by Gus Russo
The last show of official interest in the Kennedy killing allegedly occurred early in the first term of President Bill Clinton. In 1993, according to President Clinton’s one-time Associate Attorney General Webb Hubbell, Clinton requested Hubbell to see if he could learn “Who killed President Kennedy?” Hubbell wrote that his cursory exploration resolved nothing.104
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE FINAL CHAPTER
“When the right to kill is so universally accepted, we should not be surprised if our young President was slain.”
—I.F. Stone, journalist November 19631
“John Kennedy had a kind of fixation about Castro—an obsession is a better word. He couldn’t abide the fact that this cocky, arrogant young man was in charge in Cuba just a few miles off our shores and willing to defy the great United States.”
—Senator George McGovern, 19882
John and Robert Kennedy knew what they were doing. They waged a vicious war against Fidel Castro—a war someone had to lose. The Kennedys were clearly convinced the loser would be Castro. But like the Kennedys, Lee Harvey Oswald also knew what he was doing. As Oswald stated in his New Orleans radio debate, “I think that the United States government, through certain agencies, mainly the State Department and the CIA, has made monumental mistakes in its relations with Cuba.” Oswald eventually decided that this problem called for a monumental solution.
The question that must be considered is: Were either the Kennedys or Oswald morally justified? The argument can be made that John Kennedy, in his obsessive, prideful, competitive hatred of Fidel Castro, took millions of people to the brink of nuclear death on a number of occasions. Lee Oswald decided to put an end to what he perceived as the Kennedy brothers’ treachery, and he succeeded, though he, too, ought to have known the huge negative consequences of success or failure.
In fact, JFK’s actions towards Castro were so provocative that had it not been Oswald, someone else was bound to take a shot at him. Because of the Cuban policies he and his brother carried out, when President Kennedy rode down the street in an open limousine, he might just as well have had a sign on his back proclaiming “Shoot me” to Castro’s adherents.
Ed Butler, the New Orleans radio host on whose program Oswald appeared three months before the assassination, opines, “The key factor is that Oswald was someone to be taken seriously at the time. One of the big mistakes that’s been made since is to trivialize him.” Commentator Alexander Cockburn offered this interpretation and prediction:
Perhaps one day Oswald will be properly recognized as a leftist who came to the conclusion that the only way to relieve the pressure on Cuba and obstruct the attempts on Castro was by killing Kennedy. In his calculations, he was correct. . . Too bad that this radical exponent of propaganda of the deed should be now presented by assassination buffs as a pawn of the right.3
Ed Butler, the New Orleans radio host who debated Oswald, concluded:
To me, there were three very simple reasons for why Oswald did what he did. First, he wanted to make a name for himself, to be a world historical figure. You could see his desire, the need to be famous and heard and attended to. The second thing he was out for was to save Castro. He saved Castro by that act, and as we speak, Castro’s still the Generalisimo in Cuba. The third thing Oswald wanted to do, and again he succeeded, was to get America by smashing Kennedy, the top symbol of authority in this country.
After years of sifting through the documents, photographs, and interview transcripts, I reached the conclusion that John Kennedy’s assassination was almost inevitable—the consequence of the combined inexperience of the Kennedy brothers, especially Bobby. Before his 1961 appointments as de jure head of the Department of Justice and de facto head of the CIA, Bobby Kennedy had spent only a few months of his 36 years as a very junior attorney in the DOJ, and not a single day in the CIA. A senior officer in the Kennedy State Department recently said, “Bobby was an action man who wanted to take action on things he knew nothing about.” While seasoned professionals watched in amazement at their unprofessional maneuvers, the brothers believed their intellect and fierce determination would carry the day. This was the imperative that their father had suffused on their upbringing.
Both brothers held long-entrenched bureaucratic protocols in contempt. Both believed they could short-circuit the wisdom of their more experienced minions with ad hoc committees and hands-on policies—a belief that obliterated the notions of deniability and control.
