by Gus Russo
73 Garwood, 57-58.
74 CCR, 94-95.
75 Church Committee testimony of Sheffield Edwards, April 9, 1975, 5.
76 Peter Grose, 539
77 CCIR, 264
78 Donald Chamberlain to Knoche, Memorandum, 15 April 1975.
79 Ibid, 544.
80 Ibid, 553-554.
81 Mosley, 477-478.
82 J. Edgar Hoover to Gale and Tolson, note, 10 December 1963; summarized in CCR, bk. V, 50-57.
83 J. Edgar Hoover to Belmont, note, 24 September 1964; J. Edgar Hoover to Tolson, note, 1 October 1964.
84 Sullivan, 50.
85 CCR, bk. V, 49, fn. 15.
86 Interview of Senator Richard Schweiker, 26 June 1993 (FL).
87 WC transcript, 16 December 1963, 52; in Bird, 549.
88 Wesley Liebeler, interview by Edward Jay Epstein, in Epstein, 105.
89 HSCA, vol. XI, 259.
90 U.S. News and World Report, 17 August 1992, 30.
91 Ibid, 30.
92 Slawson, “Trip to Mexico City,” Memorandum, 22 April 1964.
93 Belin, Final Disclosure, 217-218.
94 Ibid, 218.
95 O’Neill, 178.
96 Cray, 425.
97 Wofford, 415-416.
98 US. News and World Report, 17 August 1992, 40.
99 Ibid.
100 Max Holland, “The Key to the Warren Report,” American Heritage Magazine, November 1995.
101 Burt Griffin, interview by Gerald Posner, 23 January 1992, in Posner, 411-412.
102 Fensterwald and Ewing, Coincidence or Conspiracy, 96.
103 The Washington Post, 19 January 1970.
104 Russell, 500.
105 Gilbert Fite, 423.
106 Colonel Philip Corso, interview by author, 6 February 1996; also Colonel Philip Corso, interview by Anthony Summers, July 1993 (FL). Transcript in author’s possession.
107 Weisberg, Whitewash IV, esp. 208-209.
108 Cartha DeLoach to Mohr, FBI Memo, 12 December 1963.
109 Transcript of show (name unknown) in author’s files.
110 President Gerald R. Ford to Phil Buchen, Memorandum, 7 March 1975, Ford Library Box, JFK Collection, National Archives.
111 Wayne Thevenot, interview by author, 20 May 1996.
112 Judge Burt Griffin, interview by author, 5 April 1993.
113 Lee Rankin, interview by Mike Ewing, HSCA Outside Contact Report, 31 May 1978.
114 Jeffrey Warren, interview by author, 3 October 1994.
115 Cray, 423.
116 Fensterwald and Ewing, 80.
117 Anthony Summers and Robbyn Summers, “The Ghost of November,” Vanity Fair, December 1994, 101.
118 Leo Janos, Atlantic Monthly, July 1973.
119 Jack Martin and Lewis, affidavit to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, 20 February 1968, 48.
120 Lyndon B. Johnson to Mike Mansfield, phone conversation, 28 September 1964, LBJ Library; also Beschloss, Taking Charge, 561.
121 Kelley, 298.
122 Livingstone, 438.
123 General Alexander Haig, interview by author, 26 February 1998.
124 Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 682.
125 Leo Janos, LBJ speechwriter, Church Committee interview by Rhett Dawson, 14 October 1975; also in the report is a follow-up interview with Bob Hardesty, SSCI box 337, folder 2.
126 Fort Worth Star Telegram, 15 December 1993.
127 Leo Janos, LBJ speechwriter, Church Committee interview by Rhett Dawson, 14 October 1975.
128 Model and Groden, 94-95.
129 New York Times, 25 June 1976.
Smith recalls the “confidential” conversation, only releasing the statement during the Church Committee hearings, well after Johnson’s death in 1972. The recollections were based on “thorough notes.” Smith recalled, “I was rocked all right. I begged for details. He [Johnson] refused, saying, ‘It will all come out one day.’”
