Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (68 page)

A furious Blakey told the press that if he had known who Joannides was, the agent would not have been his CIA liaison—he would have been sworn in as a witness and forced to testify: “Joannides’s behavior was criminal. He obstructed our investigation.” The CIA had manipulated the Warren Commission, Blakey fumed, and now he knew that it had also deceived the House Select Committee on Assassinations. “Many have told me that the culture of the agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people…I am now in that camp.”

Blakey’s credulity had allowed Joannides to stonewall the investigation and had helped suspicious CIA figures like David Phillips to slip away from the congressional spotlight. But late in his life, Phillips would become oddly confessional, providing a curious coda to the Assassinations Committee saga.In a July 1986 conversation with a former committee investigator, Phillips remarked, “My private opinion is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.”

The former spy—who, in retirement, tried his hand at a literary career—elaborated on this assassination scenario in notes for a novel that he planned to write, but apparently never completed. The novel—whose working title,
The AMLASH Legacy,
was inspired by the CIA code name for one of its assassination plots against Castro—portrayed the slaying of Kennedy as a hideous, unforeseen offshoot of the agency’s Cuba scheme. In Phillips’s scenario, it was the Soviets—working with a wealthy, CIA-hating American leftist—who subverted the anti-Castro operation, turning it into a JFK assassination plot that would destroy the CIA.

“I was one of the two case officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald,” Phillips has the CIA official based on himself declare in the book outline. “After working to establish his Marxist bona fides, we gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba. I helped him when he came to Mexico City to obtain a visa, and when he returned to Dallas to wait for it I saw him twice there. We rehearsed the plan many times: In Havana Oswald was to assassinate Castro with a sniper’s rifle from the upper floor window of a building on the route where Castro often drove in an open jeep.

“Whether Oswald was a double-agent or a psycho I’m not sure, and I don’t know why he killed Kennedy, but I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the President’s assassination but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt.”

Whether this labyrinthine literary exercise was a partial confession—or one last attempt by the disinformation master to muddy the assassination waters—is not clear. While Phillips felt compelled to at least “share” the guilt for JFK’s murder, he did so in a weirdly cloaked manner. And he still placed the primary blame on the CIA’s old nemeses—Moscow and the American left.

Shortly before his death in 1988, however, Phillips revealed more. According to the CIA veteran’s nephew, Shawn Phillips, the ailing spy confessed something to Shawn’s father, James, that he could never bring himself to tell Congress. The two brothers had grown estranged after James began to suspect David was involved in the JFK assassination. Suffering from late-stage lung cancer, David phoned his brother to attempt a final reconciliation. “Were you in Dallas on that day?” James asked him. “Yes,” David replied. James hung up the phone and never spoke to his brother again.

AFTER THE HOUSE SELECT
Committee on Assassinations found evidence of a JFK conspiracy, the panel recommended that the Carter Justice Department pursue the numerous tantalizing leads that it had developed. But, predictably, there was no further government action, and as the Reagan administration took power in 1981, the reign of secrecy in Washington only hardened.

With the government incapable of investigating itself, it fell to the media to shine a light on the dark corners of the Kennedy assassination. There was overwhelming public support for such scrutiny, with polls over the years showing that anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of Americans believed the official version of the JFK assassination was a fraud. But instead of aggressively investigating the many lingering questions about Dallas, the mainstream media continued to discredit conspiracy theories, straining harder with each passing decade to prop up the increasingly moth-eaten Warren Report. The most prestigious news institutions—the ones with the power to unearth new information—put themselves instead at the government’s service. The special reports on the assassination produced with numbing regularity by the
New York Times
,
Washington Post
, CBS, NBC, ABC,
Time
, and
Newsweek
inevitably rallied to the defense of the lone gunman theory—with editors, reporters, and producers taking their cues in many cases from Warren Commission members, CIA and FBI officials, and media executives close to these government agencies. On some occasions, journalists who were intelligence assets simply funneled the government’s version of Dallas directly into the press. As Carl Bernstein reported in an explosive 1977
Rolling Stone
article, the CIA alone had over four hundred American journalists secretly at its service. And declassified documents reveal that some of these journalists did the CIA’s bidding as the agency worked to tilt press coverage of the JFK mystery.

The American media’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination will certainly go down in history as one of its most shameful performances, along with its tragically supine acceptance of the government’s fraudulent case for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Assassination critics have long railed at the media’s obedient embrace of the Warren Report, a credulousness that grows more and more bizarre with the passage of time and accumulation of contrary evidence. But even more confounding is the failure of JFK’s close friends in the press to investigate the monumental crime. Some of these Kennedy intimates occupied influential positions high on the media ladder. Critics see their failure to look into JFK’s murder as not only a dereliction of professional duty but a personal betrayal.

The legendary newspaperman Benjamin Bradlee—who reigned for years as the executive editor of the
Washington Post
, including during its Watergate-era investigative glory days—comes immediately to mind in this regard. As I researched this book, I began to wonder why the man who was JFK’s closest friend in the Washington press corps—a man who had the power to help bring down the Nixon presidency—apparently did nothing to reveal the truth behind Kennedy’s murder.

Bradlee’s deep affection for JFK shines through his 1975 memoir,
Conversations with Kennedy
—a book, along with Red Fay’s
The Pleasure of His Company
, that offers the most intimate view of JFK, and is, essentially, a love story. Bradlee and his second wife, Tony, Mary Meyer’s sister, socialized regularly with the Kennedys at the White House, Camp David, Palm Beach, and Newport. Late at night, after one champagne-carbonated soiree, Jackie drew Bradlee aside to tearfully confide that “you two really are our best friends.” Unashamed of his unique relationship with the president, the journalist later wrote that his friendship with JFK “dominated my life.” Kennedy, he gushed, was “graceful, gay, funny, witty, teasing and teasable, forgiving, hungry, incapable of being corny, restless, interesting, interested, exuberant, blunt, profane, and loving. He was all of those…and more.” And yet, under Bradlee, the
Washington Post
showed little curiosity about how his extraordinary friend had died.

