Washington Decoded

Oliver Stone on Garrison's Demon

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   This letter-to-the-editor appeared in the Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2001.

 

    To suggest, as Max Holland does [in “The Demon in Jim Garrison”] that Jim Garrison somehow is the root cause of Americans’ current distrust in their government is absurd. Garrison himself, a combat veteran who had served in the US military for 23 years, accepted the Warren Commission’s verdict on the Kennedy assassination for three years. By the time he started his investigation, a substantial number of Americans already believed there was a conspiracy and a cover-up. So Garrison was catching up to the American people, not leading them.   

    Americans’ distrust of their government stems from decades of lies and cover-ups by arms of the government, including the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s and ’50s: the Warren Commission: the executive branch (especially during the Vietnam War; the “credibility gap” existed long before Garrison said a word about the Kennedy assassination): and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (e.g., COINTELPRO, etc.). As the lies have accumulated, so Americans’ distrust of their government has grown.

    Holland’s comparison of Garrison to Senator Joseph McCarthy shows that he lacks a fundamental understanding of McCarthyism. The essence of McCarthyism was that a member of Congress or a witness before a witch-hunting congressional committee could throw accusations around about Communists and spies in the State Department or in Hollywood or in labor unions without ever having to produce any evidence. The accusers were not accountable because they were protected by congressional immunity. Those accused did not have the right to scrutinize the evidence or to confront or cross-examine their accusers. In other words, Joseph McCarthy never operated under the rules of law.

    Jim Garrison, as a prosecutor, brought his accusations through the legal process. Clay Shaw was indicted by a grand jury of 22, had a pretrial hearing before three judges, and received a full trial. The evidence was available to him. He was able to confront his accusers and to cross-examine them. The fact that Garrison lost the case does not make him a Joseph McCarthy. Prosecutors bring cases all the time that do not gain convictions.

    And in the Shaw case, there are many reasons why Garrison lost. His investigation was sabotaged from day one. Every single one of his requests for extradition of witnesses from other states was denied. Federal attorneys refused to serve his subpoenas on Allen Dulles and other former Central Intelligence Agency officials. Garrison’s offices were bugged, and he was constantly under surveillance by the FBI. His requests for crucial evidence such as Lee Harvey Oswald’s tax records and the Kennedy autopsy photos were denied. Key witnesses such as David Ferrie and Eladio del Valle died under mysterious circumstances. The CIA, as reported by former CIA official Victor Marchetti, was helping Shaw at trial. Garrison’s files were stolen by a “volunteer” and given to Shaw’s defense attorneys before trial. And Garrison was pilloried in the press.   

    Garrison’s treatment by the press was part of an orchestrated effort by the CIA to discredit critics of the Warren Commission. A CIA memo dated April 1, 1967, outlined the strategy and called for the agency’s “assets” in the media (writers and editors) to publish stories about the critics that said they were politically motivated, financially motivated, ego-maniacal, crazy, sloppy in their research, etc. This is exactly the inaccurate portrait of Garrison that emerged in the press.

    Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins, describes what actually led him to the conclusion that the CIA was involved. He gradually uncovered pieces of evidence and witnesses, beginning with David Ferrie, who worked for the CIA; a gunrunning raid by CIA operatives in Houma, Louisiana; the fact that several of Oswald’s coworkers at Reily Coffee Company in New Orleans now worked at NASA; the fact that Oswald was working out of an office that was running the CIA’s local training camps for Operation MONGOOSE; many eyewitnesses who saw Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, and Oswald together, etc.   

    There is no doubt that the Paese Sera article was another piece of the puzzle for Garrison, but he had neither the staff nor the resources to go to Europe and follow up its leads. And it was not the centerpiece of his thinking that Holland makes it out to be.  

    A final note: During the shooting of our film in New Orleans, we noted that in spontaneous encounters on the street or in places of business, Jim was constantly hailed and approached by local supporters with great respect, greetings, and smiles. He was a clear favorite of the African American population and white working class, and was a popular, twice-elected district attorney who ran on and enforced a reform slate. The only hatred we found directed at him was expressed by people with special interests in the case, or by the power structure of the city.   

    We continue to be amazed and appalled at the disproportionate obloquy and scandal directed at Mr. Garrison. Anyone really interested in witnessing the man’s probity and clear-headedness need only watch his 30-minute address (without any notes) on national TV, granted him by the Federal Communications Commission after NBC aired a clearly biased and uncorroborated disinformation piece about him.

                                                                                                                      Oliver Stone & Zachary Sklar

                                                                                                                      Cowriters, JFK
                                                                                                                      Santa Monica, California

The Demon in Jim Garrison

Editor’s Note: For Oliver Stone’s critique of this story, click here.

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By Max Holland

    On March 1, 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested a prominent local businessman named Clay Shaw and charged him with master-minding the crime of the century: the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It was a bizarre and groundless accusation by a supremely ambitious prosecutor, but Shaw was not its only victim. This terrible miscarriage of justice was to have immense, if largely unappreciated, consequences for the political culture of the United States.

    Of all the legacies of the 1960s, none has been more unambiguously negative than the American public’s corrosive cynicism toward the federal government. Although that attitude is commonly traced to the disillusioning experiences of Vietnam and Watergate, its genesis lies in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination. Well before anti-war protests were common, lingering dissatisfaction with the official verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone broadened into a widespread conviction that the federal government was incompetent or suppressing the truth or, in the worst case, covering up its own complicity in the assassination. Today, national polls consistently show that a vast majority of Americans (upward of 75 percent) do not accept that Oswald alone killed President Kennedy. Many also believe that a co-conspirator lurked in Washington, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) always the prime suspect.

    No individual was more responsible for fomenting these beliefs than Shaw’s nemesis, Jim Garrison. There were other critics of the Warren Commission’s official report on the assassination, but none had the authority of a duly- elected law enforcement official; none could match the flamboyant Garrison’s skill in casting himself as the archetypal lone hero battling for the truth; and none was more adept at manipulating the Zeitgeist of the 1960s. His audacity and lack of scruple were breathtaking, though camouflaged by lean good looks that made Garrison appear like a prosecutor ordered up by central casting. Not since Senator Joseph McCarthy had America seen such a cunning demagogue.

    Initially, Garrison explained that, in indicting Shaw, he was only assuming an unsought, even unwanted, burden. The federal government’s bungling of the case left an honest prosecutor no other choice, he asserted. Soon that rationale was replaced by a far darker fable. Within two months of Shaw’s arrest, Garrison began articulating a truly radical critique that challenged not only the veracity of the Warren Report but the federal government’s very legitimacy. Ultimately, he would claim that the people’s elected leader had been removed in a CIA-led mutiny, and that the plotters had been allowed to walk away unscathed. As he wrote in his 1988 memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins, “What happened at Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963, was a coup d’état. I believe that it was instigated and planned long in advance by fanatical anticommunists in the United States intelligence community.”

    The fact that a New Orleans jury delivered a resounding verdict of “not guilty” after Shaw’s 1969 trial barely hindered Garrison’s ability to market this myth of CIA complicity. He would argue that the “validity” of his investigation ought not to be judged on its technical, legal results. And one has to admit that, in the court of public opinion at least, Garrison (who died in 1992) by and large succeeded, albeit with Hollywood’s help.

    Until recently, it was impossible to revisit this episode as a historian would, by examining primary documents. Garrison’s records were in the possession of his descendants and his successors in office; Shaw’s papers were in the hands of his attorneys and friends; the CIA’s records were secured in agency vaults. But all that began to change after Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 film, JFK, which breathed new life into Garrison’s decades-old charges. As the end of the Cold War eased concerns about secrecy, Congress in 1992 passed the far-reaching JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. It not only freed highly classified documents from government bureaucracies but authorized the gathering of primary materials from nongovernmental sources.

