JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (16 page)

“The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectance which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”
[172]

In his American University address, after Kennedy identified “peace and freedom here at home” as a critical dimension of world peace, he went on to identify peace itself as a fundamental human right: “And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature provided it—the right of future generations to a healthy existence?”

Kennedy concluded his “peace speech” with a promise whose beginning fulfillment in the next five months would confirm his own death sentence: “Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”

John Kennedy’s greatest statement of his turn toward peace was his American University address. In an ironic turn of events, the Soviet Union became its principal venue. JFK’s identification with the Russian people’s suffering penetrated their government’s defenses far more effectively than any missile could have. Sorensen described the speech’s impact on the other side of the Cold War:

“The full text of the speech was published in the Soviet press. Still more striking was the fact that it was heard as well as read throughout the U.S.S.R. After fifteen years of almost uninterrupted jamming of Western broadcasts, by means of a network of over three thousand transmitters and at an annual cost of several hundred million dollars, the Soviets jammed only one paragraph of the speech when relayed by the Voice of America in Russian (that dealing with their ‘baseless’ claims of U.S. aims)—then did not jam any of it upon rebroadcast—and then suddenly stopped jamming all Western broadcasts, including even Russian-language newscasts on foreign affairs. Equally suddenly they agreed in Vienna to the principle of inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency to make certain that Agency’s reactors were used for peaceful purposes. And equally suddenly the outlook for some kind of test-ban agreement turned from hopeless to hopeful.”
[173]

Nikita Khrushchev was deeply moved. He told test-ban negotiator Averell Harriman that Kennedy had given “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.”
[174]
Khrushchev responded by proposing to Kennedy that they now consider a limited test ban encompassing the atmosphere, outer space, and water, so that the disputed question of inspections would no longer arise. He also suggested a nonaggression pact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact to create a “fresh international climate.”
[175]

Kennedy’s speech was received less favorably in his own country. The
New York Times
reported his government’s skepticism: “Generally there was not much optimism in official Washington that the President’s conciliation address at American University would produce agreement on a test ban treaty or anything else.”
[176]
In contrast to the Soviet media, which were electrified by the speech, the U.S. media ignored or downplayed it. For the first time Americans had less opportunity to read and hear their president’s words than did the Russian people. A turnabout was occurring in the world on different levels. Whereas nuclear disarmament had suddenly become feasible, Kennedy’s position in his own government had become precarious. Kennedy was turning faster than was safe for a Cold War leader.

After the American University address, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev began to act like competitors in peace. They were both turning. However, Kennedy’s rejection of Cold War politics was considered treasonous by forces in his own government. In that context, which Kennedy knew well, the American University address was a profile in courage with lethal consequences. President Kennedy’s June 10, 1963, call for an end to the Cold War, five and one-half months before his assassination, anticipates Dr. King’s courage in his April 4, 1967, Riverside Church address calling for an end to the Vietnam War, exactly one year before his assassination. Each of those transforming speeches was a prophetic statement provoking the reward a prophet traditionally receives. John Kennedy’s American University address was to his death in Dallas as Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church address was to his death in Memphis.

On June 13, 1962, Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the United States after his defection to the Soviet Union. He was not met by arrest and prosecution. Nor was he confronted in any way by the government he had betrayed. Instead Oswald was welcomed by order of the U.S. government, as he and his Russian wife Marina disembarked with their infant daughter June from the ocean liner
Maasdam
in Hoboken, New Jersey. The
Warren Report
tells us that, on the recommendation of the State Department, the Oswalds were greeted at the dock by Spas T. Raikin, a representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society.
[177]
The
Warren Report
does not mention, however, that Raikin was at the same time secretary-general of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Nations, an anti-communist organization with extensive intelligence connections
[178]
—like the American government, an unlikely source of support for a traitor. The
Warren Report
does say that, with Spas T. Raikin’s help, the Oswald family passed smoothly through immigration and customs.

In the summer of 1962 the Oswalds settled in Fort Worth, Texas. They were welcomed by a local White Russian community characterized by its pronounced anti-communist view of the world. Lee was befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, the son of a czarist official. “The Baron,” as he liked to be called, traveled around the world as a geologist, consulting for Texas oil companies and doubling as an intelligence asset. In 1957 the CIA’s Richard Helms wrote a memo saying that de Mohrenschildt, after making a trip as a consultant in Yugoslavia, provided the CIA with “foreign intelligence which was promptly disseminated to other federal agencies in 10 separate reports.”
[179]
De Mohrenschildt would admit in a 1977 interview that he had been given a go-ahead to meet Oswald by J. Walton Moore, the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief.
[180]

In that March 29, 1977, interview, the last he would ever give, George de Mohrenschildt told author Edward Jay Epstein he had “on occasion done favors” since the early 1950s for government officials connected with the CIA. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. The CIA contacts then helped de Mohrenschildt arrange profitable business connections overseas.

