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Thinking Critically about the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories
Michel Jacques Gagné
Routledge. 508 pp. $29.95

 

By Martin J. Kelly Jr.

 

    In a world of sensible analysis there is an inverse relationship between analytic knowledge and unwarranted suspicion. The more we understand how the real world actually materializes in our daily lives, the less likely are we to imagine nefarious puppeteers behind the scenes. But now we are in a paranoia-laden culture that finds it easy to assert that the murder of twenty children was faked by the government, or that the Israeli Defense Force trains NYC police officers to deliver violence to innocent US citizens. These days political passion intensifies conspiracy claims and inoculates believers against embarrassment and refutation.

    Fringe ideas have always been noisy in America. In the ‘30s, a rash of outré notions marched into the Depression spotlight to capture the imagination of the disaffected. Utopian criticism from the thrusts of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin and William Dudley Pelley, for example, created deep mistrust of traditional thinking and government. Some of the movements were basted in anti-Semitism and proto-Nazism at the same time as Adolf Hitler became living myth to German volk. America was able to shrug off these radical forces because in the throes of the Depression mainstream politics and media gave them very little breathing room. In the long run, their effect on the electorate was puny.

    After the tumultuous ‘60s, America’s courting of half-baked ideas was quickened by an emerging and powerful popular culture teeming with salient facts unleavened by deliberative analysis. In its “now for something completely new” insistence on breadth against depth, the ubiquity of electronic media is part of the genome of the surge in unexamined thinking. All ideas were (are) of equal force. As a generalization, the conspiracy theory (CT) “take” on the assassination of JFK in 1963 is a hard-core historical element in the unwitting pursuit of “at-large” mythic ideas in the country—the death of a president is mainstream by definition. That the murder was investigated by two different government initiatives in 1964 and 1977-78, solidifies its genetic importance for American suspicion along with several zany notions that come with it in the pop culture.

    Michel Jacques Gagné’s Thinking Critically is a richly-detailed antidote to JFK conspiracy thought. He submits JFK CT thinking to direct tests against reality. It is impossible to praise this book too much or to capture its power in a few words. The result of decades of research and five yearsof writing, Thinking Critically is a textured and thoughtful treatment of many of the major conspiracy themes surrounding JFK’s murder. While he asserts the analysis is not an exercise in formal logic, Gagné does pick out some hackneyed fallacies in the JFK CT literature like sic hoc ergo propter hoc and “lack of evidence indicates a successful cover-up.” And he includes types of fallacies and formal argument in two very useful appendices.

    The entire book is somewhat discursive, i.e., moves coherently from topic to topic without attempting to glue together the JFK CT movement into a univocal conceptual package. The soul of the book is in its conceptually savvy treatment of crucial features in the JFK CT tradition through a sound hearing of full evidence in each analysis. Just about all of the CT cognitive artifices that have distorted the murder for decades collapse under the weight of their own jerry-rigged density and the force of the evidence Gagné examines. The analysis demonstrates most CT facts to be “factoids” and conspiracy scenarios to be filled with fundamental contradictions. Not one conspiracy claim survives the established facts.

    Thinking Critically intimates that the JFK Camelot myth had ignited energetically from Jacqueline Kennedy’s PR fantasies about her dead husband into a full-fisted Arthurian political and moral depiction of JFK by CT writers. JFK became a peace-loving universal ultra-liberal whose loving kindness and superior moral stance made him the target of hateful intolerance from his own colleagues in government. In such a Romantic milieu, every citizen with an inclination toward reading conspiracy into his murder was possessed by unstoppable passion.

False and mendacious allegations of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy persist nearly 59 years later despite multiple investigations.

    Gagné suggests that JFK’s death was felt as an end to liberal hope so that a wellspring of  desperation kept the conspiracy alive in a segment of the population. As time went on, then,  the original Warren Commission and its defenders become historical villains in the vision of  the CT community.

    We learn that Oswald was not the mild-mannered cipher lionized in CT writings. Oswald’s  story is checkered and problematic. While there is a psychiatric history of him in 1953 when he  was in the New York city public school system, Gagné’s analysis relies mostly on more  accessible facts rather than on technical psychological observations. Anyone can support these  quotidian facts with the professional psychiatric examination on the record. Oswald was filled  with fantasies of omnipotence and violence as part of his personality disorder.

    Crucial physical evidence such as ballistics, forensics, X-rays and photos, and the Zapruder  film are ratified again and again by straightforward exposition. All claims of these elements  having been forged or altered by Dallas Police, FBI, military doctors, secret X-ray or film labs  are shown not only to be groundless but also to be impossible in 1963. The backyard photos,  the autopsy report with X-rays and photos, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and the single bullet,  the fragments from JFK’s skull and Governor Connally’s body, etc., are indelibly certified by a  cold look at the brute facts of the case.

    All of the standard CT claims, baroque and mundane, are shredded in Thinking Critically by  a sane study of basic facts and evidence. Grassy Knoll and man-hole snipers, as well as Oswald  impersonators and KGB operations explode under rational scrutiny. Icons of the conspiracy  movement evaporate as well under the epistemic ridicule brilliantly wielded by Professor  Gagné. We learn not only that Nixon, LBJ, CIA, the mafia and the Pentagon, etc. had no hand  in JFK’s murder but also that major CT public figures were less than competent with the  primary empirical findings in the case. Mark Lane, David Lifton, Gary Aguilar, David Mantik and even Roger Stone, to name a few, are stripped of their New Clothes.

    Lifton believes JFK’s body was switched and altered at autopsy. Gagné shows the clear impossibility of such a maneuver. Mantik, who has a PhD in physics and an MD, insists the x-rays were altered to make JFK’s front skull entry wound look like an exit wound. While Gagné demonstrates how Mantik, a radiologist, has rotated an X-ray improperly to make his claim, he doesn’t indict the doctor for other technically unsound CT research on JFK’s skull X-ray that catapulted Mantik stage-front in the CT movement a few decades back. A bit bumbling and a little paranoid are some of these CT thinkers despite their PhD’s and MD’s. To see these notions and their proposers unmasked as Gagné punches up the validity of foundational facts is an epiphany for the reader.

    Thinking Critically is a beautiful and indispensable contribution to public sanity in an age of tabloid concepts. It shows unequivocally that, in the decades since 1963, only an evidence-free paranoid suspicion has characterized the conspiracy community’s long Sumo-grapple with the reality of the JFK case. Everyone should read the book and be deeply grateful.

Martin J. Kelly Jr., a  Professor Emeritus of Psychology who also taught History of Science, is a frequent contributor to Washington Decoded.

©2022 by Martin J. Kelly Jr.

The JFK Medical Evidence:

 

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New Light on a Lingering Forensic Controversy

 

By John Canal

 

The exact entry site of President Kennedy’s head wound is the most perplexing medico-legal controversy stemming from the assassination. It has confounded assassination researchers and credentialed experts for decades.

Conflicting conclusions over the entry wound’s location—and the tightly-associated debate over the damage to the cranium—have lingered for so long they seem irresolvable.

Factoring in a simple technique familiar to every skilled mortician, however, makes it possible to resolve the contradictions between the findings of the original pathologists and the official inquiries that revisited the medical evidence in 1968, 1975, 1978, and 1998. It is finally possible to square this particular circle and put the issue to a well-deserved rest.

 

The Controversy in a Nutshell

    All five of the official forensic investigations have been unanimous on one point: a single, high-velocity missile entered the rear of the president’s head, with the instant, gruesome results captured in the Zapruder film beginning at frame 313. Expert opinion is in disagreement about almost everything aside from that.

    The three military officers/physicians who performed the postmortem on the night of November 22 placed the entry wound near Kennedy’s external occipital protuberance (EOP), a little knob typically about two inches above the hairline. The autopsy report stated, “Situated in the posterior scalp approximately 2.5 cm. laterally to the right and slightly above the external occipital protuberance is a lacerated wound measuring 15 x 6 mm. In the underlying bone is a corresponding wound . . . .”[1]

    These prosectors also noted the grievous damage to JFK’s head. They described a large irregular defect of the scalp and skull on the right involving chiefly the parietal bone but extending somewhat into the temporal and occipital regions. (The parietal bone extends from the occipital bone, which is essentially the back of the head, to the frontal bone, essentially the forehead.) This finding was consistent with the recollections of more than 25 eyewitnesses, most of them medically-trained, who reported seeing an exit-like wound about the size of a small orange in the rear of the president’s head.[2]

    Figure 1 is one unofficial attempt from 1967 to depict the damage to the back of the head (BOH) as described in Dr. Robert N. McClelland’s testimony before the Warren Commission. McClelland’s description was one of the more precise eyewitness accounts. But accounts of the damage to this area understandably varied, as the majority of medical personnel had been preoccupied with trying to resuscitate JFK at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital.[3]

    The BOH opening, in all likelihood, was created after the bullet’s explosive impact exposed the president’s brain through a tear in the rear scalp and an opening between two or more dislodged (but not blown-out or missing) pieces of loose rear skull. This observation is supported by the fact that the lateral X-ray shows no missing rear bone whatsoever. Dr. J. Thornton Boswell, one of the prosectors, did say in 1996 that he repositioned some bone pieces before the X-rays and photos were taken; it seems logical that he pushed some loose pieces of skull (dislodged but still adhering to the scalp) roughly back into place.[4]

    The initial postmortem finding regarding the location of the entry wound in the head was accepted until 1968. In that year Attorney General Ramsey Clark commissioned four experts to revisit the postmortem because of a public controversy that had arisen over the findings. While the so-called Clark Panel did not have the decided advantage of examining the body directly, it was composed entirely of forensic experts, whereas only one of the prosectors had training in that specialty. Citing one X-ray in particular, these experts declared that the prosectors had incorrectly located the rear entry wound in the head. The Clark Panel Report claimed the X-ray in question revealed the entry to be as high as the area of the president’s cowlick, or almost four inches (or ten centimeters) higher than the location established back in November 1963.[5]

    A single photographic view was also cited to underpin the Clark Panel’s correction; number 42 representing that view is reproduced here as Figure 2. This photograph was presumed to have been taken just after JFK’s corpse arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital, site of the autopsy, and it presumably showed the entry wound well above the EOP—in the vicinity of the president’s cowlick rather than near the EOP. The Clark Panel made no mention of the dubious practice it had engaged in of using a movable body part, such as the scalp, to locate the entrance wound. Normally, as one wound-ballistics expert put it, the “location of a penetrating wound to the cranium is usually pinpointed by the cratered hole in the skull.”[6]

    The other manifest difference between the Clark Panel and the findings of the original prosectors concerned the visible damage to the rear of the president’s head. The Clark Panel reported what seemed self-evident from Figure 2: aside from the cowlick entrance wound, the BOH was relatively unscathed; indeed, the scalp was apparently intact.[7]

    The bottom line was that the Clark Panel findings did not fundamentally change the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had fired the one bullet that penetrated the president’s skull, in addition to the separate shot that pierced JFK’s upper back. Nonetheless, the amended conclusions were stunning: assertion of a four-inch error in the entry wound, and refutation of visible BOH damage. The notion that the postmortem contained such gross errors in the first place left doubt where there should have been absolute certainty.

A Miss

 

Hit List

Richard Belzer & David Wayne

Skyhorse Publishing. 368 pp. $26.95

 

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By Ron Capshaw

     As the historiography of the Kennedy assassination approaches its 50th year, the pendulum seems to be swinging back to the Oswald-did-it-alone thesis of the much-maligned Warren Commission. The Dallas Police Department (DPD) in recent years unearthed records that showed Oswald’s fingerprints on the trigger of the Mannlicher-Carcano. The DPD also revealed that the tramps arrested on the day of the shooting were in fact tramps and not fleeing assassins or point men for the plot.

    For those who argue that anything coming out of the DPD, that collection of Southern crackers in collusion with the military-industrial complex, is suspect, there are those who present evidence with no political axe to grind. Computer analysis of supposed bullet trajectories from the grassy knoll show that for a head shot to have come from there the shooter would have had to be elevated 40 feet from the ground—a matter that witnesses that day might have noticed. A non-partisan sniper recently tried to duplicate a shot from the grassy knoll and concluded that it would have passed through the president’s head and ripped Jackie’s face off.

