Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (21 page)

When Oliver Stone came to New Orleans with Kevin Costner, they invited me to his hotel; they wanted me to help them with the movie. When Oliver Stone finished explaining his movie to me, I told him, “You are going to do terrible damage to the young people of the United States, because what you are saying in that movie is wrong. You are not portraying the truth in that movie.” He told me, “Carlos, you have to realize that I am not doing a documentary, that I am doing a movie. In a movie, I have the latitude of expanding the truth a little bit.”

I told him, “I don’t want to cooperate with you,” and I walked out of that room. Kevin Costner was running after me into the elevator, asking me to reconsider. I said, “No. The damage this will do to the American
people is terrible. The people will think that what he’s saying in the movie is true, and it is not true.”

One person who told me what was going on after the Garrison investigation was Oriana Fallaci. She interviewed me over at Casa Roca at that time and told me, “Carlos, when this trial is finished, a movie will be made about this. If Garrison wins, a movie will be made about how good he was. If he loses, a movie will be made about how much of an idiot he was.” But she was wrong. He lost, and a movie was made about how good he was.

History changed when Lee Harvey Oswald fired those three shots in Dallas on November 22, 1963—not only the history of Cuba but also the history of the United States and the history of the world. If Lee Harvey Oswald was alive today, he would be very happy to see the way the United States is going.

I met the president of Guatemala, Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes. He was president of Guatemala during the Bay of Pigs invasion. I met him one time at a dinner in New Orleans, and he was sat next to me. He wanted me to tell him about Lee Harvey Oswald and my encounter with Oswald. I said, “I will tell you that if you tell me something about the Bay of Pigs that I am not aware of.”

He told me, “One month before the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy sent an emissary to Guatemala, telling me to dismantle the camps, because the invasion was not going forward. I sent a friend of mine to Washington to give my response to Kennedy.” Ydigoras said that when my friend met Kennedy, he told him what Ydigoras said: that that was the right time to get rid of Castro.

“If we don’t get rid of Castro now, Castro is going to get rid of us.” Fuentes told me that my friend Alajhos said that at that moment Kennedy had started moving in his rocking chair and after a few minutes told him, “OK, tell your president he is right, that I am sorry that I am surrounded by
fediches.
” That was the word Ydigoras Fuentes used.
Fediches
are bad advisors, people who are bringing you only the bad news about a situation—and so the invasion would go.

Two of the leaders of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy and Anastasio Somoza, were both killed by Castro’s people. One in Dallas, Texas, and the other in
Asunción, Paraguay, by another Castro sympathizer, a communist Argentinean trained in Cuba and sent to Paraguay to kill President Somoza. I believe that one of the reasons that President Kennedy and even Bobby Kennedy were killed was because of Castro.

Sirhan Sirhan was a follower of Fidel Castro too. Sirhan Sirhan was identified as attending a meeting that was for Castro, where he had a confrontation with a Cuban exile also. I invited Bobby Kennedy to come to New Orleans during that campaign, and he sent me a letter promising that in the future he would be coming and meeting with us here.

I once presented one of my books,
Operation Judas,
in Miami. After the presentation, I saw a man in the first row. About two weeks before I went to Miami, I had seen his picture in a book he wrote.

After the presentation, this man came to me and asked, “Do you know who I am?”

I said, “Yes, you are Felix Rodriguez. You are the man who cut Che Guevara in Bolivia.”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “I saw your picture in the book you wrote.”

He said, “I want to tell you that I was a friend of Bobby Kennedy and that everything you said in your book is the truth.”

I don’t have any doubt in my mind that if Bobby Kennedy had become president of the United States, he would have gotten rid of the man who had killed his brother. So Bobby Kennedy could not be allowed to become president of the United States; that is one of the reasons Bobby Kennedy was also assassinated.

One of the other victims of Fidel Castro, in my opinion, was Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King was not a Communist. Martin Luther
King was looking for the advancement of colored people in the United States. Martin Luther King had been invited to Cuba several times, but he refused to go to Cuba and give his seal of approval to the dictatorship of Fidel Castro. Martin Luther King didn’t want to be part of the revolution that Castro wanted to come inside the United States. He was a friend of the Kennedys. In my opinion, that is one of the reasons he was also killed, in order for the Communists to take over the black movement in the United States.

I am glad I had the encounter with Oswald to a certain extent, because I believe I was in God’s hands. I believe that gave me the opportunity to destroy the myth that Kennedy was killed by right-wingers or conservatives or whatever—because I was there; I know what happened.

In regard to Garrison, I was glad to be there too, because I believe I confronted him. I believe he respected me, and he didn’t want to confront me because he knew that I knew more about the assassination than he knew. I have read the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission. Every time Garrison was saying something on television in New Orleans, the television station would interview me after that, and I was saying, “What the district attorney said is not true because what happened was this, this, and this.” Garrison would change everything.

I feel bad that thing happened to me, though, because as this was happening we lost a little girl. My wife was pregnant during the Garrison investigation. At one point I was thinking that Garrison was going to arrest me at any minute, so I sent her with the kids to her family in Buenos Aires—I didn’t want the kids to be present if they arrested me. When eventually I thought Garrison was not going to move against me, I called her. She came back to the United States. Then she lost the kid. We lost that kid when she was seven months pregnant, and I believe we lost that kid because of the Garrison investigation. She was crying every night; she was very upset with the situation, and she was very afraid.

Unfortunately that is not what Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner think about the assassination.

Richard Reeves

Political biographer and news columnist Richard Reeves was a twenty-six-year-old reporter for the
Newark News
in 1963. An award-winning author, primarily writing on American politics, he teaches at the University of Southern California.

I
don’t think he was prepared, but I don’t think anyone ever has been. The job is sui generis, and they make of it what they can. They have much less room for movement than I had imagined. John Kennedy obviously was well read in history and thought about it. All the sickness he had had as a kid, he read almost everything he could. He, like every other person I’ve ever talked to who ran for president—Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson were his real rivals at that time—had the answer, “Hell, if they can do it, I can do it.” Then they get there. They come into this building that has been emptied out, every paper is gone, everything is white and what-not, and it’s really a “What do I do now?” situation.

He did have, with some exceptions, the best and the brightest for him. He was a very tough guy. Politicians at that level have to be ruthless, and they have to cut away the people who helped them along the way but are no longer useful. Being rich probably helped in that. He saw them as servants, and he, more than other presidents I’ve looked at, made his own decisions in secret.

He organized the White House as a spoke-and-wheel, with himself as the hub and the spokes leading out to other people. No one in there ever felt fully secure, because they didn’t know what he was saying to other people. He didn’t do things as if it were a group. He talked about this himself. He wanted to keep total control over what he was doing. He did that by dealing along to spokes of that wheel.

He was used to doing what other presidents often had to learn to do—not to do anything himself that could be done by someone else. He was very used to people waiting on him. Some days he would change his shirts five times a day with someone else, Bobby or some stiff, holding it out. You talk about him being surprised about small things—he was stunned to find out that Ben Bradlee would wear shirts for two days in a row. That was totally alien to him. He lived in a world where there were lawyers, maids, cleaners, doctors, everything you needed, in that same kind of organization around you. Eisenhower had the same kind of treatment, though he didn’t have the money, because of his rank. You have to know that to be president. You can’t go in there like Jimmy Carter and think it’s like everything else. It’s not like everything else. Rich people know that.

The fists were closed, but they were often swung at each other, and that was the way Kennedy wanted it. He wanted them to be competing against each other with only him knowing what the competition was really about. Jackie Kennedy’s biggest worry was really about her children being exploited. As far as John Kennedy was concerned, there was a whole world out there to be exploited, including these two beautiful children. When her car pulled out of the driveway at the White House, he often grabbed a phone, called a photographer, and said, “She’s gone, you can come over and take pictures.” Of course when they got there, the kids were there, and some of those images are now indelible in our view.

