JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (77 page)

“Nothing is impossible.”
[3]

With the help of Pope John, even Kennedy and Khrushchev had begun to believe that nothing was impossible. That was true of both good and evil. They had passed through the mutual threat of an inferno into a sense of interdependence. Through their acceptance of interdependence on the brink of nuclear war, peace had now become possible.

In the American University address, Kennedy appealed to the American people to recognize that, while the United States and the Soviet Union had differences, they were still, in the end, interdependent: “And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
[4]

Because Kennedy and Khrushchev had recognized their interdependence, nothing was impossible. After Kennedy’s peace speech, he and Khrushchev showed their determination to make peace by their remarkably quick signing of the nuclear test ban treaty—to the consternation of the president’s military, CIA, and business peers. The powers that be were heavily invested in the Cold War and had an unyielding theology of war. They believed that an atheistic, Communist enemy had to be defeated. Theirs was the opposite of Pope John’s vision that we all need to be redeemed from the evil of war itself by a process of dialogue, respect, and deepening mutual trust. The anti-communist czars of our national security state thought the only way to end the Cold War was to win it.

However, moved by the missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev had turned from absolute ideologies. They had caught on to the process of peace. At least equally important was the fact that the people of both their countries had caught on. Ordinary citizens who had felt helpless during the Missile Crisis wanted more steps for peace. Khrushchev knew the Russian people were heartened by the American University address and the test ban treaty. Kennedy felt a significant shift toward peace among the American people, too, by the end of the summer of 1963.

When JFK went on a speaking tour of western states in September 1963, he discovered to his surprise that whenever he strayed from his theme of conservation to mention the test ban treaty, the crowds responded with ovations. He found that his beginning steps toward peace with Khrushchev had become popular in areas normally identified as bastions of the Cold War. When he spoke at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, usually considered the heart of conservatism, he was greeted by a five-minute standing ovation.
[5]
Intrigued White House correspondents suggested to Press Secretary Pierre Salinger that the president was suddenly tapping the public’s newfound desire for peace. Salinger agreed. “We’ve found that peace is an issue,” he said.
[6]
Kennedy realized from his trip west that he could make peace much more of an election issue than he had thought.

Moreover, he now had a secret political partner in Khrushchev, who had admitted in their correspondence that a second JFK term as president “would appeal to us.” Not quite one of the six years Khrushchev said he hoped to work with Kennedy “for peaceful coexistence on earth” had passed. They had made good progress. Nothing was impossible in the five years remaining in Khrushchev’s hoped-for time line for their joint peacemaking.

Following the president’s successful grassroots organizing with Norman Cousins for Senate ratification of the test ban treaty, the hope for peace was becoming contagious. Kennedy realized from both Khrushchev’s readiness to negotiate and the public’s support of the test ban treaty that a peaceful resolution of the Cold War was in sight. Nothing was impossible.

To the power brokers of the system that Kennedy ostensibly presided over, his and Khrushchev’s turn toward peace was, however, a profound threat. The president’s growing connection with the electorate on peace only increased the threat, making JFK’s reelection a foregone conclusion. As the Cold War elite knew, Kennedy was already preparing to withdraw from Vietnam. They feared he would soon be able to carry out a U.S. withdrawal from the war with public support, as one part of a wider peacemaking venture with Khrushchev (and perhaps even Castro).

For people of great power in the Cold War, everything seemed to be at stake. From the standpoint of their threatened power and what they had to do, they, too, thought that nothing was impossible.

Lee Harvey Oswald was being systematically set up for his scapegoat role in Dallas, just as Thomas Arthur Vallee had been set up as an alternative patsy in Chicago. Vallee escaped that fate when two whistleblowers, Chicago Police Lieutenant Berkeley Moyland and an FBI informant named “Lee,” stopped the Chicago plot. Oswald was not so fortunate in Dallas. His incrimination by unseen hands continued. Oswald, or someone impersonating him, continued to engage in actions evidently designed to draw attention to himself, laying down a trail of evidence that could later be drawn upon to incriminate Lee Harvey Oswald as the president’s assassin. However, the Warren Commission ended up ignoring or rejecting much of that evidence, because it indicated the work of intelligence agencies at least as much as it did the guilt of Oswald.

On Friday, November 1, at the same time as the Chicago plot was unraveling, a man bought ammunition for his rifle in a conspicuous way at Morgan’s Gun Shop in Fort Worth, Texas. A witness, Dewey Bradford, later told the FBI that the man was “rude and impertinent.” The man made an enduring impression on the gun shop’s other customers, as he seems to have intended. He made a point of telling Bradford that he had been in the Marine Corps, a detail that fit Oswald’s background. Dewey Bradford was in the shop with his wife and brother-in-law. When they later saw Oswald’s picture in
Life
magazine, all three of them agreed that the rude “ex-Marine” who had so vocally bought the ammunition for his rifle was Lee Harvey Oswald.
[7]

But was it in fact Oswald at the gun shop or instead an impersonator who bore a resemblance to him? Why did the “ex-Marine” seem to deliberately make a scene while buying his ammunition? The
Warren Report
ignored the incident, thereby avoiding the question of a plant.