    But Oswald as the lone assassin seems to run aground when the matter of the mysteriously dying witnesses comes up. Even those that believe in the Warren thesis contradict themselves about the witnesses. A stalwart liberal friend of mine once said in the same breath that he believed Oswald did it alone and that the deaths of the witnesses was very much mob behavior.

    And we have Jack Ruby to thank for this, or “Sparky” as he was known to his friends. Ruby’s televised murder of Oswald set tongues wagging, or as Christopher Hitchens said, once Oswald’s mouth had been shut, “everyone else’s was free to open.”

    Richard Belzer’s  is certainly open. Belzer is one of these actors who take their film or TV roles to heart. We’ve seen this all before: Jessica Lange, or Sissy Spacek, believe that by playing farmers, they acquire the expertise to testify before Congress on the plight of the agrarian community. Belzer plays a homicide detective on TV, but somewhere from script to his own writings, the concept of empirical and forensic evidence seems to have eluded him.

    Hit List, with its CIA using dart guns to induce cancer and/or heart attacks, goes beyond even Oliver Stone, who after all, only showed a witness dying by having lethal pills shoved down his throat. Jack Ruby is injected with cancer while in prison; Guy Bannister suffers a heart attack by dart. Even J. Edgar Hoover is not immune from a death-dealing poison administered by White House operatives.  Lee Bowers, the railroad man in a 14-foot-high tower, not noticing the 26-foot-higher platform of the grassy knoll sniper, is drugged before being run off the road and killed by driver on a dirt road in Midlothian, Texas. (Geraldo Rivera posed the best rebuttal to the need for Bowers’s supposed murder when he rhetorically asked, why kill Bowers when it seemed he already told all he knew?).

    The authors could have been on surer footing with the death of Eladio De Valle and Johnny Rosselli. Both were killed in violent ways; De Valle, with ties to the anti-Castro community in Miami, was shot in the heart and had his head split open with an axe; Rosselli was found in a 55 gallon oil drum stabbed, shot, and legs sawn off.

    But that is not enough. Belzer argues that both Ferrie’s death in New Orleans and De Valle’s in Miami were coordinated by the assassins to occur at the same time (walkie- talkies anyone?).

    On Ruby, they cannot argue for any pre-planned assassination of Oswald. In a death- bed interview with his defense attorney, while those “injected cancer cells” were supposedly raging, Ruby stated he never knew Oswald and intercepted him quite by accident, as he was out telegraphing money to one of his strippers at the Western Union office near police headquarters. That Ruby did not know exactly what he was going to do beforehand is evidenced by him leaving his beloved dog, who he bizarrely called his “wife,” in the car.

    That he did it, not on orders from the mob or Allen Dulles or Hunt oil, but to keep Jackie from the stress of a trial, was borne out in a comment he made to Assistant DA Bill Alexander after being arrested: “That son of a bitch killed my president!”

    Like Oliver Stone, Belzer quotes Ruby’s jailhouse testimony to Earl Warren about the conspiracy of Nazi-types taking over the country and how he believes he cannot talk freely in Dallas. Like Stone though, Belzer cherry picks Ruby’s testimony, leaving out key comments that contradict the Belzer/Stone thesis.

    Ruby also said, “No one else requested me to do anything. I never spoke to anyone about attempting to do anything. No subversive organization gave me any idea. No underworld person made any effort to contact me. It all happened that Sunday morning.”

    Belzer lays much stock in the Ruby quote that “a whole new form of government is going to take over our country” without providing the preceding quote that made suspect anything Ruby said about conspiracies, i.e., the “Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment.”

    Like many conspiracy-mongers, Belzer gives the CIA a wet-work capability they simply did not have. After all, this group couldn’t knock off Castro, and their attempts—poison scuba suits, exploding cigars—were the last word in musical comedy (apparently those cancer-causing blow darts weren’t considered). William F. Buckley, in a bit of gallows humor, concluded that the CIA couldn’t have killed Kennedy because the president was murdered. If actually tasked with the assignment, the CIA would have characteristically missed JFK and killed everyone else.

    Belzer details many other journalists and witnesses who were allegedly knocked off.  But consider who wasn’t killed. Why not LBJ? After all, he should have earned the wrath of the anti-Castro/CIA group since, right after assuming office, called off the Kennedy brothers’ “goddamn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean” (JFK was a better bet for the Castro plots, as before November 22, he had stepped up the assassination plots against the dictator). If the CIA/mafia had such a reach as to kill J. Edgar Hoover then why not slip some cancer-causing cells into one of Johnson’s sirloin steaks?

    At the same time, eyewitnesses like Jean Hill, who had the seemingly dangerous testimony of having seen a man firing from the grassy knoll, lived till 2000. Victoria Adams, who claimed she didn’t see Oswald running down the Depository stairs beside her after the shots were fired (and hence, he could not have been on the sixth floor) was alive until several years ago. Marina Oswald, the person closest to Oswald, is still up and running.  Perhaps they had quicker reflexes to dodge those darts.

   Historians and even some conspiracy theorists may consider Belzer a trespassing amateur. But the reality is that the former stand-up comedian, and the CIA he conjures up are made for each other. Both inadvertently provide us all with prat-falling comedy.

©2013 by Ron Capshaw

 

 

 

 

RFK OK’d Sabotage Against Cuba in November 1963; Overruled by JFK

 

 UPDATED

 

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By Max Holland

 

    Ever since the Church Committee’s investigation of the intelligence community in the mid-1970s—if not earlier—it has been well known that Robert F. Kennedy was deeply involved in the Kennedy administration’s efforts to subvert and overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro. RFK regularly attended meetings of the so-called Special Group of the National Security Council, which directed and coordinated US policy toward Cuba, including most covert operations. And as Harris Wofford observed in his 1980 book, Of Kennedys and Kings, within the Special Group 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.

    Still, extant records specifying RFK’s direct involvement are few and far between.

    One of seven documents released by the National Archives in response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit, however, is an EYES ONLY memo that reveals Robert F. Kennedy personally signed off on a sabotage operation against Cuba in November 1963.

   

 The November 1963 document released to Judicial Watch is a brief, one-page proposal for a “low-key sabotage operation” with the plan to be accomplished by a commando group on or about 8 November 1963. Using demolition charges and incendiaries, the commandos were to destroy a pier and warehouse on the northern coast “as part of our continuing long-range program.”

   Sterling J. Cottrell, the coordinator of Cuban affairs, submitted the sabotage proposal to Robert Kennedy on November 4. The next day, the operation was one of several items discussed at a special meeting of the Special Group (SG), which included RFK; McGeorge Bundy, the president’s national security adviser; John McCone, CIA director; Richard Helms, CIA deputy director for plans; U. Alexis Johnson, deputy undersecretary of State for political affairs; Cyrus Vance, secretary of the army; Dr. Albert “Bud” Wheelon, CIA deputy director for science & technology; Colonel Ralph Steakley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Bruce Cheever, deputy to Desmond FitzGerald, the head of the CIA’s Special Affairs Staff, which ran espionage, paramilitary, and other intelligence operations against Castro.

    Cheever presented the proposal, which had been given the designation No. 3111, to the Special Group. The SG tentatively approved the operation along with two others: No. 3112, a sabotage operation directed against a sawmill located in northern Oriente province; and No. 3115, which involved the infiltration of a radio operator to provide communications for a “ratline,” an emergency escape route for Agency assets and agents in Cuba.

    At the conclusion of the November 5 special meeting, Mac Bundy put all three operations in a “fail safe ” status. They were to proceed as planned “pending concurrence in each case by higher authority ”—meaning until the president himself signed off on them. The next day, however, President Kennedy disapproved all Cuban operations scheduled to run before November 12. Thus, only one of the three operations, No. 3115, received presidential sanction.    

    In the mid-1990s, the November 4 document was one of seven identified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) as “assassination-related” and contained in the papers of Robert F. Kennedy. But none of the seven were released, according to the ARRB, by the time it ceased operating in September 1998. Records in the RFK papers required the express permission of an RFK Donor Committee before they could be released. As of January 2011, according to an internal memo from the John F. Kennedy Library, the seven documents remained closed because the RFK Donor Committee “never formally ruled to open them.” However, after Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit it turned out that six of the documents were in fact open to the public because copies of them existed in files not controlled by the Donor Committee. They had already been released and were available in the JFK Assassination Records Collection at the NARA II facility in College Park, Maryland.  Only the document cited above had not been made part of the Assassination Records collection.

    The Judicial Watch lawsuit was filed subsequent to a December 2012 Freedom of Information Act request by Washington Decoded’s editor Max Holland. Upon notification that all seven documents were open to researchers, the lawsuit was dropped. Nonetheless, further steps are being taken to ensure the availability of all government records in the RFK papers that are related in any way to the JFK assassination.

 Villanova Professor David M. Barrett, a member of Washington Decoded’s editorial board, provided the documents about what happened to proposed operation No. 3111.

©2013 by Max Holland

McCone's Telcon Gaffe

 

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 By David M. Barrett & Max Holland

 

    No matter how controversial the use of drones to kill al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders in Afghanistan or Pakistan may be, historians in the future won’t have to struggle over ambiguous, fragmentary evidence about who ordered them. Everyone understands it was President Barack Obama.

    It wasn’t always so clear-cut.

    In stark contrast, a half-century later there is still a lingering controversy over whether  the Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro (and some other Third World leaders) were ever authorized by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. By the CIA’s own admission, we do know the Agency was involved in attempts to kill/overthrow Castro as the leader of Cuba. But the doctrine of plausible deniability meant there was no paper trail—an express order—traceable from the CIA back to the Oval Office. Consequently, various defenders of these presidents have often claimed (the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. comes to mind) that it was unthinkable that President Kennedy would ever have given an order to “eliminate” Castro. More objective observers, noting the cold-blooded qualities required of and sometimes displayed by presidents, consider it entirely likely that in some cryptic, unrecorded way, Eisenhower and Kennedy did tell their heads of the Central Intelligence Agency to do so.[1]

    Curiously, since it was the CIA that attempted to kill Castro in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, the question of whether its directors authorized those attempts might seem more easily answered. Indeed, evidence is reasonably clear that Allen W. Dulles, who served Eisenhower as director of central intelligence (DCI) for eight years and then Kennedy for nine months, sanctioned such operations.[2]

    The record regarding John A. McCone, whom Kennedy appointed as DCI in the autumn of 1961, has been unclear and even bizarre. Specifically, is it possible that the CIA carried out assassination plots without his approval or even in the face of his disapproval? It seems an absurd proposition if not a very disturbing one. Following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961, in which Washington failed, in almost the most humiliating way possible, to overthrow Castro, some critics blamed the president for not authorizing sufficient air support for the Cuban exiles organized by the CIA to carry out the operation. Kennedy then chose McCone to succeed Dulles precisely because McCone had a widespread, well-deserved reputation as an aggressive, capable administrator and a ferocious Cold Warrior. He was also a Republican who might well have been Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense had the GOP won the 1960 election. As Kennedy once privately observed to his brother Robert, the selection of McCone was “useful.”[3]

     Nonetheless, when evidence of the CIA assassination plots surfaced publicly a decade and a half later, the retired McCone insisted he had not known of any such plans. McCone advocated many aggressive actions against the Cuban leader’s regime, but claimed to have feared excommunication from the Catholic Church if he even discussed, much less approved, assassination plots. Yes, he recalled, a few colleagues in the Kennedy administration had occasionally made passing remarks about getting rid of Castro, but he had always squelched those suggestions.[4]

    A Senate select committee headed by Frank Church (D-Idaho) in the mid-1970s investigated, among other things, assassination plots from the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Several CIA and other Kennedy administration officials had vague memories of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara raising the idea at a 10 August 1962 meeting, and McCone was supposed to have fiercely objected to the topic being discussed. Yet the official, detailed notes from that meeting do not show the topic being raised, and McNamara and other key officials who were there claimed to recall no such conversation.[5]

    Former DCI Richard M. Helms, who served as the deputy director of Plans (covert operations) under McCone, chose not to illuminate Church committee members about the particulars of that August 10 discussion. But on the general question of whether McCone knew of assassination plots carried out by the CIA while he was DCI, Helms stated that McCone “was involved in this up to his scuppers . . . I don’t understand how it was he didn’t hear about some of these things that he claims he didn’t.”[6]

   Now, however, new and dispositive evidence is available derived from a meeting held eleven days later. We recently found notes from a  cryptic telephone call McCone made to Secretary of State Dean Rusk on 21 August 1962, notes that have sat unnoticed for years in a box at the National Archives. They support the claim that while McCone opposed any open discussion of assassination proposals, he was witting and did not oppose the efforts as a matter of principle.

