Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (66 page)

Once again, Walinsky intervenes to put the Kennedy memorializing in perspective. He refuses to indulge in the senseless “what if they had lived” ritual. “I was at one of those memorial events once,” Walinsky recalled, “and Arthur [Schlesinger] got up and went into this long deal about if John Kennedy had lived, this would be different, that would be different, and this struck me wrong. So when it came my turn to talk, right after Arthur, I just put aside what I was planning to say and I said, ‘Look, the entire time I worked for Robert Kennedy, I never heard him say, ‘If only President Kennedy had lived, this would be different.’ Because to him that would have been a statement of weakness. That would have been saying, ‘My brother didn’t succeed in doing it, therefore we can’t.’ The question to him was not ‘what if?’ It was ‘what now?’ He felt ‘Here we are, we are responsible, it’s up to us.’ And there’s a real logic in this. Because if you say, ‘Too bad President Kennedy isn’t still alive’—why stop there? What about Lincoln, Washington—isn’t it a pity George Washington isn’t still here with us! And how about Socrates, Moses? Jesus could walk among us again! The fact is, other people can’t solve your problems for you—they can only give you an example of how to live, then it’s up to you what to do about it.”

With his gleaming shaved head, flashing eyes, and disputatious style—a cross between a courtroom lawyer and Talmudic scholar—Walinksy presents himself as the tough, unsentimental guardian of Robert Kennedy’s legacy. As Bobby himself would insist after Jack’s death, Walinsky doesn’t want to be caught up in the misty past. But as he’s talking, sitting in a sunny breakfast nook off the kitchen of his Scarsdale home, he’s watched over by another saintly photo of Bobby. This one is a black-and-white picture of Kennedy with the small child of migrant farmworkers, crouching in the dirt next to the family’s home, an abandoned, rust-eaten car. Walinsky is not so different from the other men who served John and Robert Kennedy. The Kennedy years remain their touchstone, their reminder of what is best in them. Like the others, Walinsky’s eyes are sometimes stung with tears as a particular memory comes suddenly to mind. And like the others, his house is filled with Kennedy memorabilia. The mementos—framed photos, stirring quotations, political cartoons—cover the walls in these men’s studies, living rooms, even breakfast nooks. These men’s homes are shrines to that heroic past, when they all were young and the country was beginning anew. When Robert Kennedy called to them, telling them, “Come, my friends, it’s not too late to seek a newer world.” And they believed him.

A
fter Robert Kennedy was killed in 1968, there was no major figure in Washington with the drive to solve the JFK assassination—or investigate the lingering questions around RFK’s own death. But in the early 1970s, the Watergate scandal began to lift the cloak that hid some of the country’s darkest secrets. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” Leonard Cohen sings. And Watergate—along with years of senseless bloodletting in Vietnam—cracked the system enough to let the light seep in.

The closest the U.S. government came to solving the JFK mystery was in the post-Watergate period, as the Church Committee and then the House Select Committee on Assassinations reexamined the Warren Commission’s conclusions. These congressional inquiries unearthed important new evidence of a conspiracy and raised troubling questions about the role of government agencies in the assassination cover-up, if not the crime itself. But, in the end, these probes were frustrated by political limits imposed from within and without. They underlined how doomed any investigative effort was bound to be that depended on the voluntary cooperation of agencies like the CIA and FBI—deeply secretive institutions that had already blatantly misled the Warren Commission and would prove equally obstructionist during the 1970s inquiries.

The Church Committee was convened in January 1975 under the leadership of Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho, to investigate abuses of power in the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies. The committee produced a string of revelations—from the CIA’s illegal opening of American citizens’ mail to the FBI’s pathological obsession with Martin Luther King Jr. But its most explosive discovery was the CIA’s secret efforts to assassinate hostile or simply inconvenient foreign leaders, including Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, and Chile’s General Rene Schneider, who was seen as an obstacle to the overthrow of President Salvador Allende. It was news of the CIA’s assassination program that made the deepest impact on the American press and public, leading to cries for more congressional oversight of the agency—which Senator Church famously castigated as a “rogue elephant.”

Among those who were shaken by the CIA assassination disclosures was Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, one of the more active members of the Church Committee. A moderate Republican who had been inspired by JFK’s call for a new era of public service, Schweiker was stunned to learn how the CIA and FBI had withheld critical information from the Warren Commission, including the CIA-Mafia collaboration against Castro. And he began to wonder what more the Senate committee would learn if it turned its spotlight on Dallas. In late 1975, as the panel was winding down its investigation, Schweiker persuaded Church to let him set up a subcommittee—composed of himself and Gary Hart of Colorado, a young post-Watergate reformer recently elected to the Senate—to investigate an assassination closer to home, that of JFK.