In mid-afternoon the next day, a young man walked into the Downtown Lincoln-Mercury showroom near Dealey Plaza in Dallas. The young man told car salesman Albert Guy Bogard he was interested in buying a red Mercury Comet. He said his name was Lee Oswald. He told Bogard he didn’t have any money then for a down payment, but as the salesman recounted the conversation later to the FBI, “he said he had some money coming in within two or three weeks and would pay cash for the car.”
[8]
“Oswald” accepted Bogard’s invitation to test drive a red Comet. He then gave the salesman a memorable ride, accelerating “at speeds up to 75 and 85 miles per hour” on a Stemmons Freeway route that coincided with the scheduled route of JFK’s motorcade twenty days later.
[9]
Back in the showroom, the increasingly flamboyant young man became bitter when Bogard’s fellow salesman, Eugene M. Wilson, tried to sell him the Comet on the spot but said he needed a credit rating. “Oswald” then said provocatively, “Maybe I’m going to have to go back to Russia to buy a car.”
[10]

The
Warren Report
dismissed the provocative behavior of the young man at Downtown Lincoln Mercury, saying he couldn’t have been Oswald: Their descriptions didn’t match, Oswald couldn’t drive, and Oswald was apparently elsewhere that afternoon.
[11]
But the Warren Commission left unmentioned another possibility—that the “returnee from Russia” who “would soon have the cash” to buy a $3000 automobile was indeed not Lee Harvey Oswald but an imposter, planting fake evidence against the man whose name he was using as his own.

What was going on in the mind of John Kennedy during that time when the plot to kill him intensified? Did he have any intimation that, in Thomas Merton’s phrase, he had been “marked out for assassination”?

Merton was a poet and a spiritual writer, not a political analyst. His premise for an assassination was not so much a political plot as it was a spiritual breakthrough, by President Kennedy, to “depth, humanity, and a certain totality of self forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication.” From his Trappist monastery in Kentucky one year into JFK’s presidency, Merton hoped and prayed in a letter to a friend that “maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by miracle.”
[12]

Nine months after Merton wrote those words, Nikita Khrushchev, who was no more of a saint than John Kennedy, helped Kennedy “break through into that depth” at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis “by miracle,” just as Kennedy at the same critical time helped Khrushchev break through “by miracle.” The form of the miracle, following Pope John’s process, was communication, respect, and agreement between two political enemies at the height of the most dangerous conflict in history. The two men then turned together, at the risk of their lives and power, toward the “deeper kind of dedication” Merton described. It was a breakthrough for humanity that, according to Merton’s inexorable spiritual logic, marked out Kennedy for assassination. With no knowledge of any plots, Thomas Merton had simply understood that if Kennedy were to experience the deep change that was necessary for humanity’s survival, he himself might very well not survive: “such people are before long marked out for assassination.”
[13]

Set in that spiritual context, as this entire book is, the question of Kennedy’s awareness is not whether he knew of any specific plot machinations, which was unlikely. It is rather whether he knew, in the words of another poet, what was blowing in the wind, namely, his own death. When the question is considered in terms of Kennedy’s thinking about his own death, we can see he had been listening for a long time to an answer blowing in the wind.

JFK biographer Ralph Martin observed: “Kennedy talked
a great deal about death, and about the assassination of Lincoln.”
[14]
Kennedy’s conscious model for struggling truthfully through conflict, and being ready to die as a consequence, was Abraham Lincoln. On the day when Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved the Missile Crisis, JFK told his brother, Robert, referring to the assassination of Lincoln, “This is the night I should go to the theater
.”
[15]

Kennedy was preparing himself for the same end Lincoln met during his night at the theater. As we saw from presidential secretary Evelyn Lincoln’s midnight discovery of the slip of paper JFK had written on, he had adopted Lincoln’s prayer: “I know there is a God—and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”
[16]

Kennedy loved that prayer. He cited it at the annual presidential prayer breakfast on March 1, 1962,
[17]
and again in a speech in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 25, 1963.
[18]
More important, he made the prayer his own. Ever since his graceful journey on the currents of Ferguson Passage, Kennedy had known there was a God. In his deepening conflicts with the CIA and the military, he saw a storm coming. If God had a place for him, he believed that he, too, would be ready for the storm.

In his final months, the president spoke with friends about his own
death with a freedom and frequency that shocked them. Some found it abnormal. Senator George Smathers said, “I don’t know why it was, but death became kind of an obsession with Jack.”
[19]
Yet if one understood the pressures for war
and Kennedy’s risks for peace, his awareness of his own death was realistic. He understood systemic power. He knew who his enemies were and what he was up against. He knew what he had to do, from his turn away from the Cold War in his American University address, to negotiating peace with Khrushchev and Castro and withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. Conscious of the price of peace, he took the risk. Death did not surprise him.

For at least a decade, his favorite poem had been “Rendezvous,” a celebration of death. “Rendezvous” was by Alan Seeger, an American poet killed in World War I. The poem was the author’s affirmation of his own anticipated death. Before the United States entered the war, Alan Seeger, a recent Harvard graduate, volunteered for the French Foreign Legion. He was killed on July 4, 1916, while attacking a German position in northern France.
[20]

The refrain of “Rendezvous,” “I have a rendezvous with Death,” articulated John Kennedy’s deep sense of his own mortality. These words of an earlier Harvard graduate, who like Kennedy had volunteered for a war front, became part of JFK’s lifelong meditation on death. Kennedy had experienced a continuous rendezvous with death in anticipation of his actual death: from the deaths of his
PT
boat crew members, from drifting in the dark waters of Ferguson Passage toward the open ocean, from the early deaths of his brother Joe and sister Kathleen, and from the recurring near-death experiences of his almost constant illnesses. The words of his American University address were heartfelt: “we are all mortal.”