Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (13 page)

Johnson said he accepted the findings of the Warren Commission at the time. There’s no question about that. But he did say when I was on the staff, and I think he may have told Walter Cronkite—he told somebody at one point in an off-camera part of an interview—the same thing: that Castro was involved. I remember something else. Shortly after Johnson became president, I was still in the Pentagon. Johnson disbanded the committee and ordered a stop to all this activity. I was sent around the country to meet with various Cuban brigade units to tell them that it was over. There would be no more sabotage, there’d be nothing else; there would never be another invasion of Cuba. Their hope hadn’t really died yet, so that was quite a moving and difficult experience. But Johnson stopped it all. By February of ’64, all that activity was totally turned off.

I am persuaded that Oswald was working in concert with Castro’s people. I really am. I’m persuaded of that when I just put those pieces together. We know Oswald went to Mexico, to the Cuban embassy there. He said he was all for the Cubans. We know he’d been to the Soviet Union. When you just think about those events, and if you were Castro and you saw Diem knocked off, you
had
to know we were trying to kill you. I mean, there were too many crazy attempts to do that—and Castro’s little statement in September 1963 that “they’re trying to kill me or our leaders; their leaders are vulnerable too.”

I think someday there will be a final connection, but we may never know until the Castros are out of power or until we have access to all their files the way we have access to so many of the Soviet files. We learned so much about what was going on between Soviet spies and the KGB and the United States.

When I started doing my memoir,
Inside: A Public and Private Life,
I went in to get as many documents as I could. I knew there had been a meeting among Dick Helms, Fitzgerald, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was a meeting they wouldn’t let me go to, even though I was Vance’s alternate. It was a meeting at which Vance was not present. I used the Freedom of Information Act to get the memorandum of that meeting. That confirmed my suspicion, because that memorandum literally states that the CIA people were looking at what Hitler’s generals had done to Hitler to see if they could learn something from that vis-à-vis Castro. At
that point in time, I was having people interview Cuban military exiles to see if they could identify Castro generals or top Castro military people who might have access to him. It was clear to me, at least at that point, that one of the things they were trying to do was maybe get the generals to knock off Castro.

The day Kennedy was assassinated, the CIA had a guy in Paris meeting with a man I think was nicknamed AM/LASH who was asking for a sniper’s rifle. The CIA was giving him a pen with lethal poison in it. So there’s no question what we were trying to do. The other thing I don’t know the answer to is: Why didn’t the Warren Commission ever talk to anybody who was involved in that?

I asked Jerry Ford that once, and he said none of that ever came to their attention. Jerry Ford deeply believed that Oswald acted alone. There was also a great sense of putting this to rest. If you go back and listen to the Johnson tapes, you hear his conversation with Dick Russell, with senior senators saying, “You’ve got to go on this,” and getting Earl Warren to become chairman and getting Jerry Ford, the House minority leader, to go on. You listen to Johnson on the phone saying, “We’ve got to do this; we’ve got to put this to rest. We’ve got to deal with this for the American people.” And they did put it to rest.

I also think you have to remember that Johnson really did turn this whole Cuban operation off. Kennedy’s assassinated on November 22. Within days or weeks after Johnson becomes president, before the end of the year, all the Cuban coordinating committee activities are turned off. In early 1964, in early February, I’m sent out to go around the country and tell all these people it’s over. For whatever reason, Johnson didn’t want any part of that; he didn’t want that going on.

There’s no doubt in my mind that President Kennedy approved of what the CIA was trying to do with Castro. The documents show higher authority [but] never mentioned the president knew this. I do know the president
pretty much approved all of the sabotage things that we wanted to do eventually, and believe me, I know Dick Helms. I know the CIA. They wouldn’t have done what they were doing—in Paris giving AM/LASH a poison pen to kill Castro—if President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy hadn’t okayed the idea. There’s no question. That committee was driven by Robert Kennedy. Have no illusions; he was at most of the meetings. When he wasn’t at the meetings, somebody from the Justice Department was telling us what they wanted to do, and it was constant: “You’ve got to find other ways. You’ve got to do something. We’ve got to get rid of this.” He called it, at one point, one of the most important things we were doing in the government.