The time was right for a reopening of the case. Watergate, and the earlier Church Committee revelations, had raised dark questions in the public’s mind about its own government. The American people’s confidence in the government was shaken further that year when television viewers watched the first national broadcast of the Zapruder film, after TV news showman Geraldo Rivera pushed ABC to air the horribly revealing footage on its late-night
Good Night America
show.

Schweiker, regarded as something of a Boy Scout by his Senate colleagues, was equally dazed by what he was discovering in the catacombs of his government as he sifted through piles of evidence and declassified documents in the National Archives related to JFK’s assassination. After hearing of the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro, Schweiker initially suspected Kennedy was the victim of retaliation by the Cuban dictator. “But we never produced any evidence that Castro was involved,” recalled Dave Marston, the senator’s legislative counsel and his lead man on the subcommittee’s investigation. Schweiker’s suspicions then began to head in an even more explosive direction. “We don’t know what happened, but we do know that Oswald had intelligence connections,” Schweiker told the press. “Everywhere you look with him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence.”

Marston, who later left Schweiker’s office to become U.S. attorney in Philadelphia and is now in private practice, is still convinced of this. “Oswald could not have acted alone,” he says today. “His global wanderings clearly point to something bigger going on. There were so many CIA people and other government agents scheming in Florida and New Orleans, doing the crazy things they do—it’s inconceivable that they didn’t know about Oswald.”

Gary Hart was amazed to hear Schweiker voice his suspicions during meetings of the Church subcommittee. “Dick made a lot of statements inside the committee that were a lot more inflammatory than anything I ever said, in terms of his suspicions about who killed Kennedy,” Hart said in an interview for this book. “He felt, this is outrageous, we’ve got to reopen this. He was a blowtorch.”

But Hart’s mind was also blown by what they were finding. As the Church subcommittee dug deeper into the swamps of anti-Castro intrigue that festered in Florida during the Kennedy years, Hart was stunned by the complexity of the anti-Kennedy ecosystem and by the intricate web that linked the CIA, Mafia, and Cuban exiles. “I think the whole atmosphere at the time was so yeasty,” he said. “And I don’t think that anybody had control of the thing. There were people plotting with people, the Mafia connections, the friendships between the Mafia and the CIA agents, and this crazy exile community. There were more and more layers, and it was honeycombed with bizarre people. I don’t think that
anybody
knew everything that was going on. And I think the Kennedys were kind of racing to keep up with it all.

“If there was anybody who was on top of it, it was Dick Helms—the man who kept the secrets,” Hart added. “He would have been closer to knowing what was going on than anybody else, but I don’t think even he did. There was no mastermind there. There was too much going on, involving too many people. Too many rogue elephants all over the place. Too many ad hoc operations. It was just a nightmare. I think a big book could be written on Florida in the early sixties, just a huge book.”

Hart makes clear that he doesn’t believe the assassination of JFK was an official CIA operation—his suspicions focus more on the Mafia. But he doesn’t rule out rogue agents who were working closely with the Mafia. And he believes the agency was involved in the cover-up. “If there was any lockdown, I’m sure Helms would have been part of it,” Hart said.

In the course of the Church investigation, it became shockingly clear that the Senate panel was confronting ruthless forces. In June 1975, Chicago godfather Sam Giancana was shot to death in the basement of his home, one week before he was to testify in Washington. Soon after, Johnny Rosselli—the key liaison between the Mafia and CIA—was called before the committee on two occasions to answer questions about the Castro assassination plots. The following year, Schweiker subpoenaed Rosselli once more to answer questions about the Kennedy assassination in a tightly guarded session of his subcommittee. He was hoping to grill the gangster more, when—on July 28, 1976—Rosselli’s dismembered body was found stuffed in a rusting oil drum, floating in the waters off Miami. It was obvious that Rosselli’s former confederates would stop at nothing to prevent the Senate investigators from getting at the truth.

“Rosselli was killed every way you can be killed,” Hart said. “He was garroted, his arms and legs were sawn off, he had a bullet hole in his head. I went down on behalf of the subcommittee, in secret, to meet with the Miami detectives and the Dade County sheriff’s office. And they showed me pictures of when they pulled him out of the water—terrible, the worst things I’d ever seen in my life. They told me it was a Mafia hit. It wasn’t amateur night.” Church Committee staff investigators concluded that Rosselli’s execution, as well as Giancana’s, had been ordered by Florida godfather Santo Trafficante, another key suspect in the Kennedy conspiracy.

Stonewalled by CIA witnesses like Helms and violently deprived of key witnesses like Rosselli and Giancana, the Church probe finally ran out of time and political momentum. Frank Church went off to pursue the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, which he lost to Jimmy Carter. And Richard Schweiker was lured away from his Kennedy probe by Ronald Reagan, who was hoping to soften his image in his ill-fated challenge of President Ford by adding the moderate Pennsylvanian to his ticket.

