Still Guilty After All These Years: Sirhan B. Sirhan
By Mel Ayton
It has often been said that lurid theories about the Lincoln and JFK assassinations have thrived because neither John Wilkes Booth nor Lee Harvey Oswald received their day in court. The concept of due process is so embedded in the American psyche, in other words, that its denial inexorably gives rise to conspiratorial explanations.
The aftermath of Robert F. Kennedy’s June 1968 assassination, however, challenges this somewhat comforting observation.
In this instance, the assassin was literally caught red-handed—tackled by Kennedy’s bodyguards moments after the shots were fired, a .22 caliber revolver still in hand. When the trial of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old native of Palestine, opened seven months later, his defense counsel explained, “There will be no denial of the fact that our client . . . fired the shot that killed Senator Kennedy.”[1] Instead, Sirhan’s lawyers mounted a defense of not guilty because of “diminished capacity,” the only way to spare their client from what seemed to be his likely fate, the gas chamber at San Quentin.
Sirhan’s counsel had no other choice because the presiding judge, Herbert Van Walker, exercising his discretion, had summarily rejected a plea bargain that would have exchanged life imprisonment for a guilty plea. “We don’t want another Dallas,” Walker reportedly observed, repeating the mantra uttered moments after Sirhan’s apprehension.[2] Walker believed, presumably, that prosecuting Sirhan to the full extent of the law would avert the uncertainty that was already rampant with respect to the first Kennedy assassination. The Sirhan case was being tried at virtually the same time the awful miscarriage of justice in New Orleans—the circus-like persecution of Clay Shaw by district attorney Jim Garrison—was coming to a head. And that debacle was the direct outgrowth of the doubt and disbelief which existed because of Jack Ruby’s vigilantism, and the denial of due process for Oswald.
Sirhan Sirhan had his day in court, indeed, several months. Because of the extraordinary security precautions employed, Sirhan’s prosecution was judged the most expensive US trial ever held, costing the county of Los Angeles $900,000 ($5.3 million in 2007 dollars).[3] And despite the best efforts of his lawyers, Sirhan received the ultimate sanction. The only factor which saved him from being executed decades ago was that three years after his sentence was handed down in May 1969, the state Supreme Court declared California’s death penalty unconstitutional. Sirhan’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and Corcoran State Prison near Fresno, an infamous maximum-security facility, is where he remains to this day—along with other notorious inmates such as Charles Manson.
Judge Walker was not a naïve man, but even a cynic might have been hard pressed in 1969 to foresee how conspiracy theorists would succeed in twisting the facts in a ceaseless effort to raise doubts about what amounted to an open and shut case. Today it comes as little surprise, given the absence of any editorial vetting on the internet, to find many websites and blogs saturated with bogus revelations and mindless repetition of supposed “facts” that were, in actuality, refuted or rationally explained years ago.[4] The tide of nonsense is sufficiently high that on occasion, and as if by osmosis, palpable falsehoods are accepted and propagated by even the most venerable news organizations, as will be seen below.
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11 January 2008
Doubt and Disbelief in the Warren Report
By Max Holland and Tara Marie Egan
Last October, when the Lyndon B. Johnson Library released a new batch of recordings, one of the most revealing conversations went literally unnoticed. Yet, the 13½ minute conversation between President Johnson and Justice Abe Fortas on January 11, 1967—the day after LBJ had delivered his third State of the Union address to Congress—underscores one of the most striking insights ever to come from the once-secret tapes.
At the outset, in error, Lyndon Johnson blamed Robert F. Kennedy for fomenting the disbelief in the Warren Report
that was widespread by late 1966. Indeed, both Johnson and Fortas
viewed RFK’s reach and influence with such suspicion that to them, it
seemed conceivable that The New York Times had aborted its 1966 investigation into the Warren Commission because the Times’s findings had turned out to be too “favorable.”
Publication of a single story, much less a series, that put the
commission in a positive light would supposedly run counter to
Kennedy’s interests and might incur his displeasure, or so Johnson and
Fortas mistakenly thought.
Johnson’s toxic notions about RFK, to be sure, were not entirely unwarranted. A prima facie case could be made that Robert Kennedy was bent on putting the Warren Commission into disrepute. By the fall of 1966, despite a growing chorus of criticism of the Report, Kennedy, then the junior senator from New York, resolutely persisted in his policy of “no comment” with respect to all the controversies that had arisen in the assassination’s wake. His refusal to put a damper on the damaging speculation—in a way that only the slain president’s brother could—had the net effect of allowing baseless criticism to grow and deepen. In addition, Kennedy acolytes, like former White House aide Richard Goodwin, were writing or speaking out about alleged shortcomings in the Warren Commission’s investigation. In the absence of comment from Kennedy, it was not unreasonable to believe Goodwin was acting as Kennedy’s agent, writing what the New York senator dared not say himself.