De Mohrenschildt said that in late 1961 he had met in Dallas with the CIA’s J. Walton Moore, who began to tell him about “an ex-American Marine who had worked in an electronics factory in Minsk for the past year and in whom there was ‘interest.’”
[181]
The Baron had grown up in Minsk, as Moore seemed to know before being told. The ex-Marine, Moore said, would be returning to the Dallas area. De Mohrenschildt felt he was being primed.

In the summer of 1962, de Mohrenschildt said, he was handed Lee Harvey Oswald’s address in Fort Worth by “one of Moore’s associates,” who suggested that de Mohrenschildt meet Oswald. De Mohrenschildt then phoned Moore to confirm such a mission and set up another mutually beneficial relationship. He told Moore he would appreciate help from the U.S. embassy in Haiti in arranging approval by Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier for an oil exploration deal. Moore then gave de Mohrenschildt the go-ahead to befriend the Oswalds, which de Mohrenschildt promptly did—with the firm understanding that he was carrying out the CIA’s wishes. “I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it,” de Mohrenschildt said in his final interview. “Too much was at stake.”
[182]

On October 7, 1962, nine days before the Cuban Missile Crisis began, de Mohrenschildt urged his new friend Lee Harvey Oswald to move to Dallas, where more of the Russian immigrants lived. Oswald took him so seriously that the next day he quit his job at a Fort Worth welding company and made the move.
[183]
De Mohrenschildt then became Oswald’s mentor in Dallas. The Baron’s wife and daughter said it was he who organized Oswald’s securing a new job, four days after his move, with a Dallas graphic arts company, Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall.
[184]
The official record is that Louise Latham of the Texas Employment Commission sent Oswald to the firm. Author Henry Hurt interviewed Ms. Latham, who denied that de Mohrenschildt got the job for Oswald.
[185]

Whoever was responsible for Oswald’s immediate hiring, it was a remarkable achievement. Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, described by the Warren Commission simply as “a commercial advertising photography firm,”
[186]
had contracts with the U.S. Army Map Service. Its classified work connected with Oswald’s history as an apparent traitor. From interviews with Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall employees, Hurt concluded, “Part of the work appears to have been related to the top secret U-2 missions, some of which were then making flights over Cuba.”
[187]
Four days before President Kennedy was shown U-2 photos that confirmed Soviet missiles in Cuba, Lee Harvey Oswald reported to work at a defense contractor that was apparently involved in logistics support for the U-2 mission. According to Oswald’s co-workers, some of them were setting type for Cuban place names to go on maps
[188]
—probably for the same spy planes whose radar secrets the ex-Marine had already offered to the Soviet Union. Oswald was once again, through the intervention of undercover angels, defying the normal laws of government security barriers.

As it turned out, in mid-March 1963 George de Mohrenschildt did receive a Haitian government contract for $285,000.
[189]
In April he left Dallas, and in May he met in Washington, D.C., with CIA and U.S. Army intelligence contacts to further his Haitian connections.
[190]
De Mohrenschildt then departed for Haiti. He never saw Oswald again.

None of George de Mohrenschildt’s extensive U.S. intelligence connections are mentioned in the
Warren Report
, which describes him vaguely as “a highly individualistic person of varied interests” who befriended Oswald.
[191]
Relying on U.S. intelligence for its questions and answers, the
Report
concludes concerning George and his wife, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt: “Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witness contacted by the Commission has provided any information linking the de Mohrenschildts to subversive or extremist organizations.”
[192]

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in his investigation of the Kennedy assassination asked a different kind of question about George de Mohrenschildt. Garrison identified de Mohrenschildt as one of Oswald’s CIA “baby-sitters,” “assigned to protect or otherwise see to the general welfare of a particular individual.”
[193]
Garrison concluded from his conversations with George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt that the Baron was in some sense an unwitting baby-sitter, without foreknowledge of what was in store for the “baby” in his custody. Both de Mohrenschildts, Garrison said, were vigorous in their insistence to him that Oswald had been the assassination scapegoat.
[194]

On March 29, 1977, three hours after his revelation of the CIA’s sanctioning his contact with Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt was found shot to death in the house where he was staying in Manalapan, Florida. His death also occurred on the day Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, left his card with de Mohrenschildt’s daughter and told her he would be calling her father that evening for an appointment to question him. Soon after de Mohrenschildt took the card and put it in his pocket, he went upstairs, then apparently put the barrel of a .20-gauge shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
[195]

Though he had been Oswald’s CIA-approved shepherd in Dallas, George de Mohrenschildt had no “need to know,” and thus probably no understanding in advance of the scapegoat role that lay ahead for his young friend. In the years after John Kennedy and Lee Oswald were gunned down, the de Mohrenschildts seemed to grow in remorse for the evil in which they had become enmeshed. Jim Garrison said, “I was particularly affected by the depth of their unhappiness at what had been done not only to John Kennedy but to Lee Oswald as well.”
[196]
George de Mohrenschildt was another casualty of Dallas. Like Oswald, he, too, was a pawn in the game.