130 Schorr, 178.
131 Weidenfeld, 350.
132 Russell, 454.
133 CCR, bk. V, 6-7.
134 Ibid, 60.
135 HSCA, vol. XI, 260.
136 Ibid, 256-257.
137 Ibid, 260-261.
138 Ibid, 261.
139 CIA Review of Oswald File, 5 May 1975, 5-6.
140 David and David, 230.
141 Panorama, BBC, March 1978.
142 Judge Burt Griffin, HSCA testimony.
Chapter Seventeen (Bobby Alone)
1 Wofford, 426.
2 David and David, 3.
3 Guthman, 244.
4 Wofford, 384.
5 Harry Williams, interview by author, 22 December 1993.
6 John Davis, interview by author, 20 November 1993.
7 Sergio Arcacha Smith, interview by author, 24 April 1997.
8 William Vanden Heuvel, interview by author, 7 August 1993.
9 David and David, 217.
10 William Vanden Heuvel, interview by author, 7 August 1993.
11 Oppenheimer, 265.
12 G. Robert Blakey, interview by author, 22 July 1992.
13 David and David, 219.
14 Ibid, 217.
15 Ibid, 220.
16 Ibid, 221.
17 David and David, 215.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid, 217.
20 Leo Janos, Church Committee interview by Rhett Dawson, Memo for the Record, 14 October 1975.
21 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. “JFK: Truth and Fiction,” Wall Street Journal, 10 January 1992.
22 Nilo Messer, interview by author, 20 May 1998. Messer was Artime’s secretary.
23 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 664.
24 Newfield, 29.
25 David and David, 221.
26 Quoted in David and David, 216, fn. 6.
27 Richard Goodwin, 463.
28 Quoted in Belin, Final Disclosure, 217.
29 Ibid.
30 HSCA box 18, section 88, National Archives.
31 Seymour Hersh, 450-451.
32 Julius Draznin, interview by Seymour Hersh, 17 April 1994.
33 Interview of Al Maddox, 12 June 1993 (EL).
34 Vincent Drain, interview by author, 18 October 1993.
35 After this trip, according to sources close to the Kennedy circle, Bobby contacted “my best friend in the Justice Department,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Moynihan was charged with resolving two questions: 1) Was the Secret Service bought off on the day of the assassination? and 2) Was Bobby’s nemesis Jimmy Hoffa involved? After a short period of involvement on his investigative task, Moynihan reported negatively on both counts. Moynihan was confronted with this allegation by a writer from Ramparts magazine in 1968. According to authors Bill Turner and Warren Hinckle: “Moynihan jumped as if a live grenade was rolling toward him. In CIA fashion, he declared he would neither confirm nor deny his secret mission for Bobby Kennedy. After leaving the room to use the phone, the suddenly unamiable Irishman returned and announced that he had nothing more to say.” (Hinckle and Turner, 260)
In March 1964, Secret Service Agent Mike Howard witnessed an incident that may relate to Bobby’s interest in a Hoffa connection. At the time, Howard had been assigned to Jackie Kennedy, with whom he would become quite close. (Howard recalled her having terrifying nightmares. He would often spend the night just outside her bedroom, sometimes rushing in to comfort her when she would wake up screaming, then sit on the edge of her bed until she fell back asleep.) One morning in April 1964, Howard remembered going down to the kitchen in Jackie’s house in suburban Virginia, and being startled to see Robert Kennedy there. RFK asked Howard to drive him to a section of Dulles Airport where private planes were parked, and Howard drove onto the tarmac, where Jimmy Hoffa was disembarking from a plane that had just landed.