Finally, of course, Johnson had every reason to believe Kennedy was intent on impugning the Warren Commission because of the publishing spectacle that had simply become known as the “Manchester affair.” Part soap opera, part opéra bouffe, this scandal had fixated the publishing world for more than three months by January 1967. Retained by the Kennedys to write the “authorized” version of the most agonizing four days in American history, Manchester had produced a book, The Death of a President, that depicted Lyndon Johnson in an unflattering light—an uncouth power-grabber from the very state with the unspeakable city that was responsible for the assassination. Sitting presidents had never been treated this way by a major New York publisher like Harper & Row. And although Johnson’s popularity was fast declining, the vast majority of the American people still appreciated the thoughtful and sensitive manner he had displayed immediately after the assassination, when the entire nation was on edge after the wrenching presidential transition. Now Manchester, the Kennedys’ chosen instrument, was trying to rob Johnson of his finest hour. The conversation with Fortas occurred two days after the first excerpt from Manchester’s book had been published in Look magazine.
Johnson’s near-paranoia about Robert Kennedy, however, could not have been more mistaken in this instance. The one person with the most to lose,
and nothing to gain, from a re-investigation of the assassination was
RFK himself. Re-opening the assassination would threaten again to
expose one of the darkest secrets from the Kennedy presidency, namely,
that RFK had been the leading advocate and motive force behind the
CIA’s plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Any re-investigation would
almost surely tug again at the loose strands from these plots, and,
as in 1964, threaten to unravel them. Ultimately, JFK’s martyrdom would
be put at risk, as would RFK’s ambition to lead a Kennedy restoration,
which might be the only way to repair the bottomless grief he felt over
his brother’s assassination.
Sooner than President Johnson could imagine, he would gradually become disabused of the notion that Robert Kennedy was intent on undermining public confidence in the Warren Report. Just five days after the conversation with Fortas, Washington columnist Drew Pearson would approach Johnson privately and tell him about an astonishing rumor: that the CIA had attempted to assassinate Castro numerous times in the early 1960s, and that most of these attempts had occurred at RFK’s direction, when the then-attorney general was “riding herd” on the agency for his brother.[1]
Johnson, though so embittered that he was inclined to believe the worst about RFK, still found Pearson’s story incredible. Later he would liken it to someone “tellin’ me that Lady Bird was taking dope.”[2] But as the rumor continued to gather force, the president would turn to CIA Director Richard Helms and ask for a full report. On May 10, five months after LBJ’s conversation with Fortas, the president would learn directly from Helms that the rumor was true, save for one aspect: there was no evidence that Castro had retaliated by ordering the assassination of President Kennedy.
Helms’s caveat would fall on unreceptive ears. Confirmation of the efforts to assassinate Castro astounded Johnson. That, together with the president’s innate proclivity to relate things that were not connected, meant that LBJ would go to his grave believing that “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first.”[3]
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22 November 2007
JFK’s Death, Re-Framed
FORTY-FOUR years ago today, a clothing company owner named Abraham Zapruder filmed the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. And for 44 years, most people have presumed that his home movie captured the assassination in its entirety. This presumption has led to deep misunderstandings.
The majority of witnesses in Dealey Plaza heard three shots fired. Lawmen found three cartridges in Lee Harvey Oswald’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Yet Zapruder’s film captured only two shots clearly. As a result, the film has been scoured for evidence of another shot, presumably the first one fired at the president. Research has yielded contradictory findings.
But what if Zapruder simply hadn’t turned on his camera in time?
Zapruder’s 26-second movie has two distinct parts. Approximately seven seconds after he started filming from the north side of Elm Street, Zapruder stopped his Bell & Howell Zoomatic at frame 132 because only Dallas police motorcycles were driving by. He did not restart his camera until the president’s limousine was clearly in view. Consequently, Z 133 is the first frame to actually show the president’s Lincoln—a frame exposed several seconds after the car had made the sharp turn onto Elm Street from Houston Street, and, we believe, after Oswald had squeezed off his first shot.