Mark Lane: The Original Shyster

 

Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK

Mark Lane

Skyhorse Publishing. 304 pp. $24.95

 

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By Mel Ayton

 

     The idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was somehow connected to the CIA is a legitimate line of inquiry considering how many allegations have been made that posit the Agency has not released all its files pertaining to the assassination.

    The non-release of some CIA files, including those of Agency officers William Harvey (sealed until 2063) and George Joannides, only helps fuel suspicion that a cabal of  operatives, known to be involved in an enterprise designed to either kill or topple Fidel Castro, enlisted Lee Harvey Oswald or used Oswald as a “patsy” in a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.[1]

    Conspiracy writers have named singularly, or as a group, such CIA officers as William Harvey, George Joannides, James Angleton, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, and David Morales, amongst others. It is the considered opinion of this reviewer that any additional CIA files will not support the allegations of CIA involvement in the assassination and will likely develop into a farce along the lines of the false Morales/Joannides/Campbell connection to the RFK assassination. However, the central ethical tenet for journalists and historians is to illuminate the unknown therefore it is in the interests of everyone that these files be released.[2]

    Outside of the wild and speculative books that attempt to tie in the CIA to the JFK assassination, there have been a number of respected authors (including Bayard Stockton, Vincent Bugliosi, Gus Russo, Evan Thomas, Tim Weiner, Jefferson Morley, and Peter Grose) who have researched the allegation. Most discovered curious, but essentially ephemeral, Oswald connections to anti-Castro Cubans and their CIA handlers. Additionally, alleged CIA/Oswald connections were investigated by the Warren Commission, Rockefeller Commission, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), as well as the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). All these investigatory bodies found no credible evidence to support CIA involvement or culpability in the assassination.

    Vincent Bugliosi, in his 1,600 page opus about the JFK assassination, Reclaiming History, concluded that conspiracy theorists have been unable to come up with “any evidence connecting the CIA to Oswald.” Bugliosi meticulously researched the JFK/CIA allegations that had been circulating since the sixties and observed that “. . . the only books written that suggest the CIA was behind the assassination are those by conspiracy theorists . . . . on the other hand, a considerable number of books have been written about the CIA and its history, warts and all, and not one of their authors, even though they had every ethical, professional (Pulitzer Prize, esteem of peers. etc.) and commercial reason to expose the CIA . . . . as being behind the assassination, found the need to devote no more than a paragraph or two in their long books to Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination.”[3]

    Bayard Stockton, an ex-CIA agent who later worked as a journalist for Newsweek, may be the exception as he devotes a chapter of his 2006 book to the allegations. He researched the possibility of CIA involvement in the JFK assassination for his biography of CIA officer William Harvey. Stockton interviewed many former officials and Harvey’s wife, all of whom reacted with “horror and disbelief” about the allegations. Stockton wrote that although a conclusive decision could not be made until the CIA releases all its documents, there was no credible evidence to blame the CIA. “I find it very hard to believe,” Stockton wrote, “that sworn officers of the CIA plotted the death of the president of the United States. I think the Agency’s top echelon knew more than it has admitted and was embarrassed that it had not yielded its knowledge instantly.”[4]

    Those who have an interest in learning more about the purported role the CIA played in the JFK assassination will be disappointed in what Mark Lane has to offer in his new book Last Word. He offers absolutely nothing new to the “CIA-did-it” literature. He will also likely upset many serious researchers who have been receptive to claims of CIA malfeasance because he has partly built his arguments around preposterous propositions, including the notion that the witness testimony and physical evidence “proves” a second shooter was involved in the assassination. Those old canards were debunked years ago.[5]

     Judging from website reports, Lane’s supporters are unaware of his previous shenanigans which stretch back to December 1963; yes, Lane was present at the creation. In 1966, Lane’s first book, Rush to Judgment, was persuasive with the mainstream media who were taken in by Lane’s lawyerly tricks and silver tongue as he debated supporters of the Warren Commission around the world. As Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler observed, Lane’s antics during these debates reminded him of “an old legend about frogs jumping from the mouth of a perfidious man every time he speaks . . . . If (Lane) talks for five minutes, it takes an hour to straighten out the record.” Even the counter-culture Rolling Stone magazine characterized Lane as a “huckster” and “hearse chaser.” Bugliosi describes Lane as having “infidelity to the truth” . . . a person who commits “outright fabrications” . . . “a fraud in his preachments about the known assassin” . . . and that he had “deliberately distorted the evidence” and repeatedly omitted “evidence damaging to his side.”[6]

    In Rush to Judgment, Lane abused the Warren Commission testimony of Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer, and others like Charles Brehm, an alleged “grassy knoll” witness, who said Lane took his statements out of context and added a different meaning to them. Lane also omitted the statements of key witnesses like Johnny C Brewer, who observed a nervous Oswald avoid police patrols after the shooting of Officer Tippit.[7]

    But Lane has a long history of playing fast and loose with the facts. In the early 1970s he used unreliable testimony to accuse American soldiers of multiple atrocities during the Vietnam War, according to New York Times correspondent Neil Sheehan, a prominent critic of US involvement in the Vietnam War. Sheehan investigated the accounts in Lane’s book, Conversations with Americans Testimony from 32 Vietnam Veterans, and found most of them to be bogus.[8]

    In the late 1970s, as a lawyer for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray, Lane appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), a congressional probe into the circumstances surrounding the separate assassinations of the civil rights leader and President Kennedy. HSCA said of Lane in its report, “Many of the allegations of conspiracy that the committee investigated were first raised by Mark Lane . . . . As has been noted, the facts were often at variance with Lane's assertions . . . . Lane was willing to advocate conspiracy theories publicly without having checked the factual basis for them . . . . . Lane's conduct resulted in public misperception about the assassination of Dr. King and must be condemned.”[9]

    With the publication of his latest book Lane’s modus operandi has clearly not changed. In fact, his new tome depends on readers’ ignorance, and no independent knowledge of the dramatis personae of the assassination literature or how the CIA behaved at the time of the assassination. For example, the author of the book’s introduction resurrects the myth that FBI agents listened to a tape recording of a “Lee Oswald” at the Soviet embassy during the assassin’s trip to Mexico City weeks before the assassination. The allegation that such a tape existed was debunked many years ago by HSCA. The story of the existence of tapes had originated with only one FBI agent out of many who handled the transcripts of the tapes because the tapes had been copied over as per the CIA’s usual procedures. [10]

    There are literally tens of thousands of documents and items of evidence in the JFK case. There are therefore endless opportunities for conspiracy writers to add a word here or a word there to give a different contextual meaning to either a witness statement or a government document. The vast majority of readers simply do not have the time to wade through the relevant documents. As Victor Navasky observed in a 2010 article, “The Rosenberg Variations” in The Nation, “we live in a state of opinion trusteeship. None of us have the time and few of us the ability to do our own research on all the complex, problematic issues of our day.” Consequently, many conspiracy supporters mistake crude manipulation for scholarship.

Unspeakably Awful

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JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters

By James W. Douglass

Orbis Books. 510 pp. $30

By John McAdams

    James Douglass treads a familiar path in JFK and the Unspeakable. It is yet another book that claims John Kennedy was killed because he had decided to withdraw from Vietnam. Kennedy’s “rejection of Cold War politics was considered treasonous by forces in his own government,” according to Douglass, and supposedly made JFK’s violent removal an urgent necessity.[1]

     What makes Douglass’s volume unique is that his argument is dressed up in verbiage  unfamiliar to JFK assassination buffs. Most authors of books on the assassination  attempt to cloak their political views, and pretend to arrive at the truth about the  assassination after a supposedly objective analysis of the facts. Douglass wears his politics on his sleeve. He is a Catholic “peace activist” and disciple of Thomas Merton, whose observations infuse the book. Self-styled activists like Douglass have a long history of being opposed to the use of military power by the United States, although they don’t seem to mind as much when military power is used by America’s adversaries. And while they employ religious rhetoric to justify and rationalize their unilateral pacifism, their worldview, ultimately, is indistinguishable from that of secular leftists like Oliver Stone (who, not surprisingly, is a big fan of Douglass’s book).

    Douglass’s key villain—the “Unspeakable” of his title—turns out to be the same kind of opaque nemesis that Stone is fond of conjuring up. The best identification Douglass can offer is “shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats under the cover of ‘plausible deniability,’” and even more vaguely, “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.”[2] How convenient: a culprit who is indescribable. In essence, though, Douglass’s evil-doer is indistinguishable from that bogeyman of vulgar, atheistic, and leftist radicals from the ‘60s: the “military-industrial complex,” except that he adds to the stew the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Vanity of Vanity Fair

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By Max Holland

    Under the editorship of Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair has become the most reliable purveyor of Camelot nostalgia.

    Over the last decade, either the glossy magazine or vanityfair.com has published 19 articles, book excerpts, or photo spreads about the Kennedys. In the last three years alone, Kennedys (Jack, Bobby, Jackie, or some combination thereof) have three times graced  Vanity Fair’s cover, one of the most sought-after pieces of magazine real estate in the business. Single-handedly, Graydon Carter seems bent on extending what Garry Wills once called “the Kennedy time in our national life.”[1]

    The latest cover story in the October 2009 issue is unlike its predecessors though. It’s neither a  syrupy excerpt from a fawning book, nor an amply-illustrated puff piece. Instead, Sam Kashner’s “A Clash of Camelots” purports to be a serious, original piece of journalism about the 1966-67 “Manchester affair,” the first episode to tarnish the Kennedys’ escutcheon following the 1963 assassination of JFK. As the table of contents states, “[VF contributing editor] Sam Kashner unearths the story behind [William Manchester’s The Death of a President,] a best-seller that captivated the nation, divided the Kennedys, and nearly destroyed the author.”

    Far from unearthing the story, or even shedding new light on it, the article mostly recycles what has long been known. Newspapers, especially The New York Times, covered the so-called “battle of the book” in agonizing detail for months. Afterwards, the heavily publicized struggle was the subject of three books, two of them authored by Times-men. Eventually, even Manchester had his unabridged say, publishing a 60-page chapter about the controversy in a compilation of his essays.[2]

    Still, there wouldn’t be much to criticize—and it would be churlish to do so—if this boast were only the issue. The genuine problem is the article’s many errors of commission and omission, including Kashner’s uncritical acceptance of clichés and untruths in Manchester’s own narrative that have been circulating for 42 years. Some of these issues have long been points of dispute, while the truth about others has only become known recently, through the release of such sources as the once-secret Lyndon Johnson tape recordings.

    The VF editors’ note says Kashner’s interest in the Manchester story was first aroused in 1984, when John F. Kennedy, Jr. told Kashner that The Death of a President was the “only book he would ever read about his father’s assassination. This revelation piqued Kashner’s obsession with the controversial history . . . ” If so, Kashner’s obsessiveness is strictly limited to sources that conform to a flattering portrayal of William Manchester and his book, which Kashner considers a “masterpiece.”

    Here are some of the outstanding errors of fact, interpretation, and history in “A Clash of Camelots.”

The Underwood Hoax

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President Lyndon Johnson shaking hands with Marty Underwood during
the swearing-in ceremony for Marvin Watson as postmaster general, 26
April 1968.                                         Still photo courtesy of the LBJ Library.




By Max Holland

   

    On October 28, Bloomsbury USA published Brothers in Arms, Gus Russo’s second book on the Kennedy assassination, co-authored with Stephen Molton. The book came well-blurbed, with Diane McWhorter, Joe Califano, and Daniel Schorr singing its praises.

    Bloomsbury’s press release boasted that Brothers in Arms contained “explosive new information” about the role of Castro’s Cuba in the assassination. One of the specific disclosures was advertised as coming from “deathbed interviews” of Marty Underwood, “one of LBJ’s closest confidantes, a man who also was in charge of Johnson’s international security arrangements.” At LBJ’s behest, Underwood allegedly went on a secret mission to Mexico City in 1968 to find out what the CIA really knew about Cuban involvement in JFK’s assassination. Underwood’s “revelations, supported by his contemporaneous notes, reveal a shocking truth that was too dangerous to be disclosed . . . until after his passing.”[1]

    Next month, Washington Decoded will review Brothers in Arms in full, and examine all its allegations in light of the available evidence. This month is devoted solely to the backstory about Marty Underwood’s shocking truth.