Approaching each other without shaking hands, Kennedy and Hoffa spoke in conversational tones for some ten minutes. Not wanting to eavesdrop, Howard heard none of the conversation until its end, when he hea
rd Hoffa ask, “Is that all right with you?” “Yes,” replied Kennedy. On March 4th, 1964, the Justice Department had just obtained a conviction of Hoffa for complicity in jury tampering, and would push for a second conviction in April, when Hoffa and seven others would go on trial in Chicago for defrauding the Central States Pension Fund of over $20 million. That might have been the subject of the conversation at the airport—but that spring, Robert Kennedy remained too shattered by his brother’s assassination to undertake any serious work as Attorney General. There was, of course, another possibility—the assassination. Did Kennedy want to look into Hoffa’s eyes while asking him if he had anything to do with his brother’s killing—as he had done with, among others, John McCone of the CIA? (Mike Howard, interview by author, 7 December 1993)
Although Moynihan declined to divulge any information, other sources, albeit second-hand ones, have disclosed that Bobby Kennedy’s next foray into the mystery of his brother’s death came after the release of the Warren Commission Report. At that time, Kennedy said, “I just can’t believe that guy [Oswald] acted alone. I’m going to contact someone independent of this government to get to the bottom of this.” Bobby then contacted a lifelong friend of the Kennedy family, then working in Britain’s intelligence agency, known as MI6. The friendship dated back to the days when Papa Joe Kennedy was the U.S. Ambassador to England. Undertaking this highly secretive mission, the MI6 agent contacted two French intelligence operatives who proceeded to conduct, over a three year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States. One agent was the head of the French Secret Service, Andre Ducret. The second was known only as “Philippe”—believed to be Philippe Vosjoly, who was a former French Intelligence Chief in the United States. Over the years, Ducret and Philippe hired men to infiltrate the Texas oil industry, the CIA, and Cuban mercenary groups in Florida. Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months before his own assassination in June of 1968.
There is no information concerning Bobby’s reaction to the document. After Bobby’s death, the MI6 agent contacted the last surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, inquiring as to what to do with the material. Teddy said the family wasn’t interested. The agent proceeded to hire a French writer by the name of Hervé LaMarre to fashion the material into a book. Published in Europe and authored under the pseudonym of “James Hepburn,” the book was entitled Farewell, America. It contains highly exaggerated prose combined with a large dose of poetic license. Because the anecdotes about LBJ and others could be considered downright libelous, the book was never published in America. Over the years, however, through private dealers, the book obtained an “underground” distributorship in the United States. One of the dealers approached Dave Powers, Kennedy intimate and curator of the John F. Kennedy Museum, for his opinion of the book. Echoing Moynihan, Powers responded, “I can’t confirm or deny the European connection, but Bobby definitely didn’t believe the Warren Report.” (Al Navis, interview by author, 19 November 1993. In the 1980’s, Navis conducted inquiries about RFK’s investigation with members of the Kennedy family inner-circle.)
For more background on the “European Connection,” see the notes of former FBI agent William Turner on file at the Assassination Archive and Research Center in Washington, D.C. Turner and his partner Warren Hinckle traveled extensively, interviewing a number of those enlisted in the Bobby Kennedy investigation.
36 This same doctor went on to become part of the cottage industry that has ghoulishly surrounded the Kennedy assassination. In what seemed to many to be demagogue-like fashion, he has appeared on countless panel discussions and television programs trumpeting the theme that the government lied to the public about the manner of Kennedy’s death, but never offering any proof of his contention. To the contrary, he originally emerged from his viewing of the autopsy photographs admitting that there was no evidence of a shot from the front. He eventually left his place of employment in 1983 under a cloud of accusations that he had misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds. By 1993, the doctor had repaid $200,000 to his local government.
37 Initial chronology compiled in HSCA vol. VII, 23-34.
38 JAMA, 27 May 1992, vol. 267, no. 20, 2803.
39 Ibid, 2803.
40 CE 391.
41 National Archives, Memo of Transfer, 26 April 1965.
42 Angela Novello, interview by author, 26 April 1994.
43 Thomas, The Man to See, 162.
44 After Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, Evelyn Lincoln began to wonder what had happened to the president’s brain. She called Ted Kennedy, who assured her that everything was under control.
45 George Burkley, HSCA interview, 1 September 1977.
46 The author made attempts to contact both Giordiano and Dalton for interviews. Efforts included a brief telephone call to Joseph Giordano, 10 May 1994, when he declined an interview request, and a letter to Dalton in 1992, which was not answered.
47 Thomas J. Kelly, Asst. SS Director, Memo for file, 13 February 1969.
48 HSCA, vol. VII, 29.
49 G. Robert Blakey, Outside Contact Report, 22 March 1976.
50 Both the HSCA and the author spoke to numerous people present at the gravesite for the reinterment, none of whom saw anything but the coffin reburial. After the Committee ended its work, Blakey told the author that he was informed that a National Archives employee knew the brain was in the ground. The employee denied this to the author. A friend of the Archive employee believes that the employee knows about the brain, but prefers to have the Kennedy family verify it.
