went on to help those who had helped the company. In 1973, Kendall formed the Save the Presidency Committee, which sought to protect Nixon from the wrath of Watergate investigations.
It is especially interesting to note that Cartha DeLoach, the FBI official who was chief liaison between Director Hoover and President Lyndon Johnson, later joined Pepsi-Cola.
With Nixon in Dallas was Pepsi-Cola heiress and
actress Joan Crawford. Both Nixon and Crawford made comments in the Dallas newspapers to the effect that they, unlike the president, didn’t need Secret Service protection, and they intimated that the nation was upset with Kennedy’s policies. It has been suggested that this taunting may have been responsible for Kennedy’s critical decision not to have the Plexiglas top placed on his limousine on November 22.
Nixon also caused a stir in Dallas when he suggested that Lyndon Johnson would be dropped from the 1964 Democratic national ticket. Quoted in the November 22, 1963, Dallas Morning News, Nixon stated, “We must remember that President Kennedy and his advisers are practical politicians. . . . Lyndon was chosen in 1960 because he could help the ticket in the South. Now he is becoming a political liability in the South, just as he is in the North.”
On the morning of November 22, Nixon was driven to Love Field in Dallas, where he boarded American Airlines Flight 82 for New York. Less than two hours after Nixon left, Air Force One landed at Love Field with the doomed Kennedy.
Three months later, the Warren Commission asked the FBI to investigate Marina Oswald’s allegation that her husband had tried to kill Nixon during a visit to Dallas. The FBI report dealing with Nixon’s interview stated:
On February 28, 1964, the Honorable Richard M. Nixon, former Vice President of the US, was contacted by Assistant Director in charge of the New York Office, John F. Malone, and furnished the following information:
Mr. Nixon advised that the only time he was in Dallas, Texas, during 1963 was two days prior to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The question of whether Nixon was merely forgetful or dissembling in his comment to the FBI might have been cleared up by yet another bureau report, “Letter of FBI of June 29, 1964, concerning Richard Nixon.” However, this document was reported missing from the National Archives in 1976.
