A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (65 page)

Kennedy appeared taken aback. For nearly seven months, he had managed to avoid any public comment about his brother’s murder. The creation of the Warren Commission had given the attorney general an excuse for his silence; he could insist he did not want to prejudge the investigation or influence Warren’s findings. But Kennedy’s triumphant trip to Europe in June—first to Germany, where he had unveiled a plaque honoring his brother in the newly named John F. Kennedy Platz in Berlin, and now to Poland—had appeared to lift his spirits. The crowds in Communist Poland had repeatedly cheered the mention of his brother’s name.

So he decided to answer the young Pole’s question.

President Kennedy, he said, had been assassinated by a “misfit” named Lee Harvey Oswald who had been motivated by his anger against American society. “There is no doubt” about Oswald’s guilt, Kennedy declared. “He was a professed Communist, but the communists, because of his attitude, would have nothing to do with him.” Kennedy continued: “What he did he did on his own and by himself.… Ideology, in my opinion, did not motivate his act.… It was the single act of one person protesting against society.” His remarks made for instant headlines back in the United States, since the attorney general seemed to be endorsing what the Warren Commission was expected to conclude in its final report.

*

For much of 1964, Kennedy had been beyond grief, it seemed; he had effectively gone into hiding. He had accepted Johnson’s offer to stay on as attorney general, saying he was committed to pursuing his late brother’s agenda at the Justice Department, especially on civil rights. But he then largely ignored his responsibilities at the department, staying away from the headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue for days at a stretch. He spent his time instead at Hickory Hill, the Civil War–era mansion that he and Ethel had bought from Jack in 1957, or in Georgetown with Jacqueline and her children. He seemed to find real comfort only from the company of family, especially his eight children; Ethel was pregnant with their ninth.

Kennedy literally wrapped himself in evidence of his despair; he had taken to wearing his dead brother’s clothes. When he made his regular nighttime visits to the gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery, he was sometimes seen wearing either Jack’s favorite leather jacket or the slain president’s old overcoat. Before his trip to Europe, when the subject of his brother’s assassination came up, Kennedy insisted that he was paying no attention to the work of the Warren Commission and that he had little interest in the question of whether Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. “Why should I care?” was the answer he offered routinely when asked about the commission’s work. “None of it is going to bring Jack back.”

But as his aides and closest friends knew, those comments were meant largely for public consumption. They would admit years later that Kennedy had never stopped suspecting that there had been a conspiracy to kill his brother. Throughout 1964, some of his Justice Department deputies—and friends elsewhere—continued to search, at his request, for evidence that might point away from Lee Oswald as the lone gunman. Kennedy appeared worried, in particular, about the possibility that Castro or the Mafia was behind the assassination.

Kennedy would have known that there was a terrible logic to theories about a Cuban connection to his brother’s murder, since the United States had been trying for so long to assassinate Castro, sometimes with the help of the Mafia. By 1964, he had known for at least two years about the plots to kill the Cuban strongman, government records would later show. After the debacle at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, his brother placed him in charge of the administration’s secret war against Castro, known at the CIA as Operation Mongoose. Among officials who took part in Mongoose, there was little doubt that the operation was intended to bring about Castro’s violent death.

Kennedy had been aware of the Mafia’s involvement in CIA plots against Castro since at least May 1961, only four months after he was sworn in as attorney general, when he was warned by J. Edgar Hoover in a memo that the CIA was involved in “dirty business” in Cuba with Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. Kennedy clearly read the FBI memo because he wrote a note in the margin: “I hope this will be followed up vigorously.” A year later, he was told explicitly that the “dirty business” included CIA plots to assassinate Castro. In a meeting in May 1962 that he requested, Kennedy was told by CIA briefers the names of the organized crime figures involved in the plots, including Giancana. According to a CIA summary of the briefing, he claimed to his briefers from the spy agency that the Mafia’s involvement in the schemes came as an unwelcome surprise: “I trust that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you will let the attorney general know.” But was it a surprise, given Hoover’s report to him a full year earlier? And while Kennedy’s friends would later insist that he would never have approved of an order to assassinate a foreign leader, the fact is that the CIA’s efforts to murder Castro would continue until the final hours of the Kennedy administration, at a time when Robert Kennedy was running the secret war against Cuba. The CIA’s inspector general, the agency’s internal watchdog, would determine years later that on November 22, 1963, the day of President Kennedy’s murder, a CIA officer was meeting in Paris with a Cuban agent to hand him a poison pen—a ballpoint pen rigged with a hypodermic needle that could be filled with a deadly, commercially available poison known as Blackleaf 40—to take back to Havana. The inspector general wrote that “it is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent … and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro.” Even after his brother’s murder, Kennedy continued to receive reports about ongoing efforts by the Mafia, with or without the CIA’s backing, to kill Castro. In June 1964, at about the time of the attorney general’s trip to Germany and Poland, the CIA forwarded a detailed memo to his office about reports of a new offer by “Cosa Nostra elements,” working with anti-Castro Cubans, to murder the Cuban leader. “They have offered to assassinate Castro for $150,000,” the agency’s memo said.

Whether President Johnson knew in 1964 about the Castro plots could never be determined with certainty, although the long-secret recordings of his White House telephone calls suggest that the CIA told him nothing about the plots, and the Mafia’s involvement, until 1967. Still, in the first months of his presidency, Johnson appeared to have a strong suspicion that the assassination was somehow an act of revenge by a foreign government. That winter, Johnson told his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, who held the same job under Kennedy, that the assassination had been “divine retribution” for reported American involvement in the deaths of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, and of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam; the Vietnamese leader had been killed less than three weeks before Kennedy, during an American-backed coup d’état.

Johnson’s remark was quickly relayed to Kennedy, as the president might have suspected, and the attorney general was furious. “Divine retribution?” Kennedy asked in astonishment. In a conversation in April 1964 with his friend, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy described it as “the worst thing that Johnson” had ever said.

But was Johnson wrong? Whatever his fury toward the new president, Kennedy had his own suspicions that a foreign leader targeted for assassination by the Kennedy administration had simply struck first: Castro. According to Schlesinger, he asked Kennedy that fall—“perhaps tactlessly”—if he really believed that Oswald had acted alone. “He said that there could be no serious doubt that Oswald was guilty, but there was still argument if he had done it by himself or as part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by gangsters.”

So Kennedy faced a dilemma that June, when he received the letter from Chief Justice Warren, writing on behalf of the commission, asking if the attorney general had “any information suggesting that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy.”

Should Kennedy reveal what he knew about the Castro plots and his suspicions of a conspiracy that might involve Cuba? What would be the impact of the disclosure that he had been aware, for years, that the CIA had not only tried to kill Castro but had recruited Mafia chieftains to do it—the same mobsters who were supposedly targeted for prosecution by his Justice Department?

Kennedy’s political strategists would certainly not have welcomed any of that information becoming public, especially in the summer of 1964, when they were—sometimes bizarrely, it seemed—trying to whip up speculation that the attorney general was the obvious choice to be Johnson’s running mate that November. Although he did little to hide his loathing for Johnson, Kennedy also did not dampen the speculation about his candidacy. Opinion polls showed him, by a wide margin, the most popular choice for number-two on the Democratic ticket.

Kennedy delayed responding to Warren’s letter. “What do I do?” he wrote in a tiny, undated handwritten note to an aide who reminded him weeks later that the commission was awaiting his response.

Ultimately, though, on August 4, he signed a one-page letter to the chief justice that hinted at none of what he really knew or what he suspected:

I would like to state definitely that I know of no credible evidence to support the allegations that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy. I would like to assure you that all information relating in any way to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the possession of the Department of Justice has been referred to the President’s Commission for appropriate review and consideration. I have no suggestions to make at this time regarding any additional investigation which should be undertaken by the Commission prior to the publication of its report.

Given what would later be learned about Kennedy’s suspicions, the letter was, at best, evasive and, at worst, an attempt to throw the commission off the trail of evidence of a possible conspiracy. The wording of the letter might be literally true, but it masked his dark fears that Oswald had not acted alone. Kennedy might have no “credible evidence” of a conspiracy, but he had plenty of suspicion. He might not be aware of evidence “in the possession of the Department of Justice” to suggest a conspiracy, but it might exist elsewhere—at the CIA, especially.

Although the commission had already ruled out the need for his testimony, Kennedy closed the letter with an offer to appear before the panel and answer questions; it was an offer he could be confident would not be accepted. Other than President Johnson, the attorney general was the highest-ranking government official not required to give sworn testimony to the investigation.

50

THE OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR

THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

WASHINGTON, DC

AUGUST 1964

Lee Rankin was genuinely embarrassed over the demands that the commission made on the FBI, he said. The requests for information and assistance continued nonstop throughout the summer of 1964, even as the commission was moving to finish its report. On August 18, Rankin telephoned Alex Rosen, head of the bureau’s General Investigative Division, to thank the FBI for its willingness to carry out requests “regardless of how ridiculous the request might have seemed.”

In the final weeks of the investigation, FBI agents in Texas and across the border in Mexico fanned out to chase the commission’s new leads. Agents in Mexico City were asked to contact every silver store in that massive city in search of one that might have sold Oswald the bracelet he had given to Marina. The commission wanted the search conducted, even though its staff was convinced the bracelet was actually made in Japan and bought by Oswald after he returned to the United States. The FBI’s Mexico City office was asked to conduct a similar investigation of every photo shop where Oswald might have had passport photos taken for his visa application to Cuba.

More significantly, the commission wanted the FBI to conduct a thorough reinvestigation of the allegations of Silvia Odio. “Mrs. Odio’s reliability has been vouched for by several reputable people who know her,” Rankin wrote to Hoover on July 24, adding that the commission wanted Annie Odio, Silvia’s sister, to be reinterviewed as soon as possible. Hoover wrote back on August 12 to report that the FBI had interviewed Annie Odio and that, although she supported her sister’s account, the FBI was still convinced that the investigation was at a dead end. “No further action is contemplated in this particular matter in the absence of a specific request from the commission,” Hoover wrote.

Wesley Liebeler said that he was astonished by the letter. Why did the FBI have so little interest in following up on a seemingly credible witness whose account might point to conspirators in the president’s murder? He began his own detailed review of Odio’s claims, matching her account against what was known of the chronology of Oswald’s trip to Mexico. The outcome suggested to Liebeler that although time would have been extraordinarily tight, Oswald could have made the trip to Dallas in late September. If he had had access to a private car or had flown, he could have slipped into Dallas, if only for a matter of hours, before crossing the border into Mexico.

In late August, Liebeler drafted a detailed letter for Rankin to sign in which the commission would, effectively, demand that the FBI reopen and reinvestigate every part of the Odio story. Rankin could be sure the letter would not be well received by Hoover, but he sent it anyway. “It is a matter of some importance to the commission that Mrs. Odio’s allegations either be proved or disproved,” the letter said. “Would you please conduct the investigation necessary to determine who it was that Mrs. Odio saw in or about late September or early October 1963?” The letter offered Liebeler’s detailed analysis of the timetable of Oswald’s travels, and it noted the similarities between Odio’s description of one of the two Latino men at her door—“Leopoldo”—and a man who was reportedly seen in Oswald’s company in a New Orleans bar.