Inexperience and self-assurance proved a fatal combination when the Kennedys formulated their anti-Castro policy. They represented the “Peter Principle” even before the term was coined. Late in the day, they began to worry that someone would find out about their “secret war” and take action. When the assassination occurred, Bobby immediately grasped the implications, and made sure his brother’s character was not assassinated as well.
Robert Kennedy knew that his brother had likely died as a result of their policy initiatives. But his actions and inactions in the realm of his brother’s assassination, especially in hiding the truth from the world, greatly contributed to the great public mistrust in government which dates back to the days of the Warren Commission report. Many observers have pointed to the government response to the assassination as the original cause of America’s “loss of innocence”—one occurring long before Watergate. Thus, it is unfortunately the case that Lee Oswald and Robert Kennedy unleashed a wave of cynicism from which the country will likely not recover in the foreseeable future.
Lyndon Johnson had to be aware that he was contributing to that mistrust as well. However, his decision was predicated upon his refusal to have an international investigation of the assassination jeopardize millions of lives— American and other. As he saw it, Johnson was faced with a terrible choice: risk a war, or risk public cynicism stemming from a Washington coverup. He wisely chose the latter, but suffered greatly for it.
The CIA, more than willing to go along, also helped trigger the more than three decades of often-justified public mistrust of it.
Clare Booth Luce, the diplomat and Time-Life heiress who gave financial support to the Cuban exiles, reached her own conclusions about the government’s reaction to the assassination, citing her high-level government sources as the basis for them. Luce stated that, “Unable to prove that the assassination was backed by the Castroites—but perhaps suspicious of it—the Kennedys and the Johnsons and the whole government decided to say nothing about it since even to raise the suspicion might have plunged us into a war with Cuba.”4
Who Killed John F. Kennedy?
“Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me!”
—Fidel Castro, March 1953, at his sentencing for leading insurrections against the Cuban Army5
“No question in my mind. . . I think Castro hit Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs invasion.”
—Johnny Rosselli, 19666
History will eventually record without equivocation that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy. However, the ensuing coverup of Oswald’s motives rendered it forever impossible to precisely determine if Win Scott, Des FitzGerald, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and many others were correct in their suspicions of Castro involvement. Even back in 1964, it would have proved difficult to verify Oswald’s “missing days” on the shadowy back streets of Mexico City (and possibly Havana). Thirty-five years later, it is nearly impossible.
The question will probably always remain: Did Castro, or the climate implicit in his regime, play a role in the murder of John Kennedy? Given the American assault on his person and his regime, he certainly had the motive. And when Oswald appeared in Mexico City, Castro’s agents were undoubtedly handed the means and opportunity—but did they act on it?
On the one hand, the lofty social goals of Castro’s revolution prompted his supporters to give Fidel a Christlike persona. However, this is but one facet of a man who, like John Kennedy, is highly complex and compartmentalized.
For years,
the story has been told of how Castro claimed to be shocked and dismayed on hearing of Kennedy’s death. That account was clearly a piece of fiction. “Castro is an artist, a great actor,” says Manuel Artime’s secretary Nilo Messer. “He should get an Oscar. He hated Kennedy so much.”7 Obviously, it was in Cuba’s interest for Castro to claim shock and dismay, and it still is in 1998, as Castro, the Pope, President Clinton, and others try to normalize Cuba’s trade and other relations with the United States.