Several witnesses saw a man firing from the sixth floor. No one’s recollection about the first shot was more precise, though, than that of a ninth grader named Amos L. Euins. He told the Dallas County sheriff, “About the time the car got near the black and white sign, I heard a shot.”
As the photograph from a December 1963 restaging shows, the president’s limousine would have passed a black and white sign before Zapruder restarted his camera (the ghost image here approximates the location of the Lincoln at the moment Zapruder started his camera again). View this photo.
If one discards the notion that Zapruder recorded the shooting sequence in full, it has the virtue of solving several puzzles that have consistently defied explanation. The most exasperating one is how did Oswald, who was able to hit President Kennedy in his upper back at a distance of around 190 feet, and then in the head at a distance of 265 feet, manage to miss so badly on the first and closest shot?
A first shot earlier than anyone has ever posited gives a plausible answer. About 1.4 seconds before Zapruder restarted filming, a horizontal traffic mast extending over Elm Street temporarily obscured Oswald’s view of his target. That mast was never examined during any of the official investigations. Yet if this mast deflected the first shot, that would surely explain why the bullet missed not only the president, but the whole limousine. Significantly, the highway sign cited by Amos Euins was just a few feet west of the traffic light’s vertical post in 1963.
In May 1964, with the help of surveyors, the Warren Commission first considered the idea that a shot could have been fired before Zapruder restarted his camera. The commission later heard testimony that included references to what the staff labeled “Position A.” It did not appear on the Zapruder film, but represented the “first point at which a person in the sixth-floor window of the book building . . . could have gotten a shot at the president after the car had rounded the corner.”
If the commission had followed up this insight, it would have conceivably been able to describe the duration and intervals of the shooting sequence: that Oswald fired three shots in approximately 11.2 seconds, with intervals of 6.3 seconds and 4.9 seconds between the shots.
Why would this have mattered? Because the lack of a clear explanation for the shooting sequence was a key reason the Warren Report fell into disrepute.
And why has it taken so long to realize that the assassination and the Zapruder film are not one and the same? Part of the answer lies in the power of the film itself. As the critic Richard B. Woodward wrote in The Times in 2003, the assassination became “fused with one representation, so much so that Kennedy’s death is virtually unimaginable without Zapruder’s film.” To that, one has to add the element of distraction. The Warren Commission did not pursue its May 1964 insight because it was fixated not on the shot that missed but on the ones that killed the president.
If this belated revelation changes nothing from one perspective—Oswald still did it—it simultaneously changes everything, if only because it disrupts the state of mind of everyone who has ever been transfixed by the Zapruder film. The film, we realize, does not depict an assassination about to commence. It shows one that had already started.
Reprinted from The New York Times © 2007, The New York Times Company
All rights reserved.
Editor’s Postscript:
Not surprisingly, the radical explanation presented here (and earlier, in “11 Seconds in Dallas, Not Six”) has come under attack. Somewhat surprisingly, the most vociferous critics have not been conspiracy theorists, but come from the ranks of those who agree that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin in Dealey Plaza.
These critics are not only wedded to the Zapruder film for intellectual and emotional reasons. The most strident have a vested interest in an explanation that literally depends on the belief that the film equals the assassination. They are unable to conceive that anything of moment occurred outside the film, even though it is now patently clear that the notion that Zapruder captured the assassination in full was never more than an unwarranted presumption, however understandable.
The photograph that accompanied The New York Times Op-Ed—which depicted, from Oswald’s perspective, how belatedly Zapruder began filming—has not been challenged in any meaningful way. In their heated effort to impeach the one picture that says it all, the oft-condescending critics embrace the pettifoggery that has long been the hallmark of conspiracy theorists.
They also gloss over a critical and inconvenient fact. The initial essay found that three shots fired in approximately 11 seconds is in accord with five evidentiary considerations: ear-witness testimony; eyewitness statements; the fact that the first shot fired missed; Oswald’s mentality (which is, admittedly, a subjective issue); and lastly, the Warren Commission’s discovery of “Position A” in May 1964.
To these five, a Seattle lawyer named Ken Scearce recently, and independently, added a sixth consideration: the Zapruder film itself. Altogether, no other explanation previously offered fits all these six elements as neatly and plausibly. No other explanation comports with the balance and totality of all the available evidence.
The same cannot be said for explanations that stubbornly insist the assassination must fit within the mesmerizing time and space defined by the Zapruder film because . . . well, just because it has always been that way.
An expanded version of the “11 Seconds” analysis is being prepared, and will incorporate additional evidentiary elements.
