The Kennedy Half-Century (110 page)

10
. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali,
“One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–64
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 344–45. Fursenko and Naftali also say that “Walton, and presumably Kennedy, wanted Khrushchev to know that only RFK could implement John Kennedy’s vision and that the cooling that might occur in U.S.-Soviet relations because of Johnson would not last forever” (345–46).

11
. Thomas P. O’Neill,
Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill
(New York: Random House, 1987), 178.

12
. Theodore C. Sorensen,
Kennedy
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 750; personal interview with Ted Sorensen, October 22, 2010. Others have been less convinced by the Douglass volume. John McAdams, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University, calls Douglass’s book “a self-indulgent political fantasy.” “As bad as Douglass’ account of Kennedy’s foreign policy is,” wrote McAdams in a scathing review entitled “Unspeakably Awful,” “his depiction of a plot to murder JFK is worse—unspeakably bad, in fact. To paraphrase Thomas Merton, Douglass’ muse and inspiration, the bunk and nonsense Douglass recycles goes beyond the capacity of words to describe. He is utterly uncritical of any theory, any witness, and any factoid, as long as it implies conspiracy.” John McAdams, “Unspeakably Awful,”
Washington Decoded
, December 11, 2009,
http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2009/12/unspeakably-awful.html
 [accessed May 18, 2011].

13
. Jefferson Morley, “JFK: ‘It [A Military Coup] Could Happen in this Country,’” JFK Facts, January 21, 2013,
http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/quote/jfk-it-a-military-coup-could-happen-in-this-country/#more-2129 [accessed January 22, 2013].

14
. In theory, the cabal could also have been the opposite: Communist-inspired. In April 1961, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent Attorney General Robert Kennedy a memo admitting that the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA’s parent organization) had been infiltrated by a “Communist element” that “created problems and situations which even to this day affect US intelligence operations.” See Hoover to RFK, April 21, 1961, NARA Record Number 124-90092-10011, Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=99112&relPageId=3
 [accessed April 16, 2013].

15
. Lindsay Porter,
Assassination: A History of Political Murder
(New York: Overlook Press, 2010), 15, 93, 160–61.

16
. According to Arthur Schlesinger, “Marvin Watson of Lyndon Johnson’s White House staff told Cartha DeLoach, [a senior official] of the FBI that Johnson ‘was now convinced [1967] there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson stated the president felt that CIA had had something to do with this plot’ (
Washington Post
, December 13, 1977).” See Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 616.

17
. Personal interview with Bill Alexander, Dallas, January 14, 2011. It is unclear whether any copies of the newspaper, the
Dallas Morning News
, were actually printed containing this charged information—Alexander says two thousand were—but they were either not distributed or do not survive, as far as we can determine. Yet Alexander is correct that the
“Communist conspiracy” charge was considered Friday afternoon and evening. As Gary Mack of the Sixth Floor Museum notes, this internal debate explains an important aspect of the November 22 timeline: “Clearly, something caused a delay [in charging Oswald with JFK’s murder] since Oswald was charged with Tippit hours before he was charged with Kennedy. The decision whether or not to amend the charge by removing ‘Communist conspiracy’ was a pretty darn good reason.” E-mail from Gary Mack, August 30, 2011.

18
. Did President Johnson have ironclad evidence of his suspicions, or were these his surmises after the passage of years? The written and testimonial record is not clear, though one naturally assumes that a sitting president has access to the people and documents needed to form conclusions of these sorts.

19
. Joseph A. Califano, Jr., “Letter to the Editor: A Concoction of Lies and Distortions,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 28, 1992: A15.

20
. Max Holland, “The Assassination Tapes,”
Atlantic Monthly
, June 2004,
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/holland_atlantic.htm
 [accessed July 27, 2011].

21
. G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings,
The Plot to Kill the President
(New York: Times Books, 1981), 140.

22
. Henry Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation Into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 309.

23
. “Dousing a Popular Theory,”
Time
, October 2, 1978,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,948669,00.html
 [accessed August 16, 2011].

24
. Jefferson Morley,
Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 225–26. Morley believes that Washington silenced Mann because a full investigation could have “revealed that the CIA and FBI had been playing close attention to the FPCC and Oswald in the years, months and weeks before JFK was killed.” See “At the Newseum: Epstein’s Unconvincing Indictment of the Pro-Castro Assassin,” JFK Facts, April 8, 2013,
http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/news/at-the-new seum-epsteins-unconvincing-indictment-of-the-pro-castro-assassin/#more-4118
 [accessed April 11, 2013].