I think—and I use this in the best sense of the word—Johnson was enormously opportunistic in terms of dealing with the assassination and getting all the good he could out of it. You think about him saying, “There’s no greater tribute we could pay to John F. Kennedy than the 1964 Civil Rights Act.” Then you think of him saying, “There’s no greater tribute we could pay than getting the tax bill.” With many of the programs Johnson proposed, which we know were in his head during his years in Congress and the Senate, he constantly invoked President Kennedy: “Let’s do this for President Kennedy.”

Little Washington, DC, was a cultural desert. For years there had been attempts to have a cultural center in Washington, DC. Nobody had been able to get it passed, but Johnson said, “We have to have the Kennedy Center.” He got the Kennedy Center. In that sense, the assassination had a significant impact. It was one of the key factors in Johnson’s ability to revolutionize the country in those four years. It also started to shake up the country in the sense that followed, in April of ’68, Martin Luther King’s assassination and then, in June of ’68, Robert Kennedy’s assassination. What an incredible group of years.

Camelot, we know, was a myth. There’s no question about that. I think Kennedy did the best he could. I think you have to look at it in the context of the Cold War. Remember, Eisenhower had put in motion something to get Castro thrown out. Eisenhower puts in motion the Bay
of Pigs invasion. Kennedy runs against Richard Nixon in 1960, and the campaign is, “I can be tougher than you can be on Castro.” Both of them are saying, “I’ll be tougher; I’ll do this; I’ll do that.” Even after the Bay of Pigs invasion failed, Kennedy goes down to Miami, to the stadium down there, and says, “This flag will fly in a free Havana. We’ll take it there.”

Robert Kennedy never could quite tell the Cuban brigade, as we had in the Army and elsewhere, that we weren’t going back to Cuba. He felt, I think, so guilty. Remember, one hundred Cubans lost their lives at the Bay of Pigs. We tend to forget that. Every time I put some restriction on them, they’d go to him. They had total access to the attorney general, and Bobby would reverse it; tell me, “No, don’t do it.”

We know that Camelot is a myth. But it’s not only John Kennedy. Robert Kennedy also is portrayed as a saint. We have two saints there. Saints aren’t perfect. And we know Robert Kennedy could be pretty tough in a whole variety of ways. I think he changed when he started running for office. He changed not only on the war. When there was pressure in the Kennedy administration about civil rights and “Do something about the ’64 Civil Rights Act, open up public accommodations, end discrimination in employment,” the whole focus of the Kennedy brothers was on politics: “What are the politics of this?”

And there’s the meeting in the cabinet room where Johnson says, “This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue. We should do this.” In his book, Taylor Branch writes that Martin Luther King said, “Johnson was a breath of fresh air because, every time President Kennedy talked to me or Bobby, the first thing they’d say is, ‘You’ve got to get rid of
Communists that may be advising. You’ve got to get rid of them. That could be a real problem.’” Johnson never mentioned that. It was always, “How do we get the Civil Rights Bill passed? How do we get the Voting Rights Bill passed?”

Those were the times, and they were part of a post–World War II culture in which the CIA believed: “We can do it,” and it’s fine to assassinate people if that would be a good thing for America.

Joe English

Native Philadelphian Joseph English, MD, was thirty years old at the time of JFK’s death. After Dr. English had served as a research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health, Sargent Shriver made him the first chief of psychiatry for the Peace Corps. When President Johnson appointed Shriver head of the War on Poverty, Shriver asked Dr. English to become its director of Health Affairs. He played a major role in the development of the Community Health Centers Program and other initiatives of the War on Poverty. Wilbur Cohen, President Johnson’s secretary of health, education, and welfare, asked him to become head of the largest health agency in Washington. In early 1970 New York mayor John Lindsay tapped him to head the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, where he stayed until 1973, when he became chair of the Department of Psychiatry at St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Centers of New York. He now serves as Sidney Frank chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of the New York Medical College.