11 June 2007
A Word About Lee Harvey Oswald
Editor’s Note: November is indelibly associated with the assassination of President Kennedy, and the fall is normally the period when major new books and articles are timed to appear. Because May marked what would have been John F. Kennedy’s 90th birthday, however, several notable new books appeared last month, including Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, David Talbot’s Brothers, Burton Hersh’s Bobby and J. Edgar, and James Piereson’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution. (Reclaiming History has already been reviewed for The Wall Street Journal and this website, and Brothers will be reviewed here in July.
Despite the unanticipated burst of attention, one aspect of November 22nd remains glossed over: the motivation that drove Lee Harvey Oswald to commit political murder. Washington Decoded is pleased to publish a new essay by the journalist and author who knew Oswald best, and wrote one of the lamentably few reliable books about the assassin of President Kennedy.
After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.
Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life. He had, by his account, become seriously interested in politics at fifteen or sixteen, when someone on a street corner in the Bronx handed him a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed two years earlier as spies for the Soviet Union. At eighteen, huddled in his Marine Corps barracks in Japan, he studied Russian from a Berlitz phrase book. And at nineteen, he wangled a hardship discharge from the Marines and made the arduous journey by steamship and train to the USSR.
Arriving there as a tourist, he immediately proclaimed to Russian authorities and officials of the U.S. embassy in Moscow that he intended to relinquish his U.S. citizenship and become a citizen of the USSR. It was at that moment in his life, November, 1959, that I happened to meet and talk with him.
I was a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance in search of a human interest story and he had just marked his twentieth birthday. I had no way of knowing that this boy dressed in a dark gray suit, white shirt, and dark red tie—he looked like an American college student—had, two weeks earlier, slashed his wrists in his hotel bathtub in a gesture of desperation after being informed by Soviet officials that he could not remain in the Soviet Union. Throughout our conversation, which took place over several hours in my room at the Metropole Hotel, I asked Oswald why he was defecting to the USSR, while he tried to engage me in a discussion of Marxist economics.
When I asked what would become of him if he returned to the United States, he replied that his lot would be that of “workers everywhere.” He would be ground down by capitalism as his mother, a practical nurse, had been. He spoke bitterly of racial discrimination in the United States, but did not disclose that as a schoolboy he had taken action against it by riding in the black section of the segregated buses of New Orleans.
While I realized that Oswald was angry at the country he was hoping to leave behind, I also sensed that his desire to live in the Soviet Union had something theoretical about it. He had traveled thousands of miles to get there, but had ventured no more than two blocks on his own and preferred to sit by himself in his hotel room rather than go sight-seeing in Moscow. So far as I could see, his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was based on neither knowledge of, or curiosity about, everyday life there.
The Russians refused Oswald’s plea for citizenship but allowed him to remain in their country. He, whether from anger at the way he claimed to have been treated by U.S. consul Richard E. Snyder, or from desire to leave himself an “out,” refused to return to the American embassy to reclaim the passport he had left behind.
In early 1960, a couple of months after I met him, Oswald was sent to the provincial city of Minsk and given a job at the Minsk Radio Plant. There he distinguished himself as a below-average worker, but embarked on an eight-month romance with a woman named Ella German of which he seemed to be proud. But Ella jilted him, and Oswald, to spite her, married nineteen-year-old pharmacist Marina Prusakova. Her friends and his co-workers quickly taught him the daily realities of Soviet life.
His disenchantment with the poverty, lack of amusement, and ubiquitous spying can be found in what he called his “Historic Diary” and in “The Collective,” an essay he started to write in the USSR. After less than two years in Minsk, Oswald opened a correspondence with the once-hated U.S. consul, Richard E. Snyder, in Moscow, seeking to return to the United States. Snyder’s superiors in Washington determined that, having left his passport at the embassy that angry autumn of 1959, Oswald had retained his citizenship.
In June, 1962, he was allowed to return to America, bringing Marina and their three month-old daughter, June. That summer and fall, and throughout the following winter, he held a series of menial, disheartening jobs, first repairing houses in Fort Worth, then as apprentice at a printing plant in Dallas. Oswald’s criticisms of the society around him returned with a vengeance, and his reading of two left-wing publications, The Worker, mouthpiece of the U.S. Communist Party, and The Militant, newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, helped focus his discontent. Oswald said of The Militant that “you can see what they want you to do by reading between the lines.”