    If it weren’t so pathetic, the backstory might actually be amusing.                         

Death of a President and Birth of a Fabricator

    Underwood’s penchant for telling tall tales first became evident in 1967, with publication of William Manchester’s The Death of a President.

    Manchester interviewed Underwood on June 21, 1965 for the book, which was originally envisioned as the Kennedys’ authorized account of the assassination. How and why Manchester came to interview Underwood, who was the advance man for only the Houston leg of the Texas trip, is not precisely known. The advance men for the Fort Worth and Dallas legs, Jeb Byrne and Jack Puterbaugh, were not interviewed, although their recollections would seem to have been even more valuable to Manchester’s narrative. The only plausible explanation for why Byrne and Puterbaugh were ignored is that Manchester believed Underwood was present during the devastating aftermath, in particular, the moment when Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One.

    But Underwood was not there.

    Manchester put Underwood on the airplane, and even identified him in the iconic picture of the swearing-in that was taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton.

The spectators who were to be framed in Stoughton’s lens were a lopsided group. [Presidential physician George] Burkley stood behind someone else . . . there were [press secretary Mac] Kilduff and his two pool reporters [Newsweek’s Charles Roberts and UPI’s Merriman Smith]. There was [Martin] Underwood, and there were three Kennedy secretaries—Evelyn [Lincoln], Mary [Gallagher], and Pam [Turnure]—each of whom was led in by Jack Valenti and Lem Johns.[2]

    It was conceivable, of course, that Manchester made this mistake on his own, because The Death of a President had more than its share of factual mistakes. But another passage in the book made it clear that the source of the false claim had to be Underwood himself.[3]

    According to this passage, Underwood was sound asleep in Houston’s Rice Hotel, 600 miles [sic] away, when the shots were fired in Dallas. In the mistaken belief that he was an important part of the presidential entourage, the hotel’s staff roused Underwood out of bed and rushed him to the airport, where he just managed to catch a scheduled flight to Dallas. “Afterward [Underwood] would have only the haziest recollection of how he had got there . . . . He was nowhere near as important as the Rice management had thought him to be. Except as a dazed witness to the upcoming [swearing-in] ceremony he was useless.” [4]

    Not only was Underwood not captured in Stoughton’s famous picture—nor in any of the 21 stills made immediately before, during, and after the ceremony—Underwood was not even on board the airplane, as a manifest prepared by the Secret Service in February 1964 proves.[5] Manchester was deceived by Underwood, who in his spare time actually studied and collected information about how con men operated, according to Jeb Byrne, one of his advance team colleagues from the 1960s. One of the lessons Underwood  learned, apparently, was how to construct a  lie out of a kernel of truth. In this instance, Underwood did actually rush from Houston to Dallas. But he returned to Washington aboard Air Force Two, not the airplane carrying a new president and the body of John F. Kennedy.[6]

    Among his peers, Underwood, who was divorced for a second time in 1962, had a reputation even back then for embellishing his peripheral role as an advance man, always making him more central to events than he was. When queried about why Underwood inserted himself in this iconic moment, Harold Pachios, who worked alongside Underwood as an advance man in the 1960s, recalled in October 2006 that Underwood was a “lonely guy who battled a drinking problem . . . and wanted to be important.”[7]

    Putting himself aboard Air Force One, at a moment of national trauma, would not be Underwood’s last fabrication, and far from his worst. In the years to come, he would hoodwink two of the biggest names in American journalism.

11 Seconds in Dallas Redux: Filmed Evidence

Figure 1.  Still photo taken during a restaging of the assassination by the Secret Service in 1963. Six months later, the Warren Commission would independently label the limousine’s location at this approximate point on Elm Street “Position A.” The ghost image, which is inserted, approximates the position of the presidential limousine on November 22 at the moment Abraham Zapruder restarted his camera (see figure 2).

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By Max Holland & Kenneth R. Scearce

  

    In March 2007, the inaugural issue of Washington Decoded posited a radical new description of the shooting sequence in Dealey Plaza.

    “11 Seconds in Dallas, Not Six” argued that the Zapruder film did not capture in full the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. Rather, the iconic movie recorded an assassination that had already commenced. Lee Harvey Oswald’s errant first shot was fired about 1.4 seconds before Abe Zapruder started his camera, or just after the president’s limousine reached a point on Elm Street identified by the Warren Commission in 1964 as “Position A,” which was “not on the Zapruder film” (figure 1).[1]

    This new explanation changed nothing, and everything, at the same time.  In the first sense, it only underscored that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed President Kennedy. But it also lay to rest the notion, which had long haunted the official story, that Oswald’s feat of marksmanship was anything exceptional. Firing three shots in 11 seconds took no great skill.

 

Figure 2. Frame 133 from the Zapruder film, the first frame in which the presidential limousine is visible. The car had reached the second set of lane dividers, and was approximately 70 feet down into Dealey Plaza.

   

   


    Seeing is believing, the cliché goes. And it is a testament to the power of visual media that for 44 years, the Zapruder film was considered equivalent to the assassination. During that time, it was no secret that Abraham Zapruder had turned off his camera about seven seconds after he initially started filming, after seeing nothing but police motorcycles through the viewfinder. And it was also fairly easy to calculate that by the time Zapruder restarted his “Zoomatic,” the presidential limousine had already traveled about 70 feet down Elm Street.

    Yet the presumption made at the outset—that Zapruder had captured the assassination in full—was never seriously questioned. As the critic Richard B. Woodward insightfully observed in 2003, the assassination quickly became “fused with one representation, so much so that Kennedy’s death [was] virtually unimaginable without Zapruder’s film.”[2]

    The March 2007 essay in Washington Decoded, and a subsequent Op-Ed in The New York Times, made the case for an 11 second-long shooting sequence on the basis of numerous earwitness and eyewitness testimonies, and because Oswald’s first shot missed—most likely because it ricocheted off a traffic-light mast overhanging Elm Street (see figure 1).[3] An independent November 2007 essay by Kenneth Scearce, a co-author of this article, examined how the Zapruder film itself provided additional corroboration.[4]

    This new essay takes another fresh look at some old evidence, including several films from Dealey Plaza, to see if there were any additional clues that might have been overlooked during all those years the Zapruder film exerted its grip on the collective imagination. Several pieces of old evidence turn out to corroborate the observation that a shot was fired before Zapruder restarted his “Zoomatic.”

    The new paradigm of 11 seconds cannot, in all likelihood, be proven beyond a reasonable doubt today, as might have been in the case in 1963 or 1964 had the traffic mast been examined promptly for metallic residue. But three shots in 11 seconds should now be regarded as the depiction with the greatest fidelity to all the known facts.

Still Guilty After All These Years: Sirhan B. Sirhan

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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.

Doubt and Disbelief in the Warren Report

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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]

JFK’s Death, Re-Framed

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By Max Holland and Johann Rush

   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.

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.

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 By Priscilla McMillan

    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.”

The JFK Files: Cuba, Kennedy, and the Cold War

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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.

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

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).

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.

The Atlantic Monthly

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The Assassination Tapes

Lyndon Johnson secretly recorded many of his telephone conversations as President. The tapes provide our only window into his thoughts after hearing what was then a rumor about CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro—information that shaped Johnson's views of both JFK's assassination and his own presidency.

      

---

n July of 1973, six months after the death of Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Atlantic published an article by a journalist and former Johnson speechwriter named Leo Janos. "The Last Days of the President," about LBJ in retirement, was elegiac in tone and fact, save for one dissonant paragraph—in which Johnson volunteered his opinion that President John F. Kennedy's assassination had been the result of a conspiracy organized from Cuba. "I never believed that [Lee Harvey] Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger," he explained to Janos. Johnson thought such a conspiracy had formed in retaliation for U.S. plots to assassinate Fidel Castro; he had found after taking office that the government "had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean."

Johnson's assertion generated just a ripple of attention at the time, ten years after the assassination. Conspiracy theories about the assassination had become a cottage industry, and the fact that even a former President believed in one was interesting, but only mildly so. Then, too, Kennedy's mythic stature left no room for an allegation of this nature, and Johnson's well-known penchant for exaggeration worked against him. Besides, it was easy to discount the views of a President whose term had given rise to the phrase "credibility gap." After his bitterly divisive years in office the public wanted none of Johnson's regrets, reminiscences, or revelations.

Johnson's remark was dismissed until 1975, when an extraordinary series of events, ignited by the Watergate break-in, culminated in the baring of the Central Intelligence Agency's darkest secrets—including the fact that it had indeed tried during the early 1960s to assassinate Fidel Castro. Still, the story behind Johnson's indiscretion to Janos has never been adequately understood or explained. Surely Johnson appreciated the likely consequences if his words were taken at face value. They could be devastating to the government and the nation to which he had devoted the greater portion of his life. To answer the question of why Johnson spoke out is to understand how he himself saw his presidency.

It is possible to reconstruct the story only because Johnson secretly recorded many of his telephone conversations. Without these recordings—history with the bark off—vital information would be altogether missing. Not one of the millions of documents in the Johnson Library reveals the President's own thoughts soon after hearing what was then a rumor about CIA plots against Castro; only the recordings do. It is virtually an article of faith among historians that the war in Vietnam was the overwhelming reason the President left office a worn, bitter, and disillusioned man. But the assassination-related tapes paint a more nuanced picture—one in which Johnson's view of the assassination weighed as heavily on him as the war.

We pick up the story just after the November 1966 elections. The Republican Party had come roaring back after being trounced in 1964. The biggest bone in the President's throat, though, was not the Republicans but his own party. The once impregnable Johnson, whose roots were certifiably southern but who had governed from the left, was seen as increasingly vulnerable because of the midterm election results. He was losing the support of the party intelligentsia—a crucial segment, and one that he had always found frustratingly elusive. On the domestic front, liberals charged the President with doing too little to alleviate poverty, discrimination, and the problems of America's inner cities; as for foreign policy, there was only Vietnam.

One barometer was especially telling in Johnson's eyes: polls pitting the President against Senator Robert Kennedy, the only person considered a serious obstacle to Johnson's renomination in 1968. The idea that Johnson might face a challenge from his own party was extraordinarily disheartening. That his putative challenger was Robert Kennedy was infuriating. The most painful presidential transition in American history was bound to have had difficulties. But JFK's brother had been a unique problem for Johnson since the day of the assassination, when RFK had acted as if Johnson were an undeserving pretender rather than the legitimate successor to the presidency.

By the winter of 1967 Johnson's handling of the transition, once widely viewed as flawless, was coming under criticism. New books and press reports had kindled relentless controversy over the official version of the assassination —that is, the Warren Report, which had concluded that the shots that killed President Kennedy were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald, and that no evidence existed that Oswald was part of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic. For the first time since the report's release, in September of 1964, a plurality of Americans believed that the assassination was the culmination of a conspiracy. No less damaging to Johnson was the serialization of William Manchester's forthcoming The Death of a President (1967). Manchester revealed that severe strains lay behind the pageantry that had gripped America for four days in November of 1963. But, conspicuously, only one major figure emerged without dignity. Manchester depicted LBJ as an unworthy successor to JFK, a crude and boorish Vice President who had grabbed the nation's highest office with unseemly haste. Taken together, these developments continually reminded Americans of the violent and abrupt manner in which Johnson had become President. The assassination was a wound in the body politic that had not healed, and was not being allowed to.

As he grappled with what amounted to an existential attack on his presidency, Johnson recorded two revealing telephone calls in early 1967.

On Monday, February 20, Johnson called Ramsey Clark, the acting Attorney General, because of an astonishing news story published on Friday afternoon in the New Orleans States-Item. The Orleans Parish district attorney, Jim Garrison, had "launched an intensive investigation into the circumstances surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy," alleging that there had been a conspiracy. Although his legal reach was limited, Garrison had subpoena power over the jurisdiction in which, he claimed, the conspiracy had been hatched.

