Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (71 page)

Laura Hunt, an elementary schoolteacher in Miami, confirmed that she was opposed to reopening the Kennedy assassination in her husband’s memoir. “Things were a little strained” within the family, she acknowledged. But she does not repudiate the book, and she emphasizes that Hunt, though ailing, was of sound mind when he was working on it. She also denies that Hunt’s speculations about a CIA role in the JFK assassination were prompted by any bitter feelings he might have harbored about the agency for not coming to his aid during Watergate. “He never felt bitter with the agency,” she said. He was not trying to “get some body back. Howard Hunt wasn’t made that way.”

Hunt’s most explosive revelation about the CIA and the Kennedy assassination is not contained in his book. Before he stopped telling his oldest son about his buried past, however, the old spy unburdened himself of a stunning secret. And this revelation was not speculative, but an eyewitness account. In 1963, Hunt recalled, he was invited by Frank Sturgis—the mob-friendly anti-Castro operative who later joined Hunt’s Watergate burglary team—to a clandestine meeting in a CIA safe house in Miami. At the meeting, a group of men—including David Morales—discussed what was referred to as “the big event,” which, it soon became clear, was a plot to kill President Kennedy. After Morales left, Sturgis asked Hunt, “Are you with us?” Hunt said he was “incredulous.”

“You guys have everything you need—why do you need me?” Hunt asked Sturgis.

“You could help with the cover-up,” Sturgis suggested.

Hunt was no Kennedy lover. He once told St. John he wanted to have a bumpersticker made reading: “Let’s finish the job—let’s hit Ted.” But Hunt insisted he did not join the plot, because he learned that Bill Harvey was involved, a man he regarded as “an alcoholic psycho.”

After Kennedy was shot down in Dallas, Hunt recounted, he was “haunted” by the assassination “like the rest of the country.” He felt “lucky” that he had not played “a direct role” in the conspiracy. But Hunt left his exact role in the plot hazy. In the audiotape he sent St. John in January 2004, he said, “I was a benchwarmer in [the plot],” adding cryptically, “I had a reputation for honesty and information was brought to me.”

Sitting in the Red Lion as the winter sun sank into the Pacific and the shadows fell over the coastal redwoods, St. John Hunt tried to make sense of his father’s truncated confession. Was his father a co-conspirator in the killing of President Kennedy? “At the end of the day, I just don’t know. But I do know that he at least had foreknowledge of it. He certainly knew a lot more than he said about it. I was just starting to get a lot out of him when they shut him up.”

Whatever Hunt did in his life, his son has found a way to forgive him. The eulogy that St. John delivered for his father at his funeral in Miami was an outpouring of love for the swashbuckling spy he called “the classic CIA man; an American James Bond.” If he was guilty of base deeds, it was out of a misguided sense of mission. “My personal feeling,” St. John told the assembled mourners, who included Hunt’s fellow Watergate convict Bernard Barker and aging anti-Castro militants like Felix Rodriguez, “is that my father’s deep sense of loyalty and patriotism for this was country was exploited by men of petty concerns and vastly inferior moral fiber.”

He has no qualms about making public his father’s JFK confession, St. John said later. Why? “Because it’s the truth. And I don’t see it as that terrible. Assassination is part of the American political culture. It was going on long before Kennedy and it will be going on long after us.”

IN RECENT YEARS, THE
Kennedy legacy has been clouded by a spate of books, documentaries, and articles that have attempted to demythologize Camelot by presenting JFK as a drug-addled, sex-deranged, mobbed-up risk taker. While Kennedy’s private life would certainly not pass today’s public scrutiny, this pathological interpretation misses the essential story of his presidency. There was a heroic grandeur to John F. Kennedy’s administration that had nothing to do with the mists of Camelot. It was a presidency that clashed with its own times, and in the end found some measure of greatness. Coming to office at the height of the Cold War and held hostage by their party’s powerful Southern racist wing, the Kennedy brothers steadily grew in vision and courage—prodded by the social movements of the sixties—until they were in such sharp conflict with the national security bureaucracy and Southern Democrats that they risked splitting their own administration and party. This is the fundamental historical truth about the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

And yet, caught up in the fashionable anti-Kennedy backlash of the times, prominent journalists like Christopher Hitchens dismiss JFK as “a vulgar hoodlum.” One result of this relentless Kennedy bashing has been to diminish the public outrage over JFK’s unsolved murder. After all, if President Kennedy really was such a sleazy character, where is the tragedy in his violent demise?