05 April 2007
The JFK Files:
Cuba, Kennedy, and the Cold War
By Max Holland
Just when you thought you deserved a respite, here comes the thirtieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. More than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles have been published, and numerous documentaries and feature films produced, about November 22, 1963. Yet this anniversary will yield a bumper crop of offerings in every medium.
The persistent disbelief attached to the Warren Report, the ceaseless re-examinations, have to be grounded in unfinished business, some yearning that goes well beyond narrow questions such as whether all pertinent government documents have been released. In a letter to The New York Times, William Manchester skillfully identified this unrequited need last year. The author of The Death of a President wrote:
There is an aesthetic principle here. . . . If you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.
A conspiracy, of course, would do the job nicely.
If great events demand great causes, as Manchester argues, thirst for a conspiracy will never be slaked. As he stands, Oswald is unequal to the task of assassinating a president who, fairly or not, is sometimes rated higher than Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. But perhaps this anniversary ought to be an occasion to re-examine that imbalance, if possible, adjust the scales, and make the assassination coherent. In addition to marking thirty years, this November is the first major anniversary since the geopolitical rules changed and exaggerated passions and fears abated. Its more than possible that our understanding of the assassination, like so much else, has been obscured by cold war exigencies. New documentary evidence, not only about the assassination but also about Kennedy’s Cuba policy, has been released, and principal officials are talking, some after a long silence.
In his first Weekly published after the assassination, I.F. Stone wrote a passionate and piercing column on the fallen president entitled “We All Had a Finger on That Trigger”:
Let us ask ourselves honest questions. How many Americans have not assumed--with approval--that the CIA was probably trying to find a way to assassinate Castro? How many would not applaud if the CIA succeeded? . . . Have we not become conditioned to the notion that we should have a secret agency of government--the CIA--with secret funds, to wield the dagger beneath the cloak against leaders we dislike? Even some of our best young liberal intellectuals can see nothing wrong in this picture except that the “operational” functions of [the] CIA should be kept separate from its intelligence evaluations! . . Where the right to kill is so universally accepted, we should not be surprised if our young president was slain.
Drawing a rhetorical, unproven connection between the cold war mindset and Oswald’s stunning act was vintage Izzy Stone. With virtually every American still in shock, it took a journalistic dissenter to hold up the assassination against a backdrop of political violence contributed to by the United States. In retrospect, I.F. Stone was closer to understanding the context of the assassination than almost anyone at the time.
The full story is a bipartisan one. The Eisenhower administration was hardly shy about subverting unsympathetic Third World regimes, and uncounted soldiers and civilians died during CIA-backed shadow wars and coups in the 1950s. But ostensibly adverse trends apparent in 1959 raised a new question: If thousands of deaths were acceptable, why not the murder of particular persons? It might be a less costly way to nip unfriendly regimes in the bud or oust a pro-Western but repressive ruler who might engender a Communist takeover. “Executive action,” the assassination of actual or potential leaders deemed inimical, was added to the CIA’s bag of covert tactics. In fragmented and frequently violent Third World polities, executive action appeared quite feasible, the rewards worthwhile, the risks tolerable.
In 1960, four political murders were authorized as elements of wider covert operations designed to influence outcomes in the Congo, Iraq, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The respective targets were Patrice Lumumba, Abdul Karim Kassem, Rafael Trujillo and Fidel Castro, who was a quarry of special urgency. If Castro’s radicalism succeeded, the administration believed, Cuba promised to become a model for other Latin American revolutionaries and a bridgehead for Soviet subversion in the Western hemisphere. A major Soviet operational base and intelligence platform in America’s backyard was Washington’s worst nightmare.
Kennedy required little convincing about the need to act with similar dispatch. During the 1960 campaign, he had suggested that Castro’s rise to power was a symbol of America’s decline under Eisenhower. And uprooting Castro’s Cuba while simultaneously preventing another one in this hemisphere was to be a centerpiece of Kennedy’s foreign policy from the moment he took office. Kennedy was also highly enamored of the CIA’s proven ability to bend events in countries like Iran and Guatemala, and covert operations were in keeping with the action-oriented prosecution of the cold war he favored.
“Neutralizing” Castro was only one element, of course, in a far larger effort to land Cuban exiles in the spring of 1961 and foment a counterrevolution. But the Bay of Pigs invasion was an utter debacle and left Kennedy livid over the embarrassment caused his infant administration. As significant, Castro was no longer simply an enemy inherited from Eisenhower, and Kennedy became adamant about getting rid of him. As then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later testified, the administration was “hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter.”
