JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (76 page)

[
214
]. Madeleine G. Kalb,
The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa—from Eisenhower to Kennedy
(New York: Macmillan, 1982), p. 196.

[
215
]. Schlesinger,
Thousand Days
, pp. 553-54.

[
216
]. Ibid., p. 554.

[
217
]. Ibid.

[
218
]. Ibid.

[
219
]. Richard D. Mahoney,
JFK: Ordeal in Africa
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 69.

[
220
]. Richard D. Mahoney interview of Paul Sakwa, May 2, 1978, Washington, D.C. Summarized by Mahoney,
JFK: Ordeal in Africa,
p. 266, endnote 58.

[
221
]. Mahoney,
JFK: Ordeal in Africa,
p. 59.

[
222
]. Ibid.

[
223
]. “Kennedy Cancels Trip Here: Viet Crisis Keeps Him in Capital,”
Chicago Daily News
(November 2, 1963), p. 1.

[
224
]. Record of Arrest for Thomas Arthur Vallee, Chicago Police Department: “DATE & TIME 2 Nov 63 0910.”

[
225
]. House Select Committee on Assassinations interview with Abraham Bolden, January 19, 1978. JFK Record Number 180-10070-10273.

[
226
]. Author’s interview with Bolden, July 13, 2003.

[
227
]. Author’s interview with Abraham Bolden, June 16, 2001.

[
228
]. Ibid.

[
229
]. Ibid.

[
230
]. Ibid.

[
231
]. Author’s interview with Bolden, July 13, 2003.

[
232
]. Ibid.

[
233
]. Author’s conversation with Abraham Bolden, August 11, 2007.

[
234
]. Author’s interview with Bolden, July 13, 2003.

[
235
]. Testimony of Abraham Bolden.
United States of America vs. Abraham W. Bolden.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, No. 14907; pages 44-45, 59.

[
236
]. Ibid., p. 61.

[
237
]. Bernard Fensterwald, “The Case of Secret Service Agent Abraham W. Bolden—Who Wanted to Tell the Warren Commission about a Chicago Plot to Kill President Kennedy and Was Jailed Six Years for Trying,”
Computers and Automation
(June 1971), p. 42.

[
238
]. Ibid., p. 43.

[
239
]. Testimony by Joseph Spagnoli on January 20, 1965. Appendix in Bolden Appeal, pp. 4-9. Abraham Bolden said Joseph Spagnoli was not the only witness who committed perjury in Bolden’s trial. When Bolden had been released from prison, one day he ran into a former Secret Service agent whom he once trusted. Bolden asked the man why he had told such lies about him in his sworn testimony. The fellow agent said he was under enormous pressure to do so. Bolden said that was no excuse. The ex-agent said, “They would have done the same thing to me that they did to you.” Author’s interviews with Bolden, June 16, 2001, and July 13, 2003.

[
240
]. Author’s interview with Abraham Bolden, July 22, 1999.

[
241
]. Author’s interview with Abraham Bolden, October 1, 2004.

[
242
]. Author’s interview with Abraham Bolden, July 2, 1998.

[
243
]. Author’s interviews with Bolden, July 2, 1998, and October 1, 2004.

[
244
]. Fensterwald, “Case of Bolden,” p. 43. Sherman Skolnick Suit, p. 4 (see n. 137 above).

[
245
]. Fensterwald, “Case of Bolden,” p. 43.

[
246
]. “Cops Seize Gun-Toting Kennedy Foe,”
Chicago American
(December 3, 1963).

[
247
]. “Quiz North Sider on Weapons Count,”
Chicago Daily News
(December 3, 1963). After Thomas Arthur Vallee escaped the fate of Lee Harvey Oswald in November 1963, he left his Chicago job at IPP Litho-Plate in December and moved to New York City. During the remaining twenty-four years of his life, he drifted from one printer’s job to another in a series of moves from Long Island to Indianapolis to Columbus, Ohio, to Houston. In each locale the U.S. Secret Service kept Vallee aware that he was being watched through their periodic phone calls, visits, and inquiries to his employers. When I requested Vallee’s available files from the National Archives, they included many such Secret Service reports on him spanning the rest of his life. He was always living alone in an apartment or trailer, pursuing his profession as a printer, having no apparent contact with any political groups or government agencies other than his Secret Service checkups. His relatives whom I interviewed seldom saw him. Mary Vallee-Portillo believed her brother chose such isolation because he did not want his problems, including his strange link to the Kennedy assassination, to burden members of his family. They almost invariably described him as “a lost soul.” Thomas Arthur Vallee died of cancer in Maywood, Illinois, on March 26, 1988. He was fifty-four years old.

[
248
]. Douglas P. Horne, the Assassination Records Review Board’s Chief Analyst for Military Records, has made public the story of the Secret Service’s shredding of what the Review Board suspected were incriminating documents: “In 1995, the Review Board Staff became aware that the U.S. Secret Service had destroyed protective survey reports related to John F. Kennedy’s Presidency, and that they had done so well after the passage of the JFK Records Act, and well after having been briefed by the National Archives (NARA) on the Act’s requirements to preserve all Assassination Records from destruction until the ARRB had made a determination that any such proposed destruction was acceptable.” Douglas P. Horne,
Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK,
V (Amazon.com, 2009; also available from Mary Ferrell Foundation website), p. 1451.

The protective survey reports destroyed by the Secret Service covered all of JFK’s trips from September 24 through November 8, 1963, including three folders on his cancelled November 2, 1963, trip to Chicago (ibid., pp. 1453-54). Faced by a legal mandate to produce specified evidence in the assassination of the president, the Secret Service had instead shredded two boxes of critical documents.

On August 7, 1995, the ARRB’s Executive Director David G. Marwell sent a letter to Secret Service officials spelling out the criminal nature of their action: “The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act (JFK Act) forbids the destruction of any documents ‘created
or made available for use by, obtained by, or [that] otherwise came into the possession of … the Select Committee on Assassinations … of the House of Representatives.’ It is our understanding that the records in Accession 87-75-0004 that the Secret Service destroyed were examined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations and thus were ‘assassination records’ under the JFK Act and they apparently were destroyed in violation of law.

“We see the destruction of these assassination records as particularly ominous in light of the fact that the Secret Service revised its destruction schedule
after
passage of the JFK Act and that it targeted for destruction records that, at the time the law was passed, were slated to be held ‘permanently’” [emphasis in original]. Cited by Horne, ibid., p. 1456.

Douglas Horne reported that ARRB officials were then “considering holding public hearings in which the Secret Service officials responsible for said destruction would be called to account and castigated, in an open forum, with the media present” (ibid., p. 1451).

Secret Service officials quickly arranged a truce with the ARRB, promising they would destroy no more records “related to Presidential protection for the years 1958-1969” without ARRB approval and would grant “full access to all Secret Service records upon demand” (ibid., p. 1457). However, the Chicago plot documents and many others were no longer accessible to anyone. They had already been criminally destroyed.

ARRB staff member Horne commented: “The Review Board itself consciously soft-pedaled the dispute in its Final Report, devoting only one paragraph (and virtually no details whatsoever) to the incident” (ibid., p. 1451).

CHAPTER SIX

Washington and Dallas

A month and a half after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nikita Khrushchev sent John Kennedy a private letter articulating a vision of peace they could realize together.

“We believe that you will be able to receive a mandate at the next election,” Khrushchev wrote with satisfaction to the man who had been his enemy in the most dangerous confrontation in history. The Soviet leader told Kennedy hopefully, “You will be the U.S. President for six years, which would appeal to us. At our times, six years in world politics is a long period of time.” Khrushchev believed that “during that period we could create good conditions for peaceful coexistence on earth and this would be highly appreciated by the peoples of our countries as well as by all other peoples.”
[1]

Khrushchev’s son Sergei said the missile crisis had forced his father to see everything in a different light. The same was true of Kennedy. These two superpower leaders had almost incinerated millions, yet they had also turned in that spiritual darkness from fear to trust. Their year-long secret correspondence had laid the foundation. Then JFK’s appeal for help in the crisis, Nikita’s quick response, and their resulting agreement had forced them to trust each other. Sergei said, “Since he trusted the U.S. president, Father was ready for a long period of cooperation with John Kennedy.”
[2]

It was during that time of hope that a conversation took place at the Vatican between Pope John XXIII and Norman Cousins, two men who were helping to mediate the Kennedy–Khrushchev dialogue that promised so much. Pope John was dying of cancer. When he and Cousins talked in the pope’s study in the spring of 1963, Pope John had just written his encyclical “Peace on Earth,” whose theme of deepening trust across ideologies was then being incarnated in the Kennedy–Khrushchev relationship. As Cousins recalled their conversation ten years later, the dying pope kept repeating a single phrase that seemed to sum up his hopeful message of peace on earth: