JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (112 page)

Wayne said goodbye to the pilot. With a sense of profound sickness, he left work to find a television set where he could watch the news of the president’s assassination unfold.

Until 1992, Wayne January lived alone with the nightmare of what the pilot had told him. Because of what he knew, he feared for his life and the lives of his wife and family. When the FBI and a few researchers asked him questions related to the assassination, he told them only about the couple with Oswald whom he had turned down when they tried to charter a plane for Friday the 22nd.
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Without his knowledge, the FBI then discredited him by dating the incident four months earlier, minimizing its importance and making a more delayed Oswald identification seem less plausible.

However, Wayne remained silent about the CIA pilot who knew the president was going to be killed, the colonel representing “Houston Air Center,” and the newly purchased CIA plane that took off from Red Bird Air Field the afternoon of November 22. He also kept secret the pilot’s prediction of what would happen to Robert Kennedy, as fulfilled by his murder in June 1968, “and any other Kennedy who gets into that position.”

In 1992 Wayne January broke his silence about the pilot’s revelation. As we have seen, author Matthew Smith had already interviewed him the year before about the couple with Oswald. After Smith showed him the FBI report that claimed falsely the incident occurred the previous July, the two men became good friends. January realized he had finally found someone he could trust with his long-held secret. He faxed to Smith at his home in Sheffield, England, a complete account of what the CIA pilot had said to him. Smith had been puzzled in Dallas at how January could be so sure in saying the CIA was behind the Kennedy assassination. Now he knew.

January told Smith that sending his faxed statement after thirty years of silence “seems to be a release of some kind that I don’t understand,” “a relief that seems to make me more relaxed.”
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He gave the British author permission to publish the story on the condition that he not be identified, because “he still feared for his life and for that of his wife.”
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Smith agreed. He used a pseudonym for January’s name and changed a few details to avoid identifying him.

The story of “Hank Gordon’s” experience with the CIA pilot at Red Bird Air Field subsequently appeared in Matthew Smith’s books,
Vendetta: The Kennedys
(1993) and
Say Goodbye to
America
(2001).
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After Wayne January died in 2002, Smith obtained permission from his widow to reveal his name.
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He did so at a November 2003 conference in Dallas and in his book,
Conspiracy—The Plot to Stop the Kennedys
(2005).
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Thanks to Wayne January’s friendship with a CIA pilot who risked confiding in him,
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and to January’s deeper friendship with Matthew Smith, in whom he risked confiding, we can now see more than we may want to see. We can see a possible commitment to a chain of covert-action murders that would extend from JFK to RFK and any other Kennedy liable to become president: “They are not only going to kill the President, they are going to kill Robert Kennedy and any other Kennedy who gets into that position.”

The Kennedy family has been well aware since John F. Kennedy’s murder as president, mirrored by Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s murder as a presidential candidate, how dangerous it is for one of them to aspire to the presidency. Others have attributed that peril to the office of the presidency, combined with the legendary hazard of being a Kennedy. When the danger is seen as more specific, however, from evidence that government agencies have conspired in their deaths, it is a peril not only for the Kennedys but for every U.S. citizen who believes in the right to change the government. JFK and RFK were targeted because they refused to comply with national security demands imposed upon them from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. Two and a half years into his presidency, enlightened by the Missile Crisis and emboldened by the hope of peace, JFK had reached a point where he began to transcend the ruling assumptions of national security. He was inspired to seek peace with such enemies of the state as Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro.

In short, the Kennedys believed in seeking a just, negotiated peace with the enemy. Their more secret, domestic enemies thought peace with justice was impossible or even undesirable. Having faced the total darkness on the planet that was its alternative, John and Robert Kennedy were prepared to wage peace with the same kind of dedication that we normally associate with waging war—a willingness to give their lives for the good of the country. If seeking peace in the resolute way they did is what makes one an enemy of our national security state, we have all become at least potential enemies of the state. Anyone can, and perhaps should, become a peacemaker, thereby becoming the natural enemy of a state whose purpose has become intertwined with waging war.

What does the nature of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy reveal about ourselves? What does it reveal about a national security state we have allowed to assume control over our lives? Have we reached the point where the state itself has become an enemy of the people, at least until we the people can manage to change, even revolutionize, its purpose?

Can we transform our lives, and the state of the United States of America, so as to practice the truth that waging peace is our only real security?

JFK’s death in Dallas preempted several decisions he was ready to make in Washington the following week. The first was the question of how to deal with his rebellious ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, who wanted to escalate and “win” the war the president had decided to withdraw from.

Robert Kennedy has commented on his brother’s loss of patience with an ambassador who would not carry out his instructions or even give him the courtesy of a response to those instructions: “The individual who forced our position at the time of Vietnam was Henry Cabot Lodge. In fact, Henry Cabot Lodge was being brought back—and the President discussed with me in detail how he could be fired—because he wouldn’t communicate in any way with us . . . The President would send out messages, and he would never really answer them . . . [Lodge] wouldn’t communicate. It was an impossible situation during that period of time.”
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According to RFK, the president in consultation with the Attorney General had already made the decision to fire Lodge: “We were going to try to get rid of Henry Cabot Lodge.” It was only a matter of “trying to work out how he could be fired, how we could get rid of him.”
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President Kennedy was scheduled to meet with Lodge on Sunday afternoon, November 24, as soon as JFK returned from his trip to Texas and Lodge from his post in Vietnam.
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Kennedy had prepared for his encounter with Lodge by inviting to it a strong dissenter to the Vietnam War, Under Secretary of State George Ball. He talked to Ball by phone on Wednesday night, November 20, right after the White House reception for the judiciary,
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making sure the most antiwar member of his administration would attend the Sunday meeting with Lodge.