    What emerges from these papers, and from other, unexpected quarters, is an altogether new view of the Garrison story. The district attorney who legitimated the notion of CIA complicity emerges as an all-too-willing accomplice to a falsehood. Garrison allowed himself to be taken in by a lie, a lie that may well have been part and parcel of the Soviet KGB’s relentless propagation of disinformation during the Cold War.

Why RFK Shunned the Inquiry into His Brother’s Assassination

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By Max Holland

   

    For the federal government, and all Americans, it has been a long, torturous road from the 6th floor of 411 Elm Street in Dallas to the second floor of 600 E Street in Washington. But now these two red brick buildings are irrevocably connected in history as the federal government writes the last chapter of its part in the tragedy which, 35 years ago, struck dumb an entire nation.

    Four-eleven Elm Street is more commonly known by the name of its former tenant, the Texas School Book Depository Company. The nondescript building at 600 E Street has no such claim on the national consciousness, though over time the work of one tenant there will do as much or more to shape history - if reason ever prevails over our paranoia with respect to the assassination of President Kennedy.

    For the past four years, five presidential appointees have labored almost anonymously, yet tirelessly, in Suite 208 to make public every significant artifact and document related to November 22, 1963, and its aftermath. Within a matter of days the Assassination Records Review Board, as the appointees are collectively known, will publish its final report and shut down for good on September 30th.

    Unlike every previous federal effort, however, the review board will not assert a single conclusion, in keeping with its mandate. It will report only what it managed to find. It’s up to others to make sense out of the four-million-page collection, assembled at the cost of $ 8 million to the taxpayers.

    While there are 10,000 stories in those documents, including many peripheral to the assassination, it is not premature to ask how, if at all, they affect our understanding of the emotional and political Grand Canyon that opened beneath our gaze in 1963.

     Many of the documents have lain open for months already. Whether by accident or design, the review board has shed new light on the genuine Rosetta stone to that weekend in Dallas, namely, the response of Robert F. Kennedy to his brother’s murder.

    The version heretofore propagated was congenial to the Camelot metaphor, though independent of it. Roughly described, the preferred account has been that Robert Kennedy, attorney general at the time, was so profoundly devastated by the loss that he paid little heed to who was responsible for the assassination. “Jack’s gone and nothing is going to bring him back” was RFK’s refrain whenever he was intermittently pressed on his apparent uninterest in the Warren Commission’s investigation.

    The truth turns out to be considerably more complicated and interesting. Through the review board’s efforts, you can piece together as never before the genuine, underlying reason for Robert Kennedy’s uncharacteristic response. His pain was compounded by guilt. Because what occurred in Dallas was roughly what Robert Kennedy hoped and planned to have happen in Havana.

  While a dozen documents retrieved and declassified help to build this case, the single most striking is an Oval Office memorandum of conversation dated January 4, 1975, almost 12 years after Dallas. There are only three men in the room that Saturday morning as the discussion begins: Gerald Ford, president for a mere five months; Henry Kissinger, who held unprecedented power as Ford’s secretary of state and national security adviser, and Brent Scowcroft, the note-taker (and later a national security adviser in his own right). The urgent, 9:40 a.m. meeting was called because the season of inquiry spawned by Watergate had not exhausted itself. But now the target was not a president but the sacrosanct Central Intelligence Agency, which was hanging in the fire after press reports of “massive” wrongdoing.

    Kissinger is conveying to Ford the gist of his just-concluded breakfast conversation with former CIA Director Richard Helms, who had been summoned from Tehran to brief the White House about the alleged misdeeds. “What is happening,” Kissinger tells the president, “is worse than in the days of McCarthy. You will end up with a CIA that does only reporting, and not operations.

    “Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.”

    The suggestion has already been made (this memo was opened in July) that the document does not really mean what it states in plain English, that it must be carefully put into context. Yet it is precisely the context that makes this document dispositive. Unless the White House could devise a mechanism, the CIA’s days as an instrument of presidential power were numbered. But the president had to have all the facts to act effectively. It is inconceivable that Richard Helms told Henry Kissinger anything less than the full, hard truths as Helms knew them and as Kissinger needed to know them. As Allen Dulles once explained the need-to-know principle, “I would tell the president of the United States anything . . . I am under his control. He is my boss.”

    This truth about Robert Kennedy’s bottomless melancholy, which never fully lifted during the reminder of his life, has at least three implications. For one, it helps explain his uninterest in the Warren Commission. Months before that federal panel presented its conclusion - indeed, probably no later than Christmas 1963 - he had reached the unavoidable conclusion, relying on his own crack investigators: Oswald, though enamored of Castro, had acted alone and Jack Ruby was a self-appointed vigilante. None of RFK’s bete noires - not Castro, Jimmy Hoffa or the Cosa Nostra - had anything to do with the Dallas murders. Consequently the Warren Commission was not going to tell him anything he did not already know.

  Indeed, in some respects the Warren Commission’s investigation represented a threat, first to the Kennedy administration’s image and then to RFK’s own political viability. That is the only conceivable reason why Kennedy, when specifically asked by Earl Warren, did not share his knowledge of anti-Castro plotting with the Warren Commission. One is left with the bleak, sobering fact that Robert Kennedy and other high-ranking officials, no less than the CIA, realized that the national interest (as apart from the truth) would not be served by having the Warren Commission delve into and probably expose the plotting.

    Rock-solid intelligence proved Castro had nothing to do with Oswald. Therefore, whatever the US government was trying to do was irrelevant to the issue of Oswald’s culpability. The same need-to-know principle that compelled full disclosure in 1975 dictated in 1964 that the chief justice and Warren Commission staff be kept in the dark insofar as possible. And so they were.

    Robert Kennedy’s anguish and predicament turns out to be the metaphor for understanding the aftermath of the assassination. The entire, vast apparatus of the federal government had been put in motion to find out who had murdered a president. But once the facts pointed overwhelmingly in one and only one direction, the truth was portioned out to protect individuals and bureaucracies.

    It’s not the civic portrait (a government of laws, not men) depicted by high school textbooks. But it is the legacy left behind by the Assassination Records Review Board, and it ought to shift the entire axis of public understanding. Will Americans ever come to terms with this portrait of imperfection, and understand that for all the omissions, their government did not fail in its one supreme duty - which was to tell the people who had killed their president.

This article first appeared in The Boston Globe, 18 September 1998
© 1998 by Max Holland

Politics and Intelligence: The “Photo Gap” That Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba

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By Max Holland

    The Kennedy administration harbored three great secrets in connection with the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, not just two, as widely understood.

    The most sensitive, of course, was the quid pro quo that ended the acute phase of the crisis. In exchange for the prompt, very public, and verified withdrawal of Soviet missiles, President Kennedy publicly pledged not to invade Cuba and secretly committed to quietly dismantling Jupiter missile sites in Turkey in 1963. Management of this first secret was so masterful— involving public dissembling, private disinformation, and a plain lack of information—that the quid pro quo remained a lively, but unconfirmed, rumor for nearly three decades.

    The second secret involved keeping a lid on Washington’s ongoing effort to subvert Fidel Castro’s regime. Operation MONGOOSE, which was overseen by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, played a significant role in fomenting the missile crisis. Yet that covert effort was not part of the public discourse in 1962 and remained a secret in this country until the mid-1970s. Only after an unprecedented Senate probe into intelligence activities did enough information seep out to reveal that Castro’s fears of US military intervention (and Soviet claims to that effect) were not wholly unfounded, however mistaken.