51 Robert Tanenbaum, interview by author, 5 April 1992.
52 Frank Mankiewicz, interview by author, 19 January 1994.
Jack Metzler, Jr., current Arlington Superintendent (and son of the Superintendent in 1967), researched all gravesite records for the author and reported that no other groundbreaking occurred besides the original burial and the reinterment. He said, however, that security is very lax at night, and it would be easy to sneak in, bury material, carefully replace the sod, and never be detected.
53 Manchester, The Death of a President, 378
54 Hinckle and Turner (The Fish is Red), 238.
55 Thomas Powers, 143.
56 CIA Headquarters to JM/WAVE, cable, 23 November 1963, cited in Corn, 106.
57 Loch Johnson (Church Committee staff), memo on his inspection of classified Cuba documents, 21 July 1975, LBJ Library.
58 Nilo Messer, interview by author, 20 May 1998.
59 Blight and Kornbluh, 122.
60 Guthman and Shulman, 379.
61 Rene Cancio, interview by Judith Artime, 61.
62 Al Haig, interview on ABC’s Nightline, 12 December 1997.
Chapter Eighteen (Assault on Camelot)
1 Through an informant, FBI agent Jack Barron learned that Rosselli had lied in testifying to the Kefauver Committee about his birth in Chicago. According to Barron’s information, Rosselli was actually born Filippo Sacco in Esteria, Italy in 1911. After emigrating to Boston six years later, young Filippo fell into a world of crime, eventually burning down his family home in an arson for insurance scam. He then fled to Chicago, changed his name to Johnny Rosselli, and began working for Al Capone (Demaris, 232).
2 Demaris, 233.
3 CCIR, 85, fn. 4.
4 Luncheon Meeting with William K. Harvey, Howard Osborn, CIA Memo For the Record, 4 October 1967.
5 Edward Morgan, Church Committee testimony, 19 March 1976.
6 CCR, bk. V, 80.
7 Henggler, 40-41.
8 Henggler, 37.
9 Parker and Rashke, 92.
10 Henggler, 40-41.
11 Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 715.
12 Thomas and Isaacson, The Man to See, 182.
13 Henggler, 81.
14 Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 711.
15 Ibid, 715-716
.
16 Ibid, 716.
17 Henggler, 198.
18 Ibid, 206.
19 For more details, see Van Gelder and Bennett (in the Bibliography).
20 Shesol, 366.
21 This confrontation recalls what Johnson aides have long claimed to have been Johnson’s biggest, self-admitted mistake—retaining the original JFK advisors, whom he came to believe ill-served him.
22 Among other interviewees, Johnson’s Military Aide and lifelong friend, Colonel Howard Burris, recalled this LBJ view for the author. Also, LBJ Special Assistant, Martin Underwood, who shared many an after-hour drink with Johnson in the residence area of the White House, said Johnson was firm on this fact.
23 Henggler, 209.
24 LBJ with Governor John Connally, phone conversation, 2 March 1967; LBJ library tape 67.02.
25 Leo Janos, Atlantic Monthly, July 1973.
26 Kirkwood, 180.
27 William Hundley, interview by author, 7 October 1993.
28 We know Garrison knew the story, because John Connally told LBJ that he learned the story from sources in Garrison’s office (LBJ with Governor John Connally, taped conversation, JFK Collection, National Archives). Also, the CIA pointed out that Rosselli himself was in touch with Garrison when the two of them were in Las Vegas at the same time as Ed Morgan in March 1967 (CIA Inspector General Report, 120). Rosselli himself admitted that he spoke with Garrison in Las Vegas, referring to the D.A. as a “phoney” and a “publicity seeker” (Sheffield Edwards, CIA Memo For The Record, 11 December 1968).
29 Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, 13.
30 Kirkwood, 79.
31 Ferrie was dogged for years with allegations of improper activity with young boys. However, he was never convicted of any such offense. In addition, interviews with many of his so-called victims bring rapid denials that Ferrie ever made a pass at any of them. As for his appearance, Ferrie suffered from Alopecia Totalis, a condition which often involves total loss of body hair. This occurred late in life, and there are numerous conjectures as to how or why it occurred. Ferrie didn’t help matters by insisting on wearing an ugly toupee while sporting painted-on eyebrows. In any event, it must be remembered that none of this has any bearing on who killed JFK.
32 SAC New Orleans to Director, FBI AIRTEL, 20 December 1966.
