JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (78 page)

He recited “Rendezvous” to Jacqueline in 1953 their first night home in Hyannis after their honeymoon.
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She memorized the poem, and recited it back to him over the years. In the fall of 1963, Jackie taught the words of the poem to their five-year-old daughter, Caroline. It was Caroline who then gave “Rendezvous” its most haunting rendition.

On the morning of October 5, 1963, President Kennedy was meeting with his National Security Council in the White House Rose Garden. Caroline suddenly appeared at her father’s side. She said she wanted to tell him something. He tried to divert her attention while the meeting continued. Caroline persisted. The president smiled and turned his full attention to his daughter. He told her to go ahead. While the members of the National Security Council sat and watched, Caroline looked into her father’s eyes and said:

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When Spring comes back with rustling shade

And apple-blossoms fill the air—

I have a rendezvous with Death

When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath—

It may be I shall pass him still.

I have a rendezvous with Death

On some scarred slope of battered hill,

When Spring comes round again this year

And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows ’twere better to be deep

Pillowed in silk and scented down,

Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.
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After Caroline said the poem’s final word, “rendezvous,” Kennedy’s national security advisers sat in stunned silence. One of them, describing the scene three decades later, said the bond between father and daughter was such that “it was as if there was ‘an inner music’ he was trying to teach her.”
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John Kennedy had been listening to the music of death for years. He had no fear of it, indeed welcomed hearing that music so long as he could remain faithful to it. From repetition and reflection, “I have a rendezvous with Death,” with its anticipated parallel to the end of his own journey, may have become his personal refrain, alongside Lincoln’s prayer. Now hearing his own acceptance of death from the lips of his daughter, while surrounded by a National Security Council that opposed his breakthrough to peace, he may have once again deepened his pledge not to fail that rendezvous.

As he had written to himself during a midnight flight two years earlier, Kennedy knew there was a God and saw a storm coming. The storm he feared was nuclear war. If God had a place for him—a rendezvous with death—that might help avert that storm on humanity, he believed that he was ready.

The framing of Lee Harvey Oswald in advance of the assassination continued. From September through November, there were repeated sightings (reported after November 22) of a man who looked like Oswald taking target practice in Dallas with his rifle.

Once again, Oswald, or an imposter, was acting in such a way as to draw attention to himself. Warren Commission witness Malcolm H. Price, Jr., remembered a man who resembled Oswald asking Price’s help in adjusting the scope on his rifle at the Sports Drome Rifle Range in Dallas. Price told the Warren Commission that “it was just about dusky dark” one night in late September when he turned on his car headlights on a target at the rifle range, so he could adjust the man’s scope. After Price zeroed in the rifle, “Oswald” used it to fire three shots into a bull’s eye on the target illuminated by the car’s headlights.
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Price said he saw the same man practicing with his rifle in mid-October at the Sports Drome, and again in November not long before the assassination.
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Witness Garland G. Slack remembered a man who looked like Oswald firing his rifle at the Sports Drome on November 10 and 17. Slack recalled him vividly because of the way the man provoked him. On November 17, after Slack put up his own target for shooting, the man turned his rifle and repeatedly fired into Slack’s target, “burning up the ammunition.” When Slack objected strenuously, the man gave him, Slack said, “a look that I never would forget.”
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Oswald, or a double, was again making himself easy to remember in situations that in retrospect would suggest he was training for a killing.
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On the face of it, this evidence of the presumed assassin’s rifle practice strengthened the Warren Commission’s case against him. However, the testimony pointing to an Oswald in training with his rifle carried its own disturbing question as to how Oswald managed to be in two places at the same time. As we have seen, the CIA had already placed Oswald in Mexico City at the end of September, in another choreographed scenario at least equally damaging to his profile. In the end, the “rifle practice Oswald” had to be subtracted from the official biography of Lee Harvey Oswald that the government composed for the
Warren Report
.

For, according to the
Warren Report
, on September 28, 1963, when Malcolm Price turned his headlights on the Sports Drome target and zeroed in the rifle of the man who looked like Oswald, “Oswald is known to have been in Mexico City.” The
Report
went on to observe that “since a comparison of the events testified to by Price and Slack strongly suggests that they were describing the same man, there is reason to believe that Slack was also describing a man other than Oswald.”
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The
Warren Report
had painted itself into a corner where it was faced by one too many Oswalds doing too many Oswald-like things to arouse people’s suspicions, at exactly the same time. If Oswald was “known” to be in Mexico City suspiciously visiting the Russian and Cuban Embassies,
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then who was the Oswald look-alike suspiciously getting his telescopic sight adjusted at the same time on a Dallas rifle range?

