by Gore Vidal
FIFTY-FIVE
I shall now borrow Publishers Weekly’s nice précis of this long highly detailed book, which states that Gerald Posner’s polemic, Case Closed(1993),
took the CIA’s lack of involvement for granted, and that, according to this mammoth and painstakingly researched account, was a big mistake. It is Waldron and Hartmann’s…contention—bolstered by access to many previously unavailable files, and interviews with little-known as well as prominent figures—that the CIA knew a great deal about the assassination. But the agency couldn’t admit what it knew because that could uncover the existence of a U.S. plan for a coup in Cuba, run by JFK’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The assassination, say the authors, was carried out by hired gunmen on the orders of three noted Mafia dons whose lives were being made miserable by RFK’s ruthless pursuit—and these Mafia men knew about the planned invasion because they had worked with the CIA on previous efforts to topple Castro. Oswald, long a hidden CIA agent, was set up as the patsy, and it had always been Jack Ruby’s job to eliminate him if he wasn’t killed at the scene of Kennedy’s shooting. How do the authors make their case? With a relentless accumulation of detail, a very thorough knowledge of every political and forensic detail and the broad perspective of historians rather than assassination theorists.
Ultimate Sacrifice describes how the Kennedy C-Day plan was penetrated by three Mafia godfathers—Carlos Marcello (New Orleans), Santo Trafficante (Tampa, Florida), and Johnny Roselli (out of Chicago). All three were being vigorously pursued by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, along with a dozen of their associates of whom six were also working on the Castro murder case. The crime bosses then used parts of the C Plan, aka AMWorld, to arrange JFK’s assassination in a way that would prevent a thorough government investigation in order to protect the Coup Plan, its participants, as well as, naturally, national security by invoking the secrecy surrounding the C Plan. The Mob bosses targeted JFK twice before Dallas, once in Chicago on November 2 (JFK called off his motorcade) and then in Tampa on November 18 (he survived unscathed). Ultimate Sacrifice reveals and details why Robert Kennedy later told several close associates the name of the godfather (Carlos Marcello) who had ordered his brother killed—but he couldn’t do anything about it for fear the Soviets might go to war: Irony in tragic action…I recall when over the years I’d be asked why what happened at Dallas happened, I’d answer: “Because Bobby had broken a truce made with the Mob by Joe Kennedy in 1960. Bobby, seeking glory, broke it by hounding Teamster boss Hoffa, and going after the Mob bosses”: in the case of Carlos Marcello of New Orleans (and sometimes Havana), Bobby had him deported to Guatemala. Trafficante, a Florida boss, was recorded as telling Marcello that they must kill Bobby but Marcello said no. “When a dog bothers you, you don’t cut off its tail.” Thus was the murder of JFK ordered and carried out by the same team that his brother was assembling to murder Castro and prepare the way for an invasion of Cuba at the request of a Kennedy-selected provisional government. This is classic irony and on the bloodiest scale. Had word leaked out, the Soviets in order to avenge Castro might have used its nuclear-tipped missiles against some fifty U.S. cities. Hence, the use of Oswald as patsy and his murder by a fellow CIA agent Jack Ruby: the transcript of Ruby’s later quizzing by a clueless Chief Justice Earl Warren is worthy of that non-ironist Samuel Beckett.
FIFTY-SIX
Professor Marcie Frank has flattered me by a comparison to Pope. So, in ending, let me quote the last lines of the Dunciad, lines that I learned, voluntarily, as a schoolboy:
Nor public flame nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall,
And universal Darkness buries all.
In 1943 when I recited this to a classmate at the Phillips Exeter Academy, he was bewildered. “Why did you learn that?” he asked. “Because,” I said, “it’s bound to be apt one of these days.” And so it is today, January 1, 2006.
Much time over thirty years was spent on the balcony overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Ulysses, more than usually off course, was believed to have sailed…well, rowed on the scenic route back home to Ithaca. Several miles to the back of my head are the temples of Paestum.
PHOTO CREDITS
Photography research by Ann Schneider
Chapter Five: Warner Brothers/Photofest
Chapter Six: Photofest
Chapter Seven: Collection of Gore Vidal
Chapter Seven: Gerald Bruneau/Grazia Neri/Polaris
Chapter Nine: Everett Collection
Chapter Eleven: U.P.I. Bettmann/CORBIS
Chapter Twelve: A.P. Images
Chapter Fourteen: Fred R. Conrad/New York Times
Chapter Fourteen: Collection of Gore Vidal
Chapter Sixteen: Everett Collection
Chapter Nineteen: Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos
Chapter Twenty: Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Sotheby’s
Chapter Twenty-Three: Paramount Pictures/Photofest
Chapter Twenty-Five: Keystone/Gamma
Chapter Twenty-Six: Collection of Gore Vidal
Chapter Twenty-Six: Everett Collection
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Phillips Exeter Academy Archives
Chapter Thirty: Bettmann/CORBIS
Chapter Thirty-Two: Bettmann/CORBIS
Chapter Thirty-Three: Collection of Gore Vidal
Chapter Thirty-Five: Collection of Gore Vidal
Chapter Thirty-Five: Collection of Gore Vidal
Chapter Thirty-Six: Polaris
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Collection of Gore Vidal
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Roddy McDowall
Chapter Forty-Two: Collection of Gore Vidal
Chapter Forty-Five: Eamonn McCabe/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.
Chapter Forty-Eight: Bettmann/CORBIS
Chapter Fifty-Two: Collection of Gore Vidal
Chapter Forty-Six: Eamonn McCabe/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-five novels, six plays, many screenplays, more than two hundred essays, and the critically lauded memoir Palimpsest. Vidal’s United States: Essays 1952–1992 won the 1993 National Book Award.
ALSO BY GORE VIDAL
NOVELS
Williwaw
In a Yellow Wood
The City and the Pillar
The Season of Comfort
A Search for the King
Dark Green, Bright Red
The Judgment of Paris
Messiah
Julian
Washington, D.C.
Myra Breckinridge
Two Sisters
Burr
Myron
1876
Kalki
Creation
Duluth
Lincoln
Empire
Hollywood
Live from Golgotha
The Smithsonian Institution
The Golden Age
NONFICTION
Inventing a Nation
SHORT STORIES
A Thirsty Evil
Clouds and Eclipses
PLAYS
An Evening with Richard Nixon
Weekend
Romulus
On the March to the Sea
The Best Man
Visit to a Small Planet
ESSAYS
Rocking the Boat
Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship
Homage to Daniel Shays
Matters of Fact and of Fiction
The Second American Revolution
At Home
Screening History
United States
The Last Empire
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
Imperial America
MEMOIR
Palimpsest
*1Diana Phipps’s collages (minus color) have b
een used as endpapers for this edition.
Return to text.
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2007
Copyright © 2006 by Gore Vidal
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.vintagebooks.com
This book contains excerpts from How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal by Marcie Frank. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press. Reprinted with the kind permission of Duke University Press.
Photo credits appear on Back Matter.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vidal, Gore, 1925–
Point to point navigation : a memoir, 1964 to 2006 / Gore Vidal.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Vidal, Gore, 1925–2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
PS3543.I26Z475 2006
818.5409—dc22
[B]
2006011644
eISBN: 978-0-307-38770-7
v3.0