I
’m not so sure that President Kennedy wasn’t a little skeptical about the Peace Corps, as most of the people in the Foreign Service community were, because of the idea of having young students running around in various countries causing international incidents. I think when he began to see its potential is when he gave that speech at the University of Wisconsin at three o’clock in the morning.

John Landgraf (center left), Joe English, and Sargent Shriver flanked by guides in North Borneo

The reaction he got from young people when he started describing something like the Peace Corps was the beginning of it. But when you saw him seeing off the Peace Corps volunteers, the very first who went abroad, from the White House, as he often did, then you knew that he
understood they were not only going to grow but they were going to come back with an understanding of the developing world that we didn’t have in this country. He was already beginning to sense that there was poverty in this country to rival anything we could find in the outside world, and these young people would come back and be able to help with that from the experience they’d gained abroad.

So many things developed as a result of the Peace Corps and not just from the volunteers—for example, Kennedy’s commitment to helping the volunteers stay well. He said, “I don’t want our volunteers to become a burden on the host country.” That’s why we were permitted to put a young doctor in every country the Peace Corps volunteers went to. The doctor’s task was to keep them well. They got so good that these young doctors began to find themselves advising the health minister in the country on how to improve health generally. Those doctors came back, and many of them didn’t go into private practice. They continued in public service with that spirit of the Peace Corps and became some of the leaders of great innovations in health care around the country in the years following.

I had just been at the White House because I was being asked to become a special assistant for Health. Stafford Warren had been in that position and was going back to Stanford, and they wanted me to take it. That was of course a great honor. I was essentially a college psychiatrist, and the thought of leaving the Peace Corps was unthinkable. It was also considered unthinkable by Dr. Warren that someone wouldn’t accept this. I had just turned it down and gotten back to the Peace Corps office on Friday morning.

I was up in my office, thinking I had just made the greatest mistake of my life, when the medical director of the Peace Corps came in with tears streaming down his eyes and said, “We just heard the president was shot; they want you down in his office,” in Sargent Shriver’s office. Mr. Shriver and Eunice were off for an obstetrician appointment, then having lunch. I waited in the office until they returned, and the three of us awaited the news.

The first report was that it was a head shot, and then I thought,
Oh . . .
here I am, a psychiatrist. I should know what to do because the next news is going to be worse.
It wasn’t long until the cable came in and I told them. I’ve never felt so helpless in my life. It was something I thought I ought to be able to help with—but I was helpless. Sarge said, “Eunice, I think we should kneel down around my desk and say the rosary for Jack.” Eunice, a strong woman as she always was, knelt down, as Mr. Shriver and I did, and we did that. That gave me a chance to collect my thoughts.

She was shaken, as we all were. I went to her. I knew she was pregnant, and I said to her, “Eunice, you have two people to worry about here; I’m not so sure this is where you ought to be. I think we ought to get over to the White House and see if perhaps you shouldn’t go to Hyannis to be with your mother.”

We got into a car and went over to the White House. Young Teddy came down, and he had apparently had the same thought. He took Eunice up to Hyannis to stay with her mother. Sarge was asked to organize the funeral once the body of the president got back to Washington. Bobby Kennedy took care of things until then. Sarge asked Dick Goodwin and me to stay in to help with the funeral.

At the White House, people were totally in disbelief, crying. We got into Ralph Dungan’s office, which is one of the larger offices in that wing. You had Supreme Court justices, members of the staff, a few people from the Secret Service, and people at first couldn’t believe it. It was almost Greek tragedy. In the midst of all of that, Bill Moyers became the man who was going to help the president. The new president really felt that the way the country was going to grieve would have a lot to do with how they felt about what had happened, so he asked Bill to ensure that, as the funeral was planned, anything the family, and particularly Mrs. Kennedy, wanted would occur. It was in the wake of that that Mr. Shriver started trying to organize the funeral, but I’ve never seen such a sight of tremendous sadness and grief.

There were many issues. One was whether the casket should be open. Some on the new president’s staff felt that it should be so people could see that it was really him and that there was no conspiracy here. No one really knew what had happened. There was a question of whether he had been kidnapped and all kinds of things going around. In addition, we were going on the highest military alert I think we ever had because all of this was going on together.

