Read Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) Online
Authors: David Talbot
Laura Hunt, an elementary schoolteacher in Miami, confirmed that she was opposed to reopening the Kennedy assassination in her husband’s memoir. “Things were a little strained” within the family, she acknowledged. But she does not repudiate the book, and she emphasizes that Hunt, though ailing, was of sound mind when he was working on it. She also denies that Hunt’s speculations about a CIA role in the JFK assassination were prompted by any bitter feelings he might have harbored about the agency for not coming to his aid during Watergate. “He never felt bitter with the agency,” she said. He was not trying to “get some body back. Howard Hunt wasn’t made that way.”
Hunt’s most explosive revelation about the CIA and the Kennedy assassination is not contained in his book. Before he stopped telling his oldest son about his buried past, however, the old spy unburdened himself of a stunning secret. And this revelation was not speculative, but an eyewitness account. In 1963, Hunt recalled, he was invited by Frank Sturgis—the mob-friendly anti-Castro operative who later joined Hunt’s Watergate burglary team—to a clandestine meeting in a CIA safe house in Miami. At the meeting, a group of men—including David Morales—discussed what was referred to as “the big event,” which, it soon became clear, was a plot to kill President Kennedy. After Morales left, Sturgis asked Hunt, “Are you with us?” Hunt said he was “incredulous.”
“You guys have everything you need—why do you need me?” Hunt asked Sturgis.
“You could help with the cover-up,” Sturgis suggested.
Hunt was no Kennedy lover. He once told St. John he wanted to have a bumpersticker made reading: “Let’s finish the job—let’s hit Ted.” But Hunt insisted he did not join the plot, because he learned that Bill Harvey was involved, a man he regarded as “an alcoholic psycho.”
After Kennedy was shot down in Dallas, Hunt recounted, he was “haunted” by the assassination “like the rest of the country.” He felt “lucky” that he had not played “a direct role” in the conspiracy. But Hunt left his exact role in the plot hazy. In the audiotape he sent St. John in January 2004, he said, “I was a benchwarmer in [the plot],” adding cryptically, “I had a reputation for honesty and information was brought to me.”
Sitting in the Red Lion as the winter sun sank into the Pacific and the shadows fell over the coastal redwoods, St. John Hunt tried to make sense of his father’s truncated confession. Was his father a co-conspirator in the killing of President Kennedy? “At the end of the day, I just don’t know. But I do know that he at least had foreknowledge of it. He certainly knew a lot more than he said about it. I was just starting to get a lot out of him when they shut him up.”
Whatever Hunt did in his life, his son has found a way to forgive him. The eulogy that St. John delivered for his father at his funeral in Miami was an outpouring of love for the swashbuckling spy he called “the classic CIA man; an American James Bond.” If he was guilty of base deeds, it was out of a misguided sense of mission. “My personal feeling,” St. John told the assembled mourners, who included Hunt’s fellow Watergate convict Bernard Barker and aging anti-Castro militants like Felix Rodriguez, “is that my father’s deep sense of loyalty and patriotism for this was country was exploited by men of petty concerns and vastly inferior moral fiber.”
He has no qualms about making public his father’s JFK confession, St. John said later. Why? “Because it’s the truth. And I don’t see it as that terrible. Assassination is part of the American political culture. It was going on long before Kennedy and it will be going on long after us.”
IN RECENT YEARS, THE
Kennedy legacy has been clouded by a spate of books, documentaries, and articles that have attempted to demythologize Camelot by presenting JFK as a drug-addled, sex-deranged, mobbed-up risk taker. While Kennedy’s private life would certainly not pass today’s public scrutiny, this pathological interpretation misses the essential story of his presidency. There was a heroic grandeur to John F. Kennedy’s administration that had nothing to do with the mists of Camelot. It was a presidency that clashed with its own times, and in the end found some measure of greatness. Coming to office at the height of the Cold War and held hostage by their party’s powerful Southern racist wing, the Kennedy brothers steadily grew in vision and courage—prodded by the social movements of the sixties—until they were in such sharp conflict with the national security bureaucracy and Southern Democrats that they risked splitting their own administration and party. This is the fundamental historical truth about the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
And yet, caught up in the fashionable anti-Kennedy backlash of the times, prominent journalists like Christopher Hitchens dismiss JFK as “a vulgar hoodlum.” One result of this relentless Kennedy bashing has been to diminish the public outrage over JFK’s unsolved murder. After all, if President Kennedy really was such a sleazy character, where is the tragedy in his violent demise?
It has also become fashionable in all the media babble about Dallas that fills the air each year around November 22 for commentators to opine that “we will probably never know the truth about John F. Kennedy’s assassination”—a self-fulfilling prophecy that relieves them of any responsibility to search for the truth. Ironically, some of the more politically backward countries where Bobby Kennedy took his rapturous mission in the 1960s—including South Africa, Argentina, and Chile—have made strenuous, if painful, efforts to confront the deepest traumas of their past, including assassinations, kidnappings, and torture. In South Africa, this post-apartheid process of political and moral self-examination became known as “truth and reconciliation.” But in the United States, the darkest political mysteries of recent decades—including the assassination of President Kennedy—have yet to be fully explored. From Dallas to Vietnam to Iraq, the truth has consistently been avoided, the perpetrators have never fully answered for their actions. When the nation
has
mustered the courage to impanel commissions, these investigations soon come up against locked doors that remain firmly shut to this day. The stage for this reign of secrecy was set on November 22, 1963. The lesson of Dallas was clear. If a president can be shot down with impunity at high noon in the sunny streets of an American city, then any kind of deceit is possible.
Assassination researchers insist that it is not too late, even at this remote date, to revive the JFK investigation. Most people who could have shed light on the crime are now dead, researchers acknowledge, but the trail has not receded entirely into history’s far horizons. Researchers list a variety of actions that can still be taken. The government should be compelled to release the JFK files it is still withholding—including the 1,100 documents related to George Joannides that the CIA has admitted it still has locked away. The CIA should also be required to disclose the phone and travel records of other agents suspected of involvement in the JFK—and RFK—assassinations, such as David Morales. Washington should follow this by making a formal request to the Cuban and Mexican governments to release all their secret files on the case. The Justice Department should offer amnesty and waive government secrecy pledges for all those who step forward with relevant testimony. Lingering technical disputes about the events in Dealey Plaza—such as the hotly debated “acoustic fingerprints” on the Dallas police motorcycle Dictabelt that apparently indicated that as many as five shots were fired that day—should be resolved by utilizing the most sophisticated forensic resources, including those of the federal Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which has oddly refused to take on the case. Finally, the Kennedy family should be persuaded to completely open the papers under their control—including those of John and Robert Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—which are still subject to frustrating restrictions.
The assassination researchers are, of course, indefatigable by nature. That’s what has allowed them to carry on, through years of government obstruction, media ridicule, and the bewilderment of family and friends. But outside this shrinking community of hardy souls, a malaise hangs over the JFK crusade.
Some of those with a long history of involvement in the case are deeply pessimistic. When I visited Bob Blakey in November 2003, the week before the fortieth anniversary of the JFK assassination, he seemed resigned to the idea that the crime would never be solved. We spoke in his home near the University of Notre Dame campus, where he teaches law, sitting in over-stuffed chairs in his dimly lit study, where the flickering flames in the fireplace warded off the chill of an overcast afternoon. Near the end of the interview, Blakey told me that the Kennedys no longer seem important, at least not to those Americans who were born after JFK was shot. “The Kennedys are not part of this generation,” he said. “I teach this generation. [The assassination] is not a big deal for them. They grew up in a different world.”
So how will history resolve the Kennedy mystery? I asked him. “My guess is that the Warren Commission will carry the day,” said the man whose congressional investigation offered the first—and last—official challenge to the Warren Report. The lone gunman theory has the virtue of simplicity, Blakey explained. It was a dreary place to circle back to, after forty long years of exploration.
A couple of years later, I found myself at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, sitting in a quiet cubicle and reeling through Bobby Kennedy’s life in video. Maybe Blakey is right, and the Kennedy story is no longer relevant for many Americans. But the black and white footage flashing before me that day seemed to be loaded with painful meaning, even now.
The last reel I looked at was Bobby in 1968, and it included his appearance on a San Francisco public TV talk show called
Kaleidoscope
as he geared up for his final campaign. The interviewer asked pointed but polite questions, in a public television kind of way. But Bobby seemed pained and the interview took on the strained intensity of a psychodrama. In close-ups, the camera captured his raw, weather-ravaged face and scabbed lips. The country was angry and demoralized, the interviewer observed. He could also have pointed out that it was suffering a kind of moral rot and vacancy of the soul because of the ugly, no-exit war that had begun seeping into every corner of American life. In these brutal circumstances, why would he commit himself to the political arena? Kennedy was asked. Working for the public good was “no sacrifice,” Bobby replied. “The most unhappy people in the world are those who are involved in just themselves.”
But, even though he was on the eve of the political adventure of his life, Bobby did not seem happy. There was never a mask with Bobby. On camera that day, he was quiet, wistful, ironic. He was constitutionally incapable of the cheerful artifice and empty bravado that is required of American politicians. And yet, he really did believe in America—he simply refused to give in to what it was becoming.
