Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (48 page)

For the wily Washington operator, it must have been a case of keeping an enemy close. Helms was not interested in befriending Kennedy or consoling him, said RFK aide John Nolan, who observed the CIA official continue to court Kennedy when he became a senator. “Dick Helms was not a warm and cuddly guy. He was a consummate bureaucrat, and in that sense a savvy operator in Washington power games…. Calling Bob Kennedy every morning…was his way of either currying or maintaining favor with Bob Kennedy.”

Bobby clearly felt no warmth for Helms. The day after the assassination, the deputy CIA director handwrote a condolence letter to Kennedy on his home stationery. “There is nothing for me to say that has not been said better by many others,” wrote Helms. “When you sent me to see the president Tuesday afternoon [to discuss the Cuban arms allegedly found in Venezuela], he never looked better, seemed more confident or appeared more in control of the crushing forces around him. Friday struck me personally. Mrs. Helms and I extend our deepest sympathy and heartfelt condolences to you and the family. We pray that you will continue to give us your leadership. Respectfully and sadly, Dick Helms.” Helms’s letter was smoothly crafted—down to his less-than-sincere “prayer” that Bobby remain the CIA’s master. But it apparently left Kennedy unmoved. “Dear Dick,” he perfunctorily replied two weeks later. “My thanks to you.” Condolence letters from a range of other well-wishers—Kirk Douglas, Hugh Downs, even Soviet ambassador Dobrynin—elicited warmer responses from Kennedy.

As Hoover did with the FBI, Dick Helms—working with his old mentor Allen Dulles—made certain that the CIA was insulated from the Warren Commission’s investigation. Dulles was the most diligent member of the commission. “I don’t think Allen Dulles ever missed a meeting,” Warren later recalled. Mark Lane would comment that the assassination panel should have been called “the Dulles Commission.” The former CIA chief had lobbied hard to get appointed to the panel. He lost no time in establishing himself as its dominant player, expertly deflecting the investigation away from the spy agency and herding his fellow panelists toward the lone gunman conclusion. No one in the mainstream press commented on the striking irony of the man whose career had been terminated by President Kennedy leading the inquiry into his murder. After being forced into political exile by JFK in 1962, the embittered Dulles found it hard to adjust to life outside Washington’s whirling power center. “He had a very difficult time to decompress,” observed James Angleton, who made a point of visiting his old colleague two or three times a week at his house. His service on the commission brought Dulles back to life. Though no longer on the CIA payroll, he served as the agency’s undercover man on the commission, leaking information to Angleton, with whom he continued to confer regularly.

Meanwhile, Helms moved swiftly to limit the CIA’s own probe of the assassination, taking the case away from the bright, aggressive official to whom it was originally assigned—a well-respected forty-three-year-old covert operations veteran named John Whitten—and handing it to the spooky wizard Angleton. Helms removed Whitten from the investigation at a December 6, 1963, meeting after the conscientious agent complained that information about Oswald—on whom the CIA had maintained files for at least three years—and his Cuba-related activities was being withheld from him. With Whitten out of the picture, the CIA’s probe of the Kennedy assassination soon became mired in Angleton’s misty swamps, where he and his counterintelligence sorcerers strained mightily to draw a connection between Dallas and Moscow.

Angleton, whose counterintelligence unit was in charge of monitoring defectors to the Soviet Union like Oswald, drew gauzy theories about the ex-Marine’s alleged KGB role. But Bobby Kennedy and his Justice Department team did not buy the spook’s theories. “A stranger man I never met—he just gave me the creeps,” said Nick Katzenbach, who talked to Angleton on several occasions. Angleton was known to loathe President Kennedy, whom he came to regard—in his alcohol-fueled paranoia—as an agent of the Soviet Union. If the Soviets had launched their doomsday missiles, he darkly muttered to reporters late in his career, the Kennedys “would have been safe in their luxury bunker, presumably watching World War III on television, [while] the rest of us would have burned in hell.”

Years later, as newly appointed CIA director William Colby prepared to sack Angleton in a sweeping effort to purge the agency of its past sins, the fallen spymaster made a strange and airy remark apparently related to the Kennedy assassination. In December 1974, pursued by the dogged Seymour Hersh, who was then investigating the CIA’s illegal domestic operations for the
New York Times
, Angleton suddenly blurted to the reporter, “A mansion has many rooms…I’m not privy to who struck John.” What did the cryptic remark mean? “I would be absolutely misleading you if I thought I had any fucking idea,” says Hersh today. “But my instinct about it is he was basically laying off [blame] on somebody else inside the CIA, and the whole purpose of the conversation was to convince me to go after somebody else and not him. And also that he was a completely crazy fucking old fart.”

In May 1978, John Whitten again surfaced in relation to the Kennedy probe, appearing before the House Select Committee on Assassinations to discuss his aborted investigation. Testifying for seven hours in secret session, using his old CIA code name “John Scelso,” the former agent—then living in Austria, where he had fled the intelligence world to sing with the Vienna Men’s Choral Society—drew a disturbing picture of the machinations of his former bosses, Dick Helms and Jim Angleton. Helms hid the CIA’s assassination plots against Castro from him, Whitten told the two committee investigators who were questioning him. If he had known about the plots, testified Whitten, he would have zeroed in on the CIA’s Miami station and conducted a thorough investigation of its activities. He told the congressional investigators that he was stunned to learn that Helms had chosen Bill Harvey—a “ruthless guy who was, in my opinion, a very dangerous man”—to run the assassination operation against Castro. When Harvey brought mobster Johnny Rosselli into the fold, Whitten added, it reenforced the sinister character of the scheme. “The very thought of Helms entrusting Harvey to hire a criminal to have the capacity to kill somebody violates every operational precept, every bit of operational experience, every ethical consideration.” Moreover, Whitten declared, it was a “morally highly reprehensible act” for Helms to withhold the Castro assassination plots from the Warren Commission. He had obviously done so “because he realized it would have cost him his job and precipitated a crisis for the agency.”

Then Whitten was asked an even more explosive question: Could Harvey have been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy? His elliptical reply was worthy of a longtime spy. “He was too young to have assassinated McKinley and Lincoln,” Whitten said.

Whitten also offered an unsettling view of Angleton. He regarded him as psychologically unsound, finding his “understanding of human nature…his evaluation of people, to be a very precarious thing.” Then came another provocative question: Did Angleton have ties to organized crime? This time Whitten’s answer was blunt: “Yes.” Angleton had covered for his Mafia associates in federal investigations, added Whitten, and he had used them in Cuba operations.

If John Whitten and his thirty-agent team had been allowed to carry out the CIA’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, the Warren Commission would have found itself deeply enlightened by their work. But Richard Helms and James Angleton made sure that did not happen. “Whitten was a rare CIA hero in the Kennedy assassination story whose personal odyssey is a poignant but unsettling reminder that inquiries into national tragedy can be compromised early on,”
Washington Post
reporter Jefferson Morley has observed. Without an investigative unit of its own, the Warren Commission was utterly dependent on the information provided by Hoover at the FBI and Helms and Angleton at the CIA. The commission boasted some of the most distinguished names in Washington—from Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren on down—but its mission was compromised from the very start by its investigative weakness. The blue-ribbon panel would be the helpless pawn of two agencies that Robert Kennedy considered his mortal political enemies.

“NICK, WHAT DO I
do?” wrote Bobby in his tight, tiny script on the letter he received from Earl Warren on June 12, 1964. There was a plaintive quality to Kennedy’s question, which was directed to his deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach, the man he had asked to take over Warren Commission-related duties at the Justice Department. Kennedy was in a dilemma. He had so far avoided testifying before the Warren Commission, but now the chairman—a man he greatly respected—was writing to tell him that before the panel wrapped up its investigation, it needed to hear directly from the attorney general. “In view of the widely circulated allegations on this subject,” Warren wrote, “the Commission would like to be informed in particular whether you have any information suggesting that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy. Needless to say, if you have any suggestions to make regarding the investigation of these allegations or any other phase of the Commission’s work, we stand ready to act upon them.”

Kennedy had made it clear to Katzenbach that he wanted nothing to do with the Warren Commission. “He said he didn’t give a damn whether there was any investigation,” the former Kennedy aide recalled. “‘What’s the difference? My brother’s dead.’ That’s what he would say to me.” But as Katzenbach suspected, that was not the full story behind Bobby’s refusal to cooperate with the commission.

