JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (133 page)

[
751
]. Premier Nikita Khrushchev liked to call attention to Pope John’s personal medallion that was given to him through Norman Cousins. He told Cousins, “I keep it on my desk at all times. When [Communist] Party functionaries come to see me, I play with it rather ostentatiously. If they don’t ask me what it is right away, I continue to let it get in the way of the conversation, even allowing it to slip through my fingers and to fall on the floor, so that they have to watch out for their toes. Inevitably, I am asked to explain this large engraved disc. ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘it’s only a medal from the Pope . . .’”

When Cousins told Kennedy this story, the president smiled at both the atheist premier’s pride in papal recognition and the ironic contrast to his own situation. “You know,” he said, “that’s one advantage a Communist leader has over an American President, especially a Catholic. Khrushchev can go out of his way to boast about receiving a gift from the Pope. I’ve got to be careful about these things.” Cousins,
Improbable
Triumvirate
, pp. 108, 119.

[
752
].
Pacem in Terris
, pp. 50-51.

[
753
]. Norman Cousins’s hand is particularly evident in one turn of phrase found in this central paragraph of the American University address. On November 24, 1958, Cousins had written in a letter to a Presidium Member of the Soviet Cultural Relations Society in Moscow: “the overriding need of mankind today is to
make the world safe for diversity
” (emphasis added). Norman Cousins to Mrs. L. D. Kislova, November 24, 1958; p. 3. Lawrence S. Wittner identified this very specific contribution of Cousins to the text of the American University address in his
Resisting the Bomb
, p. 572, note 18. Cousins’s letter to Mrs. Kislova, shared with me by Professor Wittner, is from Box 208 of the Cousins Papers at UCLA.

[
754
]. “Commencement Address at American University in Washington,” June 10, 1963.
Public Papers of the
Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963
, pp. 462-64.

[
755
]. Nikita Khrushchev to Averell Harriman. Cited by Schlesinger,
Thousand Days
, p. 904.

[
756
]. Associated Press dispatch from Vatican City that appeared in the New York
Herald Tribune
(European edition) on June 7, 1963.

[
757
]. S. Khrushchev,
Nikita Khrushchev and the Making of a Superpower
, p. 670. According to Sergei Khrushchev, his father refused to approve the mass production of tactical nuclear weapons because of their heightening the danger of war as well as their economic liability: “All these ‘small things’ struck Father as being very dangerous because of their down-to-earth quality, which lowered the threshold of fear. Moreover, such ‘treats’ could be extraordinarily expensive.”

[
758
]. Ibid., p. 676.

[
759
]. Ibid., pp. 676, 719-20.

[
760
]. In addition to the transmission of the Soviet media, Soviet citizens heard the American University address from the U.S. government’s Voice of America, broadcast from outside the U.S.S.R., which the Soviet government suddenly stopped jamming. Sorensen,
Kennedy
, p. 733. What U.S. citizens seem to have lacked for access to the president’s peacemaking speech was a Voice of America in their own country.

[
761
]. Statement by Ralph Leon Yates to FBI special agent Ben S. Harrison, November 26, 1963, Dallas, Texas. Reproduced by John Armstrong on his CD-Rom for
Harvey and Lee
, “1963 November 1-21,” image 22.

[
762
]. Ibid.

[
763
]. Ibid., image 23. In his first FBI interview, Ralph Yates said the man raised a question that (if seen later in retrospect) would suggest a connection between the hitchhiker and Jack Ruby: “Yates stated as they drove along, the man had asked him if he knew a certain party, whose name Yates cannot recall now, and he had indicated to this man he did not. He said the man then asked if he had ever been to the Carousel Club [owned by Jack Ruby] and Yates had replied that he had serviced refrigerators in the past in a number of clubs and that possibly he had been to this one, but he did not recall.” Ibid., image 22.

In his second FBI interview, in which he made and signed a first-person statement, Yates remembered that the “certain party” mentioned by the hitchhiker was in fact Jack Ruby: “The man then asked me if I knew a Jack Rubenstein, and I said, ‘Who?’ The man then said that Jack Rubenstein was more commonly known as Jack Ruby, and Ruby ran the Carousel Club. I then asked the man if Ruby ran Jack’s Branch Office Lounge on Industrial, and the man said that he didn’t. I told the man that I had serviced refrigerators in a number of clubs, in the past, and had possibly been to the Carousel Club, but did not remember it.” Yates, December 10, 1963, image 24.

The hitchhiker’s remarks pointing toward Ruby, whether implicitly or explicitly, were apparently part of the fallback, Mob-connected part of the scenario. The purpose, as we shall see, was to draw on Ruby’s Mob involvements to implicate Organized Crime as a second-level (false) sponsor of the assassination. A Mob conspiracy to kill Kennedy was then used to replace the first-level, lone-assassin portrayal of Oswald when it inevitably fell to pieces. The “exposure” of a Mob plot, with Ruby and Oswald as its tools, would again leave the CIA and the Cold War system it represented safely in the shadows.