    It was the administration’s third secret, however, that has proven the hardest to unpack. The Kennedy administration “shot itself in the foot” when it limited U-2 surveillance for five crucial weeks in 1962, which is why it took the government a full month to spot offensive missiles in Cuba. If proved, this “photo gap,” as it was dubbed by Republican critics, threatened to tarnish the image of “wonderfully coordinated and error-free ‘crisis management’” that the White House sought to project before and after October 1962. The administration’s anxiety over whether cover stories about the gap might unravel even trumped, for a time, its concern over keeping secret the quid pro quo. After all, an oral assurance with the Soviets concerning the Jupiters could always be denied, while proof of the photo gap existed in the government’s own files.

    Largely because the administration labored mightily to obfuscate the issue, the photo gap remains under-appreciated to this day, notwithstanding the vast literature on the missile crisis. Recently declassified documents finally permit history to be filled in 43 years after the crisis, and these same records alter the conventional story in at least one important respect. John McCone, the director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and the CIA as a whole were deeply distrusted by key administration officials in the weeks leading up to discovery of the missiles. Moreover, the rampant uncertainty that prevailed within the Agency, itself, has been downplayed, if not forgotten, to the detriment of depicting the complexity of what actually occurred.

    The literature on the crisis has painted a rosier-than-warranted picture of how human intelligence, assiduously collected in September, finally overcame self-imposed restrictions on U-2 overflights. What actually happened was not a textbook case of how the system should work. And although tension between the CIA and the administration abated after the crisis, it was not by very much. Lingering sensitivity over the photo gap left a chill in the relationship between the DCI and the Kennedy brothers, a result that can only be labeled ironic, given McCone’s role in securing the critical photo coverage.

    An article on the “photo gap” appeared in the Winter 2005  edition of Studies in Intelligence, and may be read by clicking here.

    Postscript: As the story of the “photo gap” shows, the relationship between policy-makers, who prefer to learn whatever corroborates their conceptions, and intelligence officers, who are often cast in the role of telling the White House what it doesn't want to hear, is a never-ending struggle. It is grounded in human nature, and human nature is inveterate. Still, the abuse of that relationship during the Bush administration was unprecedented.

© 2005 by Max Holland

Greed Is All Right

Den of Thieves
By James B. Stewart
Simon & Schuster. 493 pp. $24.95

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By Max Holland

    If James Stewart's Den of Thieves (Simon & Schuster, 1991) is just half accurate, Wall Street’s mores and culture in the 1980s bore an amazing resemblance to the Mafia’s. As depicted by Stewart, Wall Street was a world unto itself greased by the exchange of favors. Money, power and sex defined status. Providing for one’s family was the ostensible excuse for any behavior, and only suckers played without an edge. Wall Street argot, as in “This company is going down” or “We’ll squeeze the board of directors,” bespoke violence, albeit of an economic kind. The universe outside was viewed with contempt, and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawyers (the cops on the beat) were fools too stupid to make it on the Street. Whenever the SEC mounted an investigation, Wall Street prized silence and loyalty above telling the truth. In practice, though, betrayal to save one’s own skin was commonplace. Den of Thieves reads like the script from director Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, with investment banker Martin Siegel in the role played by Ray Liotta.

    The great strength of this book lies in its use of SEC documents and federal court records, supplemented by interviews, to construct a story valuable, above all, for its coherence. Readers who closely followed newspaper accounts of the criminal misdeeds of Dennis Levine, Martin Siegel, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, the four main culprits in Den of Thieves, will still have their eyes opened by Stewart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with a law degree. Even the outstanding coverage of The Wall Street Journal, where Stewart is front-page editor, is no substitute for a sustained narrative that weaves together new information with half-forgotten facts. In particular, the means by which the government lawyers bring down “the Russian” (Boesky) and then Milken is crucial to understanding the whole sorry mess. Half the book is devoted to that grinding, slow-motion chase, most of which has never been reported, and it is the better half of the book.

    Few characters emerge with their reputations intact, fewer still with their reputations enhanced. Of the latter, the most prominent is Federal Judge Kimba Wood (a Reagan appointee, it must be pointed out), who sentenced Milken to ten years in prison precisely because he committed “only crimes that were unlikely to be detected.” Wood is to this scandal what John Sirica was to Watergate, a judge who restored some faith in the system, although Sirica had to work much harder and longer. Stewart’s other heroes are the SEC and Justice Department attorneys who persevered, finding resolve in the knowledge that they were, as one of them put it, “engaged in the single most important thing we would ever do in our lives.” Admirable characters outside the government are harder to find. Perhaps only Harvey Pitt acquitted himself well. Pitt, a former SEC general counsel who represented, among others, Ivan Boesky, managed to serve the interests of his clients and Justice at the same time.

    That Milken emerges as the most malign individual among large cast of unsavory characters 1s no surprise. As late as 1986 Boesky seemed to have that mantle all to himself. In that year he defined the spirit of the eighties with his “greed is all right” commencement speech at Berkeley, not uncoincidentally marking Ronald  Reagan’s ultimate triumph over the campus that launched the Free Speech Movement. But Stewart rightly shows that Boesky, the arbitrageur, paled next to Milken, the junk bond king. It may have been a symbiotic relationship, but it was not equal. Boesky did Milken’s bidding, and so the decade ended with Milken as the embodiment of greed.

How to Kill a Company: Anatomy of a Leveraged Buyout

 

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By Max Holland

   

    Phil O’Reilly recognized that his company, Houdaille Industries, was taking a gamble when it underwent a leveraged buyout in 1979. A bad year or two could suck the Florida-based conglomerate into a whirlpool of debt. Ultimately, it might have to sell off its most attractive assets to satisfy creditors and buyout investors.

    But if nothing untoward happened, if Houdaille managed to service its debt, then O’Reilly knew that by 1984 a “pot of gold” awaited him and other equity investors. This is the moment when a private, leveraged company, having whittled its debt-to-equity ratio down to acceptable proportions, returns to the stock market. Equity investors then reap a huge reward, as much as 10 or 20 times their original investment.

  A buyout is a Faustian deal because it flouts a cardinal rule of management: Don’t bet the business. Houdaille’s executives did, and lost. Today Houdaille (pronounced WHO-dye) doesn’t exist anymore as an industrial manufacturer.

    The debate over the business wisdom of LBOs cannot be decided by the fate of one company. Buyout artists point out, and rightly so, that there are lots of “bad” deals to go along with the “good” ones. But interestingly, the investment bankers who engineered the Houdaille deal, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co., tout it as a success despite the conglomerate’s demise.

    More disinterested observers might consider it an object lesson in what’s wrong with leveraged buyouts.

Fidel Catastrophes

The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations
    Against Cuba, 1959-1965
By Don Bohning
Potomac Books. 307 pp. $29.95

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By Max Holland

   

    Don Bohning’s new history of covert operations against the regime of Fidel Castro, is admirably conceived. Much of the literature about U.S. policy toward Cuba in the 1960s is segmented and, consequently, unbalanced. Authors interested in presidential and/or CIA debacles have focused on the ill-fated Bay of Pigs expedition, often to the exclusion of the rest of the story. Other writers, intent on showcasing John F. Kennedy’s finest hour -- and one of the CIA’s -- have concentrated on the Cuban missile crisis while attenuating the significance of what transpired before and after. Meanwhile, the anti-climactic coda to this sometimes comic story -- namely, U.S. policy following President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 -- is seldom, if ever, written about. Bohning’s first contribution is that he tries to tell the story whole, as it should be.

