So we
went. We closed out our apartment, packed what we could carry into shoulder
bags, and we moved on. We did not return to say goodbye to anyone. Again that
was Nathan's choice. He said people would ask questions, and unless we worked
out what we were going to say it would become awkward and complex, and he
really couldn't be doing with the hassle. So we would just go. Disappear. For
my part, I felt our sudden disappearance would raise suspicion, that someone
might think we had drowned, that a report might be filed, and then there would
be questions. But I said nothing. Again I said nothing, and I could see from
Nathan's expression, could hear in the tone of his voice, that he had made his
decision and I either went along with it or left.
And
so I went, like a child, like a lamb, and Nathan Verney - a good man, a
preacher's son - led us all the way to Hell.
When
I think of the events that appear to have carried me here, I think again of
Robert Schembri and the days he spoke to me in August of 1972. I think of a man
who wove his threads of conspiracy into the most fantastic and brightly-colored
quilt.
I
believe I was the sleeper, the fall guy, in some minor conspiracy of my own.
I was
no Lee Harvey Oswald, no James Earl Ray, but in the smaller scheme of things I
had a part to play and I played it well. I walked into it like a deaf, dumb and
blind kid.
Nathan
and I used to talk politics, and though we never really either agreed or
disagreed on anything specific we did concur that Nixon was dangerous. January
20th 1969 had seen him inaugurated as President of the United States. Finally
he had achieved the position he'd been working towards since the early 1940s.
We believed that a committed and criminal fraternity of judges and lawyers and
international financiers had supported Nixon throughout his political career,
but it was Robert Schembri, the man who'd sat and talked to me about Kennedy,
who gave me a far greater understanding.
Schembri
had spoken to me over three meal periods, always with that same distant look in
his eyes, that feeling that I could have been anyone at all, but simultaneously
the sense that here I was listening to something valuable enough never to miss
a word. Like Schembri himself said:
a channel from the gods.
I
seem to recall it was a Tuesday, the second day I searched him out in the mess
hall at Sumter. Craning my neck across the hundreds of seated men, I saw him at
his usual corner table. I took my food and made a beeline for him, sat down,
and waited patiently while he arranged his food in neat concentric circles.
First the rice, then peas, and finally a neat pile of chicken pieces in the
center. When he was done he looked right at me, just for a moment, as if simply
to acknowledge I was there, and then he looked down and started talking.
Momentarily his speech would slow, his voice become quieter, and not wishing to
interrupt his flow I found myself leaning ever closer to hear every word that
came from his lips.
'In
1960, the evening before the New Hampshire primary,' Robert Schembri began,
'Frank Sinatra introduced a girl called Judith Exner to John Kennedy. A few
weeks after that Mister Sinatra introduced the same girl to Sam Giancana, the
Chicago Mafia boss. This girl continued an affair simultaneously with the most
powerful mobster in America and the most powerful political leader in the
world. Giancana had been hired by a former FBI and CIA operative called Robert
Maheu to form up assassination teams to go after Castro. Maheu told Giancana
that wealthy Cuban exiles were behind this thing, that that's where the money
would come from, but the money came directly from the CIA. Giancana put his
L.A. lieutenant, Johnny Roselli, in charge of the hit squads.
'In
1978, when the House Select Committee questioned him, Roselli said that those
teams were trained up for the Kennedy assassination as well. Shortly after his
testimony his body was found floating in an oil drum off the Florida coast.
Giancana never got a chance to testify. He was shot in Chicago. One point that
Roselli made was that the Warren Commission never questioned the possibility
that there were more than three shots fired at Kennedy. They listened to the
eyewitnesses, the eyewitnesses heard only three shots, and they took that as
gospel…'
Schembri
looked up at me. 'You payin' attention, kid?'
I
nodded a yes.
'Sure
as shit hope so… you only get this stuff once, you understand… and we don't get
into any kind of question and answer period later, eh?'
I shook
my head. Okay.
Schembri
nodded, spooned another mound of rice and peas into his mouth and seemed to
swallow without chewing.
'Roselli
intimated that there were up to three different assassination teams in Dallas
that day, and that many more shots were fired, the majority of them with
silenced weapons. Reports indicated from inspection of the road around the
vehicle, from the bodywork of the vehicle itself, that a great many more than
three bullets were aimed at JFK.'
Schembri
smiled knowingly, held up his spoon and moved it to emphasize each word he was
saying.
'And
now there's Nixon. Nixon's presidency was planned meticulously. Military
fanatics and industrialists were upset with Kennedy, upset that he didn't go to
war with the Soviet Union. The publisher of the
Dallas News,
a known
militant paper, told Kennedy that America needed a man on horseback to lead the
nation, that too many people in Texas and the Southwest saw him as riding
Caroline's tricycle.'
He
smiled sardonically.
'Kennedy
said he wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the
wind. Soon after he said that he was killed. After his death the South-East
Asian situation escalated with no visible provocation. John Foster Dulles,
ex-Secretary of State, still held phenomenal power in this Warfare State they
had created, and his brother Alan was head of OSS. With his brother protecting
him from any unpleasant consequences, Alan Dulles went ahead to satisfy the
military-industrial demands of the Far Right. Alan
Dulles
was the same guy who'd run Operation Paperclip towards the end of the Second
World War. He'd been posted in Switzerland, his function to round up and assist
German specialists in all the fields of armaments and military production. Between
1945 and 1952 they brought six hundred and forty-two German and foreign
specialists - scientists and the like - and their families into the U.S. and
placed them in senior positions within aerospace programs, war industries,
armaments manufacture and defense systems. In 1945 ex-General Reinhard Gehlen
joined forces with the OSS. Gehlen was placed in charge of wartime intelligence
for Foreign Armies East. Gehlen met with the main players at the Pentagon
itself - Hoover, Dulles, some others. That affiliation, Gehlen's intelligence
network and the OSS, became what is now known as the CIA.'
Schembri
lowered his spoon and leaned towards me. 'You didn't know this shit did you?'
he whispered.
I
shook my head.
'Tomorrow
I'll tell you about the fucking Ku Klux Klan, same folks you collided with down
in Carolina, eh?'
I
leaned closer. 'Tell me… tell me now.'
But
my informant leaned back slightly, and again smiled, that wry knowing smile
that made you feel he knew everything there was to know in the world, and all
of it was true.
'And
so there you had it… the Nazi experts in clandestine assassinations and
reversal of judicial proceedings became the tutors for Dulles and Richard
Helms. These were the people who invented the American-Soviet conflict and the
Cold War.'
I
felt frustration for a moment, a sense of agitation. 'What about the Ku Klux
Klan?' I asked. 'Tell me what you know about that.'
Schembri
again spooned in a mouthful of food and swallowed it without chewing. He looked
at me without seeing me.
'And
our friend Nixon… he applied to the FBI after graduating from law school. They
never replied to him. With the outbreak of World War Two he requested sea duty
and was assigned to the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command. He was out
there fifteen months and then he was posted to Alameda, California with Fleet
Air Wing 8 under special orders from the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. His job
was to wind up active contracts with aircraft firms such as Bell and Glenn
Martin. Those same six hundred and forty-two scientists were coming in at this
time, and with a healthy donation from the Guggenheim Foundation they secured a
hundred and sixty acres and the medieval castle built by the financier Jay
Gould at Sands Point on Long Island.
'Those
German and foreign scientists were stationed there under the auspices of the
Navy's Office of Research & Inventions. And the American states that were
most likely to benefit from this influx of German scientific brilliance were
those in the South and Southwest. The segregated, racist states were fuelled by
propaganda machines funded by those same departments, and it was in those
states that the majority of the military-industrial production facilities were
based.
'Nixon
himself was in New York, wondering where he would go career-wise. He decided to
move to Maryland, and coincidental with his move an advertisement appeared in
twenty-six different newspapers. The ad asked for a Congressman candidate, no
previous political experience, no political strings or obligations, but with a
few ideas for betterment of the country. Herman Perry, Vice-President of the
Bank of America, called Richard Nixon and asked if he was a Republican, and if
he was available.'
Schembri
nodded as if to grant Papal indulgence to his statement.
'Nixon
was a creation of some very interested people, a creation that was born as an
idea by the Committee of One
Hundred
Men in California in August of 1945, and wound up here, the early 1970s, with
the realization that Nixon is a fucking loon and he needs to disappear
quietly.'
Schembri
smiled and again emphasized his words with his spoon.
'And
I'll tell you something else, kid… if they hadn't shot Kennedy back then in
'63, if they'd gotten him out through the legal process or perhaps exposed his
sexual history and predilection, they would have shot Nixon instead of cooking
up this bullshit longwinded Watergate fiasco. They can't shoot Nixon, they wish
they could, but even they figure they might have a hard time pulling it off
twice. Anyway, Nixon's crazy enough to do himself in if someone doesn't get
there first.'
Suddenly
there was a commotion behind us. I turned to see the majority of General
Populace making its way towards the exits. The end of meal bell had sounded and
I hadn't noticed. My own food sat untouched in front of me. I snatched a piece
of bread, folded it, stuffed as much chicken as I could between the two halves
and buried it in my pocket.
'They're
all a bunch of crazies, kid… and you ran foul of a very small corner of that
world… you and your man Goldbourne, and all that shit that went down with Jack
Kennedy's brother. Tomorrow,' Schembri said, 'I'll tell you all about that
tomorrow.'
He
winked knowingly, put one last spoonful of rice into his mouth, and then he
stood and waited for the guard to come down and take him to his cell.
That
move in March of '69, the journey we took out to Panama City and Pensacola, was
really the beginning of the end.
If I try
to collapse this thing into one statement, like trying to synthesize the extent
and scope of my life into one paragraph, it is really about nothing more than a
friendship. My friendship with Nathan Verney was really the beginning and end
of everything. It was with Nathan Verney that I discovered the world, and I
cannot think of any significant event that occurred prior to his death that we
didn't share. It was always the two of us. From six to twenty-four years old we
ran parallel lives, and though one or other would veer momentarily to the left
or right, perhaps pause or slow or miss a step, there would always be that
moment a little way up the line where we would coincide once more.
Truth
be known, it would have been difficult to create a life after Nathan's death.
With him gone it was perhaps simpler to just vanish into the American judicial
and criminal system, to become a non-person, to disappear from the eyes and
minds of the world. That's what I had done, and sometimes I would wonder if I
hadn't
wanted
it that way.
There
have been times when I have tried to imagine what it would have been like to
grow old, to sit on some porch stoop or verandah, to recount tales of Eve
Chantry, of Sheryl Rose Bogazzi, of Caroline Lanafeuille and Linny Goldbourne,
of Marty Hooper and Larry James; to talk of the day the Army came to Greenleaf,
of Reverend Verney and the day Kennedy died; to reminisce about the baked ham
sandwich by Lake Marion where the smell was like the flowers and the fish and
the trees, and summer mimosa down near Nine Mile Road, and something like pecan
pie and vanilla soda all wrapped up in a basket of new-mown grass.