Garrison, then forty-five, was considered a responsible, reform-minded prosecutor, albeit one with a decided flair for publicity. Like most district attorneys, he was politically ambitious. There was little on the record to suggest that he was, as it turned out, a cunning demagogue the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Thus the almost universal response to Garrison's action was He must have something. By the time the President called Clark, New Orleans was at the center of a media maelstrom.

Ramsey Clark with President Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office, March 23, 1967.  (Credit: LBJ Library Photo by Yoichi Okamoto)

Clark was especially discomfited by one "nutty" aspect of the story—a rumor that Garrison was linking Johnson to the conspiracy. As fantastic as it sounded, the rumor seemed to have a credible source: the Democratic representative Hale Boggs, whose district encompassed much of New Orleans, and who had served on the Warren Commission.

Perhaps to Clark's surprise, Johnson responded to the story with equanimity, without swearing or even muttering to himself when he heard what Garrison was reported to be saying. As it happened, the rumor from New Orleans was far from the wildest one making the rounds. Johnson asked Clark if he had heard an even more fantastic rumor—one that had been personally conveyed to the President on January 16 by Drew Pearson, a syndicated columnist who was considered something of a renegade by his peers. The story was that the CIA had sent men into Cuba on a mission to assassinate Fidel Castro after the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle. Pearson also said that Robert Kennedy had been directly involved.

Little wonder that Johnson received the news from New Orleans with such restraint. He professed to Clark that he found Pearson's story "incredible," but he could hardly have done otherwise. It would have been political suicide for Johnson to spread, or be associated with spreading, a rumor so potentially damaging to Kennedy. Johnson probably believed that if Garrison was on to anything, it might be strands from Pearson's story—which, after all, led back to Washington. Garrison might simply have been mistaken about which Washington doorstep the scandal led to. Johnson was not worried about being personally implicated by either story.

As he always did when faced with a ticklish political-legal problem, Johnson had consulted at length with his longtime counsel, Abe Fortas, even though Fortas was by then on the Supreme Court. Johnson's idea of what to do about the Garrison and Pearson developments was essentially the advice Fortas had given him: watch them both carefully; start a file; don't interfere; see how they play out.

---

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1967, 9:40 A.M.
Call to Acting Attorney General Ramsey Clark

CLARK: I think that what he [Jim Garrison] is workin' on must be the associations that Oswald had in the three or four months that he was down there [in New Orleans] in '62 [and] '63. I doubt ... I think it'd just be incredible if he [Garrison] had anything that went beyond that. I think this subject is so volatile and emotional, though, that it could get confused and obscured.

[Uncomfortably and hesitantly] I had heard that Hale Boggs was sayin' [that] he—Garrison—was sayin' that ... or privately around town [was saying] that it [the assassination] could be traced back [to you] ... or that you could be found in it someplace, which ... I can't believe he's been sayin' that. The Bureau says they haven't heard any such thing, and they got lots of eyes and ears.

'Course, that was a [credible] fella like Hale Boggs. But Hale gets pretty emotional about people [like Garrison] that he really doesn't like, and people who have fought him and been against him, and I would be more inclined to attribute it to that. Either that, or this guy Garrison [is] just completely off his rocker.

JOHNSON: Who did Hale tell this to?

CLARK [somewhat in disbelief]: Apparently Marvin [Watson].¹

JOHNSON [aside to Watson, who was in the room]: [Did] Hale tell you that—Hale Boggs—that this fella [Garrison, this] district attorney down there, said that this is traced to me or somethin'?

WATSON: Privately he [Garrison] was using your name as having known about it [the assassination]. I said [to Boggs], Will you give this information to Barefoot Sanders?² Ramsey was out of town—this was Saturday night. [Boggs] said, I sure will. So I asked the operator to get Barefoot and Ramsey together, and they did.

JOHNSON [to Clark]: Yeah, I don't know about it. They don't ever let me in on it, Marvin and Jake [Jacobsen] over here, so you have to call me direct.³

CLARK: Well—

JOHNSON: They just think this stuff's for them.

CLARK: Such nutty things that ... it's awfully explosive but ... The press, really, has quite a jaundiced eye about it ... and about Garrison, so far.⁴ I had several press interviews out in Des Moines [on] Saturday evening and afternoon, and the thrust of their questions is, What kind of nut is this?

JOHNSON: Two things I think. You know [there's] this story going around about the CIA and their tryin' to get ... sendin' in the folks to get [Fidel] Castro.

CLARK: To assassinate Castro.

JOHNSON: Have you got that full story laid out in front of you, and [do you] know what it is? Has anybody ever told you all the story?

CLARK: No.

JOHNSON: I think you oughta have that. I don't ... it's incredible. I don't believe there's a thing in the world to it, and I don't think we oughta seriously consider it. But I think you oughta know about it.

CLARK: Who would I get it from?

JOHNSON: I've had it from three or four [sources]. I've forgotten who's come in here. I'll have to check it.

CLARK: Does the Bureau have it?

JOHNSON: No, I don't think so. You might ask 'em. Pearson—Drew Pearson—came [in] and gave it to me. [Pearson] said [Edward] Morgan⁵ told him ... [Morgan is James] Hoffa's lawyer. He [Morgan] says that they have a man that was involved, that was brought in to the CIA, with a number of others, and instructed by the CIA and the Attorney General [Robert Kennedy] to assassinate Castro after the Bay of Pigs [in 1961].⁶

CLARK [uncomfortably]: I've heard that ... you know, I've heard that much. I just haven't heard [any] names, and places, and ...

JOHNSON: Well, let's see who it is ... let's see. I think it would be—[it would] look very bad on us if we'd had it reported to us [a] number of times and we just didn't pay any [attention]—just laughed ... if this is true.

He [Morgan] says that his [client's] limitation—let's check it and see if [the statute of] limitation[s] does run out in November ... they say that the limitation runs out in November.⁷ I don't know about this conspiracy, or how much—how many years [the statute of limitations runs]—

CLARK: [It'd] be six years, all right, which would be November, probably. But it [the statute of limitations would] not [run out] for a concealed situation.

JOHNSON: Well, that's what I'd think. But anyway, he [Pearson] says in November he's [Rosselli's] going to tell it. And that—

CLARK: Mr. Pearson is [going to publish the story]?

JOHNSON: No. This individual [Rosselli].⁸

CLARK: This individual?

JOHNSON: Yeah. And these lawyers [Morgan, for one] have it.

There's just all kinds of things that come to me every day. I don't pay any attention to 'em, but maybe I was a little worried this mornin' because one of my lawyer friends told me I oughta call you and talk to you about it.⁹ So [that] you'll have a file that protects you, that you just don't look like they report these things to us and we just throw 'em overboard and say, Well, we don't like 'em and it['s] not what we wanna hear. So we're not gonna do anything about it.

But anyway, [the story is] that following this, Castro said—they [the plotters] had these pills, and they're supposed to take 'em when they caught 'em, and they didn't get to take their pills—so he [Castro] tortured 'em. And they told him all about it, and who was present and why they did it. So he [Castro] said, okay. We'll just take care of that. So then he called Oswald and a group in, and told them to ... about this meetin', and go set it up and get the job done.

CLARK: Uh-hmm.

JOHNSON: Now that's their story. And I talked to Abe [Fortas] about it first, and he just said, Well, it's so incredible that ... he'd do it.¹⁰

[Brief discussion of controversy over FBI wiretapping.]

Now here's what I called about. I just think that if you haven't heard that, maybe you oughta put yourself in a position to either hear Pearson or whoever's circulatin' it. There've been two or three here circulatin' it to me, and Pearson was just one of 'em. But I've forgotten who the others are.¹¹ They were reputable people, or they wouldn't [have] gotten in here.

CLARK: Pearson was in last week.

JOHNSON: Who?

CLARK: I said, Pearson was in to see me last week and sat here for thirty [or] forty minutes [and] never mentioned anything about it.

JOHNSON: Well, he came to see me ... came to see me in the [Executive] Mansion, oh, I'd say a month ago.¹² And there was before that, one or two others, but I can't remember who. They were responsible people. But it sounded just so [wild]... just like your tellin' me that Lady Bird was taking dope. I just wouldn't pay much attention to it. If I'm seein' her every day, I just don't believe that that was involved.

Anyway, I'll try to think of the other names and give 'em to you. He's the only one I can remember now, and I don't credit it ... I credit it ninety-nine [and] ninety-nine one-hundredths percent untrue. But that's somethin' I think we oughta know has been reported, and y'all oughta do what you think oughta be done to protect yourself.

[Clark and the President continue to discuss how to monitor Garrison's investigation without seeming to be either too interested or too uninterested.]

---

        y late February several of Jim Garrison's top aides were begging him to drop his investigation. The sudden death (from a brain aneurysm) of his ostensible chief witness, David Ferrie, was a golden opportunity, they privately told him: it provided a perfect excuse to halt the probe. "Are you crazy?" Garrison responded. "Don't you realize that we are on the verge of solving one of the crimes of the century?"¹³

On March 1 Garrison ordered the arrest of Clay Shaw, one of New Orleans's most esteemed and civic-minded businessmen, for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy. The city was dumbstruck, as were some of the aides in the DA's office. But few people other than Shaw's friends and lawyers believed that a district attorney would be so reckless and irresponsible as to arrest a man without substantial evidence. Garrison must have something.

These events unfolded while John Connally, the governor of Texas, who had been wounded in the Kennedy assassination, was in New York publicizing the next World's Fair, which was scheduled to open in San Antonio in April of 1968. Although Connally was bent on generating attention for the exposition, reporters wanted only to talk to him about the arrest. The feverish reporting eventually got to Connally, who had always concurred with the overall findings of the Warren Commission even though he disputed its "single-bullet theory."¹⁴ Now his certitude was shaken.

Connally called Johnson to discuss some of the reports he'd just heard. He probably expected the President to be intrigued by the news, for two reasons. He knew that Johnson's thinking often gravitated toward conspiratorial explanations. And the story Connally was hearing cast Robert Kennedy in a very unflattering light. Johnson, however, was not impressed. Initially the Garrison probe and the Pearson story had tended to reinforce each other in his mind, insofar as he had attached any credibility to them. But by now the FBI had convinced him that Garrison was a charlatan. And Abe Fortas had pointed out that upon close inspection, Drew Pearson's story seemed full of holes.

---

THURSDAY, MARCH 2, 1967, 9:22 P.M.
Call From Texas Governor John Connally

CONNALLY: I'm sorry to bother you. Can you listen to me for about five minutes?

JOHNSON: Sure.

CONNALLY: All day today I have been interviewed up here ... they're continually breaking stories on this conspiracy thing ... based on what this fella, this DA in New Orleans talks about, [this DA] named Garrison.

I have just been interviewed again. And of course, I just simply say that I know nothing about it. But a newsman named Paul Smith has just been here to interview me again. They have a long story on the radio tonight, over WINS, a news radio station here in New York. Charley Payne is the [WINS] general manager, and [has] talked to me off and on all day [trying to keep] me posted on it. They [WINS] supposedly have a story from a man who saw the files in Garrison's office ... he is the DA in New Orleans. I don't have the whole story, but here's what they say.

That Garrison has information that would prove that there were four assassination [teams] ... assassins in the United States, sent here by [Fidel] Castro, or Castro's people. [Sent] not by Castro himself, but one of his lieutenants. One team was picked up in New York ... but did not ... was picked up and interviewed by the FBI and the Secret Service, but did not reveal a great deal of information which was available.

One of the teams was composed of Lee Harvey Oswald; this fella [Clay] Shaw, that has just been arrested in New Orleans yesterday; and the [deceased] man [David] Ferrie; plus one other man. They were teams of four. And there were two other teams that I know nothing about.

WINS Radio has had some reporters, according to the media here, in Cuba ... working on various angles of this thing for the past [few] days. They also have a team of reporters in New Orleans with Garrison. In Cuba they found, according—[and] this is very confidential, and all of this is not goin' on the air ... at all.¹⁵ But in Cuba ... and the two reporters that they had there were working from different angles and came together with exactly the same story.

