JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (108 page)

In the course of Ralph’s psychiatric treatment, Dorothy said, he was given the tranquilizing drugs Thorazine and Stelazine to the point where “they made him walk around like a zombie.”
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He learned to resist the process. Just as Abraham Bolden had done in the Springfield Penitentiary psychiatric unit, Ralph faked swallowing the pills.

More difficult to avoid were the shock treatments. He received over forty of them. The impact of the shock treatments on his long-range memory was, his wife said, “evidently nothing, because he didn’t forget what he was there for,” his encounter with the hitchhiker he had dropped off at Elm and Houston.
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Ralph told Dorothy, “I don’t know if they’re trying to make me forget what’s happened, or what. But I’m always going to say those things happened.”
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To the end of his life Ralph held on to the truth of his experience with the hitchhiker carrying the curtain rods. “He never backed down,” Dorothy said.
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Ralph died at Rusk State Hospital on September 3, 1975, from congestive heart failure. He was thirty-nine years old.

Over three decades later, Dorothy continues to ponder her husband’s stubborn adherence to a strange story that in effect made him a prisoner in mental hospitals, took him away from a family he loved, and impoverished all of them. He was haunted by an experience he couldn’t forget, for which he then suffered the rest of his life because of his unwillingness to recant it.

Other relatives and friends dismissed Ralph’s account of the Oswald-like hitchhiker with the curtain rods package as pure fantasy.

His uncle, J. O. Smith, who went with him on his first trip to the FBI office, said of his nephew’s story, “I really thought that was all just imagination.”
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His cousin, Ken Smith, remembers Ralph before Kennedy’s death as nothing more than “a chain-smoker who watched football games.”
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Once Ralph had what he thought was his Oswald experience, Ken said, he became a man obsessed:

“He wouldn’t let it go. He believed it to be true. This consumed Ralph. His thinking didn’t go beyond that afterwards. This just totally destroyed his life.

“Ralph blamed himself for Kennedy’s assassination. He said, ‘I was the reason the President got killed.’

“If he had shut up, his life wouldn’t have been so bad. Everybody thought he was crazy. So he became crazy.”
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Even Ralph’s co-worker and corroborating witness, Dempsey Jones, who confirmed to the FBI that Yates told him at least one day before the assassination about the hitchhiker’s talk on shooting the president, was skeptical. As the FBI liked to point out, he added a disclaimer: “[Jones] said Yates is a big talker who always talks about a lot of foolishness.”
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Only the FBI knew why Ralph Yates needed to be taken seriously. Not even Yates himself, who had no sense of an Oswald double, understood the significance of what he felt compelled to say for the rest of his life. Only the Federal Bureau of Investigation recognized the importance of his testimony, with the threat it posed to the government’s case against Oswald. If evidence surfaced of the Oswald-like hitchhiker, who delivered his “curtain rods” to the Depository two days before the assassination, it would have preempted and brought into question the government-endorsed curtain rods story, as given by Buell Wesley Frazier. Thanks to the bungling redundancy of cover stories, the plot to kill the president was again in danger of exposure.

There were too many Oswalds in view, with too many smuggled rifles, retelling a familiar story to too many witnesses. At least one curtain rods story, and the disposable witness who heard it, had to go. The obvious person to be jettisoned was the hapless Ralph Yates. His stubborn insistence on what he knew he had seen and heard, from the man he had given a ride, had to be squelched.

Ralph Yates then went through eleven years of hell. Yet he could not forget, and would not stop speaking about, what he witnessed when he picked up the man he thought was Lee Harvey Oswald. Without ever understanding the full meaning of the experience he refused to renounce, Ralph Leon Yates was a witness to the unspeakable.

The deepening sense John Kennedy had of his assassination was, as in everything he faced, laced with irony.

While in church waiting for Mass to begin one Sunday morning, the president turned to the reporters sitting behind him and said, “Did you ever stop and think, if anyone tried to take a shot at me, they’d get one of you guys first?”
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He had both a detachment about death and an urgency about life. He told one of his friends, “I have no fear of death . . . You know, during my experience out in the Pacific, I really wasn’t afraid to die. And I wasn’t afraid of dying when I was in the hospital in New York . . . Maybe I’m not that religious. I feel that death is the end of a hell of a lot of things. But I’ve got too many things to do. And I just hope the Lord gives me the time to get all these things done!”
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Two things that he wanted to get done in October 1963, while he still had the time, were to visit his infant son’s grave and his bedridden father.

On Saturday, October 19, Kennedy’s friends and aides, Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, went with him to the Harvard–Columbia football game in Boston. As halftime approached, the president fell silent. He seemed oblivious to the game on the field.

He turned to O’Donnell and said, “I want to go to Patrick’s grave and I want to go there alone, with nobody from the newspapers following me.”
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Helped by a Boston police officer, who kept reporters’ cars from leaving a parking lot in time to follow, the president, O’Donnell, and Powers went to the Brookline cemetery.

JFK stood at his son’s headstone, inscribed simply “Kennedy.” He said, “He seems so alone here.”
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He spent the next day with his father at their Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, home. Joseph Kennedy had been incapacitated by a stroke in December 1961. His right side was paralyzed, and his speech garbled. The president, ignoring a house full of guests, sat by his father’s bed through the morning and afternoon. Although Joseph Kennedy could say almost nothing comprehensible to his son, he loved being with him. For long periods the two men just sat quietly together.