After a long discussion of the country’s woes, the interviewer asked Bobby, “But you are an optimist?” Kennedy nodded and smiled his weary-eyed smile. “Just because you can’t live any other way, can you?” he replied. He was America’s first and last existential leader.
We live in a dark age of clashing fundamentalisms. The country is ruled by an administration that has made a cult of secrecy and obedience. We are caught up in another endless war, this time on “terror”—or perhaps it’s a struggle with fear itself. But in this bleakest of times, Bobby Kennedy’s message seems more compelling than ever.
We can’t go on, we must go on.
Do Americans still want the truth—starting with Dallas and going all the way to Guantánamo? Do they want to take back their country? I don’t know for certain. But I have to be optimistic. Just because there really is no other way, is there?
1: NOVEMBER 22, 1963
1
was eating lunch: William Manchester,
The Death of a President
, 146.
1
“I have news for you”: Ibid., 195.
2
“told me with pleasure”: Author interview with Nicholas Katzenbach.
2
“on the faculty of Howard University”: Quoted in Anthony Summers,
The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
, 364.
2
“amazing computer brain of his”: Author interview with Jack Newfield.
3
“riding into an ambush”: Quoted in Lamar Waldron, with Thom Hartmann,
Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK
, 15.
4
inscribed a picture, Edward Guthman,
We Band of Brothers
, 7.
4
“so much bitterness”: Ibid., 244.
4
“He distinctly said ‘they’”: Author interview with Guthman.
4
encircled Kennedy’s estate: Ibid.
5
“built like a tank”: Quoted in William Doyle,
An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford Mississippi, 1962
, 68.
6
Bobby was “president”: Quoted in Waldron, 69.
6
a stunning outburst: Seymour Freidin and George Bailey,
The Experts
, 85. The authors did not cite a source for this revealing account. But co-author Freidin, the former foreign affairs editor of the
New York Herald Tribune
, was later revealed by columnist Jack Anderson as a paid informant for the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s. According to Anderson, Freidin also spied on the Humphrey and McGovern presidential campaigns for Richard Nixon). So presumably Freidin got his scoop about the Kennedy phone call directly from his CIA contacts.
6
“seized with the horror of it”: William Manchester interview with John McCone, CIA-DCI file, declassified October 9, 1998.
6
“if they had killed my brother”: Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
, 616.
7
blessed by the pope: McCone letter to Robert Kennedy, Attorney General papers, December 20, 1962, JFK Library.
7
two shooters in Dallas: Schlesinger, 616.
8
“no such thing as organized crime”: Author interview with Guthman
8
“open some doors”: Quoted in Seymour Hersh,
The Dark Side of Camelot
, 450.
8
“numerous federal marshals”: Author interview with Walter Sheridan, Jr.9 “in any foxhole”: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s eulogy for Walter Sheridan, JFK Library.
9
“a news flash”: Quoted in Walter Sheridan,
The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa
, 299.
9
“One of your guys did it”: Quoted in
Washington Post
, April 17, 1981.
10
“passionate parish priest”: Author interview with Haynes Johnson.
10
“it was a shocking thing”: Ibid. This is the way Johnson originally reported the phone conversation in a April 17, 1981 article for the
Washington Post
. But in a November 20, 1983 story in the
Post
, Johnson implied that Kennedy told him, not Ruiz-Williams. The two different accounts have led to some confusion over the years. Today Johnson insists that the original version is accurate: Kennedy was talking to Ruiz-Williams when he said, “One of your guys did it.”
10
shuttled in and out of Cuba: Gerald D. McKnight,
Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why
, 10.
11
“they make me crazy”: Quoted in Waldron, 139.
11
“expecting to see a very impressive guy”: Quoted in Haynes Johnson,
The Bay of Pigs
, 290.
11
“an old-fashioned buccaneer type”: Author interview with Johnson.
11
[RFK] sent Harry to Miami: Waldron, 131.
11
Miami had already been ruled out:
Newsweek
, May 13, 1963.
11
“keep a sharp look on our Cubans”: Author interview with Angelo Murgado.
12
like a Welsh collie:
New York Times Magazine
, May 28, 1961.
13
“I don’t have any recollection”: Author interview with Robert McNamara.
13
“Let them see what they’ve done”: Quoted in Manchester, 348.
13
“I want his friends to carry him down”: Ibid, 386.
14
the hot, bright streets of Dallas: Ibid, 392.
14
“You do that”: Ibid., 391.
14
“accepted that there was a conspiracy: Vincent Palamara,
Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect the President
(self-published manuscript).
15
an organized plot more powerful than the presidency: James Hepburn,
Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK
, 10.
15
“looking burned alive”: Quoted in Manchester, 406.
15
“three-ring circus”: Quoted in McKnight, 154.
