Reclaiming History (281 page)

One of the very worst examples of COINTELPRO abuse occurred in the late 1960s and involved prominent Hollywood actress Jean Seberg, a known supporter and financial contributor to the Black Panthers, a militant black nationalist group. When she became pregnant in 1970, the FBI became aware of it through the wiretap of a telephone conversation from Black Panther headquarters to Seberg, and the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office sent an Airtel to Hoover on April 27, 1970, stating that “permission is requested to publicize the pregnancy of Jean Seberg, well-known movie actress, by Ray Hewitt of the Black Panthers Party…by advising Hollywood gossip columnists in the Los Angeles area of the situation. It is felt that the possible publication of Seberg’s plight could cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the general public. It is proposed that the following letter from a fictitious person be sent to local columnists.” Permission was granted and on May 19, 1970,
Los Angeles Times
gossip columnist Joyce Haber published the story, which was syndicated to about a hundred papers around the country. On August 23, Seberg, who was married to French diplomat and novelist Romain Gary, prematurely delivered a baby daughter, who died two days later. At the infant’s funeral, Seberg opened the casket to prove the child was white and the story about her a lie. According to the
Los Angeles Times
, the story “triggered the actress’ downward spiral across a decade, her husband and others close to her said. For nine years, Seberg tried to take her life around the baby’s birthday. On September 8, 1979, her body was found naked in the back of a Renault parked on a Paris side street, the death credited to an overdose of barbiturates.”
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Hoover’s illegal wiretaps to gain compromising information on anyone he perceived to be a threat to his power, and oftentimes on political opponents of the president then in the White House (sometimes at the request of the president himself), started in the 1930s under FDR, reaching their zenith in the 1960s under the Machiavellian LBJ, Hoover’s personal friend. Only one president, Truman, had virtually no relationship with Hoover, to the extent of not even allowing Hoover to deal directly with him, forcing Hoover to deal with Truman’s chief military aide, Brigadier General Harry Vaughn.
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Hoover’s power was such that President Kennedy was fond of telling people when they asked why he never fired Hoover, “You don’t fire God.”
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LBJ had a more earthy way of putting it: “In the long run, I’d rather have Edgar on the inside pissing out, than on the outside hosing me down.”
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After Hoover died,
New York Times
reporter Tom Wicker wrote that Hoover had “wielded more power, longer, than any man in American history.”
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And Hoover was never shy about letting everyone know just how powerful he was, referring to his FBI headquarters office as “SOG” or “Seat of Government.”
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In fact, the term “Seat of Government” was even used routinely in official FBI documents, for example, “All of the supervisors and officials who came into contact with this case at the
seat of government
, as well as agents in the field…”
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It seemed that Hoover didn’t know his place in the executive branch of government, and during his lifetime no one was about to remind him.

Virtually every Hoover biography, from Curt Gentry’s best-selling
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets
on down, has confirmed not only that Hoover had a bulging, six-hundred-page file on JFK’s dalliances,
*
but also that Kennedy was well aware of what Hoover had on him.
⁸⁸
And Hoover made sure his targets knew, directly or indirectly, that he had the goods on them.

The most blatant, outrageous, and vile example of this was the fifteen FBI bugging tapes of Martin Luther King, containing words and physical sounds of King with other women in hotel rooms around the country. These tapes were sent to King (whom Hoover despised and viewed as a Communist pawn dangerous to America, which resulted in King’s telephone also being tapped under authorization from RFK on national security grounds) at King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference office in Atlanta in mid-November of 1964. FBI coverage of King had revealed that King’s wife, Coretta, “opened his mail for him when he was on the road.” A letter accompanying the tapes was from an anonymous writer, who told King that he was “a complete fraud…and an evil, vicious one at that…You are done.” One note is believed to have actually encouraged King to commit suicide, reading, “King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.”
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DeLoach confirmed that the FBI’s wiretaps of King’s phone, which RFK approved, were at the request of the FBI, not RFK. However, in May of 1968, columnist Drew Pearson said that RFK ordered the wiretaps on King’s phone, and that he would soon release the documentation he had to support this, which he never did.
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Hoover showed his personal distaste for King and his firsthand involvement in the effort to destroy him in a handwritten note at the bottom of an internal FBI memo discussing the “microphone surveillance” of King in his room at the Shroeder Hotel in Milwaukee. “King is a tomcat,” Hoover scribbled, “with obsessive degenerate sexual urges.”
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Hoover even went so far as to try to peddle a dossier on King, which included a taped composite of King’s sexual activities in various hotel rooms, to key members of the Washington, D.C., press corps, but they declined to accept his offer.
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By all accounts, though there is no record of what was said, Hoover’s lunch with Kennedy at the White House on March 22, 1962 (at which he brought along an FBI memo on Judith Campbell Exner, prepared for him two days earlier, that set forth the dates of her calls to the White House and the fact that she had “associated with prominent underworld figures Sam Giancana of Chicago and John Roselli of Los Angeles”), was to inform the president that he must cease seeing Exner. It is no coincidence that White House records show the last of seventy telephone calls put through the White House switchboard to Exner’s number occurred that afternoon after the luncheon.
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Just as those who wear their patriotism on their sleeves usually have very little left inside—in a similar vein one is reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark that “the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons”—many law-and-order extremists like Hoover very often have no compunction about violating the law themselves. In addition to the well-chronicled fact that Hoover often used FBI personnel to make repairs to his home, there is at least one clear case of a prosecutable felony (grand theft) committed by Hoover; many people have gone to jail for less. “As you know,” former assistant FBI director William Sullivan wrote to Hoover in 1971, a few days after he left the FBI, “I had a number of men working for many months writing your book,
Masters of Deceit
, for you. Contrary to what you have said it was not done on private time. It was done on public time, during the day at taxpayers’ expense [we’re obviously talking here about well over $100,000]…Do you realize the amount of agent time that was spent not only in writing the book but on advertising and publicizing it all around the country? All our field offices were told to push it…We even wrote reviews here at the Headquarters which were sent to the field to have printed by different papers.”
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Louis Nichols, the FBI’s first publicist and lobbyist, and a Hoover partisan who was more responsible for the lionization of Hoover in the public’s eye than anyone else, confirmed Sullivan’s story about
Masters of Deceit
, which sold 250,000 copies in hardcover and 2 million in paperback.
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Returning to the central issue, as previously stated, no one, ever, has produced one piece of evidence connecting J. Edgar Hoover with Kennedy’s death, and your more responsible conspiracy theorists don’t devote any space to the charge. Indeed, the very thought that J. Edgar Hoover decided to murder President John F. Kennedy is too far-fetched for any but the most suspicious and irrational minds. Hoover had already proved (the March 22, 1962, luncheon with JFK over Judith Campbell Exner) the power he had to blackmail the president, and it is therefore ridiculous to say that he would try to kill Kennedy—and thus expose himself to a sentence of death—in order to keep his job. When we couple all of this with the fact that, as author Curt Gentry writes, “Hoover’s concern with preserving his good name became an obsession” and “the fear that his carefully constructed image would come tumbling down obsessed him most of his life” (the “hundreds of hours” he spent “fussing over the blueprints” to the building in Washington, D.C., that currently bears his name is a metaphor for his all-consuming concern over his image and reputation),
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the thought becomes too crazed to put to paper, and I apologize to his surviving relatives, if he has any, for even discussing this issue.

T
he Warren Commission found no evidence of FBI involvement in the assassination.
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And the HSCA, having examined the allegation of FBI complicity in the assassination, concluded that the FBI was “not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”
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(Both the Warren Commission and the HSCA had the good taste not to even ask the question of whether J. Edgar Hoover, individually, was involved.) And the earlier Church Committee, in 1975, after investigating the possibility of U.S. intelligence (specifically the FBI and CIA) being involved in the assassination, said it did not uncover “any evidence” of such involvement.
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O
ne other U.S. intelligence agency has had the suggestion of complicity in the assassination leveled against it by the conspiracy theorists, the Secret Service, but nowhere near as much as the CIA and FBI.

The U.S. Secret Service, a bureau of the Department of the Treasury, dates back to 1865, the last year of the Civil War, when it was created primarily to combat the widespread counterfeiting of U.S. currency. Nearly one-third of all currency in circulation at the time was counterfeit, and the country’s financial stability was in jeopardy. In 1894, since the Secret Service was the only federal investigative agency at the time, it began to provide informal and part-time protection to the president. In 1902, following the assassination of President William McKinley the previous year, the Service, without statutory authority, and in addition to its anticounterfeiting mandate, assumed full-time responsibility for the protection of the president. Following the election of William Howard Taft in 1908, the Secret Service started protecting the president-elect. In 1913, Congress enacted legislation expressly providing for full-time Secret Service protection of the president. Although the Secret Service began protecting the vice president in 1945, it wasn’t until 1951 that Congress enacted legislation authorizing such protection, but only upon the vice president’s request. Legislation in 1962 required protection of the vice president, with or without his request.

During fiscal year 1963, the Secret Service had an average strength of 513 personnel, 351 of whom were special agents (weapon-carrying personnel, whether members of the Presidential Protection Division or some other division), with sixty-five field offices throughout the country. The core of the presidential security arm of the Secret Service is the White House detail, which in 1963 consisted of 36 special agents and 6 special agent-drivers.
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With respect to the Secret Service, for all intents and purposes the inquiry about complicity in the assassination begins and ends with the motorcade route. This is so because if the Service or any of its agents were involved in the assassination, they necessarily would have had a determinative or at least important hand in helping to make sure the limousine proceeded beneath Oswald’s window on Elm Street. But all the evidence shows they did not have such a hand; in fact, the Secret Service let it be known that it favored, for security reasons, a different destination for the motorcade, which would have meant a different route altogether, and no assassination.

On November 4, 1963, Gerald Behn, the special agent in charge of the White House’s Secret Service detail, called Forrest Sorrels, the special agent in charge of the Dallas field office of the Secret Service, to inform him of the president’s intent to visit Dallas “around November 21st.” He said that two buildings had been suggested for a luncheon site following the presidential motorcade—the Trade Mart, a new and attractive convention hall off the Stemmons Freeway to the northwest of Dealey Plaza, and the old Women’s Building located on the fairgrounds in the southern part of Dallas—and asked Sorrels to survey both sites. Sorrels immediately did and reported back to Behn that same day that “security-wise the Women’s Building appeared to be preferable” (because there were only two entrances to the building, whereas the Trade Mart had many entrances as well as suspension bridges on the second and third floors) but that, as opposed to the Trade Mart, the one-story building “wasn’t a very nice place to take the president” because the ceiling was low and the “air-conditioning equipment and everything was all exposed.”
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So Sorrels made no choice. However, Behn, who was in charge of trip security, did, announcing on November 5 that he favored the Women’s Building.
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But selection of the luncheon site was out of the hands of the Secret Service. It was to be decided by politicians.

Today, there are two main parties in Texas, the dominant Republican Party and the Democratic Party. However, in 1963 Texas was essentially a one-party state (Democratic) and the party was clearly divided along liberal and conservative lines. The relationship between the two wings of the party was so bitter and combustible that, for instance, they even engaged in fistfights on the floor of the 1960 Democratic national convention in Los Angeles. The liberals, led by Senator Ralph Yarborough, lobbied the White House hard for the Women’s Building, which not only had a larger seating capacity, permitting more of the president’s supporters to attend, but also had an atmosphere more compatible with that of the common man, the so-called working class. But the conservative wing of the party, led by Governor Connally, was fiercely opposed to the Women’s Building site, demanding that the luncheon be held at the Trade Mart, the headquarters in Dallas for the city’s predominantly conservative business community.
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The White House ultimately deferred to the governor, and Kenneth O’Donnell, special assistant to the president, notified the Secret Service of its position on November 14,1963.
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A presidential advance man, Jerry Bruno, wrote in his November 15, 1963, diary entry, “The White House announced that the Trade Mart had been approved.
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I met with O’Donnell and [Press Secretary Bill] Moyers who said that Connally was unbearable and on the verge of canceling the trip. They decided they had to let the Governor have his way.” As the HSCA concluded, “The Secret Service was, in fact, a bystander in the process; its protective functions were subordinated to political considerations.”
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However, just because the Trade Mart was chosen didn’t mean there was going to be a motorcade to get to it. Indeed, both Governor Connally and Frank Erwin, the executive secretary of the Texas State Democratic Committee, objected to the motorcade, fearing that because Dallas was so conservative, there might be some incident or sign along the parade route that would be embarrassing to the president. Connally also felt that the motorcade, requiring the president’s interaction with the crowd along the motorcade route, would put an excessive strain on the president, especially in view of his tight schedule.
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In the end, the White House wishes for a motorcade prevailed. Kenneth P. O’Donnell told the Warren Commisssion, “We had a motorcade wherever we went. Particularly when we went to a large city, the purpose of going there was to give the president as much exposure to the people…as possible. The speaking engagement was a luncheon which was rather limited. And the president would not want to leave Dallas feeling that the only ones that were able to see him were a rather select group.”
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The fateful decision to send the motorcade along Main Street and then in front of the Book Depository Building was somewhat preordained by the prior decision to make the Trade Mart the luncheon site. (If the Women’s Building, in a different part of the city, had been selected, the motorcade would not have passed by the Depository Building.) Sorrels and Winston G. Lawson, a member of the White House Secret Service detail in Washington who acted as an advance agent for the Dallas trip, obviously could have come up with a different route from Love Field to the Trade Mart without passing by the Book Depository Building. But Main Street had always been the traditional parade route in Dallas (including for the only previous presidential visit, by President Roosevelt in 1936, which Sorrels, who joined the Service in 1923, had worked), and to reach the Trade Mart from Main Street, the most direct route is the Stemmons Freeway. And contrary to the allegations by conspiracy theorists, the only practical way for westbound traffic on Main Street to reach the northbound lanes of the Stemmons Freeway is by way of Elm Street past the Book Depository Building. Continuing on Main
past
Houston (instead of turning right on Houston to Elm) does not enable one to get on the Stemmons Freeway. An island separates Main from Elm at the Stemmons Freeway, and it extends beyond the freeway for the specific purpose of preventing drivers on Main Street from trying to get on the Stemmons Freeway by changing lanes across Elm Street (on the right) to do so. Dallas police officials were briefed on the parade route on November 15, and they agreed it was a proper one, not expressing a belief that any route might be better.
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But even if it could be shown that the Secret Service was responsible for the selection of the luncheon site and the motorcade route, the notion that the Secret Service was behind the assassination is, like virtually all the conspiracy theories, ridiculous on its face. What conceivable motive would the Secret Service have had? None. In fact, even if Secret Service agents got away with it, it would only hurt their individual careers in the Secret Service that the president had been killed on their watch.
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Why, indeed, would an agency (or any member thereof) whose agents are literally trained to take a bullet themselves to protect the president want to murder him? As former Secret Service agent Dennis McCarthy writes in his book,
Protecting the President
, “Every minute of every day, agents are on duty protecting the President, both as an individual and as a symbol of the government that he leads.” And part of their duty is to give their very life to save his, if necessary. All agents are trained, McCarthy says, “to put themselves between the President and the source of the shots,” making themselves “as large a target as possible.” A celebrated example was when John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan just after Reagan had exited the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., on March 30, 1981. McCarthy writes, “The first shot was fired when Reagan was just three feet from the limousine door that Agent Tim McCarthy was holding open. Immediately, Tim turned in the direction of the shots, spread his arms and legs to protect the President, and took a bullet in the abdomen.”
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In response to a series of questions submitted to him by J. Lee Rankin, general counsel for the Warren Commission, the then chief of the Secret Service, James J. Rowley, wrote that one of the “two general principles in emergencies involving the President” that the Secret Service has “consistently followed” is for agents “to place themselves between the President and any source of danger.”
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T
hough it defies logic that the Secret Service was involved in the assassination, many conspiracy theorists don’t agree. For instance, although he responsibly concludes that the Service was not involved, Walt Brown, in his book
Treachery in Dallas
, can’t resist asking rhetorical questions like, “Why was a fifty-four year old Secret Service Agent the driver of the car? Why, since it was Dallas, did the head of the [Secret Service] White House Detail stay in Washington?”
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(Hmm. Maybe the Secret Service was behind the assassination after all.) Conspiracy theorist Harrison Edward Livingstone, in his book
Killing the Truth
, has it all figured out. He writes that “Secret Service Agents close to the President who knew of some of his feminine liaisons resented it, sat in judgment of him, and cooperated with the plotters to kill him.”
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Livingstone, of course, does not, cannot, cite any source for his speculation other than his own very fertile imagination. It should be noted that Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter, who conducted the questioning of the Secret Service agents before the Commission and interviewed them beforehand, said that only Roy Kellerman (who he did not say showed any dislike for the president, only appeared “blasé”) “did not seem to share the other agents’ attachment to Kennedy,” adding that William Greer “clearly felt deep affection for Kennedy, which I sensed had been reciprocal.”
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As Greer would later say, “He [the president] and I were pretty close friends. He treated me just wonderful.”
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Only one book I’m aware of, Vincent Palamara’s
Third Alternative—Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the JFK Murder
, is devoted solely to the Secret Service’s role in the case. From his exhaustive investigation, Palamara ends up finding the Secret Service guilty of incompetence, not complicity in the murder. Although Palamara seems honest and intelligent, and his 1993 book is reasonably well researched, I found it very difficult to read. It virtually has no discernible structure or organization, being a rambling and discursive, almost stream-of-consciousness exploration of the Secret Service’s protection—or lack thereof—of the president, with no index or even page numbers. Yes, you heard me right. No page numbers. Although Palamara is “suspicious” of the conduct of three agents (Bill Greer, Emory Roberts, and mostly Floyd Boring—“Boring is interesting,” Palamara writes), he seems to conclude, with no concrete evidence to support his conclusion, that his
Third Alternative
for the Secret Service’s role in the assassination is not the guilt or innocence of the Service, but an “innocent” but intentional “security stripping test” by the Service to “test the President’s security” that “unknowingly backfired into a full-blown assassination,” for which, apparently, the Secret Service was defenseless. Among the many examples, he says, of the deliberate “security stripping”: the railroad overpass was not cleared of people (Palamara does not say why the overpass should have been cleared of people as opposed to other areas, and ignores the fact that two Dallas police officers were assigned to be on top of the overpass); buildings along the motorcade route were not checked out;
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there was no bubbletop on the limousine;
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the Service went along with a route that necessitated a 120-degree turn at Houston and Elm that slowed the limousine down to a dangerous speed; and so on.
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Palamara, moving almost exclusively in the world of conspiracy theorists, resisted forfeiting his common sense for as long as he could as he proceeded reasonably well in his assassination research. But somewhere along the way he got off the bus and in 1997 declared, “It is now my strong belief, after shaking off years of equivocation, that several [Secret Service] agents
had
to have been involved in the actual assassination by getting wind of the impending threat and letting it happen.”
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