If nothing else, John Kennedy taught us how to be postwar rich Americans, how to dress—he dressed differently—how to cut hair, what was important. Although he didn’t think things like opera and the symphony were important, he thought it was important that Americans did because we had become a new people. Before World War II, before the GI Bill, people in this country lived very limited lives. After the war, for the first
time many Americans—even if with guns in their hands—had seen the world. They recognized and he certainly recognized that we were going to be the leader of the world; he was going to lead by example, which was an easy thing for him to do.

Conservative Republicans of course like to say that we probably could have been rougher on Kennedy, but he couldn’t have been rougher on us because one of the Kennedy policies, strategies, tactics, was that all good news would come from the White House. Any bad news would be announced by the Agriculture Department, the Labor Department, or someone else. The press caught on to that—the action wasn’t out in the agencies anymore; the action was all centralized in the White House. Kennedy was controlling it, and we really had no choice but to play the game his way. We were played very skillfully, and it wasn’t because of any love affair between us and the Kennedys.

What we liked about the Kennedys was: They were good copy. They were a good story. We didn’t think they were better than other people, but they were a hell of a lot more interesting than other people. That was part of a buildup. The man will live forever because he was a cultural icon. He was a competent politician who did some good things and some bad, but the fact of the matter is he changed the way Americans thought of themselves. The president was in our living room now, and so were some of the troubles of the world, particularly civil rights. We talk of the Internet today and all of that or Gutenberg and the press. The arrival of television was like that. It changed [the world]. Nothing was ever the same, and he understood it better than we did.

When it came to the press, he was not above picking up the phone personally and calling the press lords or even columnists and chewing them out or asking them for something—including calling the publisher of the
New York Times
when the
Times’
Tad Szulz had sniffed out what was going on in Cuba, though it wasn’t as big a secret as we think of it now. Kennedy did pick up the phone, called the
Times,
and said, “How
are you going to handle this?” To a certain extent he edited it, particularly taking out the fact that we had the time table—we at the
Times
had the time table. We knew what was happening.

Other stories were held as they are today because the president called and said, “It’s in the interest of national security.” The guy who took the most beating from him, who was one of the best reporters covering him, was Hugh Sidey of
Time
. Kennedy thought,
This is just free television
. When he was once asked during the campaign what was the most important medium in the country, he said
Time
magazine because it’s all over the world, and people think it represents the government.
Time
obviously covered him with their best man, Hugh Sidey, but Sidey woke up many unpleasant mornings with Kennedy screaming at him—the president screaming at a reporter. How do we react when that happens? We want to dive under the bed. We know our place, but he knew his place too and was willing to use it. He didn’t talk to Sidey for weeks because Sidey cited the fact that his picture, he didn’t know why, was in
Gentleman’s Quarterly
. Kennedy called him up and said, “That’s a homosexual magazine. You’re going to ruin me. Why are you doing this? Who’s making you do this to us?” Of course no one was making them do it. They were covering what happened in front of them. The president of the United States was on the cover of
GQ,
and that was it. That was a story.

Rich people grow up with long driveways, with lawyers to buy their way out of situations. He had been bought out of woman situations with payoffs since he was a teenager. That’s the way his old man, Joe Kennedy, handled his own life and handled his son’s life. It wasn’t a situation like Gary Hart, who got caught at it; the
Miami Herald
was sitting on his stoop when he was inside for a weekend with a young lady named Donna Rice. We couldn’t sit on the Kennedy stoop. We couldn’t sit at the White House. People came in cars; Marilyn Monroe came to the Carlyle. I’m going to plead innocent here because I worked for a small paper in the country at that time, but guys protecting guys and “guys will be guys” was a very large part of it. Even if we felt like reporting it, I don’t think our editors would have run it. It was still considered private business. We didn’t know enough about it, and who among us was going to be the first to throw a stone? We were afraid.