16
“you just follow orders”: Quoted in Jim Garrison,
On the Trail of the Assassins
, 248.
16
he also discussed taking possession of JFK’s death limousine: Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy phone logs, February 24, 1964, JFK Library.
17
JFK was the target of a conspiracy: Henry Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
, 49. Burkley had avoided the subject years earlier when an oral historian from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library asked him about the autopsy evidence used by the Warren Report. “I would not care to be quoted on that,” Burkley, who died in 1991, told the library interviewer—a cryptic remark that was nonetheless revealing.
17
“the greatest treasure in my life”: Quoted in Manchester, 428.
17
“I just heard him sobbing”: Charles Spalding oral history, JFK Library.
18
“in the White House with the president of the United States”: Research associate Karen Croft interview with Milt Ebbins.
18
[Kennedy said] they were facing a formidable enemy: The source for this story is a Los Angeles man named Andy Harland, a movie props supplier who became friends with Lawford later in his life. Since Lawford became a notorious alcoholic and drug addict in the years after the assassination, this account must be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion. But in an interview for this book, Harland insisted that Lawford was sober when he related this story. And the statements attributed to Bobby correspond with the views he was expressing that week. According to Harland, Bobby told Lawford that the plot against JFK had grown out of a secret anti-Castro operation codenamed “Project Freedom.”
19
blatant show of disrespect for McNamara: Manchester, 494.
19
“he could stay up there forever”: quoted on Arlington National Cemetery Web site, www.arlingtoncemetery.org/visitor_information/JFK.html.
19
an old Edward G. Robinson gangster movie: Manchester, 526.
19
“some kind of goddam banana republic”: Author interview with Matthew Walton.
19
Eisenhower was put in the same bitter frame of mind: Manchester, 260.
20
“was killed to keep him from talking”: Quoted in McKnight, 22.
20
“Bobby…turned it off”: Croft interview with Ebbins.
21
“Jack Ruby was visiting Syndicate members”: Confidential communication to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and CIA Director Allen Dulles, December 1, 1963, declassified on August 12, 1993, National Archives and Research Administration (NARA) document number 1993.08.12.17:17:16:960005.
21
Sheridan reported…that Ruby “had picked up a bundle of money”: FBI memo, November 24, 1963, declassified October 26, 1992, record number 124-10072-10228. Kennedy assassination researchers Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann supplied further evidence about Hoffa’s payoff to Ruby in their 2005 book,
Ultimate Sacrifice
. The researchers interviewed a friend of Pierre Salinger, a businessman named Jim Allison, who reported that he had witnessed the payoff at the coffee shop of a Chicago hotel on the weekend of October 27, 1963. According to Allison, the payoff was made by a bagman with ties to Hoffa and the Mafia with whom he was dining. The bagman handed Ruby a business envelope with a stack of $100 bills which the authors estimated to total $7,000.
Herbert “Jack” Miller, chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division, also checked out the story on a trip to Dallas to pursue assassination leads. According to a November 25 FBI memo, Miller determined that two newspapermen—John Mashek of the
Dallas Morning News
and Tony Weitzel of the
Chicago Daily News
—were the sources for the story. Miller called off Justice Department attorney Peloquin and terminated the investigation into the payoff after he determined the story was based on speculation of reporters only,” according to the memo. But Waldron and Hartmann suggested that a more compelling reason the Justice Department aborted the Ruby probe was to avoid compromising its ongoing case against Hoffa. As the FBI memo stated, “Miller expressed concern to Peloquin that there would be publicity regarding the Weitzel story which would give Hoffa and the Teamsters an opportunity to criticize the Department by alleging that Department was trying to tie Hoffa in with President’s murder.”
It is unclear whether Bobby approved ending the Ruby payoff probe or whether Miller made this decision on his own. Miller, one of the few Republican holdovers in Kennedy’s top ranks at the Justice Department, would surface again in the assassination saga, during Jim Garrison’s investigation in New Orleans. More on Miller can be found in Chapter Seven.
21
“I do wish Department would mind its own business”: FBI memo from chief of Chicago office to FBI director, November 25, 1963, NARA record number 124-10077-10016, NARA.
21
Draznin…provided further evidence about Ruby’s [mob] background: National Labor Relations Board memo, November 27, 1963, NARA record number 179-40005-10028, declassified October 22, 1993. The report Draznin prepared on the mobbed-up Ruby, with his “wide syndicate contacts,” seems to blatantly contradict what he later told journalist Seymour Hersh. “I picked up nothing at all tying [the assassination] to Chicago mob men,” Draznin told Hersh for his 1994 book,
The Dark Side of Camelot
, adding, “Ruby thought [killing Oswald] was a patriotic act. I believe it to this day.”