25
. Kennedy told the Florida Chamber of Commerce in Tampa on November 18: “I do not think that there is any doubt that Fidel Castro, as a symbol of revolt in this hemisphere, has faded badly. Every survey, every report, I think every newspaperman, every publisher, would agree that because Mr. Castro has embraced the Soviet Union and made Cuba its satellite, that the appeal that he had in the late fifties and early sixties as a national revolutionary has been so badly damaged and scarred that as a symbol, his torch is flickering. We have not been successful in removing Mr. Castro. We should realize that that task is one which involves not only the security of the United States, but other countries. It involves possibilities of war. It involves danger to people as far away as West Berlin, Germany, countries which border upon the Soviet Union in the Middle East, all the countries that are linked to us in alliance, as the Soviet Union is so intimately linked with Cuba … In answer to your question, Mr. Castro still is in control in Cuba, and still remains a major danger to the United States.” In Miami later that day, Kennedy added: “It is important to restate what now divides Cuba from my country and from the other countries of this hemisphere. It is the fact that a small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. They have made Cuba a victim of foreign imperialism, an instrument of the policy of others, a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other American Republics. This,
and this alone, divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible.” These tough words were delivered in two cities with large numbers of Cuban-Americans. It is not unreasonable to assume that Castro would have been interested in monitoring Kennedy’s Texas speeches to see if he continued this theme in a state with a different population mix. See John F. Kennedy, “Address and Question and Answer Period in Tampa Before the Florida Chamber of Commerce,” November 18, 1963, Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley,
The American Presidency Project
,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9526
 [accessed January 7, 2013]; and “Address in Miami Before the Inter-American Press Association,” November 18, 1963, Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley,
The American Presidency Project
,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9529
 [accessed January 7, 2013].

26
. Brian Latell,
Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 213–21.

27
. “JFK Assassination Quotes by Government Officials,” Mary Ferrell Foundation,
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/JFK_Assassination_Quotes_by_Government_Officials
 [accessed May 19, 2011]; Harris Wofford,
Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 416–18; Henry Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 309; “Dousing a Popular Theory,”
Time
, October 2, 1978,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,948669,00.html
 [accessed May 31, 2011]; “Cable to CIA Director,” March 3, 1964, “Latin American Division Work Files,” Box 1, Record Group 263, Folder “WF02:F3,” Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

28
. Martin Roberts, “Cuban Ex-Intelligence Chief Recalls JFK Assassination,”
Washington Post
, July 12, 2010.

29
. Telephone interview with Edward Martino, May 8, 2013. Martino, who has apparently not sought publicity nor profited from his story, permitted my interview with him to be cited but requested that no direct quotations be used. See also Larry Hancock, “If There Was a JFK Conspiracy, Wouldn’t Somebody Have Talked?” JFK Facts, January 2, 2013,
http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/experts/if-there-was-a-jfk-conspiracy-wouldnt-somebody-have-talked/
 [accessed May 10, 2013].

30
. The term refers to an intensely propagandized individual who has been programmed subconsciously to act as an assassin, on the orders of a foreign power. Richard Condon wrote a thriller novel by this name, and it first appeared in a film released in 1962, starring, among others, Frank Sinatra. See Hal Hinson, “The Manchurian Candidate,”
Washington Post
, February 13, 1988.

31
. “Discussion Between Chairman Khrushchev and Mr. Drew Pearson, RE: Lee Harvey Oswald,” May 27, 1964, NARA Record Number: 104-10150-10113, Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=51190&relPageId=2
 [accessed January 7, 2013]. The memo containing the details of this conversation, leaked by Pearson and his wife, was signed by Richard Helms, CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans.

32
. “Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” John F. Kennedy Library website,
http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty.aspx
 [accessed May 19, 2011]; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
(Boston: First Mariner Books, 2002), 905. Interview with Sergei Khrushchev, November 2, 2011, Charlottesville, Virginia. Richard Holmes, a seasoned British diplomat who was stationed in Moscow between
1961 and 1962, believes that JFK might have been the victim of KGB vigilantes seeking revenge for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Holmes raises interesting questions that give pause: Why did three Soviet diplomats stationed in Mexico City spend their Saturday morning meeting with Oswald, a person who was supposedly uninteresting to them? And why did these diplomats send a classified telegram to Moscow immediately after the meeting? See Richard Holmes,
A Spy Like No Other: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the KGB Links to the Kennedy Assassination
(London: Biteback Publishing, 2012).

33
. “Yeltsin Gives Clinton JFK File,”
Washington Post
, June 20, 1999; Max Holland, “A Cold War Odyssey: The Oswald Files,”
Cold War International History Project Bulletin
, issue 14/15, Washington Decoded,
http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/files/a_coldwar_odyssey.pdf
 [accessed May 24, 2011]. On November 25, 1963, Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan gave the Kremlin a report on conversations he had with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other American officials about the assassination. Mikoyan wrote, “Judging from everything, the U.S. government does not want to involve us in this matter, but neither does it want to get into a fight with the extreme rightists; it clearly prefers to consign the whole business to oblivion as soon as possible.” See “Documents Handed to President Clinton by Russian President Boris Yeltsin,” Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=929&relPageId=72
 [accessed August 5, 2011]. The Soviet high command also discovered a letter dated November 9, 1963, that Oswald had apparently sent to the Soviet embassy in Washington asking for information on “the arrival of our Soviet entrance visa’s [
sic
] as soon as they come.” The Soviets thought that the letter might be a forgery mailed by the true assassins who wanted to link Oswald to the USSR. See
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=929&relPageId=95
 [accessed August 5, 2011].

34
. One of the most intriguing books on the Mafia’s ties to the Kennedy assassination is David Kaiser’s
The Road to Dallas
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). Kaiser believes that Oswald had originally been hired to kill Castro, but targeted Kennedy after the Cuban embassy in Mexico City turned down his request for a travel visa. The Mafia despised both leaders.

35
. Coppola, F. F. (director). (2010).
The Godfather, Part II
(Coppola Restoration) [Bluray] [motion picture]. United States: Paramount Home Entertainment.