    Bohning, a journalist, brings interesting credentials. He began covering Latin America for the Miami Herald in 1964, including the large Cuban community in South Florida. This is a great advantage because so much of the story is bound up with Cuban exiles. In 1962-63, the covert “station” in Miami (aka “JMWAVE”) was the largest CIA outpost in the world, other than headquarters in Langley. According to Bohning, JMWAVE’s budget ran as high as $50 million (in 1960s dollars), The station controlled between 300 and 400 front companies at one time or another, and up to 15,000 Cubans were connected to the covert war at its height.

    Some of Bohning’s best insights come from interviews with several key CIA officers who worked at the operational level -- i.e., where airy concepts and neat plans met reality. The perspectives of Ted Shackley, the JMWAVE station chief from 1962 to 1965, and Sam Halpern, an operations officer at CIA headquarters who worked the Cuba account, make for a fascinating look at “MONGOOSE,” a largely fruitless effort conducted from 1961 to 1962. It was the first and last covert operation overseen by an attorney general (Robert Kennedy), and probably the most ill-conceived clandestine operation ever until the Iran-contra folly some 25 years later.

    Although Bohning is not the first author to track down Jake Esterline and Jack Hawkins, the CIA project chief and chief of the paramilitary staff respectively during the Bay of Pigs invasion, no one has made better use of their recollections. Their bitterness over a mission that was preordained to fail is palpable. If a person can ever be held responsible for that debacle, it has to be Richard M. Bissell, the deputy director for plans in 1961. The doctrine of “plausible deniability” is not supposed to lead to a situation where a president is kept unaware of the consequences of his decisions. Yet, on the basis of his interviews with Esterline and Hawkins, Bohning makes a convincing case that Bissell lied up and down the chain of command, as if only he needed to know.

     If Bohning’s history has a flaw, it is in his larger depiction of certain events. He gives short shrift to the primary reason why the Soviet Union implanted missiles in Cuba. Nikita Khrushchev could have turned Cuba into an island bristling with conventional weaponry if his main impulse was to foil Operation MONGOOSE and/or prevent another invasion (which Washington had no intention of mounting absent a good-size revolt). Instead, the Soviet premier sought to redress, in one swift and surreptitious deployment, a serious imbalance in the nuclear balance of terror. And since the subtext of Bohning’s book is intelligence-agency blunders, why not point out that the missile deployment represented a monumental intelligence failure on Havana’s part (not to mention Moscow’s)? Nothing before or since has put Castro’s revolution at such risk.

     Bohning also shies away from some new interpretations he might have offered based on the evidence he presents. Since the mid-1970s, for example, it has been a cliche to speak of the Kennedys’ vendetta against Castro. But as new biographies and histories have shown, President Kennedy, while reckless in some aspects of his life, was anything but when it came to Cold War hot spots such as Berlin and Cuba. He consistently tried to defuse, if not avoid altogether, situations where the superpowers were pitted directly against one another. JFK cannot be absolved of responsibility for what was undertaken during his administration, but fixations do not seem to have been his style. “Europeans think we are slightly demented on the subject of Castro,” he commented, in a typically detached remark during the missile crisis.

    The obsession with Castro that Bohning writes of radiated from Robert Kennedy, as one episode vividly illustrates. According to Bohning’s interview with a Cuban exile prominent in the CIA’s covert war, after the island had been quarantined, the attorney general personally advised the exile to provoke an incident that might spark a war. “[Y]ou Cubans, if you really want to help,” Kennedy reportedly said, “what you have to do is get yourself a boat and try to sink one of those Russian ships trying to break the blockade.”

    At the time, of course, President Kennedy was doing everything in his power to enforce the quarantine without provoking a confrontation.

     Make no mistake: Robert Kennedy was no Jack Kennedy.

This book review first appeared in The Washington Post, 7 July 2005
© 2005 by Max Holland

The Docudrama That Is JFK

Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board
U.S. Government Printing Office. 208 pp. Free

Real Answers: The True Story
    of the John F. Kennedy Assassination
By Gary Cornwell
Paleface. 205 pp. $24.95

Live by the Sword: The Secret War
    Against Castro and the Death of JFK
By Gus Russo
Bancroft. 512 pp. $26.95

With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald
    and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit.
By Dale K. Myers
Oak Cliff. 702 pp. $35

No More Silence: An Oral History
    of the Assassination of President Kennedy
By Larry A. Sneed
Three Forks. 601 pp. $35

 

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By Max Holland

    The advance text of John F. Kennedy’s Trade Mart speech was generating, on the morning of November 22, 1963, more of a buzz in the press than usual, even among the jaded White House contingent. This was no boilerplate presidential address. The President was going to deliver it in Dallas, after all, the virtual capital of his right-wing opponents and the one large municipality that had chosen Nixon over Kennedy in 1960 and was predicted to favor Goldwater in 1964. Not coincidentally, Dallas was also a fount of anti-Communist paranoia and the wellspring for some of the ugliest anti-Kennedy bile in circulation. “We’re heading into nut country today,” the President told his wife that morning in Fort Worth, where she donned her pink suit. And the press knew it, half expecting, perhaps half hoping, that some newsworthy incident would occur during the motorcade en route to the Trade Mart. What better than a display of local venom to juxtapose against the President’s speech, which would pointedly criticize “voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties”?

    Thirty-five years later, because John Kennedy never delivered that speech, we have the following result: The October issue of George, edited by the President’s son, features an article by Oliver Stone. Although he strikes a vaguely leftish pose, Stone in fact uses the familiar rightist logic of those who mutter darkly about black helicopters, fluoridation of the water and one-world government, not to mention precious bodily fluids. Kennedy was “calling for radical change on several fronts--the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam,” writes Stone. “If nothing else, a motive for murder is evident.” Until this article in George, the Kennedy family had steadfastly refused to dignify conspiracy buffs. Now Kennedy fils lends respectability to one of the worst purveyors of the kind of paranoid nonsense eschewed by his father, vigorous anti-Communist though he was.

    It is not just John junior who validates Stone, of course. A special feature of Film & History (Vol. 28, Nos. 1-2) devoted to Stone says this of the director:

    In many respects, then, Stone is one of the most influential “historians” in America today....
    In calling Stone a historian we are, of course, expanding upon the familiar definition.... In the modern age of film and video, producers and directors are acting historians, too, and their productions often make a significant impact on the public’s perceptions of history.

    A subsequent article in the same issue speaks of how students may benefit from “evaluating specific pieces of conflicting evidence from the Warren Commission and Stone’s JFK.” [Emphasis added.] No one should dismiss for a moment Stone’s reach and influence, pernicious as it is, and surely Stone’s JFK deserves rigorous study in the classroom, for he is as emblematic of his age as Leni Riefenstahl was of hers. But Stone is no historian.

    In seemingly stark contrast to this Wonderland, where words mean whatever people say they mean, stands Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian as predictable as an old shoe. Schlesinger uses words to convey commonly accepted meanings, except that he manipulates them as if he were a lifetime employee of the Kennedy White House, his eloquence in the writing of history rivaled only by his skill at dissembling it. Readers of Schlesinger’s 1978 biography of Robert Kennedy will be forgiven if they reach the last page not realizing that the attorney general forced out the one advocate, Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles, of a genuine alternative to arrogant and blinkered anti-Communism. With Bowles’s elimination, there was no one left in higher councils to argue that Cuba represented a thorn in the US flesh, not a dagger in its heart, and RFK was free to become the “wild man...out-CIAing the CIA.”