In the wake of this rout, the president toyed with the idea of replacing Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Instead, he ordered RFK, his most trusted confidant and adviser, to poke around the agency and find out what had gone wrong. Operating with his usual zeal, Robert Kennedy immersed himself in agency affairs, and as he came to understand the CIA’s capabilities he emerged its most ardent champion.
By November 1961 the covert effort to eliminate Castro resumed in earnest. Code-named MONGOOSE, the campaign aimed to destabilize Castro’s regime rather than to overthrow it suddenly. Every possible tactic would be brought to bear, including hostile diplomacy, a trade embargo, paramilitary sabotage, psychological warfare, and assassination. President Kennedy installed his brother as a kind of czar over the entire, uniquely compartmented operation, in effect the unofficial but unmistakable overseer of the CIA’s Directorate of Plans with respect to Cuba, the covert action shop then run by Richard Helms. As Senator Harris Wofford (then a White House aide) wrote in his 1980 book, Of Kennedys & Kings:
The attorney general was the driving force behind the clandestine effort to overthrow Castro. From inside accounts of the pressure he was putting on the CIA to “get Castro,’ he seemed like a wild man who was out-CIAing the CIA.
For the first nine months of 1962, MONGOOSE was the administration’s top covert priority and Castro practically a fixation for Robert Kennedy. At one of the first meetings, he told the assembled officials that his brother “really wanted action” and that “no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.” Robert Kennedy made field trips to MONGOOSE facilities in Florida, and if a sabotage raid was scheduled he insisted on knowing such unimportant details as what sidearms the exiles would be carrying. His micro-management extended to almost daily telephone conversations with Helms, during which Kennedy applied “white heat” pressure.
Although MONGOOSE did not envision U.S. military intervention until an internal revolt erupted, this distinction was lost on Castro. He found a sympathetic ear in Nikita Khrushchev. Initially, the Soviets had been wary of supporting Castro. He was not a card-carrying member of the Cuban Communist Party when he rode into Havana, and the Kremlin doubted his staying power. But a combination of factors persuaded Khrushchev in 1962 to order a Soviet military buildup in Cuba.
Nothing about the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis need concern us except the end-game. In its wake, some Kennedy advisers advocated trying to wean Castro from the Soviets because he was smarting over their “betrayal.” Ultimately, however, a modest program of covert subversion was put into place in 1963. As before, it included the goal of eliminating Castro. And though it strains credulity, plotting Castro’s demise in 1963 was at once the most sensitive secret in Washington and the most talked about. Because Helms operated directly under Robert Kennedy, even the CIA chief who replaced Dulles, John McCone, was in the dark.[1] Yet simultaneously, as I.F. Stone hinted, doing away with Castro was a favorite topic at Georgetown dinner parties.
By late 1963, Castro had been the target of almost a dozen assassination attempts. Several had varying degrees of CIA involvement, while Cuban exiles acting independently were responsible for the balance. All the attempts were plagued by informers, incompetence and Fidel’s plain good luck.
Still, Castro did not like the odds. On September 7, 1963, he gave a three-hour interview to the Associated Press during a reception at the Brazilian embassy in Havana. Largely devoted to vehement denunciations of U.S. policy and it maker, Castro included a pointed comment about assassination plots. “United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe,” he warned.
A leading newspaper in New Orleans, the Times-Picayune, was among the U.S. papers that picked up Castro’s unusual interview with an American wire service. His warning was the lead paragraph in a four-column, page 7 story on September 9. In all New Orleans, no one was more likely to be interested and believe in what Castro had to say than the city’s most ardent supporter of the Cuban revolution, a 24-year-old ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald.
Ascribing a political motive to Oswald doesn’t hinge on whether he read one newspaper article, though in all likelihood he did. Because of his politics he was extraordinarily sensitive to the hostile U.S. policy toward Cuba, as author Jean Davison painstakingly pointed out in Oswald’s Game, an undeservedly neglected biography published in 1983. In a profound sense, Oswald was only marginally less informed than, say, John McCone, about the furious effort to overthrow Castro. Diplomatic attempts to isolate Cuba--such as throwing it out of the Organization of American States in 1962 were a matter of public record. So was the trade embargo, tightened considerably by Kennedy in 1961 and again in 1962. The Bay of Pigs proved U.S. antipathy went well beyond conventional containment, while MONGOOSE and subsequent operations generated a lot of “noise” in the press, particularly in the left-wing periodicals Oswald devoutly read. Anyone who monitored Radio Havana, organized his very own “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” chapter and marched around New Orleans with a placard that read “Viva Fidel!” and “Hands off Cuba!” was aware of all this.