So the question was whether the casket should be open. Mr. Shriver came down. He had been talking with her [Mrs. Kennedy] about that, and she had asked if Robert McNamara and I would view the remains and give some advice. They cleared the East Room and closed it off; the two of us climbed a little ladder, and they opened the casket. I must say, it was really tough. It was clear that it
could
have been open, but that wouldn’t have been the way the American people would want to remember their president. That was our advice to Mrs. Kennedy. Secretary McNamara and I agreed. It would have been possible if it had been desirable. The president’s head was turned to the side because of what had happened to the back of his head, and there was makeup and the sort of things embalmers do. It wasn’t the president that we’d seen and known.

Mr. Shriver, who was really thinking of everything, realized we should have a Mass card, which is pretty standard at a Catholic funeral. Heads of state were arriving from all over the world, and he wanted to have something to give them. Even more meaningful to me personally, he asked me if I would develop the Mass card. The first thing was to find a picture for the card. There was a wonderful man in the White House at the time, Sandy, and he was the lithographer. Sandy was a very important person in the Kennedy White House; he was the one who had the pictures, and I went to see him. With the tears coming down, he said, “Let me show you this picture. This was President Kennedy’s favorite picture; he didn’t want it used except for a special occasion,” and Sandy said, “I think this is the occasion.”

We chose that picture to show to Mrs. Kennedy, and I got the traditional prayers that go on the back of a Catholic funeral card. Sarge said, “You better go up and show the picture and the prayers to Mrs. Kennedy.” So I went up to where she was sitting in the bedroom and showed her the picture. You can imagine what the reaction was. Then I showed her the prayers; she looked at them.

The presence she maintained, despite all of this, was quite remarkable. She said, “No. I want the prayers to be ones that Jack wrote himself. Go over there and get that book,” which had his inaugural address in it. Then she circled in the inaugural address what she considered to be his prayer. That’s what’s on the back of the Mass card.

There are heads of state coming in without notice, landing at the airports, and now this is the day that we’re marching down to St. Matthew’s for the funeral Mass itself. Various rooms on the first floor of the White House had the Supreme Court in one, the cabinet in another, the family in a third, the former presidents in another. In the East Room was assembled the greatest gathering of heads of state, they tell me, in the history of the world. Angie Duke was very concerned because we were late, and he thought somebody ought to apologize to them. At the same time, he was trying to figure out how to line them up for the march, because there had been a decision that there was going be a march to St. Matthew’s.

He asked, “Who’s willing to go in there and tell them how they should line up?” I said, “We have something called a peer rating.” He said, “That’s a fine idea.”

I was the box carrier for the Mass cards. We walked in and wondered who in the world would be first in line. As you may know, it was Haile Selassie; standing behind him was Charles de Gaulle, and then Prince Philip.

We knew the emperor well because we had three hundred volunteers in Ethiopia. Mr. Shriver went up to him and said, “Your Majesty, we apologize we’re a little late, but we wanted you to have a memorial of President Kennedy,” and presented him with a card. [Emperor] Haile Selassie, with tears streaming down his face, said, “Mr. Shriver, we need no memorial beyond the three hundred of Kennedy’s children who serve the people of my country.” It was a very difficult time to keep things together, but Mr. Shriver was able to do that. De Gaulle said similarly wonderful things, and as we went around the room, almost everyone linked Kennedy and the Peace Corps. Of course they knew that Sargent Shriver had developed it for him—an extraordinary experience.

Angie and Mrs. Duke said, “My God, the two former presidents are about to arrive; they’re in that room, and there’s nobody to meet them.” He said, “I have to go up, do something.”

They asked me, “Would you stand here and make sure they get to the right room?”

I said, “Of course I will,” and the first one to arrive was President Truman, who was my father’s hero in Philadelphia. I escorted President Truman in and had a steward bring him some coffee. He was standing there with his back to the door, looking out the window, when I saw a car drive up, and there was Ike: General Eisenhower, President Eisenhower.