The president postponed his usual Sunday afternoon time of return to the White House, lingering with his father until late in the evening. As dusk fell, the presidential helicopter landed outside the bedroom window. JFK finally rose to depart. He kissed his father goodbye on the forehead. He said he’d be back to see him after a trip he had to make to Texas.
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Years later, Dave Powers remembered Mr. Kennedy’s farewell to his son with his eyes—speechless, but “Oh, that look,” said Powers.
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After the president left, Joseph Kennedy’s nurse and an assistant wheeled his bed to the balcony doors, so he could watch his son board the helicopter. Mr. Kennedy waited impatiently for him to appear on the lawn.

Suddenly JFK was back in the room. Mr. Kennedy, still straining to see his son outside, didn’t realize he had returned. The president touched his father on the back of his shoulder.

“Look who’s here, Dad,” he said.
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He put his arms around his father and kissed him all over again. Then the president departed a second time, giving his father a high, wide wave from the lawn. In the helicopter, as Kennedy looked back at the balcony doors framing his father in his bed, Dave Powers saw the president’s eyes glistening with tears.
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One month later, on the Air Force One flight from Dallas to Washington after JFK was killed, Powers described this scene to Jacqueline Kennedy. He said he had never known the president to make such a return to his father. It was as if he sensed he was seeing him for the last time.
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For whatever reasons, JFK seemed to be saying goodbye to the two people he loved who were least capable of saying goodbye to him, his buried son and his stricken father.

What was the process whereby nightclub owner Jack Ruby came to murder Lee Harvey Oswald two days after President Kennedy’s assassination?

Jack Ruby’s first known involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency came in the late 1950s, when he was smuggling guns from Florida and Texas to a young Cuban revolutionary, Fidel Castro, and his band of rebels. Ruby, a Chicago mob functionary transplanted to Dallas, ran guns to Fidel, so that the Mafia could hedge its bets on the next Cuban government by supporting both the dictator Batista and the insurrectionist Castro.
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The CIA monitored the shipments. According to gun smuggler and CIA operative Edward Browder, “During the pre-Castro-[government] years, the CIA and Customs would not oppose gun shipments to Castro. After Castro turned Communist, the CIA and Customs encouraged shipments to anti-Castro forces.”
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Ruby was no more in sympathy with Castro’s cause than were his sponsors and monitors. As a friend of his put it, he “was in it for the money. It didn’t matter what side, just one that would pay him the most.”
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In 1957, Ruby commuted between Dallas and the Houston suburb of Kemah on Galveston Bay. In Kemah, according to his poker-playing friend, car dealer James E. Beaird, Ruby stored guns and ammunition in a two-story house near the waterfront. Beaird saw Ruby and his associates load “many boxes of new guns, including automatic rifles and handguns” on pickup trucks, transporting them to “what looked like a 50-foot surplus military boat.” With Ruby in command, the boat would then carry the guns across the Gulf of Mexico to Castro’s rebel army in Cuba.
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After Castro overthrew Batista in January 1959, the easily bought Ruby began to provide weapons, now with CIA support, to anti-Castro Cubans. Ruby was working with another CIA-connected gunrunner, Thomas Eli Davis III. It was an association that would later haunt him. When Ruby was preparing for his trial for killing Oswald, it was the name of Davis that he feared might be brought up by the prosecution. He told his first attorney, Tom Howard, that he “had been involved with Davis, who was a gun-runner entangled in anti-Castro efforts.”
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For robbing a bank in June 1958, Thomas Eli Davis III had received a sentence of five years probation, during which time he went to work for the CIA. Ruby’s biographer, Seth Kantor, discovered Davis helped “in training anti-Castro units in Florida and at another site in South America.”
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When JFK was assassinated, Thomas Davis was in a jail cell in Algiers, “charged with running guns to the secret army terrorist movement then attempting to assassinate French Premiere Charles de Gaulle.”
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Davis was released through the intervention of the CIA’s foreign agent code-named “QJ/WIN,” identified by the top-secret CIA Inspector General’s Report as the “principal asset” in the Agency’s assassination program known as ZRRIFLE.
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Jack Ruby knew his CIA involvement with Thomas Eli Davis in running guns against Castro and Davis’s ongoing CIA assassination ties were dynamite. When Ruby warned his lawyer about his association with Thomas Davis, he was tiptoeing through a minefield. If a witness or investigative reporter had revealed the Ruby–Davis connection, it could have blown open not only Ruby’s trial but also the Agency’s behind-the-scenes role in the assassination plot. Ruby’s CIA background may have been the lead that nationally syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen told friends she was following when she attended the trial, gained a private meeting with Ruby behind closed doors, and then, while being hounded for months by the FBI, died mysteriously in her Manhattan home.
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Another Ruby–CIA connection that lay just beneath the surface was Ruby’s friendship with Gordon McLendon, the owner of Dallas radio station KLIF. In an FBI interview, Jack Ruby identified Gordon McLendon as one of his six closest friends.
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When Ruby was arrested for shooting Oswald, he shouted out that he wanted the help of Gordon McLendon.
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Why radio station owner McLendon?

In 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations discovered that Gordon McLendon was then working closely with JFK assassination suspect David Atlee Phillips on a CIA propaganda front. McLendon, a World War II Naval intelligence officer in the Pacific Ocean Joint Intelligence Center at Pearl Harbor,
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was a leader in the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Phillips, after “retiring” from being the Western Hemisphere chief of the CIA, had founded the group. Its purpose was to counter the widening, post-Watergate critique of the CIA that helped push Congress to reinvestigate the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations. McLendon worked hand in hand with master propagandist Phillips at creating a less critical image of the CIA. On March 3, 1978, McLendon, Phillips, and Hollywood producer Fred Weintraub met with CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner in his office to explore the idea of a TV series that would “fight back in defense of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence organizations.”
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