The
Warren Report
sought an escape route from its double-Oswald corner. To try to clarify things, it argued that when Garland Slack saw the same man resembling Oswald whom Malcolm Price had seen, this time firing his rifle at the Sports Drome on November 10, “there is persuasive evidence that on November 10, Oswald was at the Paine’s home in Irving and did not leave to go to the rifle range.”
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So then it could not have really been Oswald at the Sports Drome. However, if Lee Harvey Oswald was actually with his wife and daughters at the Paine residence, then who was the Oswald look-alike who at the same time, twelve days before Kennedy’s assassination, was again taking target practice at the Dallas rifle range?

It was one week later that the same Oswald look-alike made himself notorious at the Sports Drome by deliberately and repeatedly firing at another man’s target, then staring the other man down when he objected. Who was this provocateur who looked like Lee Harvey Oswald? Why was he making himself so obvious, acting obnoxiously and “burning up the ammunition” at a Dallas rifle range just five days before the president’s motorcade was due to pass beneath the workplace of the real Lee Harvey Oswald?

More important than the masquerader’s own identity was the question of who was behind his provocative actions. Who were the Oswald look-alike’s handlers? The Warren Commission never recognized that question. It simply dismissed the case of the man like Oswald who ostentatiously took rifle practice at a public range in Dallas for the two months leading up to the assassination. Although the “rifle practice Oswald” and the “Mexico City Oswald” taken in themselves each added to the government’s circumstantial case against Lee Harvey Oswald, they overlapped in time, creating too many Oswalds. There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the
Warren Report
could use or even explain.
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As Lee Harvey Oswald was being set up as an individual scapegoat, so too was the Soviet Union, together with its less powerful ally, Cuba, being portrayed as the evil empire behind the president’s murder. It was in fact all projection by the actual plotters, but a consciously contrived projection, artfully done for the American public. The brilliantly conceived Kennedy assassination scenario being played out, scene by deadly scene, was based on our Manichean Cold War theology. After a decade and a half of propaganda, the American public had absorbed a systematic demonizing of Communism. Atheistic Communist enemies armed with nuclear weapons were thought to constitute an absolute evil over against God and the democratic West. Against the backdrop of this dualistic theology, a beloved president seeking a just peace with the enemy could be murdered with impunity by the covert-action agencies of his national security state. U.S. intelligence agencies, coordinated by the CIA, carried out the president’s murder through a propaganda scenario that projected the scheme’s inherent evil onto our Cold War enemies. The Soviet Union, whose leader had become Kennedy’s secret partner in peacemaking, was intended to be the biggest scapegoat of all.

On November 18, 1963, the Soviet Embassy in Washington received a crudely typed, badly spelled letter dated nine days earlier and signed by “Lee H. Oswald” of Dallas. The timing of the letter’s arrival was no accident. Its contents made it a Cold War propaganda bomb whose trigger would be President Kennedy’s assassination. Read in the context of Dallas four days later, the text of the letter seemed to implicate the Soviet Union in conspiring with Oswald to murder the U.S. president. Three paragraphs in particular laid the blame for the assassination at the door of the Russians.

The letter’s first paragraph read:

“This is to inform you of recent events sincem [
sic
] my meetings with comrade Kostin in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City, Mexico.”
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“Comrade Kostin” was, as the
Warren Report
noted, “undoubtedly a reference to Kostikov”
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—Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov, a KGB officer working under the cover of being a consul at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. As we have seen, Kostikov was no ordinary KGB agent. According to Clarence M. Kelley, FBI director from 1973 to 1978, Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov was “the officer-in-charge for Western Hemisphere terrorist activities—including and especially assassination.”
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He was, according to Kelley, “the most dangerous KGB terrorist assigned to this hemisphere!”
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Thus, on the Monday before the Friday when Kennedy would be assassinated, a letter from “Lee H. Oswald” of Dallas, delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, began by mentioning Oswald’s recent meetings at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City with the U.S.S.R.’s director of assassinations in the Western Hemisphere. This was the same KGB undercover specialist in assassinations, Valery Kostikov, who had already been set up as Oswald’s Russian handler in fraudulent “Oswald” phone calls and transcripts.
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Now the same Oswald-damning connection was being asserted in a (phony) letter to the most important Soviet embassy in the world. This propaganda bomb was being sent into the embassy four days before Kennedy’s motorcade would pass beneath Oswald’s workplace (while secret snipers would wait elsewhere in Dealey Plaza, just as they had been primed to wait secretly for Kennedy in Chicago near Thomas Arthur Vallee’s workplace). The fuse of the propaganda bomb in the Soviet Embassy in Washington stretched to Dallas. When Kennedy was murdered, the incriminating letter with its “Kostin”/Kostikov-Oswald connection could then be revealed to the American people. Lee Harvey Oswald, and his apparent sponsors, the Soviet Union and Cuba, could be scapegoated simultaneously in the assassination of the president. It was a scenario whose intended climax was not only the death of the president but also a victorious preemptive attack against the enemies with whom he was talking peace.

The letter’s third paragraph read: “I had not planned to contact the Soviet embassy in Mexico so they were unprepared, had I been able to reach the Soviet embassy in Havana as planned, the embassy there would have had time
to complete our business
.”
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