Looking back at his probe today, Schweiker is still perplexed by the lingering questions. The CIA’s rank duplicity deeply bothers him. “My opinion of the CIA has greatly diminished through the years,” he told me. Like Hart, he believes the agency engaged in a cover-up—and some of its rogue operatives might have been involved in the assassination itself. But the former senator has come to conclude that the JFK assassination was a Mafia plot. “I’ve gone through a lot of phases on this, but I now really think the assassination was basically a mob hit—it was the mob trying to get back at the Kennedys for cracking down on the Mafia.” But when Oswald comes up, Schweiker seems less certain that the assassination was a mob operation. The accused assassin was the product of a fake defector program run by the CIA, Schweiker observed. “And then he went haywire.” Schweiker is still clearly unsettled when he retraces Oswald’s footsteps before Dallas. “I certainly don’t believe the CIA gave us the whole story.”

As for Hart, he too suffered disappointment in his later bid for presidential glory. He was knocked out of the 1988 Democratic nomination race when the press exposed his affair with model Donna Rice, after
Miami Herald
reporters hid in bushes outside his Washington home to catch him in the act. Hart tried to weather the political storm, arguing that a politician’s private life should not be exposed to peeping-tom journalism. But it was 1987, and in these pre-Clinton years, the media’s powers as morality enforcer were still largely unchallenged. Armed with a comical photo of the candidate cavorting with the blonde beauty on a luxury yacht appropriately named
Monkey Business
, the press soon pummeled Hart’s political career into the dirt.

In later years, Hart salvaged his public reputation, serving with distinction as the co-chairman of a pre-9/11 commission that tried to warn the country of the dangers of terrorism and turning himself into a voice of reason against the Bush administration’s overreliance on a military response to the Al Qaeda threat. He still takes pride in the Church Committee’s efforts to subject the country’s shadowy intelligence apparatus to democratic controls—a struggle that has assumed new significance today.

As he looked back at the Church Committee’s limited probe of the Kennedy assassination, Hart—a tall, fit, ruddy-faced man with a penchant for cowboy boots—suddenly made a startling charge. Whenever he was asked by reporters about the Kennedy assassination during his 1984 and 1988 presidential runs, Hart said, “I would tell the press that, based on my Church Committee experience, I believe there are sufficient doubts to justify reopening the files of the CIA, particularly in relationship to the Mafia. And I think that I signed
my
death warrant when I did that. I didn’t realize it at the time…but I think what happened to me in 1987 was a pure setup. I think what people discovered then was you can assassinate somebody without using a bullet.”

Hart did not want to linger on this explosive assertion. He does not want to appear “wacky” or “obsessive”—labels, he pointed out, that are quickly applied to any politician who dares to call for reopening the JFK case. “You have to be very careful about falling into the conspiracy category,” he observed. But when pushed, Hart said that he received tips after the scandal broke that suggested a possible Mafia involvement in the
Monkey Business
affair. A prominent investigative reporter told Hart that after he began calling for a new JFK probe, close associates of Florida godfather Santo Trafficante expressed their strong displeasure with the senator. “We don’t think [Hart’s] any better than the Kennedys,” one of the mobsters told the reporter. But Hart chose not to pursue these leads. “I just didn’t want to make it my life cause,” he told me.

It is easy to understand why Hart did not want to make this claim—that he was the victim of character assassination because of his stand on the JFK case—too loudly. The press had already pilloried him back in 1987 when he tried to make reporters’ window-peeping the issue, instead of his own sexual indiscretion. He was flayed for trying to dodge responsibility for the humiliating fiasco. Hart’s assertion that his political downfall was related to the JFK conspiracy would certainly have driven the media into a new frenzy. Since Hart himself has declined to pursue the matter, it would be hard to prove that he really was set up during the 1988 campaign. But what’s intriguing is that Hart believes it might be true. One of the few Washington officials to aggressively—if briefly—investigate the Kennedy assassination, Gary Hart came away from the experience with the belief that he was up against powerful forces that, years after JFK’s murder, were still determined to keep the truth from being revealed.

SOON AFTER HE WAS
hired as the deputy chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in December 1976, Robert Tanenbaum came to see Richard Schweiker in his Senate office. The Assassinations Committee was picking up the investigation where Schweiker and Hart had left it, and Schweiker was going to hand over his JFK file to the recently formed panel. Tanenbaum was a thirty-three-year-old, streetwise product of legendary New York D.A. Frank Hogan’s office, where he had won every one of his murder cases, rising to become deputy chief of the homicide bureau. When the young prosecutor was recruited by the chief counsel of the Assassinations Committee, Richard A. Sprague, he made clear that he would only take the job if he could treat the JFK investigation like one of his New York homicide cases—with no political compromises, no interference. Sprague, the former district attorney of Philadelphia, assured Tanenbaum that he had the same philosophy and the two men began assembling an aggressive team—including investigative reporter Gaeton Fonzi, an experienced holdover from the Schweiker subcommittee, and Cliff Fenton, a savvy, black homicide detective whom Tanenbaum brought with him from New York.