It has also become fashionable in all the media babble about Dallas that fills the air each year around November 22 for commentators to opine that “we will probably never know the truth about John F. Kennedy’s assassination”—a self-fulfilling prophecy that relieves them of any responsibility to search for the truth. Ironically, some of the more politically backward countries where Bobby Kennedy took his rapturous mission in the 1960s—including South Africa, Argentina, and Chile—have made strenuous, if painful, efforts to confront the deepest traumas of their past, including assassinations, kidnappings, and torture. In South Africa, this post-apartheid process of political and moral self-examination became known as “truth and reconciliation.” But in the United States, the darkest political mysteries of recent decades—including the assassination of President Kennedy—have yet to be fully explored. From Dallas to Vietnam to Iraq, the truth has consistently been avoided, the perpetrators have never fully answered for their actions. When the nation
has
mustered the courage to impanel commissions, these investigations soon come up against locked doors that remain firmly shut to this day. The stage for this reign of secrecy was set on November 22, 1963. The lesson of Dallas was clear. If a president can be shot down with impunity at high noon in the sunny streets of an American city, then any kind of deceit is possible.

Assassination researchers insist that it is not too late, even at this remote date, to revive the JFK investigation. Most people who could have shed light on the crime are now dead, researchers acknowledge, but the trail has not receded entirely into history’s far horizons. Researchers list a variety of actions that can still be taken. The government should be compelled to release the JFK files it is still withholding—including the 1,100 documents related to George Joannides that the CIA has admitted it still has locked away. The CIA should also be required to disclose the phone and travel records of other agents suspected of involvement in the JFK—and RFK—assassinations, such as David Morales. Washington should follow this by making a formal request to the Cuban and Mexican governments to release all their secret files on the case. The Justice Department should offer amnesty and waive government secrecy pledges for all those who step forward with relevant testimony. Lingering technical disputes about the events in Dealey Plaza—such as the hotly debated “acoustic fingerprints” on the Dallas police motorcycle Dictabelt that apparently indicated that as many as five shots were fired that day—should be resolved by utilizing the most sophisticated forensic resources, including those of the federal Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which has oddly refused to take on the case. Finally, the Kennedy family should be persuaded to completely open the papers under their control—including those of John and Robert Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—which are still subject to frustrating restrictions.

The assassination researchers are, of course, indefatigable by nature. That’s what has allowed them to carry on, through years of government obstruction, media ridicule, and the bewilderment of family and friends. But outside this shrinking community of hardy souls, a malaise hangs over the JFK crusade.

Some of those with a long history of involvement in the case are deeply pessimistic. When I visited Bob Blakey in November 2003, the week before the fortieth anniversary of the JFK assassination, he seemed resigned to the idea that the crime would never be solved. We spoke in his home near the University of Notre Dame campus, where he teaches law, sitting in over-stuffed chairs in his dimly lit study, where the flickering flames in the fireplace warded off the chill of an overcast afternoon. Near the end of the interview, Blakey told me that the Kennedys no longer seem important, at least not to those Americans who were born after JFK was shot. “The Kennedys are not part of this generation,” he said. “I teach this generation. [The assassination] is not a big deal for them. They grew up in a different world.”

So how will history resolve the Kennedy mystery? I asked him. “My guess is that the Warren Commission will carry the day,” said the man whose congressional investigation offered the first—and last—official challenge to the Warren Report. The lone gunman theory has the virtue of simplicity, Blakey explained. It was a dreary place to circle back to, after forty long years of exploration.

A couple of years later, I found myself at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, sitting in a quiet cubicle and reeling through Bobby Kennedy’s life in video. Maybe Blakey is right, and the Kennedy story is no longer relevant for many Americans. But the black and white footage flashing before me that day seemed to be loaded with painful meaning, even now.

The last reel I looked at was Bobby in 1968, and it included his appearance on a San Francisco public TV talk show called
Kaleidoscope
as he geared up for his final campaign. The interviewer asked pointed but polite questions, in a public television kind of way. But Bobby seemed pained and the interview took on the strained intensity of a psychodrama. In close-ups, the camera captured his raw, weather-ravaged face and scabbed lips. The country was angry and demoralized, the interviewer observed. He could also have pointed out that it was suffering a kind of moral rot and vacancy of the soul because of the ugly, no-exit war that had begun seeping into every corner of American life. In these brutal circumstances, why would he commit himself to the political arena? Kennedy was asked. Working for the public good was “no sacrifice,” Bobby replied. “The most unhappy people in the world are those who are involved in just themselves.”

But, even though he was on the eve of the political adventure of his life, Bobby did not seem happy. There was never a mask with Bobby. On camera that day, he was quiet, wistful, ironic. He was constitutionally incapable of the cheerful artifice and empty bravado that is required of American politicians. And yet, he really did believe in America—he simply refused to give in to what it was becoming.

After a long discussion of the country’s woes, the interviewer asked Bobby, “But you are an optimist?” Kennedy nodded and smiled his weary-eyed smile. “Just because you can’t live any other way, can you?” he replied. He was America’s first and last existential leader.

We live in a dark age of clashing fundamentalisms. The country is ruled by an administration that has made a cult of secrecy and obedience. We are caught up in another endless war, this time on “terror”—or perhaps it’s a struggle with fear itself. But in this bleakest of times, Bobby Kennedy’s message seems more compelling than ever.
We can’t go on, we must go on.
Do Americans still want the truth—starting with Dallas and going all the way to Guantánamo? Do they want to take back their country? I don’t know for certain. But I have to be optimistic. Just because there really is no other way, is there?