The same year Bradlee published his Kennedy memoir, journalist Robert B. Kaiser—writing in
Rolling Stone
—explored the media’s disturbing lack of interest in the JFK assassination. The
Washington Post
’s failure to commit investigative resources to the case was “especially puzzling,” Kaiser observed, because of the newspaper’s “courageous handling of Watergate and the intimate friendship Bradlee had with President Kennedy.” When the
Rolling Stone
journalist asked Bradlee to explain his lack of interest in the case, he snarled, “I’ve been up to my ass in lunatics”—a reply that revealed not only his contempt for conspiracy researchers but his oddly passive view that the
Post
’s role was simply to sift through the “lunatics” instead of directing its own investigative firepower at the story. “Unless you can find someone who wants to devote his life to [the case], forget it,” Bradlee added. This comment also struck me as strangely resigned, especially for the man who had famously declared that reporters should be willing to “give their left nut” for a great story.

There must be other reasons for Bradlee’s inaction, I concluded, after reading the
Rolling Stone
article years later. So I decided to visit the man himself—the man whom I, like the rest of those inspired by Watergate to enter journalism, had long regarded as a craggy icon of Fourth Estate integrity. Bradlee was long retired as the
Post
’s executive editor when I spoke with him in 2004. But, at age eighty-three, he retained emeritus status at the paper—as well as a small, unassuming office, which is where he agreed to meet with me. Dressed informally in a buttoned sweater and slacks, the legendary editor still exuded the feisty energy that had driven him to the top of his profession.

We began by talking about Bradlee’s memories of Bobby Kennedy, with whom he had a somewhat prickly relationship. “I think that he maybe resented my relationship with Jack,” Bradlee said. I told him about my book, and how my research showed that, after the shots rang out in Dallas, Bobby immediately suspected the CIA and its henchmen in the Mafia and Cuban exile world. Bradlee did not seem surprised. “Jesus,” he said, in his trademark growl, “if it were your brother…I mean if I were Bobby, I would certainly have taken a look at that possibility.” Then Bradlee made a truncated, but revealing remark. “I’ve always wondered whether my reaction to all of that was not influenced by sort of a total distaste for the possibility that [Jack] had been assassinated by…” He did not finish the sentence, but the rest was clear: “by his own government.”

I pursued this angle with Bradlee. He had been the brother-in-law of CIA golden boy Cord Meyer; he socialized, like other Cold War liberals in the Washington press, with the agency’s top men at Georgetown salons. Did he ever make discreet inquiries in these CIA circles, I asked Bradlee, about what happened in Dallas?

“I’m sure I talked to Helms about it privately, but as usual he dusted me off,” he answered.

“He was good at that, wasn’t he?” I said.

“Oh, yeah, he’d ask you to have lunch with him and you’d think, ‘Oh, God, we’re going to get a real good juicy pearl’—and you got nothing.”

Then I asked Bradlee the question that had been looming throughout the interview. Why didn’t he do more as the editor of the
Post
to get at the truth? “It was the fall of ’65 when I became managing editor here,” he replied, “and I’ve got to tell you that…I was so busy with trying to, in the first place, trying to build a staff…. And so I spent an enormous amount of time trying to decide who to hire.” It was a weak explanation, and we both knew it.

I pushed him again. “In retrospect,” I asked, “do you think the
Post
should have taken a harder look at the assassination?” And then Bradlee, who surely finds it hard to bullshit other journalists, gave me a brutally honest reply. He didn’t do more to investigate his friend’s death, Bradlee told me, because he was concerned about his career. “I think I probably felt that since I had been a friend of Kennedy’s that—you know, this is just [two] years later, and the first thing that he does is come over to the paper that he’s hopefully going to run for a while—and he concentrates on
that
?” He was afraid, Bradlee continued, “that I would be discredited for taking the efforts [of the
Post
newsroom] down that path.”

And then he added a wistful little kicker that was stunning in its understatement. If his newspaper
had
solved the monstrous crime, “it would have been fantastic.”

Yes, I nodded. “It would have been an amazing story.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Bradlee.

And that was it. No angst about the way he had put his ambition ahead of his loyalty to a friend, no moaning about what letting a crime of this magnitude go unsolved does to the soul of a nation. I knew Bradlee was old school—journalists don’t blubber, and all that. You cut your losses and move on. But his attitude was still weirdly emotionless, even by his hard-bitten standards.

I later spoke with Don Hewitt, another prominent journalist who knew the Kennedys. As we have seen, the
60 Minutes
creator has long harbored suspicions about Dallas, wondering whether “disgruntled CIA types” were behind JFK’s assassination. Like Ben Bradlee, Hewitt—as the long-reigning executive producer of the most successful and esteemed investigative news show in television history—was in a position to dig deeply into the case. And that’s just what he did, Hewitt insists today.

I talked to Hewitt in 2005, the year after he stepped down as the
60 Minutes
mastermind. During his thirty-seven years at the helm of the CBS program, the show did not break one major investigative story on the assassination. But, Hewitt told me, it was not for lack of trying.

“We tried and tried and tried,” Hewitt said. “We went to Dallas, had marksmen shoot bullets out the window [of the Texas School Book Depository], tried to figure the trajectory of where it would have come from…I sat in that window and looked out that window for an hour, trying to figure out—I just never believed [the official story] for one second. And it’s the biggest mystery of my life, [why the real] story has never surfaced.”