JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (138 page)

[
909
]. Kahin and Kahin,
Subversion as Foreign Policy,
p. 230. Drawing on interviews and an article by Frederick Bunnell, “American ‘Low Posture’ Policy Toward Indonesia in the Months Leading to the 1965 ‘Coup,’”
Indonesia
50 (October 1990), p. 60; n. 152, p. 59.

[
910
]. Kathy Kadane, “Ex-agents say CIA compiled death lists for Indonesians”; at namebase.org/kadane.html. Published in the
San Francisco Examiner
(May 20, 1990), pp. A1, A22. “Letter to the Editor from Kathy Kadane,”
New York Review of Books
(April 10, 1997) at namebase.org/kadane.html. Michael Wines, “C.I.A. Tie Asserted in Indonesia Purge,”
New York Times
(July 12, 1990), p. A13.

[
911
]. William Blum,
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II
(Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 194. The CIA’s support of the massacre in Indonesia also included supplying communications systems from Collins Radio, its major contractor (whose employee Carl Mather, as we have seen, was linked through his automobile’s license to a sighting of the second Oswald the afternoon of the assassination): “The supply of radios is perhaps the most telling detail [of U.S. logistical support to the bloodbath]. They served not only as field communications but also became an element of a broad, US intelligence-gathering operation constructed as the manhunt went forward. According to a former embassy official, the Central Intelligence Agency hastily provided the radios—state-of-the art Collins KWM-2s, high-frequency single-sideband transceivers, the highest-powered mobile unit available at that time to the civilian and commercial market.” Kadane, “Letter to the Editor.”

[
912
]. Robert Martens cited by Kadane, “Ex-agents say CIA,” pp. 1-2.

[
913
]. Kahin and Kahin,
Subversion as Foreign Policy,
p. 230; Howard Palfrey Jones,
Indonesia: The Possible Dream
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 401.

[
914
]. Urged by holdover Kennedy staff members, President Johnson had reluctantly asked Attorney General Robert Kennedy to be a presidential emissary to Sukarno to resolve another Southeast Asian political and military crisis—this one between Indonesia and Malaysia. Although Sukarno and Kennedy reached agreement on a ceasefire proposal, Johnson had no interest in doing any follow-up peacemaking with Indonesia, and the Indonesian–Malaysian agreement forged by RFK collapsed. Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times,
pp. 634-35.

[
915
]. Cindy Adams,
My Friend the Dictator
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 78.

[
916
]. “Message from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,” December 11, 1962.
FRUS, 1961-1963,
vol. VI, p. 228.

[
917
]. Ibid.

[
918
]. Ambassador David-Ormsby-Gore recounted his last conversation with President Kennedy to British journalist Henry Brandon. Cited in Henry Brandon,
Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent’s Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan
(New York: Atheneum, 1988), p. 200.

[
919
]. Fursenko and Naftali,
“One Hell of a Gamble,”
p. 344.

[
920
]. Beschloss,
Crisis Years,
p. 706.

[
921
]. Salinger,
With Kennedy,
p. 335.

[
922
]. Ibid.

[
923
]. Sorensen,
Kennedy,
p. 135; Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times,
p. 212.

[
924
]. William Walton oral history, March 30, 1993, p. 127 of transcript. JFK Library. Herbert S. Parmet,
JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Dial Press, 1983), p. 35.

[
925
]. Parmet,
JFK: The Presidency
, p. 58.

[
926
]. Walton oral history, March 30, 1993, p. 34 of transcript. JFK Library. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 244.

[
927
]. Fursenko and Naftali,
“One Hell of a Gamble,”
p. 344.

[
928
]. Ibid., pp. 344-46.

[
929
]. Ibid., pp. 109-29.

[
930
]. Ibid., pp. 344-45.

[
931
]. Ibid., p. 345. The anti-Johnson statements made by Walton to Bolshakov seem to have represented Robert Kennedy’s and William Walton’s views more than they did Jacqueline Kennedy’s. Her more optimistic view of what Johnson’s attitude toward Khrushchev would be was expressed in her December 1, 1963, letter to Khrushchev. See below.

[
932
]. Ibid.

[
933
]. Ibid.

[
934
]. Manchester,
Death of a President,
p. 706.

[
935
]. Ibid. When the interpreter had translated Jacqueline Kennedy’s words to Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet diplomat “blinked and covered his face with both hands.” Six days later, on December 1, 1963, in a handwritten letter to Nikita Khrushchev, she repeated in an expanded form the message she had asked Mikoyan to give him:

“Dear Mr. Chairman President:

I would like to thank you for sending Mr. Mikoyan as your representative to my husband’s funeral. He looked so upset when he came through the line—he was trembling—and I was very moved.

I tried to give him a message for you that day—but as it was such a terrible day for me, I do not know if my words came out as I meant them to.

So now, in one of the last nights I will spend in the White House, in one of the last letters I will write on this paper at the White House, I would like to write you my message. I send it only because I know how much my husband cared about peace, and how central the relation between you and him was in this concern. He used to quote your words in some of his speeches—‘In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.’

You and he were adversaries, but you also were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up. You respected each other and could deal with each other. I know that President Johnson will make every effort to establish the same relationship with you.

The danger which always troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones. So while big men know the needs for self-control and restraint, little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride. I know that on our side President Johnson will continue the policy in which my husband so deeply believed, a policy of control and restraint, but he will need your help.

I send this letter entirely out of my personal sense of the importance of the understanding which existed between you and my husband, and also because of your kindness and that of Mrs. Khrushcheva in Vienna. I read that she had tears in her eyes when she left the American Embassy in Moscow, after signing the book of mourning. Please thank her for that.

Sincerely, Jacqueline Kennedy.” Document #191, McGeorge Bundy Files, LBJ Library.

According to a State Department historian, Jacqueline Kennedy’s original letter has never been located (
FRUS
, 1961-1963, vol. VI, p. 313). I have cited here the earliest typed version of her letter, preserved in McGeorge Bundy’s files at the LBJ Library in Austin. The document shows Bundy’s handwritten revisions of Mrs. Kennedy’s original letter, prior to its transmission by the State Department to Khrushchev. Bundy’s changes to the text are revealing. He crossed out the widow’s poignant description of Anastas Mikoyan approaching her in the reception: “he was trembling.” JFK’s National Security Adviser also replaced Mrs. Kennedy’s emphasis on mutual trust, conveyed by the phrase, “the understanding which existed between you and my husband,” diluting it to read instead, “the relationship which existed between you and my husband.”

[
936
]. Beschloss,
The Crisis Years
, p. 682.

After I finished writing this book, my friend Terry Taylor alerted me to one more account of what Jacqueline Kennedy said to Anastas Mikoyan. Viktor Sukhodrev, Mikoyan’s interpreter, has described the encounter:

“She was standing there in that black dress, I think still with the veil. And as Mr. Mikoyan came abreast of her, she took his hand, outstretched hand, into both of her hands. And this I remember as if it were yesterday. I still have a tingling feeling even today, because I can see it as it happened.

“And she said, ‘Mr. Mikoyan, thank you for coming. And would you tell Mr. Khrushchev for me that my husband and Mr. Khrushchev could have brought peace to this world by working together. Now Mr. Khrushchev will have to do it alone’” (from
JFK: A Presidency Revealed
, a History Channel DVD).

Afterword

The “why” of President Kennedy’s murder can be a profound source of hope to us all.

Now how can that be? The reason for his murder as a source of hope?

In a time when the Cold War has given way to a war on terror, hope comes from walking through the darkness of our history. We can find hope at that point of total denial and darkness where we don’t want to go. Hope comes from confronting the unspeakable truth of the assassination of President Kennedy.

The seeds of that unimaginable hope lie, first of all, in our acknowledgment of the covert origins in our history for what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The doctrine of “plausible deniability” in an old government document was a key enabler of the assassination of President Kennedy. The document was issued in 1948, one year after the CIA was established, 15 years before JFK’s murder. That document, National Security Council directive 10/2, on June 18, 1948, “gave the highest sanction of the [U.S.] government to a broad range of covert operations”
[1]
—propaganda, sabotage, economic warfare, subversion of all kinds, and eventually assassinations—all seen as necessary to “win” the Cold War against the Communists. The government’s condition for those covert activities by U.S. agencies, coordinated by the CIA, was that they be “so planned and executed that … if uncovered the US government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”
[2]