    One can almost set a clock by Schlesinger’s rebuttals. The latest, published in the December Cigar Aficionado, dismissively treats RFK’s central role in the post ­Bay of Pigs, government-wide obsession to overthrow Castro as not being the attorney general’s “finest hour.” The professor also trots out a very tired rogue elephant: There is no direct evidence that President Kennedy “authorized or knew of the assassination plots” (note the absence of Robert Kennedy’s name), and that the CIA’s involvement occurred because it “believed that it knew the requirements of national security better than transient elected officials, like presidents.”

A Conspiracy of Dunces

Rendezvous with Death:
    Why John F. Kennedy Had to Die
Directed by Wilfried Huismann
Written by Wilfried Huismann & Gus Russo
Produced by WDR/NHK/SWR/Radio Bremen
Documentary. 90 Minutes. 2006

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By Ron Radosh

    Everyone loves conspiracy theories, and Europe is no different. First they had the best-selling French book whose author claimed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were covert actions of American intelligence; next there was the Arab world’s claim that it was an operation by Israeli intelligence. Now we have a new one--in the form of a much-hyped German television documentary, Rendezvous with Death, directed by Wilfried Huismann with the help of an American JFK assassination buff named Gus Russo. The film first aired in Germany in January and is now being readied for American distribution.

    Ulrich Deppendorf, the director of German television’s public  broadcasting network, ARD--the equivalent of PBS here--claims the documentary proves that “Lee Harvey Oswald was the final pawn in a murderous feud between Fidel Castro and the Kennedy brothers.” This writer would love nothing more than to reveal that the detestable Fidel Castro, one of the hemisphere’s few remaining communist dictators and tyrants, had a hand in President Kennedy’s murder, using Oswald as a secret top agent of Cuba’s G-2, its intelligence arm. Unfortunately, this tendentious and conspiratorial film--blending favored conspiracy theories of both the far left and far right--falls far short of the task.

    The 90-minute film offers the following line of argument. Oswald, then a 24-year-old Castro supporter, got his orders in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, where G-2 gave him the job of assassinating the American president. The job was Mr. Castro’s retaliation for the CIA’s comic and failed attempts to have Mr. Castro killed--from exploding cigars to poison in his food. Those who have not studied the hundreds of assassination books, or had a chance to read Gerald Posner’s definitive conspiracy-debunking Case Closed, might find the film compelling on first viewing.

    Over dramatic music, Mr. Huismann presents - for the “first time” of course - tapped phone calls from the Cuban Embassy in Mexico; references to secret KGB documents about Oswald; and alleged former agents from G-2, now in exile in Spain and Mexico. Each says he always knew Oswald was their former agency’s pawn. Mr. Huismann also interviews Larry Keenan, a former FBI agent who was sent to investigate in Mexico after Kennedy’s death - and quickly called back - as well as a former CIA officer named Sam Halpern, who was involved in the plots to eliminate Mr. Castro in the 1960s. But Mr. Halpern offers nothing to substantiate the film’s thesis, merely reiterating familiar stories about the attempts to assassinate Mr. Castro.

    Compelling? Hardly. First, the witnesses are all speaking second-hand; not one of them is said to have been involved in running Oswald. Take one charge made by Mr. Huismann. An unidentified but alleged FSB officer, presented in silhouette, reads from what he says is a secret telegram dated July 18, 1962, sent by the KGB (the FSB’s predecessor agency) to the Cubans. The gist of the message allegedly supports former G-2 agent Antulio Ramirez’s claim that the KGB contacted him to let him know that Oswald had gone back to the United States, and was therefore ready for some unspecified mission. We are offered no proof that such a telegram exists save for Mr. Huismann’s source’s claim. Likewise, we are told that Oswald’s attempt to kill right-wing Major General Edwin Walker in April 1963--which he fumbled--was a test run by G-2 to see whether he was capable of assassination. Again, not one iota of hard evidence is offered; it’s just  asserted that the Cubans were involved.

    The main evidence offered by Mr. Huismann and writer Gus Russo--their would-be smoking gun--is a document written on White House stationery. It says on the morning of November 22, the day JFK was killed, Fabian Escalante, the head of Cuba’s counterintelligence service and a top adviser to Mr. Castro, took off in a small passenger plane to Dallas from Mexico to personally supervise the impending assassination. After Kennedy was dead, Escalante purportedly flew back to Mexico and switched to another plane for his return to Cuba.

    Viewers are shown dramatic footage of a small plane, which we are told is “Escalante’s plane” and proves nothing. (The claim is the equivalent of someone who says he has proof that then-CIA chief of counter-intelligence James Angleton had flown into Havana in a small plane to supervise the various attempts to assassinate Mr. Castro.) We are never told how Escalante brazenly managed to fly into Dallas the day of the president’s appearance undetected by radar, immigration, or customs, and then direct a covert operation. Mr. Huismann says he got the handwritten memo, which is shown on screen, from a former JFK and LBJ aide, Martin Underwood, who asked that it not be made public until his own death.

    Why would Underwood have waited decades to release this document, when for years he was a key proponent of JFK conspiracy theories? The filmmakers do not disclose that Underwood was thoroughly discredited as a fabricator years ago. Max Holland, the author of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (and with whom I watched the new film), blew apart one falsehood this same Underwood had peddled to Seymour Hersh: that in 1960 he was ordered by a JFK aide to follow JFK’s one-time mistress, Judith Exner, on a train from Washington, D.C., to Chicago. Moreover, in the late 1990s, when Underwood was asked by U.S. government lawyers from the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to repeat and document the Exner story and others he had told to the press, Underwood eventually recanted every one of his tall tales.

    The final report of the ARRB discussed the very same document that is the centerpiece of the film - i.e., the report of the secret plane trip by Escalante to Dallas to run Oswald. Underwood acknowledged to the board that he had a “lot of extra White House stationery left over from his work with President Johnson,” and wrote this particular note in 1992 or 1993 for Hersh’s benefit. Yet Mr. Huismann would have us believe it is one of his own exclusive discoveries. It was with good reason the ARRB discarded this uncorroborated, if not absurd, charge, now disingenuously resurrected by Messrs. Huismann and Russo.

    Aside from hearsay, careful viewers will note that the dramatic allegations are all unproved. We do not learn that both the CIA and FBI evaluated and found Ramirez’s claims to be worthless. A former Cuban archivist says he saw an Oswald-Kennedy dossier, but does not know what was in it. A retired FBI agent, Larry Keenan, claims to have read Mexican secret service documents proving that a Cuban agent--a black man with red hair--gave Oswald money and helped prepare him for the assassination. On camera, Mr. Keenan claims he was sent to Mexico to investigate but was quickly called back because LBJ wanted Oswald identified as a lone assassin. Why did Johnson call for a cover-up? According to Mr. Keenan, the new president was afraid that telling the truth about Oswald would lead to a third world war. (While Johnson was indeed worried, when he formed the Warren Commission, he told Senator Richard B. Russell to get the facts, wherever they might lead.)

    Mr. Huismann next turns to a former secretary of state, Alexander Haig, who as a young lieutenant colonel worked with the government when the attorney general was hatching plots against Mr. Castro. Mr. Haig notes that Cuba sent the U.S. government warnings that it should stop, or Cuba would act on its own in a similar fashion. According to Mr. Haig, Johnson’s cover-up was simply political: No Democrat could ever be elected if the Democratic president was shown to have let Mr. Castro get away with JFK’s murder. But Mr. Haig, like LBJ, a longtime believer in a Castro conspiracy, has only his opinion to offer - and no evidence of any kind to prove a conspiracy existed.

    Mr. Russo, the film’s researcher and writer, is a man who has written previously about these events. He has been shown to misconstrue evidence or, as Mr. Holland once wrote, leave out “anything and everything that contradicts his preferred thesis.” In that vein, the filmmakers evoke Mr. Keenan’s belief that he and the United States “blew it” and failed to follow leads. The implication is that Mr. Keenan, too, thinks G-2 was behind the assassination. The filmmakers do not mention that Mr. Keenan is reported to believe JFK was killed by rogue CIA agents--not by Mr. Castro.

    Mr. Huismann’s claim that he and Mr. Russo, in their three years of work on the documentary, have “settled the question” and proved that Mr. Castro or G-2 in Havana ordered the assassination is quite simply balderdash. As a recent article in the Mexican weekly eme-equis shows, nothing the filmmakers turned up in Mexico cements their case for a Cuban-directed conspiracy, and Mexico City is where the alleged conspiracy was hatched. If they don’t have the goods there, they don’t have the goods at all.

    Editor’s Postscript: More than a year later, the Huismann/Russo documentary has yet to be broadcast in the United States, although it was picked up by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in March 2006. Not surprisingly, the Cuban response, official and through solidarity groups, has been to attack the documentary vehemently. Huismann et al have even been accused of acting at the behest of the CIA to defame Castro. For what Der Spiegel had to say about the film in January 2006, click here.

Ron Radosh, a professor emeritus at CUNY, is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Along with his wife, Allis, he is the author of Red Star Over Hollywood (Encounter, 2006).

This article first appeared in The New York Sun, 14 February 2006
© 2006 by Ron Radosh
Republished with permission

Commission the Truth

Presidential Commission & National Security:
    The Politics of Damage Control
By Kenneth Kitts
Lynne Rienner. 194 pp. $49.95

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By Max Holland

    Presidents frequently resort to blue-ribbon com­mis­sions to help them find a way through, or at least temporary shelter from, political storms. High-level commissions took on the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 surprise attacks, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and any number of lesser crises, such as the Iran-contra scandal during President Ronald Reagan’s second term. Their reputation, however, is decidedly mixed. More than four decades after JFK’s murder, for example, the Warren Commission’s report remains the object of widespread ridicule. Yet such panels continue to appeal to presidents. Kenneth Kitts, an associate provost and political science professor at South Carolina’s Francis Marion University, sets out to explain why.

    He focuses on five panels, all concerned with national security: the Roberts Commission on Pearl Harbor (1941–42); the Rockefeller Com­mis­sion on the CIA’s domestic activities (1975); the Scowcroft Commission on MX missile deployment (1983); the Tower Commission on Iran-contra (1986–87); and the 9/11 Commission (2002–04). Four of the five (the exception being the Scowcroft Commission) came into being in response to catastrophes or apparent scandals, and were ostensibly established to uncover what happened, who was to blame, and how recurrences might be avoided.

    Kitts makes a solid attempt to draw back the curtain of mystery behind which these commissions typically operate. He rightly emphasizes the paramount importance of who is selected to serve on them, and provides many insights into the political intrigue behind the scenes. His sketches of the members of the Roberts Commission investigating Pearl Harbor—four military men and a Supreme Court justice—demonstrate that the panel was congenitally flawed. Major General Frank McCoy, for example, was compromised by his friendship with Secretary of War Henry Stimson; and the panel’s chairman, Justice Owen Roberts, was notable for an almost childlike naiveté.

    Some of Kitts’s omissions are curious, though. For example, he notes that the Tower Com­mission on Iran-contra portrayed President Reagan as confused and out of the loop, a president who had allowed National Security Council aides to run amok and cross-wire two covert oper­ations (arms to Tehran in exchange for American hostages and cash, with the cash then diverted to the Nicaraguan contras). By contrast, two separate  investigations, one by a joint congressional committee and another by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, found that Reagan, in Kitts’s words, “had actively presided over an illegal and politically unsound policy.” Kitts seems inclined toward the latter explanation, though he brings no new information to bear either way. Could President Reagan’s Alzheim­er’s disease, unrecognized at the time, help account for the dis­parate accounts? Kitts doesn’t even mention the possibility.

    The outlier here is the Scowcroft Commission, which came into being because President Reagan wanted blue-ribbon sanction for his plan to de­ploy a new land-based missile. Though com­missions are frequently convened to legit­imize pre-cooked decisions, Kitts would have been wise to dispense with this one and devote more of his relatively short book to mining the history of the other, more controversial panels.

    Kitts concludes that in appointing these commissions, presidents tend to be concerned more with protecting their own interests than with ferreting out the facts. At the very least, commis­sions buy time until their reports come out and establish one axis for debate. That’s true enough, though congressional investigations—which Kitts generally takes at face value—are no less tainted by self-interest and political agendas. Still, and despite its limitations, Presidential Commissions & National Security succeeds in turning a spotlight on a phenomenon that deserves scrutiny: the efforts of temporary panels, their life spans measured in months, to investigate the permanent government and its failings.

This book review first appeared in the Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2006
© 2006 by Max Holland

An Old Schism Haunts the 9/11 Commission

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By Max Holland

    Although attention largely focused on the solemn ceremonies, the most remarkable feature of the events marking the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks may have been the 9/11 Commission's reversion to its repressed partisanship.

    The precipitating factor was the seal of approval Thomas Kean bestowed on a controversial ABC miniseries that tended to ascribe a larger portion of the blame for 9/11 to the Clinton administration (although, in truth, the Bush administration did not go unscathed). Kean, a Republican former governor who chaired the commission, had been instrumental in keeping the panel on a more or less bipartisan page. But the price of unity had always been that everyone within sight was described as in some way to blame, which is another way of finding that no one was. The docudrama strove to accomplish the opposite. Thus, Kean's endorsement of The Path to 9/11 as "true to the spirit" of what had happened was tantamount to tearing up an agreed-upon script, a provocative thing to do just weeks before a national election. Some of his former Democratic colleagues responded in kind.

    Generating an aura of political bipartisanship had never been easy. In April 2004, during the public-hearings phase of its investigation, the panel gave every sign of becoming unhinged, with the sessions in Washington coming to resemble an intensely combative congressional investigation. Democratic members sought to pin the lion's share of responsibility for 9/11 onto the Bush administration because it had ostensibly disregarded an ample warning. Republicans countered by depicting a Clinton administration that had vacillated after U.S. embassies and the USS Cole burned.

    Under increasing criticism, the commission managed to close ranks, and in July 2004 it delivered a report that was an instant and widely praised best-seller. The government's subsequent, and massive, reorganization of the intelligence community, instigated in part by the report, also burnished the commission's image.

    In the two years since the report's publication, some of the sheen has worn off, as it has become apparent that to achieve unanimity the commission took a bipartisan dive. The report is compelling when the subject is Al Qaeda and its plot. But whenever the issue is how Washington let that plot be carried out, the historical analysis is underwhelming. The narrative reads like "an elephant rolling a pea," as a review by Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia political scientist, put it. "Especially disturbing [was] the inability of the commission—or, more likely . . . its unwillingness—to assign any blame among intelligence managers or policymakers." The only thing worse than this lack of accountability was the commission's decision to deny the public access to the information it had assiduously collected from government files. This barring of access insures that the panel's non-interpretation will reign supreme until at least January 2009.

How Moscow Undermined the Warren Commission

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By Max Holland

 

    The Warren Report has never been impeached, yet conspiracy theories persist, nay thrive, after 40 years. It’s fair to ask why.

    The most important reason remains the factor that spawned wild speculation in the first place, namely, the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald two days after the Kennedy assassination by a self-appointed vigilante named Jack Ruby. The assassination was a horrific act, yet one that the American public would have eventually come to terms with had Oswald — a politicized sociopath, akin to Timothy McVeigh — ever received his day in court.