[
764
]. Ibid.

[
765
]. Statement by Dempsey Jones to FBI special agent Arthur E. Carter, November 27, 1963, Dallas, Texas. CD-Rom for
Harvey and Lee
, “1963 November 1-21,” image 27. Dempsey Jones said Ralph Yates told him “the day before the President was shot” [November 21, 1963] about the hitchhiker “who discussed the fact with him that one could be in a building and shoot the President as he, the President, passed by.” Yates stated in his first FBI interview that he picked up the hitchhiker “at approximately 10:30 AM on either November 20 or 21, 1963.” Yates, November 26, 1963, image 22. In his second FBI interview, Yates said he picked up the man “on a date that I now believe was Wednesday, November 20, 1963.” Yates, December 10, 1963, image 24. Yates and Jones agreed that their initial conversation about the hitchhiker took place at least one day before the president was shot.

[
766
]. Yates, November 26, 1963, image 22.

[
767
].
Warren Report
, p. 130.
WCH
, vol. 2, pp. 222-23. Commission Exhibit 2003, p. 25.
WCH
, vol. 24, p. 209. Lee Harvey Oswald denied to Captain Will Fritz that he ever talked to Frazier about curtain rods. He also said that the only thing he carried with him in Frazier’s car on Friday morning was his lunch.
WCH,
vol. 4, pp. 218-19.

[
768
]. Commission Exhibit 2003, p. 25.
WCH
, vol. 24, p. 209.

[
769
].
Warren Report
, p. 133.
WCH
, vol. 2, p. 226. Buell Wesley Frazier’s curtain rods story, supported in part by his sister, Linnie Mae Randle, who claimed she saw Oswald carrying a brown package Friday morning (
WCH
, vol. 2, pp. 248-51), was called into question by George O’Toole in
The Assassination
Tapes: An Electronic Probe into the Murder of John F. Kennedy and the Dallas Coverup
(New York: Penthouse Press, 1975). Using a voice-measuring, lie-detection machine, the Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), O’Toole processed for his book the recorded statements of more than forty persons with direct knowledge of Kennedy’s assassination. One of them was Buell Wesley Frazier relating his curtain rods story soon after Kennedy was killed. The stress in Frazier’s voice was so great that one lie-detection analyst remarked, “On a scale of ten, this stress is somewhere near eleven.” O’Toole, p. 172.

Buell Wesley Frazier was an early focus of investigation in the Kennedy assassination. The evening of November 22, he was arrested by Dallas Police. At the same time, the police confiscated his British 303 rifle. It was the same kind of rifle that the media first said had been found in the Book Depository. O’Toole, p. 205, citing Tom Webb of WBAP-TV, Fort Worth, Texas,
News Coverage of the Assassination of President Kennedy
, MR 74-52:1 (tape), JFK Library. If JFK was killed by more than one person, the most logical second suspect at the time, in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald, was his friend and fellow Book Depository worker, Buell Wesley Frazier.

Oswald witness Garland Slack, whose shooting target Oswald (or an impostor) had provocatively fired into on November 17 at the Sports Drome Rifle Range, said Oswald had been brought to the Sports Drome “by a man named ‘Frazier’ from Irving, Texas”—which Frazier denied doing in a statement to the FBI. Commission Exhibit No. 3077,
WCH
, vol. 26, p. 681. In any case, from his undeniable situation as Oswald’s driver to the Book Depository, the nineteen-year-old Frazier was in an unenviable position, where he was especially vulnerable to government pressures.

On the night of November 22 at Dallas Police headquarters, Buell Wesley Frazier was given a polygraph test. According to Detectives G. F. Rose and R. S. Stovall, who witnessed Detective R. D. Lewis conducting the polygraph, “the examination showed conclusively that Wesley Frazier was truthful.” Commission Exhibit No. 2003,
WCH
, vol. 24, p. 293. However, O’Toole’s PSE-measured interviews ten years later produced hard stress in Stovall when he denied being present at Frazier’s polygraph test and in Frazier, Rose, and Lewis when they said the test showed Frazier was telling the truth. According to the PSE, all four men were lying. O’Toole, pp. 168-206.

[
770
].
Warren Report
, pp. 130, 137.

[
771
]. Yates, November 26, 1963, image 26.

[
772
]. “To SAC [Special Agent in Charge] Dallas from Director, FBI (105-82555),” January 2, 1964. JFK Record Number 180-10033-10242.

[
773
]. “To Director, FBI (105-82555) from SAC, Dallas (100-10461),” January 4, 1964. JFK Record Number 180-10027-10351.

[
774
]. Author’s interview of Dorothy Walker (formerly Dorothy Yates, widow of Ralph Leon Yates), August 12, 2006.

[
775
]. Author’s interview of Dorothy Walker, October 16, 2006.

[
776
]. Author’s interview of Dorothy Walker, October 6, 2006.