He was a very sick man, and one of the reasons he was so reckless and careless was that he always expected to die young—he lived life as a race against boredom. But the medical thing—someone could get elected with a woman thing today, and have been. But someone with the health profile that John Kennedy had would not be elected. Had he run in times where medical records were more accessible, where the reporters covering it were doctors like Larry Altman at the
Times
and whatnot . . . But they lied, they lied, they lied. One statement after another during the campaign; doctors would issue statements that there was nothing wrong with him. Whenever there seemed to be [something wrong], none of us knew. To my knowledge, there were only two or three pictures ever taken of him on crutches, and he was on crutches a good deal of the time. I don’t think they were published at the time.

I don’t know that he learned from what they [his military leaders and cabinet] did. What he did was stand fast in what he believed. The Bay of Pigs wasn’t much compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and here there were two men who could conceivably destroy each other and a lot of each other’s world.

His genius, and it
was
genius, was a great piece of leadership in the Cuban Missile Crisis, since he was the only guy who understood that Khrushchev was in an equally precarious position and wanted an out just as much as Kennedy did. Khrushchev had hoped to sneak all the missiles in and then announce it—but he didn’t. We caught him at it. At that moment, both of them were the same. The advisors for both were saying, “Go get ’em. Push the button. Push the button.” Both of them—seasoned politicians both of them, different systems but both politicians—knew it was disastrous and that they had to find a minimum path out of the thing. It was Khrushchev who gambled and lost.

There are two fine moments I think in the Kennedy presidency. One, which was a kind of extended moment, he was the first president to come to office when the United States could be invaded, the first time since 1812. Now with ballistic missiles, we could be reached by an enemy. The world was in better shape, closer to peace when he died than when he came in, which I think was a great achievement.

These two guys came to power knowing their own countries could be destroyed. Kennedy badly underrated Khrushchev; he also was taking a lot of amphetamines at that point in his life—he had an outside doctor, Dr. [Max] Jacobson, who was shooting him up. That probably helped his energy; it probably didn’t help his judgment. But what did him in was that John Kennedy lied more than a bit about his growing up and his development. One of the things on his résumé was that he had been at the London School of Economics and that Harold Laski, the Marxist scholar, had been his mentor. Everyone around him who really didn’t know very much about Communism thought: “He really knows about the dialectic. He knows how to deal with these people.” Well, the truth is, he never went to the London School of Economics. He got sick; he stayed home. He thought he could win on charm, like many other politicians. They always believe they’ll prevail one on one. He believed that. But it didn’t happen in Vienna, and he was just crushed by it. He said, as we know now, to Scotty Reston, “We’re going to have to stand up to them someplace because they think I’m a weak man, and I know the place.” Reston said, “What’s the place?” And he said, “Vietnam.”

It was very rough. One of the things he did when he came out [to Vienna] was to meet first with Scotty Reston in a room; it had been arranged in advance. Reston, the Washington bureau chief of the
New York Times
and probably the most powerful journalist of his generation, was waiting for Kennedy in a side room. Kennedy came in—he was carrying a hat, which was unusual for him—and he slumped onto a couch and put the hat down over his face. Reston asked, “How was it?” He said, “Worst thing in my life. I’m going to have to spend a lot of time undoing that.” What happened was that Kennedy obviously was a very rational fellow, but he had no experience at this level. Khrushchev did,
and Khrushchev was, by nature, a thug—a likable thug, a funny guy, but he never let Kennedy get off the dime. Kennedy would say, “Why don’t we do this?” and Khrushchev would jump on him, saying: “Do this with you after you put the missiles in so-and-so, and you did this, and you’re oppressing that. You’re the enemy; you’re the one trying to start a war. Why should we deal with you? Why should we deal with any of you? You sent spy planes over.”