The story—that they're not going to publish—is that after the [1962] missile crisis, President Kennedy and [Nikita] Khrushchev had made a deal to leave Castro in power. But about six months after the missile crisis was over, the CIA was instructed to assassinate Castro ... and sent teams into Cuba. Some of 'em were captured and tortured, and Castro and his people—and I assume Che Guevara—heard the whole story.¹⁶ The information they have here, which they're not gonna run, is that President Kennedy did not [issue] the order to the CIA, but that some other person extremely close to President Kennedy did. They did not name the man ... but the inference was very clear. The inference was ... that it was his brother [who] ordered the CIA to send a team into Cuba to assassinate Castro. Then one of Castro's lieutenants, as a reprisal measure, sent four teams in[to] the United States to assassinate President Kennedy. [And] that Lee Harvey Oswald was [one of the] members of the team operating out of New Orleans.

Now this is the story that they think they have. This is the information that was given to me tonight, less than an hour ago, by a reporter named Paul Smith who came here to [indistinct] Charley Payne, whom I knew in Texas. [Payne was] a radio man down there and he's now the general manager of WINS.

I thought this would be of interest to you. I know nothing more about it than that, but I thought you oughta know that.

JOHNSON: Good. This is confidential too. We've had that story on about three occasions, and the people here say that there's no basis for it.

CONNALLY: Hmm.

JOHNSON: I have had some ... I've given a lot of thought to it. First, one of [Jimmy] Hoffa's lawyers went to one of our mutual friends—

CONNALLY: Yeah.

JOHNSON: —and asked him to come and relay that to us ... just about like you have related it.¹⁷ [A] week or two passed, and then Pearson came to me, Drew Pearson—

CONNALLY: Yeah.

JOHNSON: —[and he] told me that the lawyer, Edward Morgan here [in Washington], had told him the same thing and said that they would plead ... they would tell all the story after November when the [statute of] limitation[s] ran out. I don't know ... our lawyer [Ramsey Clark] said they couldn't believe that there's any [statute of] limitation[s] on a [concealed] conspiracy, but ... [Then] I talked to another one or two of our good lawyers that I have recognized—

CONNALLY: Yes, sir.

JOHNSON: —[who's] pretty high-placed, a few months ago—

CONNALLY: Yes, sir.¹⁸

JOHNSON: He evaluated [it] pretty carefully and said that it was ridiculous.

With this CIA thing breaking and the thing turning, as it did, in reconstructing the requests that were made of me back there, at the [beginning], right after I became President, I have talked to some more [people] about it, and I've got the A[ttorney] G[eneral] coming down to see me tomorrow night ... to spend a weekend with me.¹⁹ I thought I'd go over it with him again just so that they could ... so [the FBI director J. Edgar] Hoover and 'em could watch it very carefully.

They say that ... there's not anything to the Garrison story, [at] least Hoover says so, as near as he can tell. He says that they interviewed Ferrie, and they interviewed this other fella [Dean Andrews], very carefully and closely.²⁰ And the fella [Andrews] claims that he got a call from Oswald, but they [the FBI] can't find any record of it. And the doctor that had him [Andrews] under surveillance said that he wasn't in a position to talk on November the twenty-third, and [that] he [was] under very heavy sedation.

And that the [Clay] Shaw thing is a phony, and that Ferrie died of natural causes, and that that was a phony. But that—some of these same sources that were preventin' ... tryin' to involve this jail thing ... have been feeding stuff to Garrison as they did here.²¹

I don't know whether there's any basis for it or not. I noticed even Larry—Larry Blackmon, yesterday, was in to see me on another matter—and he started makin' a big pitch about this other situation.²² So I don't know how much of it is being fed out through their network and through their channels, and how much of it anybody would know. It's pretty hard to see how ... we would know directly ... what Castro did.

CONNALLY: Yeah.

JOHNSON: The story varies a good deal. If you go to lookin' at it [hard], as Abe said, who is it that's seen Castro? Or heard from Castro? Or knows Castro ... that's [in a position to] ... [who] could be ... confirming all this? [Fortas said] that we just hear that this is what he did, but nobody points to how we hear it.

CONNALLY: Yeah.

JOHNSON: So we will look into it, and I appreciate very much your callin' me, and I'll try to bear this in mind. I may have you talk to the other fella when you get back home, just for a minute, because I think that it's somethin' we have to be aware of and watch, without gettin'—

CONNALLY: Caught either way. He [Payne] made me promise—

JOHNSON: —caught either way.

[Brief discussion about Robert Kennedy's call for a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam.]

CONNALLY: I just thought [that] since this was out in the communications—

JOHNSON: Yeah ... yeah, I think that's right. I think that's good ... and I think it's right. I think—

CONNALLY: I don't know how ... I don't know what either. I thought it might tie in with somethin' you knew, and I don't want to know anything. I don't need to know it, but I just wanted [you] to know—

JOHNSON: Well ... no ... I've told you all I know. That's all we know. And the FBI thinks that both Ferrie and Shaw are frauds—I mean, that Garrison is usin' 'em as a fraud, that they have interviewed both of 'em at great length.

CONNALLY: Yeah.

JOHNSON: They have heard these things, and they interviewed 'em back in [1963-1964], for the Warren Commission.²³ They do not give any credit to it, but we can't ever be sure, and we just want to keep watchin' and so on [and] so forth.

CONNALLY: Okay, sir. I'm sorry to disturb you.

JOHNSON: Thank you, Johnny.

---

             n March 3, 1967, the day after Johnson spoke with Connally, Jack Anderson, Drew Pearson's associate, broke the story of the alleged plots against Castro.²⁴ The column began, "President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb, an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot [against Castro] which then possibly backfired against his late brother." The column was so thinly sourced—it admitted that the story was a rumor—that The Washington Post and the New York Post refused to publish it. But hundreds of other newspapers went ahead. Anderson had rushed into print almost certainly because he feared being scooped by Jim Garrison. The column observed that the allegation it described "may have started New Orleans' flamboyant District Attorney Jim Garrison on his investigation of the Kennedy assassination," but that insiders "believe he is following the wrong trails."

Spurred on by the column, Ramsey Clark finally did what Johnson had suggested during their conversation on February 20: he asked the FBI what it knew about the matter. On March 6 the FBI prepared what is surely one of the most astonishing memoranda in its history. The heading alone was enough to set hearts palpitating at the CIA: "Central Intelligence Agency's Intentions to Send Hoodlums to Cuba to Assassinate Castro." The FBI knew far less than it thought it did about the covert operation, but its information was reliable on three vital points: the CIA did try to have Castro assassinated during the early 1960s; it employed members of the Cosa Nostra in this effort; and Attorney General Robert Kennedy knew about both the plots and the mob's involvement. Before receiving this memo, Johnson had dismissed the rumor as no more credible than the idea that his wife was on drugs. Now he had to grapple with the implications of the revelation and what he should do about it, if anything.

One of his first impulses was to talk to Chief Justice Earl Warren. In the early evening of March 13 Johnson met privately with Warren for forty minutes, with only Marvin Watson, the White House staffer who served as liaison with the FBI, in attendance. Little is known about this meeting. Since January, Warren had been aware of the story that the CIA had utilized the Mafia to try to assassinate Castro; Pearson had told him three days after telling Johnson. But until he stepped into the Oval Office that evening, he did not know that the story was true. Warren's rock-solid belief in the report that bears his name must have been weakened, at least momentarily.

The meeting had two consequences. The Chief Justice was, of course, thoroughly conversant with the evidence against Oswald, and he probably renewed Johnson's confidence in that part of the Warren Report. But the finding that Oswald was responsible for all the shots fired in Dealey Plaza didn't rule out a conspiracy. And now there was more reason than ever to believe that Fidel Castro had instigated a counterplot in retaliation for attempts on his life. So Johnson, perhaps with Warren's encouragement, became determined to get the rest of the story from the CIA.

On March 22 he asked Richard Helms, who had been the CIA liaison to the Warren Commission in 1964 and the director of the Agency since June of 1966, to prepare a full report on the allegations in Anderson's column. It is not known whether the President divulged to Helms what he already knew from the FBI memorandum, or whether he pretended to find the claim outlandish in order to test Helms's candor about such a sensitive matter. In either case, Johnson asked "[not] idly or in passing ... but asked directly, formally, and explicitly, in a tone and manner which did not admit of evasion," as the historian Thomas Powers has written.

The President is the one person whose requests for information the CIA must honor in full, and Helms had no alternative but to come back with a specific and complete answer. In early May he requested a private meeting with Johnson in order to present the results of an investigation conducted by the CIA's inspector general. The meeting, on May 10, began at 5:55 P.M. and lasted close to an hour. The gist of what Helms disclosed would become known only eight years later, when he testified before a Senate committee.

In that meeting, long before the fact became public knowledge, the President learned that CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro dated back to August of 1960—to the Eisenhower Administration, when plans for what became the Bay of Pigs invasion were reaching their final stage. In fact, Castro was supposed to be dead before the exiles landed. At the time, the idea of using members of the Cosa Nostra, which had its own interests in Cuba to protect, must have seemed clever.

The more interesting part, at least to Johnson, was what Helms told him next. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, rather than draw back, the Kennedy Administration redoubled its efforts. The injunction to the CIA was simple: get rid of Castro and his regime by any means possible, short of another invasion. The alliance with the Cosa Nostra persisted until 1962, and came to an end only because the mob bosses were never able to deliver. Efforts to remove Castro continued well into 1963. One of them was coming to a head at the time Kennedy was assassinated.

It is not known whether Johnson asked Helms under whose direction the CIA had acted. If he did, Helms presumably said that Robert Kennedy "personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro." (This quotation is taken from what Helms told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1975, after allegations of CIA wrongdoing began to surface in the press.) Then again, Johnson may not have bothered to ask. Edward Morgan had already told Drew Pearson about the former Attorney General's central role; in addition, it was common knowledge within the Administration that after the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy had made his brother the driving force behind the effort to overthrow Castro.

Knowing the President's conspiratorial turn of mind, Helms probably hastened to reassure Johnson that the CIA, the FBI, and the Warren Commission had all looked long and hard for a connection between Oswald and Cuba but had come up empty-handed. Persuading Johnson of that now, however, was a futile exercise (as later testimony by Helms suggests). The President was utterly convinced that something other than Oswald was behind Kennedy's assassination, and that that something involved Cuba.

One tantalizing but unanswerable question is what effect, if any, Johnson's knowledge had on Robert Kennedy's Hamlet-like indecisiveness in 1967 and early 1968 over whether to challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy probably considered the March 3 column a shot across his bow, because Pearson was known to be on very friendly terms with the President. For all Kennedy knew, Johnson was the source of the story, and the column was a harbinger of things to come should Kennedy decide to challenge him. (Kennedy finally did enter the race, in March of 1968.) Kennedy's response to the column, insofar as it is known, was to hurriedly search his files for any pertinent information. He also arranged to have lunch on March 4 with Richard Helms, who probably told him that the President hadn't yet asked anything about it. Still, the threat of disclosure loomed—and perhaps it motivated Kennedy's seemingly premature announcement that he fully intended to back Johnson's presumed bid for re-election. On March 2, in a dramatic address on the Senate floor, Kennedy had made his break with the Administration's policy on Vietnam official. Anderson's column appeared the next day. Two weeks later Kennedy pledged to support Johnson in 1968, calling him "an outstanding President."

Certainly, any attempt to publicize the truth would have been fraught with risks for Johnson. Kennedy partisans would have mounted a ferocious counterattack, and Johnson might have been unable to prove an allegation that would be perceived as monstrous. Also, a sitting President could hardly ignore the price the CIA and the United States would pay for admitting that the Agency had tried to assassinate Castro—and at that point, in 1967, Johnson fully expected to serve another full term. The final, unquantifiable factor was Johnson's residual loyalty to John Kennedy. Johnson had always tried to keep faith with that political partnership. As much as he might have been tempted to derail Robert Kennedy's ambition by publicizing the story, he had to have realized that JFK's reputation would have been sullied too. Johnson was "trapped between two Kennedys," in the words of the historian Paul Henggeler. "He could not openly attack Robert without implicitly attacking John."

But though Johnson said nothing publicly to advance the story about the CIA's plots against Castro, there is little doubt that the secret weighed heavily on him. His reaction to the news that Robert Kennedy had been mortally wounded on June 5, 1968, shortly after midnight California time, is revealing. Johnson was awakened almost immediately, and was not able to sleep the rest of the night.²⁵ Between telephone calls to Ramsey Clark, J. Edgar Hoover, and James Rowley, the chief of the Secret Service, Johnson doodled on a memo from the previous day. In the first hours after the shooting virtually nothing was known about Kennedy's assassin. Johnson wondered if Castro had decided that his revenge would not be complete until both Kennedy brothers were dead. He scratched out a few disjointed words: "Costra [sic] Nostra ... Ed Morgan ... send in to get Castro ... planning." By late morning, however, it was clear that Sirhan Sirhan was a disturbed loner with no apparent ties to Cuba. Johnson dropped his idea of another Cuban-instigated conspiracy.²⁶

In the months and years that followed, Johnson remained ambivalent, torn between his loyalty to John Kennedy and his antipathy toward Robert. In October of 1968, shortly before leaving office, he volunteered a piece of information to the veteran newsman Howard K. Smith, whom he deeply respected. "I'll tell you something [about John Kennedy's murder] that will rock you," he said. "Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first." "I was rocked all right," Smith later recalled; he begged for details. But Johnson refused to provide any, saying only, "It will all come out one day." Johnson was so obviously worn down by the bitterness of his years in office that Smith was left wondering if he had just witnessed a last bit of Johnson blarney.

After leaving office Johnson continued to seesaw between discretion and an aching desire to let the truth come out. He was interviewed in September of 1969 for a series of programs about his presidency, which were to be broadcast on CBS in three installments. As they discussed President Kennedy's assassination, Walter Cronkite asked Johnson if he was satisfied that there had been no foreign conspiracy. "I can't honestly say that I've ever been completely relieved of the fact that there might have been international connections," Johnson replied. Cronkite pushed a little harder, asking if Johnson's suspicions involved Cuba. Johnson replied, "Oh, I don't think we ought to discuss the suspicions, because there's not any hard evidence that would lead me to the conclusion that Oswald was directed by a foreign government." Three weeks before the segment aired, Johnson had second thoughts; he insisted that the exchange be deleted, on grounds of "national security." CBS reluctantly obliged; but in April of 1970 the story that Johnson "expressed fundamental doubts about the Warren Commission's conclusion" during the Cronkite interview leaked out anyway.

Conspiracy books usually treat John and Robert Kennedy as innocent babes who would not have thought about dirty tricks — much less assassination plots — against Castro. But the reality was very different.

On June 16, 1971, Johnson received Leo Janos, the Houston bureau chief for Time magazine, at the Johnson Library. The meeting occurred at a propitious moment. Three days earlier The New York Times had published the first installment in what would become known as the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There was much to talk about, and Johnson was in an expansive mood. Over coffee after lunch the conversation turned briefly to President Kennedy. Confident that his former speechwriter would respect the ground rules (the conversation was off the record), Johnson not only reiterated what he had told Howard K. Smith in 1968 and Walter Cronkite in 1969 but went into more detail than he ever had before, making his pregnant "Murder Inc." remark—which Janos did not publish until after Johnson's death.

Lyndon Johnson might be forgiven for jumping to his conclusion about a link between Castro and Lee Harvey Oswald. In any case, his opinion on who stood behind Oswald is not what is most significant about his revelation to Janos. Rather, Johnson was trying, somewhat awkwardly, to flesh out what was from his vantage point the central story of his years in office: the mutiny of liberal Democrats against his primacy, and their unfair treatment of him. If the CIA's attempts to assassinate Castro had been known more or less contemporaneously with JFK's assassination, the Kennedy mystique would have been punctured. The public's view of Johnson's ascension to power would not have soured; at the very least, William Manchester would not have been able to violate the conventions by which reputable publishing houses then depicted sitting Presidents. Nor would a large faction of the Democratic Party have coalesced around Robert Kennedy had his clandestine activities been known.

Johnson's motives in telling Janos about "Murder Inc." in a conversation that was off the record can only be surmised. In all likelihood they reflect how, even in retirement, he remained deeply conflicted. Johnson was reluctant to release information during his lifetime that would have tarnished the Kennedy and Eisenhower presidencies. But he must have hoped that the truth would eventually surface, and that it would influence history's verdict on his own.

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¹ Watson was a special assistant to the President.

² Harold Barefoot Sanders was the assistant attorney general in charge of the civil division at the Justice Department.

³ Jacobsen was a special counsel to the President.

⁴ Members of the press may have been privately skeptical, but Garrison was getting a lot of attention.

⁵ Morgan was one of the toughest, shrewdest, and best-connected criminal lawyers in town. He was particularly well plugged in to the FBI, having worked in the Bureau for seven years before striking out on his own as a lawyer, in 1947. Morgan had also served as counsel to three congressional investigations, including the 1946 investigation into the Pearl Harbor attack and a 1950 Senate investigation into Communist penetration of the State Department. During the latter he became enmeshed in a bitter feud with Joe McCarthy, who accused Morgan of being a skilled "whitewasher" of embarrassing secrets.

⁶ Johnson did not know the name of Morgan's client. He was John Rosselli, a member of the Cosa Nostra. Rosselli's name would not surface publicly until 1971, when the journalist Jack Anderson published it in a column.

⁷ Morgan had apparently told Rosselli that the statute of limitations for conspiring to kill someone was six years, as long as the plot had failed. Therefore, according to Morgan, Rosselli could not be prosecuted after November of 1967.

⁸ Pearson's diary suggests that he did intend to publish the story once the statute of limitations ran out and he heard Rosselli's complete account, assuming he received permission from Morgan.

⁹ As he revealed a moment later, Johnson had talked to Abe Fortas.

¹⁰ It is not clear whether, according to Johnson, Fortas found it incredible that RFK allegedly directed assassination plots against Castro or that Castro allegedly dared to retaliate.

¹¹ At this point Pearson is the only person known to have told Johnson about assassination plots directed against Castro. But in a conversation with Texas Governor John Connally in March, Johnson would again suggest that he had heard the story from someone in addition to Pearson.

¹² The meeting, which was off the record, had taken place on January 16, and lasted for an hour. In his diary Pearson wrote, "I told the president about Ed Morgan's law client ... Lyndon listened carefully and made no comment. There wasn't much he could say."

¹³ This extraordinary confrontation between Garrison and his top assistants would remain a secret for sixteen years.

¹⁴ The Warren Report posited that the bullet that hit President Kennedy in the base of his neck and exited from his throat also caused all of Connally's wounds.

¹⁵ Connally was referring to the fact that WINS was reporting only half the story. It broadcast the claim that President Kennedy was "murdered by a group of plotters directed from Cuba," but refrained from reporting that the group had been sent in retaliation for U.S. plots on Castro's life.

¹⁶ Major Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine Communist, had been a leader of the 1959 Cuban revolution. In 1967 there was a great mystery as to his whereabouts; he had not been seen in public for two years.

¹⁷ It is unclear who this "mutual friend" was.

¹⁸ Connally seemed to understand that Johnson was referring to Abe Fortas. The President had met with Fortas for seventy-five minutes on January 17, the day after he first heard Pearson's story.

¹⁹ The "CIA thing" the President referred to involved recent revelations that the CIA had covertly financed nongovernmental anticommunist organizations both in the United States and abroad. By "requests made of me," Johnson probably meant the decision he'd had to make after November 22 about whether to continue covert subversion of Castro's regime. (This effort gradually diminished.)

²⁰ Andrews was a colorful Louisiana character: five foot seven and 240 pounds, he was a bona fide lawyer and, simultaneously, a huckster looking to make a name for himself. In November of 1963, while hospitalized for pneumonia, Andrews claimed to have received a mysterious call from a man asking him to represent the accused assassin. A thorough FBI investigation determined that Andrews was simply seeking some of the notoriety that any counsel for Oswald was sure to receive; the lead, like the FBI's contemporaneous investigation of David Ferrie, turned up nothing with any bearing on the President's assassination. Four years later these would be the kinds of meaningless shards Garrison had the power to exploit.

²¹ Johnson seems to have been suggesting that the same lawyers who fed Drew Pearson the story about assassination plots against Castro had been in contact with Garrison.

²² A real-estate developer from Fort Worth, Blackmon was the president of the National Home Builders Association.

²³ Although the FBI had examined an allegation involving Ferrie, it had never investigated Clay Shaw in connection with the assassination. Johnson was probably just repeating what Ramsey Clark had said earlier in the day. In response to questions from the media, Clark erroneously asserted that Shaw had been investigated by the FBI in 1963, and cleared. Clark's error would not be acknowledged for three months.

²⁴ Pearson had told Johnson the story would not be published at least until November, but he had made that assurance before Garrison arrived on the scene. On the day of Clay Shaw's unexpected arrest, Pearson was en route to Latin America and apparently unreachable. Anderson, who often shared the byline on the column, took it upon himself to publish the story. "It was a poor story in the first place, and violated a confidence in the second place," Pearson later noted in his diary. "Finally it reflected on Bobby Kennedy without actually pinning the goods on him."

²⁵ "There was an air of unreality about the whole thing—a nightmare quality," Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary. "It couldn't be true. We must have dreamed it. It had all happened before."

²⁶ In his biography of Robert Kennedy, Evan Thomas suggested (on the basis of these handwritten notes) that Johnson toyed with the idea of reviving Pearson's story on June 4, the day Kennedy won the California primary and appeared headed for the Democratic nomination. But the notes, although written on a memo dated June 4, were clearly identified by the secretary who collected them as being from "June 5, 1968 a.m."—that is, after Kennedy had been shot. They probably indicate Johnson's initial thoughts about who might have been responsible for the attack, rather than any effort to cast aspersions on Kennedy's past.

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This excerpt from The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (Knopf, 2004) was published in The Atlantic Monthly in June 2004.

                                     © 2004 by Max Holland

Tales from the LBJ Tapes: History with the Bark Off

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By Max Holland

       

    From his first evening as president in November 1963, until his departure from the Oval Office in January 1969, Lyndon B. Johnson secretly recorded many of his telephone  conversations.

    When these tape recordings began to be released in 1993 in response to the 1992 John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act, I was eager to study them for new insights into the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963 and its aftermath. Conspiracy buffs had long put forward one theory after another, distorting virtually every primary source of  information about the Kennedy assassination, often beyond recognition. I thought that the LBJ tapes bearing on the assassination would escape this fate because they would be widely accessible and easily understandable. How could the plain words from a tape recording be twisted to mean something else? In retrospect, that was extremely naïve.

    One of the clearest examples of how the recorded information has been misrepresented can be found in Michael Beschloss’s 1997 book, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964. Beschloss presented a very important conversation between President Johnson and  Senator Richard B. Russell (D-Georgia) from the evening of Friday, September 18, 1964. Earlier that day, the Warren Commission, on which Russell sat, had met for the last time to settle  outstanding differences over the final draft of its written statement, known as the Warren Report.

    One of Russell’s key reservations was that he did not want to rule out a conspiracy. He had insisted that since the Warren Commission had not had unhindered access to the records of the communist governments of the Soviet Union and Cuba, its Report could not state unreservedly that Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s accused assassin, had acted alone.

    The Commission’s other members agreed with Russell’s reservation to an extent, and ultimately, the language in the final draft was modified to assuage him. As Russell spoke to explain this process to Johnson on the evening of September 18, 1964, he said, “I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they’d come ’round [and] trade me out of it by givin’ me a little old thread of it.”

    Beschloss’s rendering of the Russell-Johnson conversation, however, was markedly different. According to his transcription, Russell told the president that “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” [emphasis added]. Consequently, the implication was left that Chief Justice Earl Warren, along with other esteemed members of the investigating panel, had threatened the senior senator from Georgia, one of  the most powerful men in Washington at the time. Moreover, Beschloss’s rendering suggested that Russell, against his better judgment, had bowed to this unspecified “threat” for the  purpose of making the Warren Report unanimous and pacifying the American people—even if the truth had to be sacrificed in the process.

    The thrust of this conversation as presented in the Beschloss book could  hardly have been more misleading. Still, Beschloss’s misrepresentation is only one of many mischaracterizations of the Johnson recordings that have appeared over the last few years in books both notable and obscure, and in prominent magazines like The Weekly Standard.

Oliver Stone on Jim Garrison, the KGB, and the CIA

Editor’s Note: In the August 5/12, 2002 issue of The Nation, Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar published an advertisement that consisted of a letter to the editor of Foreign Affairs, which they had written but the journal refused to run. The letter criticized a review in Foreign Affairs of an article about Jim Garrison that had been published in Studies in Intelligence.