Kennedy was not ready to publicly reveal everything he knew, and he certainly was not going to tell it to the Warren Commission—a panel that, despite its august composition, was under the control of his political enemies at the FBI and CIA. In true Kennedy fashion, he wanted to control any investigation of the crime—not only to ensure its authenticity, but to prevent any damage to his brother’s legacy and his own political future. Bobby knew that if the Kennedy administration’s secret war against Castro—a war that he was supposed to be overseeing—was revealed as the source of the plot against his brother, the family’s image could be badly tarnished.

Like others close to Kennedy, Katzenbach sensed that he was plagued by feelings of guilt over Dallas. “My own feeling was that Bobby was worried that there might be some conspiracy and that it might be his fault,” Katzenbach says today, sitting in the comfortably stuffed study of his stone house outside Princeton, New Jersey. “I think the idea that he could be responsible for his brother’s death might be the most terrible idea imaginable. It might very well have been that he was worried that the investigation would somehow point back to him.”

Kennedy’s political enemies—including Lyndon Johnson—were quick to play on his sense of guilt when it suited their purposes. Within days of the assassination, LBJ—irritated with Kennedy for a series of real and imagined slights, including brushing past him to embrace Jackie when Air Force One returned to Washington—was making incendiary comments to former JFK aides, knowing they would get back to Bobby, suggesting that the Kennedys themselves were responsible for the terrible fate that had befallen Jack. “I want to tell you why Kennedy died,” Johnson told White House staffer Ralph Dungan. “Divine retribution…divine retribution. He murdered Diem and then he got it himself.” The accusation was not true—JFK had dithered on the decision to back the coup in Saigon, and was appalled by its bloody outcome—but it was an expertly aimed dart at a man haunted by the notion that he and his brother had been “more energetic than wise on a lot of things.”

Now Earl Warren was asking Bobby to resolve his inner turmoil about the assassination and tell everything he knew about Dallas. But he simply could not do it. Kennedy turned to Katzenbach to get him out of his predicament.

Conspiracy researchers would later blame the deputy attorney general for playing a key role in the government’s cover-up of the assassination. “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large…[and] speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off,” wrote Katzenbach in a post-assassination memo that would be widely quoted as evidence of his complicity in a cover-up. But Nick Katzenbach was a Kennedy loyalist—the man Bobby had called upon many times in the heat of battle, including the raging night at Ole Miss—and in the traumatic days after Dallas he was primarily responding to signals from his boss.

Katzenbach worked out a deal for Kennedy with Warren and the commission’s chief counsel, Lee Rankin. In return for being excused from testifying before the commission, Bobby would be required to sign a letter written by Warren Commission attorney Howard Willens, which read, “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.” After hesitating for several weeks, Kennedy finally signed the letter, though he knew it to be untrue, and had it delivered to Willens on August 4.

The pact Robert Kennedy made was a fateful one, for it would put his name on record as endorsing the Warren Report—a document that, as time passed, would be widely condemned as a monumental government fraud. For the rest of his life, Kennedy would be forced to publicly defend the official version of his brother’s assassination—a predicament that filled him with increasing turmoil over the years, since he believed that its central conclusion about a lone assassin was false.

Kennedy made his first public statement about who was responsible for his brother’s murder during a trip to Poland in late June 1964. Despite a cool reception from the Communist authorities, Bobby and Ethel were given a raucous greeting by the Polish people. In the town square of Cracow, the old university town, a youthful crowd thronged their car, pelting them with flowers and serenading them with “Sto Lat”—“May you live a hundred years!”—while the Kennedys responded with an improvised version of a favorite family song, “When Polish Eyes Are Smiling.” The emotional Polish crowds—which unnerved government officials in Warsaw as well as in Washington—were the first sign of the Kennedy cult that was starting to sweep the world. The long-dispirited Bobby came alive in the crush of the crowds, climbing on top of the U.S. ambassador’s car with Ethel and denting the rooftop (to the horror of the rigidly proper envoy), and clasping the beseeching hands that reached out to him.