    But the right to due process is so cherished by Americans that when this ritual is denied, ineradicable doubt flourishes no matter how damning the state’s case.

    The unavoidable corollary of disbelief is that Washington was, at a minimum, uninterested in catching the real culprits. It’s no coincidence that polls consistently have shown that public trust in the US government began declining in 1964. Among those who believe in a conspiracy, the most widely accepted theory is that elements of the US government, most conspicuously the CIA, were complicit in gunning down the 35th president in broad daylight.

    How is it that Americans have come to embrace a conspiracy theory that reads like a script written by the KGB, the CIA’s mortal Cold War adversary? Well, it turns out that Moscow’s relentless propagation of that virulent theory and its prevalence here are no mere coincidence. One of the more amazing stories to seep out of the former Soviet empire is the role Moscow played in exploiting Americans’ psychological vulnerability after the assassination, and in preying on their devotion to due process. We can piece together this concerted effort only now with the release of documents from Soviet archives — some disclosures authorized, some not. Taken together, they prove that the KGB played a central, pernicious role in fomenting the belief that the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s assassination.

    The first inkling of an aggressive KGB posture is revealed in a document gratuitously cited by Boris Yeltsin in his 1994 memoir. In a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union dated November 23, 1963 — when Oswald was still alive — KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny recommends publishing in a “progressive paper in one of the Western countries,” an article “exposing the attempt by reactionary circles in the USA to remove the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals, [i.e.,] the racists and ultraright elements guilty of the spread and growth of violence and terror in the United States.”

    Two months later, R. Palme Dutt, the Stalinist editor of a  Communist-controlled British journal called Labour Monthly, published an article that raised the specter of CIA involvement without offering a scintilla of evidence. “[M]ost commentators,” he wrote, “have surmised a coup of the Ultra-Right or racialists of Dallas. That may be; but the trail, if followed up seriously, seems to reach wider . . . on the face of it this highly organized coup (even to the provision of a ’fall guy’ . . . and rapid killing of the fall guy while manacled in custody, as soon as there appeared a danger of his talking), with the manifest complicity necessary of a very wide range of authorities, bears all the hallmarks of a CIA job.”

    Five months later, in June 1964, a freelance journalist named Joachim Joesten posited a strikingly similar analysis in his book Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? Following a chapter on “Oswald and the CIA,” Joesten asserted that the agency was beyond presidential control and bitterly opposed to Kennedy’s policy of “easing the Cold War.” It has long been a matter of record that Joesten’s book was the first published in the United States on the subject of the assassination. Until the notes of a former KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin were published in 1999, however, it was not known that Joesten’s publisher, the small New York firm of Marzani & Munsell, received subsidies totaling $672,000 from the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the early 1960s.

    These early efforts to implicate the CIA met with little apparent success. But the KGB kept on trying and finally hit the jackpot once a relatively unknown New Orleans district attorney named Jim Garrison took a sudden interest in the assassination in late 1966. The word “dupe” has long been out of favor, but that’s precisely what Garrison turned out to be after he arrested Clay Shaw in March 1967 and charged him with conspiring to assassinate Kennedy. Owing to a clever piece of KGB disinformation planted in Paese Sera, a Communist-owned Italian newspaper, Garrison came to believe that in Shaw he had apprehended an important “CIA operative.” And on the basis of this deception (again, revealed by KGB archivist Mitrokhin), Garrison constructed an entire conspiracy edifice, ultimately arguing that the CIA had plotted the assassination-coup d’etat in concert with the military-industrial complex — again, because Kennedy was allegedly easing up in the Cold War.

    If Garrison’s persecution of Shaw hadn’t been genuine, and tragic, the whole episode would be risible. It wasn’t. Garrison altered forever the parameters of Americans’ nagging doubts, though that transformation went largely unnoticed at the time. Before the spring of 1967, not even the Warren Report’s harshest critics dared suggest the government itself was involved. Within the space of a few weeks, Garrison single-handedly legitimated the fable of CIA complicity. Not even Shaw’s exoneration in 1971 was sufficient to offset the insidious notion planted by the KGB and unwittingly nurtured by Garrison. After receiving an inadvertent assist from the Watergate and intelligence hearings of the mid-1970s, the KGB could justifiably claim, by the end of the decade, that owing to its “active measures,” more Americans believed in its conspiracy theory (or some variation thereof) than in the findings of the Warren Commission.

    This preposterous allegation of CIA involvement might have faded with time but for a chance encounter in a Havana elevator between the publisher of Garrison’s 1988 memoir and a powerful Hollywood director named Oliver Stone. In JFK, Stone reconstructs Jim Garrison’s edifice so painstakingly that 88 minutes into the movie, the KGB disinformation resurfaces. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) hands Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) the Italian newspaper clipping, and the implication is created that Shaw was a “contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Arguably, Stone’s 1991 movie is the only American feature film made during the Cold War to have, as its very axis, a lie concocted in the KGB’s disinformation factories.

    If and when the archives of the Communist Party’s “sword and shield” are fully opened, the KGB’s indispensable role in propagating the lie of CIA involvement will take its place among other triumphs of Russian deception, such as the infamous Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Until then there is only this sobering thought, long an axiom of professional intelligence officers: We are never truly deceived by others; we only deceive ourselves.

This article first appeared in The Washington Post, 22 November 2003
© 2003 by Max Holland

The JFK Lawyers’ Conspiracy

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By Max Holland

   

    During forty-two years of controversy over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the legal profession has played an instrumental role. All seven members of the Warren Commission, which investigated the 1963 assassination, were lawyers. There were twenty-seven people on the commission’s staff (including Norman Redlich, a Nation contributor since 1951), twenty-two of whom were aspiring or practicing attorneys. The combined efforts of these lawyers produced an imperfect report in September 1964, although its fundamental findings have never been seriously impeached.

    But what the legal profession giveth, less scrupulous members of the bar taketh away. Since 1964 four other lawyers have been chiefly responsible for putting the Warren Report into undeserved disrepute. During a conference in November sponsored primarily by the Washington-based Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC)--headed, not coincidentally, by a lawyer--three of these four lawyers made rare public appearances or were otherwise represented in spirit.

    The paterfamilias of disingenuousness, Mark Lane, was noticeably absent. An obscure New York attorney at the time of the assassination, Lane single-handedly set the standard for dishonest criticism. In 1964 he spread innuendo about an ostensibly sinister delay in the Warren Commission’s investigation as he went barnstorming around the country giving what was then known as “The Speech.” Two years later Lane published a book titled Rush to Judgment, having conveniently forgotten his earlier accusation. Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation during those years, steadfastly refused, to his everlasting credit, to propagate Lane’s basic allegation that the government was indifferent to the truth. Little did McWilliams (or anyone else) know then that the KGB was finding Lane’s work so useful that it was secretly underwriting his “research” and travel in the amount of $12,500 (in 2005 dollars).

A Cold War Odyssey: The Oswald File

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By Max Holland

    The story of how the Soviet Union was maneuvered into releasing normally privileged information about Lee Harvey Oswald  to the US government is a little-known but important insight into the tense aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination.

     The person most responsible for persuading the Kremlin to relax its usual strictures was Moscow’s own ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. By doing so, Dobrynin defused a highly charged situation, just one year after the missile crisis. Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union for more than two years prior to the assassination, and had recently expressed a desire to return. This episode also revealed why Dobrynin would become such a durable and invaluable presence in the American capital, lasting through six administrations.

    This article was originally published in the Cold War International History Project ’s Bulletin, Winter 2003/Spring 2004 issue. Click here to read the entire article.

