A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (113 page)

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Given the effects of inflation, the $2,500 paid to Aynesworth in 1964 would be equivalent to $18,800 in 2013, while the $20,000 payment to Marina Oswald would be equivalent to $150,700.

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Specter had other reasons to be agitated that afternoon, since his hometown Phillies were defeated by the San Francisco Giants, 4–3, in ten innings, allowing San Francisco to hold on to first place in the National League.

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At the request of the author in 2012, the National Archives researched the question of why a copy of Hoover’s June 17, 1964, letter was found in the CIA’s declassified files but not in the commission’s. The National Archives said it was unable to determine the answer.

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Coleman said the author of this book was the first journalist he had ever told about the secret mission. Other former staff members of the commission told the author they had heard rumors about Coleman’s meeting with the Cuban leader. Asked about the rumors, Coleman confirmed to the author that they were true. He said he made no mention of the Castro meeting in his own memoirs,
Counsel for the Situation
, published in 2010, because he understood the information was still classified.

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Breyer would join the Supreme Court as an associate justice in 1994.

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Members of Bringuier’s militant anti-Castro group, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (“Revolutionary Student Directorate”), or DRE, participated in the Bay of Pigs operation. Although its leaders were known to be especially bitter toward President Kennedy for his failure to oust Castro, the group continued to accept money and other support from the U.S. government, most of it funneled through the CIA. (House Select Committee on Assassinations, vol. X, “Anti-Castro Activities,” March 1979).

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Dean Andrews’s testimony might have been easily ignored had it not been for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who would claim in 1967 that Clay Bertrand was an alias used by a respected local businessman, Clay Shaw, who was then prosecuted by Garrison for involvement in Kennedy’s assassination. Long before Shaw’s acquittal, the case was seen as a shocking display of prosecutorial misconduct. Even so, Garrison, as portrayed by the actor Kevin Costner, was the hero of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film
JFK
, about the Kennedy assassination. Andrews would be portrayed by the comedian John Candy.

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Given the effects of inflation, $25,000 in 1963 would be equivalent to about $190,000 in 2013.

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As a United States senator, Specter suggested that his respect and fondness for Redlich was a factor in his decision in 1987 to join Senate colleagues in rejecting the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, a federal appeals court judge and former law professor at Yale. In a previously unpublished 1996 interview, Specter said that he had been offended by reports of an incident years before the nomination in which the conservative Bork ridiculed the very liberal Redlich during a dinner speech in New York, with Redlich in the audience. “Redlich had been very ill and came out to the dinner as a matter of courtesy” to Bork, Specter said. “When Redlich told me what happened between him and Bork, I really had a very negative view of Bork, which didn’t help Bork any” at his Senate confirmation hearings (Specter interviews).

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The salary of members of the House of Representatives in 1963—$22,500 a year—would be equivalent to about $168,000 in 2013, given inflation. Ford’s $10,000 book advance would be equivalent, in 2013, to about $75,000.

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Liebeler also investigated allegations that Oswald was connected to Marcello through an uncle who lived in New Orleans, Charles “Dutz” Murret, a New Orleans bookie alleged to be tied to Marcello’s crime network. The commission found no evidence of any link between Murret and the assassination.

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The author has chosen not to list all those names, since most of the “derogatory” information appeared to be not that at all. The longest entry in the memo was, not surprisingly, for Norman Redlich. Joseph Ball was on the list, in part, because the FBI considered him a “civil rights libertarian” who had “consistently injected himself in support of the civil rights movement.”

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Liebeler would later tell Vincent Bugliosi, the author and Kennedy assassination historian, that Rankin’s comment was actually “not inappropriate at the time” since Rankin made it on the very day that the final draft of the commission’s report was being distributed among the commissioners. “From the beginning, we were all after the truth, and there were no limitations on that,” Liebeler told Bugliosi. (Bugliosi,
Reclaiming History
, p. 358.)

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Gerald Ford’s 1965 book on Oswald,
Portrait of the Assassin
, had disappointing sales, never recouping Ford’s $10,000 advance from Simon and Schuster. Under terms of the contract, he was allowed to keep all of the advance.

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The CIA would eventually acknowledge publicly that Maheu, who had done other work for the spy agency, had been asked to organize Castro’s murder. It was Maheu who then recruited Mafia figures, including a West Coast mobster named John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, to carry out the assassination. Edward Morgan would eventually represent Roselli as well. (
New York Times
, August 6, 2008.)

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Although Pearson and other journalists and Congressional investigators had continued to pursue allegations of wrongdoing involving Johnson and the Washington lobbyist Bobby Baker, the former Senate aide known as “Little Lyndon,” the scandal quieted for a time after the Kennedy assassination, and Johnson was never directly implicated in any of Baker’s crimes. In 1967, Baker was sentenced to up to three years in prison after his conviction on charges of tax evasion, theft, and fraud in an unrelated corruption case. (
New York Times
, April 8, 1967.)

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Anderson, once memorably described by J. Edgar Hoover as “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures,” inherited the column after Pearson’s death in 1969. In 1972, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting about secret diplomacy between the United States and Pakistan during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.

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In Oliver Stone’s 1991 film
JFK
, which suggested that Garrison had come close to exposing the truth about a vast conspiracy in the assassination, the role of Chief Justice Earl Warren was played by the real-life Jim Garrison.

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LIRING/3’s name was identified in CIA records that were declassified decades later. Since there is no way to confirm that the CIA records are accurate, the author has chosen not to publish the informant’s name here. Contacted by phone in 2013, the painter confirmed that he knew Duran, although he denied he had any relationship with the CIA. He also denied that Duran had ever told him that she had a sexual relationship with Oswald.

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In light of the allegations against Mr. Watson, the author of this book attempted to reach him through both the CIA and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, a Washington-area group that represents retired agency employees. Both said they had no information about Watson, including whether he is still alive. “We haven’t been able to find anyone who maintains a relationship with Mr. Watson and/or his family,” a CIA spokesman said.

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Angleton had taken on a strangely similar assignment after the October 1964 murder of a Washington socialite and painter, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was later identified as a former mistress of President Kennedy’s. Hours after the murder, Angleton, a family friend, was found inside her locked home by Washington journalist Ben Bradlee, Meyer’s brother-in-law and the future executive editor of the
Washington Post
. Angleton explained that he was looking for her diary, which she had told friends she wanted destroyed after her death. Angleton had apparently picked the lock, Bradlee said. When the diary was later found at Meyer’s painting studio, Bradlee’s wife gave it to Angleton to destroy. Bradlee saw the diary and said it contained “some handwritten descriptions” of what was “obviously an affair with the president.” (Interview of Ben Bradlee, October 5, 1995, “Booknotes,” C-SPAN.)

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They were shown it in 2012 and 2013 by the author of this book.

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CIA records identified Calvillo as an “unwitting” agent of the CIA, suggesting that he did not know that his handler worked for the agency. Investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, working with the Mexican government, were unable to track down Calvillo in Mexico. He has since died.