Of equal moment, by mid-1963 Oswald had twice demonstrated the psychological capacity to commit life-threatening acts. The first act occurred in 1959, when he slit his left wrist after the Soviet government initially refused to accept him as an important defector. The second, even more suggestive incident, occurred in the spring of 1963. Oswald had returned to America in June 1962, having left the Soviet Union because it turned out to be no better than his homeland. But in his own mind he remained a committed Marxist, with a decided taste for self-spun intrigue and drama. Upon his return Oswald moved to Dallas, coincidentally the home of one of the most outspoken American opponents of Communism, Edwin Walker, a former Army general. Walker had resigned in November 1961 after distributing John Birch Society literature to U.S. troops in West Germany. He had subsequently chosen Dallas as the most appropriate command post for anti-Communist speaking tours and other right-wing activities. The Cuban missile crisis had given an extra boost to Walker’s already prominent profile, and in February 1963 the Dallas media were full of stories about his decision to join evangelist Billy James Hargis in “Operation Midnight Ride,” a five-week national tour dedicated to fighting Communism.
Oswald put Walker under surveillance after these news stories appeared, and in late March ordered a rifle through the mail under an alias. Over the next few weeks he quietly stalked the general. When the Mannlicher-
Carcano weapon arrived, Oswald’s wife, Marina, took the infamous picture of Oswald posing with rifle in hand; he was “ready for anything.” On April 10, he attempted to assassinate Walker as the general sat in his living room, working on his taxes. The next morning Oswald turned on the radio fully expecting to hear that Walker was dead. He was still alive. Oswald was only sorry that he had missed.
That summer Oswald moved with his wife and daughter to New Orleans to make a fresh start. There his concern for Castro became all-consuming. Cuba was the embodiment of Communist ideology, the truly revolutionary country. And for the first time in years, his political efforts brought him the attention he thought he deserved all along. Oswald started his “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” chapter, forging signatures to make it look like the chapter had more than one member. He leafleted and walked the streets of New Orleans with his “Viva Fidel!” placard, and to his immense satisfaction, a local TV news show aired his protest for two minutes. He was even arrested for getting into a fracas with an anti-Communist Cuban, Carlos Bringuier, whose group he had tried to infiltrate days earlier.
In September, the Times-Picayune published Castro’s denunciation of U.S. policy and his warning. It was one of the most prominent news articles then published about renewed U.S. hostility to Cuba after the missile crisis, but far from the only one. Oswald developed a new impulse--he had to get to Cuba immediately to help defend the revolution. He arranged to send his family back to Irving, Texas, and on September 25, left for Mexico City and the Cuban consulate there.
Oswald presented himself as a “friend of Cuba.” But justifiably suspicious of all Americans--especially one who appeared unstable--the Cuban consul refused to issue a visa. Oswald returned to Dallas on October 3, embittered at not immediately being recognized for who he truly was. After two weeks he got a job through a friend of Marina’s as an order filler at the Texas School Book Depository. By now, Dallas newspapers were full of daily reports about the impending visit of President Kennedy to Texas. While the president’s itinerary was still sketchy, an opportunity for another violent act was slowly forming itself. When the precise route of the motorcade was published on November 19, Oswald, having failed to kill Walker, was “suddenly faced with the possibility of having a much greater impact on history,” as Gerald Posner writes in his book, Case Closed.
What finally catalyzed Oswald into action is impossible to prove. But in the two earlier instances when he actually took violent action--as opposed to imagining or talking about it--his proximate motive was manifestly political. When he acted out his internal demons violently, it was on a political stage. Nor was his drive to be recognized as a revolutionary capable of daring acts inconsistent with his desire to prove his importance to family and friends. In fact, they must have seemed terrifyingly reinforcing. All his life was a rehearsal for this moment.
Call it a tragic demonstration of the principle of unintended consequences. Or as journalist Daniel Schorr later put it, “an arrow launched into the air to kill a foreign leader may well have fallen back to kill our own.” As Lyndon Johnson announced the formation of a presidential commission to investigate the assassination, no one had more reason to suspect this awful truth, and be burdened by it, than the slain president’s brother.