It was George Ball who had warned Kennedy prophetically as early as November 1961 on Vietnam: “Within five years we’ll have three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again. That was the French experience. Vietnam is the worst possible terrain both from a physical and political point of view.”
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JFK responded: “George, you’re just crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.”
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However, George Ball was right, even underestimating by two hundred thousand the number of American soldiers who would be sent at one time (by Lyndon Johnson) to the paddies and jungles of Vietnam. Kennedy knew his own resistance to introducing combat troops in Vietnam, but not that he would be killed before he could effectively reverse course there.

It was his successor as president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who instead presided over the Sunday, November 24, meeting with returning ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. As
New York
Times
reporter Tom Wicker described the relationship between the two men, LBJ had a much less critical view of Lodge than did JFK, who planned to fire him: “Lodge [was] an old friend of Johnson’s from their Senate days, whom Johnson once had recommended to Eisenhower for Secretary of Defense, and who was thus close enough to the new President to speak his mind.”
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Johnson, a firm believer in an anti-communist theology, put faith in the counsel of his old friend Lodge, who was among the Cold War elite.

Lodge told Johnson, “If Vietnam is to be saved, hard decisions will have to be made. Unfortunately, Mr. President, you will have to make them.”
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Unlike Kennedy, Johnson was an unrepentant Cold Warrior. Given Lodge’s authoritative shove toward a wider war, the new president thought he knew what had to be done. A person present at the meeting said Johnson scarcely hesitated.

“I am not going to lose Vietnam,” he said. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”
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To keep making the hard decisions for war that Lodge recommended, Johnson would have to win the presidential election less than a year away, when he would run shrewdly and successfully as the “peace candidate” against Senator Barry Goldwater. However, in the course of his campaign rhetoric for peace, Johnson did not want his military advisers to confuse him with his predecessor’s fatal turn in that direction. He made clear to them that he and they were definitely on the same page.

One month after his meeting with Lodge, at a White House reception on Christmas Eve 1963, Johnson told the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Just let me get elected, and then you can have your war.”
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JFK’s murder kept him from being the one to make critical decisions in Washington that would decide the fate of not only Vietnam but also Indonesia.

As we have seen, when he left for Texas, Kennedy had said he was willing to accept an invitation from President Sukarno to visit Indonesia in the spring of 1964. Such a turn of events, sought strongly by Sukarno, would have signaled in a dramatic way Kennedy’s support for independent third world nations. As one analyst pointed out, Sukarno was “the most outspoken proponent of Third World neutralism in the Cold War.” Sukarno had himself coined the term “third world” at the first Conference of Non-Aligned Nations that he hosted at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955.
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Kennedy’s support for Sukarno was another sign of how out of step he was with his national security state. Sukarno was a close ally in the Non-Aligned Movement with Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah, a leading African nationalist whom Kennedy was also helping—to the dismay of advisers opposed to Nkrumah, including even Robert Kennedy. When JFK challenged the National Security Council in November 1961 by announcing he had decided to lend Kwame Nkrumah the money for his Volta Dam project in Ghana, he added, “The Attorney General has not yet spoken, but I can feel the hot breath of his disapproval on the back of my neck.”
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However, regardless of who opposed him in his support for Nkrumah, the president was determined “to dramatize the new American attitude toward non-alignment throughout Africa.”
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Sukarno’s invitation to him to visit Indonesia gave JFK the further opportunity to support the leader of the nonaligned bloc in Southeast Asia.

A presidential visit to Sukarno would have been a major setback to the corporate leaders with a heavy stake in third world resources, particularly in oil-and-mineral-rich Indonesia, where they accused Sukarno of having gone Communist by expropriating their holdings. Yet Sukarno had received a warm welcome from Kennedy at the White House. In his invitation to JFK to visit Indonesia, Sukarno promised him in return “the grandest reception anyone ever received here.”
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In visiting Indonesia, Kennedy would cross a threshold by demonstrating publicly his long-held support of third world nationalism. In terms of the policies he was forging in Indonesia, Ghana, and the Congo, with their adverse impact on multinational corporations, the president was being seen increasingly as a class traitor and a Cold War heretic.
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Sitting on Kennedy’s desk for his signature when the Oval Office was taken over by Johnson was a document critical to the future of United States–Indonesian relations. It was a presidential determination, required by an act of Congress, that said continuing U.S. economic aid to Indonesia was essential to the national interest. As Kennedy aide Roger Hilsman observed, “Since everyone down the line had known that President Kennedy would have signed the determination routinely, we were all surprised when President Johnson refused.”
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