    Postscript: In 2006, a Moscow television station was reportedly preparing the first-ever Russian documentary about Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina.

Tapes: Hearing a Wrong Leaning, er, Meaning

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By Max Holland

    Twenty-five years ago this month, a handful of captured conversations helped to bring down Richard M. Nixon's presidency. Given the demonstrated power of White House tapes to record, and sometimes alter, history, it's striking that it has taken all these years to flesh out a full account of surreptitious recording devices installed at the behest of presidents. The more than 3,500 hours of meetings and conversations tape-recorded during the Nixon presidency merely represent the apogee of a slow trend that began with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, and greatly accelerated during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

    These recordings are presidential history with the bark off and will foster and sometimes force novel interpretations of even the most familiar events. Yet, when the source material is so raw--one is trafficking in micro-history--the potential for misunderstanding and misrepresentation is great. Sometimes, a single mis-heard word can make all the difference. Consider, for example, the rendering of a September 18, 1964 conversation in Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964, historian Michael R. Beschloss's initial volume on the Johnson recordings.

The first minutes of this telephone conversation between Johnson and his mentor, Senator Richard B. Russell, concern the latter's participation on the Warren Commission, which was created to investigate the Kennedy assassination. That very day, after 10 arduous months, the panel had put the finishing touches on what would become known as the Warren Report. Johnson asked Russell if the commission's findings were unanimous. Russell replied, according to Beschloss's transcript, “Yes, sir. I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they'd come 'round and trade me out of it by giving me a little old threat.”

    The implication is that the senior senator from Georgia, one of Washington's most powerful men, signed the Warren Report  under duress; that he was in fundamental disagreement with one or more of the commission's key findings, but bowed to an unspecified threat.

    There's something wrong here. A Southern Democrat and staunch opponent of civil rights, Russell detested Chief Justice Earl Warren and the kind of jurisprudence the Warren Supreme Court practiced. In fact, Russell protested long and vigorously when Johnson informed the Georgian, on November 29, 1963, that he had been appointed to serve on the commission. It wasn't because Russell thought the duty unimportant; it was primarily because he didn't want to work with Warren on any matter. But Johnson insisted. “I don't give a damn if you have to serve with a Republican; if you have to serve with a Communist; if you have to serve with a Negro; if you have to serve with a thug,” he stated. So Russell did serve. Still, the notion that a grudging participant like Russell would ever bow to a threat from a panel headed by Warren is astounding.

    Listening to the tape, it becomes clear that Beschloss's transcription is incorrect. What Russell actually said is: “I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they'd come 'round and trade me out of it by giving me a little old thread of it.”

     Suddenly, the conversation makes sense. Russell came to the commission's last meeting on September 18 determined to register his opinion on two pivotal issues: whether a foreign conspiracy existed, and the sequence of the bullets that struck Kennedy and Texas Governor John B. Connally in Dallas's Dealey Plaza. Far from threatening the Georgian, Warren had labored that day to oblige him.

    The chief justice believed it was inordinately important for the commission to deliver a unanimous decision to the American people. If complete agreement proved elusive, Russell, of all the members, could not be the lone dissenter. Russell was to conservative opinion what Warren was to liberal: a standard bearer and powerful influence. So along with the other panel members, Warren kept massaging the final language until it incorporated Russell's views. Finally, the senator could only assent.

    Construing history from presidential recordings is an arduous but hardly thankless task. Yet, it requires being steeped in contemporary minutiae: events of a given day and sometimes a given hour; the nuances of every issue before the president; and the foibles of each individual unwittingly recorded for posterity. It might not even be an exaggeration to say that those who would interpret the recordings need to be as well-versed as these evocative voices were in their day.

    Postscript: Despite an enormous volume of tape recordings waiting to be transcribed and annotated, Beschloss has not released another book of Johnson tapes since his second volume,  Reaching  for Glory, was published in 2001.

This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times, 1 August 1999
© 1999 by Max Holland

11 Seconds in Dallas, Not Six

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By Max Holland and Johann W. Rush

    Within hours of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, the Kodak film exposed by Abraham Zapruder became the most important home movie ever made. The 26 seconds-long moving picture, it was thought, captured in full the shooting and death of a president. Or as Life magazine (which purchased the rights to the Zapruder film) put it in 1966, “Of all the witnesses to the tragedy, the only unimpeachable one is the 8-mm movie camera of Abraham Zapruder, which recorded the assassination in sequence.”[1]

    The truth turns out to be more complicated. Yes, Zapruder filmed the death, but he did not capture the entire shooting sequence for posterity. It is fallacious to conflate the film with everything that happened, to believe that the rifle fire commenced only after the Dallas dressmaker decided to turn on his camera.

    It is indisputable that the Zapruder film graphically depicts, in so-called “Z” frames that have become iconic, the second and third shots Lee Harvey Oswald fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. By frame Z 225, John Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally are reacting violently, and within milliseconds of one another, to being wounded by Oswald’s second shot as the presidential limousine emerges from behind a sign that briefly obscured Zapruder’s view.[2] About 4.9 seconds later, Z 313 captures, in all its gore, the third and fatal shot that opened up Kennedy’s head as if a small stick of dynamite had been placed in his right ear.[3]

    The majority of ear- and eyewitnesses in Dealey Plaza, however, heard three shots, and Dallas lawmen found three expended cartridge cases afterward in the assassin’s perch. Accordingly, the Zapruder film has always been pored over, as if it were a Rosetta stone, by students of the assassination looking for equally persuasive visual evidence that would reveal the timing of the pesky first shot.[4] The presidential limousine was much closer to Oswald’s rifle during the first shot, yet paradoxically, this bullet missed everything.

    Estimates as to which Zapruder frame coincided with the first shot have gyrated over the decades. The moment the first shot occurred also dictates, of course, the total amount of time Oswald had to fire all three shots, and how much time elapsed between them. Now, after more than 43 years, there may finally be a rational explanation that squares with the most important and salient facts.

    The first federal panel to investigate the assassination, the Warren Commission, actually chose not to hazard a guess about when the first shot occurred, emphasizing instead that there had to be at least 2.3 seconds between shots.[5] Ultimately, the Commission’s cautious arithmetic from 1964 suggested the entire shooting might have taken as long as 8.3 seconds, or as little as 5.6 seconds.[6]

    Three years later, CBS News, after a year-long investigation, was much more confident about which shot missed. It was the first one, according to anchorman Walter Cronkite. And in its four-part documentary that aired on consecutive nights in June 1967, CBS suggested that the first shot had been fired at Zapruder frame 186, making the shooting sequence 6.9 seconds long.[7]

    Some 12 years later, however, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), while concurring that Oswald’s first shot was the errant one, estimated that it had been fired as early as Z 158. That lengthened the entire shooting sequence to approximately 8.5 seconds long.[8] Subsequently, in what was considered by many to be the definitive account of the assassination, Gerald Posner, in his 1993 book Case Closed, posited that the errant first shot was fired at Z 160. That slightly shortened the shooting sequence to 8.4 seconds.[9] In the 13 years since Posner’s book, moreover, several highly respected students of the assassination have weighed in with reputable, but subtly different, analyses of the first shot’s timing. Their estimates have led to total elapsed times of around 8.8, 8.4, and 8.6 seconds.

    As the timing of the first shot wanders, the Zapruder film begins to resemble a Rorschach test rather than a Rosetta stone.[10] More to the point, it turns out that all of these estimates, regardless of their underlying rationale, rest on a common and unexamined premise: that since the second and third shots were captured by the Zapruder film, the first one must have been, too.[11]

    We believe that is not the case.