The Stone/Sklar advertisement is posted here verbatim, along with a rebuttal that subsequently appeared in the September 2/9 issue of The Nation, and lastly, Stone/Sklar's October 7 rejoinder.

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Jim Garrison, the KGB, and the CIA:

An Open Letter to Foreign Affairs Magazine

   Last fall, Nation contributing editor Max Holland wrote an article for the CIA publication Studies in Intelligence asserting that former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was duped by a KGB disinformation operation that led him, along with most Americans, to believe that the CIA had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

    This spring, Foreign Affairs magazine published a generous review of Holland’s article. As co-writers of the film JFK, we sent a reply to Foreign Affairs. The editors refused to publish it. We offered to pay for an ad, but Foreign Affairs again refused.

    For the record, here is our reply:

Dear Editors of Foreign Affairs:

    Philip Zelikow’s review of Max Holland’s recent article in the CIA publication Studies in Intelligence is a disservice to your readers. Zelikow uncritically accepts Holland’s theory that a KGB disinformation operation back in 1967 is at the root of most Americans’ current belief that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

    Holland’s thesis rests on one unproven premise: that the KGB planted a false story in March 1967 in Paese Sera, an Italian left-wing newspaper. The story reported that Clay Shaw, then recently charged with conspiracy to assassinate the President, was a board member of Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), an organization that had been forced out of Italy amid charges that it was a CIA money-laundering front.

    The problem Zelikow ignores is that Holland’s only evidence to support his premise is one handwritten note by a KGB defector named Vasili Mitrokhin that “refers to a disinformation scheme in 1967 that involved Paese Sera and resulted in publication of a false story in New York.” The note, supposedly summarizing a KGB document that Holland has never seen, does not mention Clay Shaw, Centro Mondiale Commerciale, Jim Garrison, or any specific New York publication.

    Holland speculates that the New York publication may have been the National Guardian, which based an article on the Paese Sera series. But one short article in an obscure left-wing weekly that routinely picked up stories from the international press does not seem like much of an accomplishment for a KGB disinformation operation. There is no evidence that the Guardian article was picked up anywhere else in the United States.

    Rather than speculate, Holland might have tried to interview the editors of Paese Sera series who were responsible for the articles on Centro Mondiale Commerciale, as scholar Joan Mellen has done for her forthcoming biography of Garrison. They would have told him that the six-part series had nothing to do with the KGB or the JFK assassination, that they had never heard of Jim Garrison when they assigned the story six months before, and that they were astonished to see that Shaw might have any connection to the assassination. The articles were actually assigned in the wake of a right-wing coup in Greece and were intended to prevent such a coup in Italy.

    Holland says “everything in the Paese Sera story was a lie.” His evidence? A recently released CIA document saying that the Agency itself looked into Paese Sera’s allegations and found that the CIA had no connection to CMC or its parent PERMINDEX. Holland may be willing to accept this as the whole truth, but it is unconvincing to the rest of us who have noticed the Agency’s tendency to distance itself from the fronts, to release to the public only documents that serve its interest, to fabricate evidence, and to lie outright even under oath to congressional committees.

    Two important facts from the Paese Sera story remain true:

    1. CMC was forced to leave Italy (for Johannesburg, South Africa) in 1962 under a cloud of suspicion about its CIA connections.

    2. Clay Shaw was a member of CMC’s board, along with such well-known sympathizers as Gutierrez di Spadaforo, undersecretary of agriculture for Mussolini; Ferenc Nagy, former premier of Hungary; and Giuseppe Zigiotti, president of the Fascist National Association for Militia Arms.

    Holland claims that the Paese Sera articles were what led Garrison to believe the CIA was involved in the assassination. This is nonsense. Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins, describes in detail how his uncovering of various pieces of evidence actually led him to the conclusion that the CIA was involved. This gradual process began two days after the assassination when he questioned David Ferrie, a pilot who flew secret missions to Cuba for the CIA and trained Lee Harvey Oswald in his Civil Air Patrol unit. It included his investigation of a 1961 raid of a munitions cache by CIA operatives in Houma, Louisiana; the discovery that several of Oswald’s co-workers 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 camp for Operation MONGOOSE; many eyewitnesses who saw Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, and Oswald together, etc. No doubt the Paese Sera series was another piece of the puzzle for Garrison, but it was not the centerpiece of his thinking that Holland makes it out to be.

    From the moment his investigation of the JFK assassination became public, Garrison was pilloried in the press. This treatment was part of an orchestrated effort by the CIA to discredit critics of the Warren Commission. A CIA memo dated April 1, 1967, never mentioned by Holland or Zelikow, outlines the strategy and calls for the Agency’s “assets” in the media (writers and editors) to publish stories saying the critics were politically motivated, financially motivated, egomaniacal, sloppy in their research, support the Soviet Union, etc. This is exactly the inaccurate portrait of Garrison that emerged in the press.

    With the publication of Holland’s recent article attempting to link Jim Garrison to the KGB, the CIA continues to pursue this misguided strategy of smearing Garrison and other critics of the Warren Commission. Fortunately, the American public has never bought the tired old lie that the CIA’s misadventures can be written off as figments of KGB disinformation. Too bad your critic did.

                                                       Oliver Stone & Zachary Sklar
                                                Co-writers of the film JFK

Holland’s  Reply to Stone & Sklar:

    To the uninitiated, the Oliver Stone/Zachary Sklar advertisement on page 37 of the August 5/12 Nation appears to be a telling critique of my Studies in Intelligence article on the CIA and the Kennedy assassination. It is not.

    Stone/Sklar challenge the notion of a KGB provenance for the Paese Sera articles by citing unnamed Paese Sera editors. These editors allegedly explain that the articles could not be dezinformatsia timed to Clay Shaw’s arrest, because they were “actually assigned [six months before] in the wake of a right-wing coup in Greece.” This new information would be damaging to my argument save for one thing–it can’t possibly be true. Paese Sera published the first article in question on March 4, 1967–three days after Shaw’s arrest–and the infamous colonels’ coup in Greece did not occur until seven weeks later, April 21, 1967. (For the record, my researcher in Italy contacted two Paese Sera editors and one of the two reporters who wrote the articles; the former professed not to remember the articles and the reporter wanted to be paid for answering questions.)

    Another novel concoction in the ad is provably false, again because dates are stubborn things. Until now no one has ever claimed that Garrison began to perceive a CIA hand in the assassination as far back as November 1963. This revisionism is refuted by the documentary record. In December 1966, early in his reinvestigation, Garrison handwrote a three-page letter to Life journalist Richard Billings. “At the base of everything,” the DA predicted, will be “self-designated revolutionaries from the lunatic fringe of the Cuban movement.” Not at word about the CIA. Immediately after Shaw’s arrest, Garrison fervidly claimed to journalists that the assassination was a “homosexual thrill-killing.” Again, not a word about the CIA.

    Billings’s diary gives us the precise date the New Orleans DA trained his mercurial mind on the agency: March 16, 1967, two weeks after Shaw’s arrest, the day Garrison heard about an article that “supposedly mentions Shaw’s [CIA] work in Italy.” On April 3 Billings observed, “Garrison now is hot on the CIA angle.” Correspondence in Garrison’s own papers proves he embraced Paese Sera’s stunning allegations, namely, that Shaw was an “Agency man” and a neo-Nazi intent on restoring Fascism to Italy.

    It’s crucial to understand why Stone/Sklar are hellbent on backdating Garrison’s “gradual” thought process on CIA involvement: to paper over a pivotal falsehood in Garrison’s 1988 memoir (which Sklar edited). Garrison wrote that he didn’t discover Shaw’s “life as an Agency man in Rome” until “well after” the 1969 trial. Why did Garrison lie? Everything depends on the answer.

    I find dumbfounding Stone/Sklar’s trust in a single source, Paese Sera. They regard its articles as gospel (as did Garrison) and have never seriously attempted to corroborate the allegations (nor can they; no reputable Italian newspaper ever printed remotely similar allegations). On the rare occasion they pretend to provide corroboration, they rely on outlandish sources. Their JFK: The Documented Screenplay, for example, approvingly cites Executive Intelligence Review, a Lyndon LaRouche publication. Worse, those sources turn out to be circular, always boiling down to Paese Sera! Reliance on one source is why Stone/Sklar perpetuate outrageous assertions about such peripheral figures as Ferenc Nagy, whom they smear as a “well-known fascist sympathizer” when he was actually jailed by the Gestapo in 1944.

    Ten years ago Stone testified–with “pleasure and pride”–in support of a statute to unseal the secret files on Kennedy’s assassination. Now those files are largely open, and Stone doesn’t like one of the consequences: Jim Garrison stands revealed as the Joe McCarthy of the 1960s, an audacious liar who unfortunately held a position of state power.


Stone & Sklar’s Rejoinder:

    Max Holland’s comparison of Jim Garrison to Joseph McCarthy [“Letters,” September 2/9] shows 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. They 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, McCarthy never operated under the rule of law.

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

    Holland persists in his theory that Garrison came to believe the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination solely because of an article in the Italian newspaper Paese Sera. Despite the entry in a Life reporter’s diary that Holland cities as his proof, it is simply not believable that a man with Garrison’s conservative background–two decades in the military, former FBI agent, district attorney–would jump to such a radical conclusion solely on the basis of one foreign article.

    Garrison offered a more plausible explanation. In private conversation he told us he underwent a gradual transformation of consciousness based on an accumulation of evidence he did not initially understand or connect. These included Oswald’s fake defection to the Soviet Union; Oswald’s connection to Guy Banister, who was involved in the CIA’s Operation MONGOOSE, and to David Ferrie, who was flying missions over Cuba for the CIA; Garrison’s discovery of a CIA munitions raid in Houma, Louisiana, etc. This evidence pointing to the CIA included Garrison’s reading of the Paese Sera series, but the process had begun long before.

    Holland is correct about the date of the Greek coup. But the basic point we were making remains true: Editors of Paese Sera, an independent left-wing paper, have made it clear that their series had nothing to do with a purported KGB disinformation operation. Holland has offered no credible evidence to the contrary.

Was Jim Garrison Duped by the KGB?

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By Max Holland

 

    Alone on the evening of March 5, 1967, Clay Shaw quietly pondered the nightmarish fate that lay before him.

    The week before, he had been a respected citizen and reasonably prosperous retired businessman. He fully expected that his toughest remaining decision would be to choose which of his sophisticated passions to indulge; he was equally fond of the theater, travel, New Orleans cuisine, and restoration of the French Quarter. Now all that seemed a conceit belonging to another man’s life, four days after being charged with the crime of the century by the district attorney for Orleans Parish.

    Shaw knew the accusation was preposterous. He had no knowledge of President Kennedy’s murder other than what he had learned about the 1963 assassination from the media. And being a rational, educated man, he recognized that one day some court was bound to declare him not guilty. But that was small consolation. “I realized,” the 53-year-old bachelor later wrote, “that I was on the other side of what would be the great watershed dividing my life into two parts.” No matter how complete his vindication, he could never hope to eradicate the strain of the initial accusation. From this point on, Clay Lavergne Shaw would always be known as the second man ever arrested and charged with carrying out Kennedy’s assassination.

    “Why me?” Shaw wrote in his new diary that evening. This question would baffle him until his death in 1974. Only now, 35 years after the arrest, has it become possible to piece together the complete but complicated answer to Shaw’s plaintive question. The full story goes well beyond the familiar tale of Shaw’s ordeal at the hands of a publicity-mad district attorney with few scruples. Indeed, Jim Garrison’s relentless persecution of Shaw only makes sense when one factors in this last secret: the hidden role played by an entirely unexpected actor, the Soviet KGB.

    The KGB’s pernicious contribution is best understood by looking at the trajectory of Garrison’s public statements about the case. 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’Etat. 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” at 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.

Opening the Records

    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; CIA 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 unexpected quarters, is an altogether new view of the Garrison story. The district attorney who legitimized 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.

    To begin unraveling the complicated tale, one has to go back to February 17, 1967, when the New Orleans States-Item broke the sensational story that Garrison had opened a new investigation into the Kennedy assassination. A media firestorm erupted, with New Orleans at its center.