Making sense of the assassination requires making the aftermath as coherent as the act itself. Clearly, the Warren Commission is the most difficult aspect to come to terms with. On the one hand, President Johnson created the commission with an express mandate to get to the bottom of the assassination. It was headed by then-Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose reputation for probity was nearly unblemished, and several commissioners were singularly versed in intelligence and national security affairs, notably Allen Dulles and John McCloy. On the other hand,a decade after publication of the Warren Report, it became known that government officials who had pertinent information had purposely and willfully deceived the commission.[2] Is it possible to square this circle, and still arrive at the same basic finding as the Warren Commission?
First, the logic of those officials who withheld critical secrets must be understood. From their perspective, nothing about the assassination--neither the magnitude of the national trauma nor the commission’s mandate--superseded normal CIA procedures. Plausible deniability and compartmentalization of information still applied to the plots against Castro as well as to other authorized, ongoing covert activities directed against his regime. If the commission were to demonstrate an unambiguous need to know about the assassination plots, the question of what to do would have to be faced. But until and unless that happened, pertinent information was never going to be volunteered.
The CIA would have faced a genuine dilemma only if the withheld information pointed to someone other than Oswald, or someone acting in concert with him. The Warren Commission could not deliver to the American people and the world, as its fundamental finding, a false conclusion. But if the withheld information proved congruent with the finding that Oswald was a lone assassin-and it only bolstered that conclusion--the agency had every reason to adhere to its ingrained practices.
Consequently, the CIA was quite cooperative about responding to specific requests submitted by the Warren Commission staff. On more than one occasion it volunteered information the commission was unaware existed but had a demonstrated need to know, even if the information came from such highly secret means as eavesdropping or mail intercepts. And when a KGB lieutenant colonel named Yuri Nosenko defected in early 1964 with important testimony about Oswald’s (non-existent) links to the KGB, the commission was thoroughly informed.[3] But Richard Helms, who was both knowledgeable about the anti-Castro plots and the highest-ranking CIA official in close contact with the commission, refused to volunteer anything else. At times, he even deflected commission staff from leads that threatened to get into sensitive areas. As Helms later explained to a Congressional committee, he did not believe that the plots were “relevant” to the commission’s inquiry.
When the Warren Report was published in September 1964, it presented a portrait of the assassin as a resentful loner: Oswald, though highly politicized, acted upon inchoate feelings of alienation but without acute political reason. Absent his confession, and denied insight into an important part of the equation by the CIA and others, the commission staff had decided that it could not ascribe to Oswald “any one motive or group of motives.” The report gave ample details about Oswald’s political activities but in a detached, clinical manner. In the end, he was left to become Manchester’s wretched waif: a callow hater trying to elbow his way into history by striking out at a president who had it all--looks, youth, and power. Not untrue, and perhaps the commission had little alternative. But the explanation rings hollow given Oswald’s extraordinary political beliefs. As staff member (now Ohio state judge) Burt Griffin later remarked, “The fact that we could not come up with a motive for Oswald was a great weakness in the report.”
What did Robert Kennedy, who remained attorney general throughout, do while the Warren Commission conducted its investigation? As David Belin, a counsel to the commission, recounts in his book, Final Disclosure, the chief justice personally wrote Kennedy in June 1964, informing him of the commission’s progress and asking him if he was aware of “any additional information relating to the assassination” of his brother “which has not been sent to the Commission.” In particular, Warren emphasized the importance of information bearing on the question of a domestic or foreign conspiracy.
When Kennedy responded, he was no more forthcoming than the CIA. All the information in the possession of the Justice Department (emphasis added) had been sent to the commission, Kennedy wrote, which was a restrictive interpretation of Warren’s request and inaccurate anyway, since Kennedy knew the FBI was aware of some of the plots against Castro. RFK went on to say that he had “no suggestions to make at this time regarding any additional investigation which should be undertaken by the Commission prior to the publication of its report.”
Kennedy’s outward mien during these months comports with what might be expected of a man tortured by knowledge that he, almost alone, carried. William Manchester reports that many in the Kennedy clan were crushed by the assassination, then righted themselves after the funeral. But during the spring of 1964, a “brooding Celtic agony . . . darken[ed] [Kennedy’s] life.” What genuinely sent him reeling? The “tragedy without reason” of his brother’s death, as RFK’s biographer, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., put it? Or was it the death, topped by the shattering realization that somehow the Kennedys’ fixation on Castro had inadvertently motivated a political sociopath?
Belin provides a suggestive answer in Final Disclosure. He recounts a conversation with John McCone in 1975, after news of the assassination plots finally surfaced along with Robert Kennedy’s knowl