JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (54 page)

Leopoldo repeated what he had said at Silvia’s door—that he, Angel, and Oswald were leaving on a trip. They would very much like to see her again on their return to Dallas.
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He hung up. Silvia never heard from him again.

Three days later Silvia wrote to her father in prison about the visit of the three strangers, saying two had called themselves friends of his. He wrote back that he knew none of the men, and that she should not get involved with any of them.
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In the early afternoon of November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Silvia Odio heard of President Kennedy’s assassination on the radio on her way back to work from lunch. Although the radio made no mention yet of Oswald, Silvia thought immediately of the three men’s visit to her apartment and what Leopoldo said on the phone about Leon’s remarks on killing Kennedy. She felt a deep sense of fear. She began saying to herself, “Leon did it! Leon did it!”
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While everyone was being sent home from Silvia’s workplace, she became more terrified. As she was walking to her car, she fainted. She woke up in the hospital.

When Silvia’s sister, Annie, first saw Oswald on television that afternoon, she thought, “My God, I know this guy from somewhere!” She kept asking herself where she’d seen him. Her sister Serita phoned: Silvia had fainted at work and was in the hospital. Annie went immediately to the hospital.

When Annie visited Silvia, she told her she knew she’d seen the guy on the TV who’d shot President Kennedy, but she didn’t know where. Silvia began to cry. She asked Annie if she remembered the three men’s visit to the apartment. Then Annie realized she’d not only seen Oswald but had spoken with him at the door. Silvia told her of Leopoldo’s follow-up phone call about Oswald’s threats against the president. Annie, too, became deeply frightened. Silvia by now had also seen television pictures of the presumed assassin. She was certain Lee Harvey Oswald was identical to the “Leon Oswald” who had stood at her door under the light between the two Cubans.

Because of Silvia’s and Annie’s fears for themselves and their scattered family, the two sisters vowed to each other not to tell the authorities what they knew.
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However, a friend who heard their story told the FBI. Silvia was interviewed by the FBI in December 1963, but was not called to testify before the Warren Commission until the end of July 1964. Her evidence of a conspiracy setting up Oswald was not something the Warren Commission wanted to hear. As the Commission’s General Counsel, J. Lee Rankin, said to the author of a memorandum supporting Odio’s story, “At this stage, we are supposed to be closing doors, not opening them.”
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The
Warren Report
dismissed Silvia Odio’s testimony by arguing Oswald had already left for Mexico City before the three men’s visit to her door.
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But whether it was Oswald or a look-alike at the door, Leopoldo’s phone call made the purpose of the visit obvious. Oswald was being set up. The incident was proof of a conspiracy designed to make Oswald the patsy.
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An assassination scenario that included the Odio incident was still more comprehensive. In the case of the Odio family and Manolo Ray, the targets of guilt by association with Oswald included Kennedy allies in the Cuban exile community. They were also to be silenced by fear. That worked to some degree on Silvia Odio. But when it came to facing a question of conscience forced upon her, Silvia Odio was a witness to the truth.

In the fall of 1963, while Lee Harvey Oswald was being redirected to Dallas, John F. Kennedy was trying to begin his withdrawal from Vietnam. He was being obstructed by military officials—and by his own hasty support of a coup d’etat against the South Vietnamese government.

In the early summer, Kennedy had kept his military and CIA advisers out of his discussions on Vietnam. This significant fact was mentioned years later by his Assistant Secretary of Defense William P. Bundy in an unpublished manuscript. According to Bundy, during the early part of Kennedy’s final summer in office, he consulted on Vietnam with just a few advisers in the State Department and White House, thereby leaving out representatives of the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA.
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But this is hardly surprising. The dysfunctional relationship between Kennedy and his Cold War hierarchy had already reached the point where he kept his thinking on controversial subjects to himself—and a tight circle of friends with whom he shared that thinking sporadically. By leaving the Pentagon and the CIA out of the Vietnam loop, he wasn’t fooling them. They knew he planned to withdraw from Vietnam. They also knew they’d been left out of other key decisions. At precisely the same time, the early summer of 1963, besides sidestepping the Pentagon and the CIA on Vietnam, the president had also left them out of consultations for his American University address and the test ban treaty. The reason was simple. Kennedy knew the military-intelligence elite was opposed to all his efforts to end the Cold War. They wanted to win it.

At the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were dragging their heels on the Vietnam withdrawal plan. The chiefs used the Buddhist crisis as a rationale for bogging down McNamara’s May order that a specific plan be prepared for the withdrawal of one thousand military personnel by the end of 1963. On August 20, the chiefs wrote to McNamara that “until the political and religious tensions now confronting the Government of Vietnam have eased,” “no US units should be withdrawn from the Republic of Vietnam.”
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The chiefs argued, for the same reason, that “the final decision to implement the withdrawal plan should be withheld until late October”—one month before Kennedy would be assassinated. But Kennedy and McNamara sped up the process. The decision for withdrawal would in fact be made in early October.

Even the select few in the State Department whom Kennedy was consulting on Vietnam did not serve him well. In late August, Averell Harriman, who had returned triumphantly from the test ban negotiations in Moscow, and Roger Hilsman, now in charge of the Vietnam desk, precipitated a decision for U.S. support of a coup against Diem. On August 24, during a weekend when Kennedy was in Hyannis Port, Hilsman, working with Harriman and Kennedy’s aide Michael Forrestal, drafted an urgent telegram to newly appointed Saigon ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. The telegram authorized U.S. support of a looming coup by rebel South Vietnamese generals, if Diem refused to remove from power his brother Nhu and sister-in-law Madame Nhu.

Ngo Dinh Nhu seemed to be taking over the Saigon government. His ever more violent repression of the Buddhists, together with Madame Nhu’s statements applauding Buddhist immolations, had outraged Vietnamese and American public opinion. In the face of the generals’ imminent coup, the State Department telegram read in a crucially important sentence: “We wish give Diem reasonable opportunity to remove Nhus, but if he remains obdurate, then we are prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem.”
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When Kennedy was urged by Forrestal in Washington to endorse the telegram because all his advisers had done so (which proved not to be the case), the president said to go ahead and send it. Then the generals backed down from the coup. However, in a hasty policy decision that Kennedy soon regretted but never reversed, he had put the government on record as being in conditional support of a coup—after giving “Diem reasonable opportunity to remove Nhus.”

At the Saigon Embassy, Henry Cabot Lodge interpreted this condition in terms of a diplomatic strategy he had worked out with someone other than the president. After his appointment by Kennedy and before his move to Vietnam, Lodge had consulted his old friend and employer Henry Luce at
Time
on how he should deal with Diem.

By his decision to look to Luce for guidance in Saigon, Lodge was already indicating where his real allegiance lay. It was not to the president who had just given him his appointment as ambassador. Lodge was meeting in the enemy’s camp. Henry Luce was, first of all, a longtime CIA ally. As Graham Greene pointed out, it was Luce’s
Life
magazine that worked with the CIA to scapegoat “Viet Minh Communists” for the CIA’s terrorist bombings of Saigon in 1952. Besides being CIA-friendly, Henry Luce was an enemy to Kennedy. In the wake of the April 1962 steel crisis, Luce’s
Fortune
magazine had implicitly warned the president, on behalf of America’s business elite, to beware “the ides of April” for his dominant role in settling the crisis.
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The
Fortune
editorial was a corporate declaration of war against the Kennedy administration and a veiled personal threat to the president. Henry Luce and his media empire epitomized the corporate, military, and intelligence forces that wanted to stop Kennedy. For Henry Cabot Lodge to consult Henry Luce on how Lodge should act as Kennedy’s Vietnam ambassador was asking for trouble for the president. Luce was happy to oblige.

He recommended that Lodge read the
Time
articles on Vietnam by staff writer Charles Mohr. Lodge did. He was especially impressed by Mohr’s argument that Lodge’s predecessor, Ambassador Frederick Nolting, had been “too weak” in confronting Diem with demands for change. Mohr’s graphic analogy was that the United States and Diem were like “two teenagers playing head-on collision chicken in souped-up hot rods . . . The trouble is, the U.S. chickens out before Diem does.”
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Lodge became inspired by the thought of playing his own game of “chicken” with Diem. He knew Diem could not hope to win such a game with Washington. The United States had a crushing vehicle compared to its client ruler. All Lodge had to do was refuse to deal with Diem, threaten implicitly to run him over while U.S. political and economic pressures mounted, and not “chicken out.” If Diem should be so proud as to refuse to “chicken out” himself, he would be run over by the United States with Lodge’s foot on the throttle. When he moved into the ambassador’s residence in Saigon, Lodge used an abstract of Mohr’s “chicken” article as background for his own primer: “Talking Points for Conversation Between Ambassador Lodge and President Diem.”
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Following the August 24 telegram, Lodge showed how unwilling he was to give Diem any “reasonable opportunity to remove Nhus.” In response to those specific instructions, he cabled back the State Department:

“Believe that chances of Diem meeting our demands are virtually nil. At same time, by making them we give Nhu chance to forestall or block action by military. Risk, we believe, is not worth taking, with Nhu in control combat forces Saigon. Therefore, propose we go straight to Generals with our demands, without informing Diem.”
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The State Department agreed at once to Lodge’s downward revision of an already disastrous directive. In Hyannis Port, President Kennedy was informed after the fact by Michael Forrestal that Acting Secretary of State James Ball, Averell Harriman, and Roger Hilsman had approved Lodge’s “modification”
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that now gave Diem no opportunity at all to forestall a coup.

When Kennedy returned to Washington, he was furious at discovering how his decision making had been usurped and manipulated over the weekend. “This shit has got to stop!” he said.
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Michael Forrestal offered to resign for his role in the short-circuited process. Kennedy snapped, “You’re not worth firing. You owe me something, so you stick around.”
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Before the generals backed away from the coup, Lodge met with Diem on August 26. Diem said pointedly to the new American ambassador, “I hope there will be an end to reports of diverse activities interfering in Vietnamese affairs by United States agencies.”

Lodge replied evasively, “I’ve just arrived. Naturally I can’t know everything that’s going on. But I’ll look into it.”
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In fact, from his arrival in Saigon, Lodge had been actively promoting a coup. Through longtime CIA operative in Vietnam Colonel Lucien Conein, Lodge maintained regular contact with the generals. Conein had known most of the coup generals for years, ever since he conducted the CIA’s sabotage operations against the Viet Minh in the mid-fifties under the direction of Edward Lansdale.
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Lodge was continually frustrated over the next two months that he could not, even through Conein’s urging, get the generals to stage a coup sooner. Lodge saw no possibility that Diem could act any differently than he had. For Lodge, the sooner the coup, the better.

Kennedy, on the other hand, continued to hope Diem might still somehow back away from his repressive policies and remove the Nhus, who seemed to be the force behind them. Through Secretary of State Rusk, the president repeatedly urged Lodge to explore such alternatives with Diem.

On August 28, Rusk wired Lodge: “We have concurred until now in your belief that nothing should be said to Diem, but changing circumstances, including his probable knowledge that something is afoot, lead us to ask again if you see value in one last man-to-man effort to persuade him to govern himself and decisively to eliminate political influence of Nhus.”
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