Not only had Castro threatened the lives of U.S. leaders two months before the assassination, but his brother Raul expressed strong feelings about the Kennedys’ “secret war.” Raul was the man responsible for his brother’s security detail—a key lieutenant known to direct Cuban terrorism through agents such as Fabian Escalante. In 1975, Senator George McGovern visited the Castro brothers in Havana to obtain details of the Kennedy administration’s anti-Castro assassination plots. Raul told him, “Let me tell you, had any one of those attacks succeeded, I would have found some way to retaliate.”8
All this is not to say that Castro ever uttered the words, “Kill Kennedy.” Almost assuredly he did not. Castro’s September 1963 threat may easily have been perceived by his agents in Mexico City and elsewhere to be like Becket’s plea, “Who will rid me of this man?” As Jean Davison points out, “The irony is that the CIA plots [against Castro] may have evolved in the same manner.”9
The similarities between both countries’ plots were mirrored by the similarities between the men themselves. A recent biographer of Castro, Robert E. Quirk, is quick to draw the parallels between his subject and John Kennedy:
In their family and social backgrounds the two men had much in common. Both had wealthy, aggressive, and politically influential fathers. Both inherited the Roman Catholicism of their ancestors, and each was sent away to a private school. Both were the scions of recent immigrants. The pushiness of the Irish-Americans that took [the Kennedys] to the forefront of the church hierarchy and of city and state politics was matched by the vitality of the Galician latecomers in independent Cuba.10
Chicago attorney Constantine “Gus” Kangles takes the parallel one step further. Kangles, in the rare position of having known both the Kennedy brothers and both Castro brothers, opines, “John Kennedy was Fidel, and Bobby was Raul.” Jack, he explains, mirrored Fidel’s charisma and charm, while Bobby’s often arrogant, charmless demeanor could also be found in the hot-tempered Raul.11
Colonel Jack Hawkins, the military planner of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, recently observed, “The Kennedys lived in a dream world. They didn’t understand the realities at all. The whole concept of using covert action to overthrow dictators just doesn’t hold water. Kennedy was using the resources and the people of the United States as a play toy. And he almost got us blown away. The whole thing was just silly—to spend $100 million to get a few people killed.”12
Even more disturbing is the fact that Castro’s intelligence corps was known to have been trained by the Soviet KGB in Minsk, where many, like Warren Commissioner Richard Russell, worried they may have had contact with Oswald. General Al Haig concluded, “Castro was behind this [assassination], but with KGB help. Like Kennedy, the Pope’s assassination had KGB footprints all over it. I mean, these Soviets were bloody-minded people—probably even more bloody-minded than Castro.”13
Brimming with abundant self-confidence, the Castro brothers became the immovable object, while the Kennedy brothers, no less full of themselves, operated as the irresistible force. Given their backgrounds, it was predictable that neither would back down from their entrenched positions. But the consequences of that were huge. As historian Thomas G. Paterson concluded, “Had there been no exile expedition at the Bay of Pigs, no destructive covert activities, no assassination plots, no military maneuvers and plans, and no economic and diplomatic steps to harass, isolate, and destroy the Castro government in Havana, there would not have been a Cuban missile crisis.”14 There also would have been no assassination of John Kennedy.
E. Howard Hunt—the CIA propagandist who worked so closely with such Kennedy allies as Harry Williams, Manuel Artime, Richard Helms, Allen Dulles, and Sergio Arcacha Smith’s Cuban Revolutionary Council—concluded as much in his autobiography. In one passage, he writes of the influence that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee had on Oswald: “But for Castro and the Bay of Pigs disaster, there would have been no such ‘committee.’ And perhaps no assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald.”15
The ill feelings towards Cuba fostered during the Kennedy administration remain to this day, although most Americans have no inkling of their origins. At this writing, the Clinton administration still refuses to lift most economic sanctions on Cuba, yet at the same time strikes deals with nations as far removed from the “Jeffersonian ideal” as Indonesia, North Korea, and China. In January 1995, the U.S. moved to normalize relations with Vietnam, a country whose military, only two decades earlier, took almost 60,000 American lives. As these lines are written, President Clinton is in Beijing, China, pandering to a repressive, totalitarian regime that has thought nothing of running tanks over the defenseless bodies of hundreds of college students. As bad as Castro was, especially during the early stages of his revolution and his later consolidation of power, he did not brutally train weapons on unarmed students. A Cuban official, recently addressing the obvious paradox, wondered why “it is only with Cuba that America continues the Cold War.”16
Perhaps, as Mike McLaney said, “They have long memories up there in Washington.” Perhaps the memories include those of Washington insiders still suspecting that Fidel Castro’s henchmen played a hand in the murder of our 35th president. The Warren Commission, for example, was aware of Oswald’s premeditated threat/offer in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. Yet, the public was not told of this until one of the last Commission documents was released in 1995 (CD 1359). A statement by Oswald such as “I’m going to kill that bastard” was ostensibly just what the Commission would have expected to bolster its conclusion of Oswald’s guilt. Perhaps the fact that it was made to the Cubans tied the Commission investigators’ hands.
In November 1961, Bobby Kennedy, then setting up MONGOOSE, wrote: “My idea is to stir things up on the island. . . [I] do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro, but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.”17
Bobby Kennedy soon came to realize how tragically wrong his prediction had been. He would agonize over whether “we did not pay a very great price for being more energetic than wise about a lot of things, especially Cuba.” It can be argued that the “very great price” was his brother John’s life.
In the months after Dallas, immersed in the world of existentialism and Greek tragedies, Bobby Kennedy underlined a passage in one of his books by the Greek poet Aeschylus. It may have been Bobby’s conclusion about the meaning of his brother’s death, and with hindsight it should have been a guiding mantra for any investigation of John Kennedy’s death. The underlined passage read, “All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride.”18
Those in a position to place the assassination in its true perspective were to remain silent because of their friendship and loyalty to the Kennedy family—or because of their calling as professional “secret keepers.” Among the numerous examples that illustrate this conflict of interest:
Two years after JFK’s murder, Robert Kennedy recorded his oral history in which he lauded Allen Dulles.
JFK’s friendships with such key figures as Earl Warren, John McCloy, and John McCone were well-known.
RFK’s loyalists such as Manuel Artime and Harry Williams were aware of the AM/LASH and re-invasion plans, but never told the Warren Commission of these potential provocations.
Sergio Arcacha and others knew of RFK’s links to 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, but waited thirty years to divulge that key information.
FBI and CIA officials loyal to the Kennedys were aware of the coverup in Mexico
City, but only spoke of it recently in public.
Thus, the assassination coverup was never a complex conspiracy, but resulted, for the most part, from the Kennedys having numerous “friends in high places,” including the media. Virtually every facet of the Kennedys’ social milieu played into the hands of the continued secrecy. From the perspective of the Kennedy family, the narrowed investigation served its purpose: From a fallen charismatic leader with promise, John Kennedy was elevated to an Arthurian myth.
Those who knew him were confounded. As longtime presidential counsel Clark Clifford observed, “While John F. Kennedy was alive, no one imagined that he would, after his death, become a mythical figure in American culture and history.”19 Like many others, Clifford underestimated Bobby’s devotion to that end.
The sad, fascinating, and epic history of the assassination and coverup yields at least a handful of major conclusions, a great many questions and gaps, and only a few irreproachable lessons.
To any sort of moral certainty, it is probably impossible to prove precisely why Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy. Indeed, his inside-the-head motivations—a narrowly specific single reason why he acted—may never be known for certain.
We can’t be sure, for example, to what extent Oswald committed the act because he wanted to be a hero to Fidel. We can’t be sure to what extent he knew, independently or with Cubans whispering in his ear, that Castro had been the target of so many assassination plots traceable back to the U.S. and to the Kennedy brothers, and that Cuba wanted revenge. We can’t know for sure to what extent Oswald was otherwise encouraged by the Cubans to pull the trigger.
Despite the millions of declassified documents that have been released in recent years, we still cannot know for certain if Oswald truly acted on his own, whether he was hired to do the job by a foreign adversary, or if he merely was encouraged to act by a foreign nation. The single most important piece of evidence—the details of Oswald’s Cuban embassy visits—remains conspicuously missing, despite the presence of numerous electronic “bugs” and double agents. And although the CIA’s Win Scott wrote that he had Oswald watched closely in Mexico City, what became of the reports of that surveillance? Scott was well-known to keep meticulous and voluminous files.
