JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (132 page)

Hosty answered: “It does seem strange, yes, sir.” Ibid., p. 145.

The question was left unexplored by the investigating committee. To pursue it would have meant going dangerously beyond the government’s lone-assassin story toward the source of a conspiracy in which Oswald was impersonated and set up as the scapegoat.

[
700
].
WCH
, vol. 4, p. 437.

[
701
]. New Orleans bar owner Orest Pena, interviewed about seeing Oswald in the company of FBI agent Warren deBrueys.
CBS Reports
, November 26, 1975. Cited by Summers,
Conspiracy,
p. 282. Also Oswald’s friend, New Orleans garage manager Adrian Alba, who saw Oswald meeting an FBI agent Alba knew and passing him a white envelope.
Conspiracy
, p. 283.

[
702
]. Col. Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko,
Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him
(New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993), p. 77.

[
703
].
WCH
, vol. 16, p. 33.

[
704
]. Hosty testimony, p. 134.

[
705
]. Ibid.

[
706
]. Ibid., p. 137.

[
707
]. Martin Waldron, “F.B.I. Chiefs Linked to Oswald File Loss,”
New York Times
(September 17, 1975), pp. 1, 21. The
Times
article noted: “The existence and destruction of the letter was first reported two weeks ago by
The Dallas Times-Herald
.” Ibid., p. 21. In 1975 in the wake of Watergate revelations, the FBI Director took the step of acknowledging publicly the existence and destruction of the Oswald letter: “Clarence M. Kelley, who became F.B.I. Director in 1973 after Mr. Hoover’s death, has said that there is evidence that the letter was received and destroyed.” Ibid.

[
708
]. Ibid.

[
709
]. In terms of Cold War partners, Kennedy had one other important peacemaking ally, Prime Minister Harold MacMillan of the United Kingdom, who, as we saw, was pushing him toward a test ban treaty. Barbara Leaming,
Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), pp. 421-27.

[
710
]. Norman Cousins,
The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972).

[
711
]. The meeting between U.S. and Soviet representatives at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, in October 1962 was the third such “Dartmouth Conference”—named after the first, held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, in October 1960. The second Dartmouth Conference took place in the Crimea in South Soviet Russia in June 1961. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, p. 13.

[
712
]. Ibid.

[
713
]. Ibid., p. 16.

[
714
]. Ibid., p. 11.

[
715
]. Ibid., p. 17.

[
716
]. Ibid.

[
717
]. Ibid., p. 18.

[
718
]. Cited by Hansjakob Stehle,
Eastern Politics of the Vatican 1917-1979
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 305.

[
719
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, p. 18.

[
720
]. Stehle,
Eastern Politics
, p. 305.

[
721
]. Thomas Cahill,
Pope John XXIII
(New York: Viking Penguin, 2002), p. 206; Stehle,
Eastern Politics
, p. 305.

[
722
]. Stehle,
Eastern Politics
, p. 305. Only two weeks before
Pravda
praised Pope John, the same Moscow paper had dismissed the Vatican as a “warm body that no magic formula can bring back to life.” Ibid. Pope John’s fervent appeal to both sides in the Cuban Missile Crisis was more effective than any “magic formula.” Just as John Kennedy’s American University address would do the following June, the pope’s message broke through doctrinaire barriers and made the author a voice for peace in the Soviet Union.

[
723
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, pp. 20-21.

[
724
]. I can testify personally to Norman Cousins’s papal missions to Moscow. In 1964 I was an assistant to Father Felix Morlion at his Pro Deo University in Rome. There I met Norman Cousins during one of his consultations with Father Morlion and other Vatican representatives. On my return to the U.S. in 1965, I met with Cousins again at his
Saturday Review
office in New York. Through Morlion and Cousins I learned of “the improbable triumvirate” of John F. Kennedy, Pope John, and Nikita Khrushchev the year after it happened.

[
725
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, pp. 24-25.

[
726
]. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

[
727
]. Ibid., pp. 44-46.

[
728
]. Ibid., p. 49.

[
729
]. Ibid., p. 57.

[
730
]. Ibid., pp. 63-65.

[
731
]. Ibid., p. 68.

[
732
]. Ibid., p. 74.

[
733
]. Ibid., pp. 75-76.

[
734
]. Gaeton Fonzi,
The Last Investigation
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1994), p. 132. See also chapter 2 above.

[
735
]. “U.S. Curbs Miami Exiles to Prevent Raids on Cuba,”
New York Times
(April 1, 1963), p. 1. See chapter 2 above.

[
736
]. Ellen J. Hammer,
A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987), p. 116. See also chapter 3 above.

[
737
]. Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff,
Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), p. 84.

[
738
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, p. 91.

[
739
]. Pope John XXIII,
Pacem in Terris/Peace on Earth
(New York: America Press, 1963), p. 36.

[
740
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, pp. 92-101.

[
741
]. Memorandum by Norman Cousins, “April 22, 1963,” p. 1. I am grateful to Professor Lawrence S. Wittner of the State University of New York and the Cousins Foundation in Beverly Hills for sharing with me, and allowing me to cite from, this Cousins memorandum.

[
742
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, pp.113-14.

[
743
]. Cousins, “April 22, 1963,” p. 2;
Improbable Triumvirate
, pp. 116-17.

[
744
]. Lawrence S. Wittner,
Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954-1970
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977), p. 375.

[
745
]. Norman Cousins to President John F. Kennedy, April 30, 1963, pp. 1-2. Nuclear Test Ban Folder, Box 36, Theodore Sorensen Papers, JFK Library.

[
746
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, pp. 122-23.

[
747
]. See chapter 2 above.

[
748
]. Fidel Castro, Address to the Tripartite Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, January 11, 1992; Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, editors,
The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
(New York: New Press, 1992), p. 344.

[
749
]. Sergei Khrushchev,
Nikita Khrushchev and the Making of a Superpower
(University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 659.

[
750
]. Richard Helms, Memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence on “Reported Desire of the Cuban Government for Rapprochement with the United States,” June 5, 1963; Peter Kornbluh, “Kennedy and Castro: The Secret Quest for Accommodation; An Electronic Briefing Book,” at the National Security Archive’s Web site: www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive.