JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (22 page)

[
173
]. Sorensen,
Kennedy
, p. 733.

[
174
]. Schlesinger,
Thousand Days
, p. 904.

[
175
]. Ibid., pp. 904-5.

[
176
]. Max Frankel, “Harriman to Lead Test-Ban Mission to Soviet [Union] in July,”
New York Times
(June 12, 1963), p. 1.

[
177
].
Warren Report
, p. 713.

[
178
]. Jim Garrison,
On the Trail of the Assassins
(New York: Warner Books, 1988), p. 58.

[
179
]. Jim Marrs,
Crossfire
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989), pp. 200, 279. See also Epstein,
Assassination Chronicles
, pp. 463-64.

[
180
]. Epstein,
Assassination Chronicles
, p. 559.

[
181
]. Ibid., p. 558.

[
182
]. Ibid., p. 559.

[
183
]. Henry Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt
(New York: Henry Holt, 1985), p. 220.

[
184
]. Summers,
Not in Your Lifetime
, p. 158.

[
185
]. Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt
, p. 221.

[
186
].
Warren Report
, p. 403.

[
187
]. Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt
, p. 219.

[
188
]. Ibid., pp. 219, 221.

[
189
]. Epstein,
Assassination Chronicles
, pp. 559, 566.

[
190
]. According to a memorandum in de Mohrenschildt’s CIA file, he and his Haitian partner Clemard Joseph Charles were to meet in Washington on May 7, 1963, with CIA staff officer Tony Czaikowski and Assistant Director of Army Intelligence and CIA liaison Dorothe Matlack. Matlack confirmed the May 7 meeting in her testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) on September 4, 1978. She said de Mohrenschildt “dominated” Charles.
Appendix to Hearings before the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives
(HSCA) (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979), vol. 12, pp. 56-57.

[
191
].
Warren Report
, p. 283.

[
192
]. Ibid., pp. 283-84.

[
193
]. Garrison,
On the Trail of the Assassins
, p. 64.

[
194
]. Ibid.

[
195
]. Gaeton Fonzi,
The Last Investigation
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1994), p. 192.

[
196
]. Garrison,
On the Trail of the Assassins
, p. 64.

[
198
]. Glenn T. Seaborg,
Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 195.

[
199
].
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963
, p. 107.

[
200
]. On May 20, 1963; cited by Seaborg,
Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban
, p. 199.

[
201
]. Schlesinger,
Thousand Days
, p. 899.

[
202
].
Kennedy Khrushchev, and the Test Ban
, p. 200 (emphasis in original).

[
203
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, p. 128.

[
204
]. Schlesinger,
Thousand Days
, p. 734.

[
205
]. Ibid.

[
206
]. Reeves,
President Kennedy: Profile of Power,
pp. 545, 740.

[
207
]. Ibid., pp. 548-49.

[
208
]. Ibid., p. 550.

[
209
].
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963
, p. 602; all subsequent citations of the Test Ban Treaty address are from pp. 603-6.

[
210
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, pp. 128-29.

[
211
]. Ibid., p. 129.

[
212
]. “Is U.S. Giving up in the Arms Race?”
U.S. News and World Report
(August 5, 1963), p. 37.

[
213
]. “If Peace Does Come—What Happens to Business?”
U.S. News and World Report
(August 12, 1963).

[
214
]. Reeves,
President Kennedy: Profile of Power
, p. 554.

[
215
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, pp. 113-14.

[
216
]. Sergei Khrushchev, “Commentary on ‘Thirteen Days,’”
New York Times
(Sunday, February 4, 2001), OP-ED, p. 17.

[
217
]. Sorensen,
Kennedy
, p. 739.

[
218
]. Ibid.

[
219
]. Schlesinger,
Thousand Days
, p. 911.

[
220
]. Sorensen,
Kennedy
, p. 740.

[
221
]. Schlesinger,
Thousand Days
, pp. 909-10.

CHAPTER TWO

Kennedy, Castro, and the CIA

In his final Cold War Letter, written to Rabbi Everett Gendler in October 1962, Thomas Merton searched for an effective way out of a Cold War politics that seemed destined to end in nuclear war. In that month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Merton expressed a deep pessimism as well as a hope that no politics of war could suppress. He said that while he supported wholeheartedly the efforts of the peace movement to communicate new ideas against a tidal wave of propaganda, “at the same time I am impressed with the fact that all these things are little more than symbols. Thank God they are at least symbols, and valid ones. But where are we going to turn for some really effective political action? As soon as one gets involved in the machinery of politics one gets involved in its demonic futilities and in the great current that sweeps everything toward no one knows what.”

Yet with a Gandhian faith in the power of truth, Merton continued to hope: “Every slightest effort at opening up new areas of thought, every attempt to perceive new aspects of truth, or just a little truth, is of inestimable value in preparing the way for the light we cannot see.”
[1]

When Merton wrote those words, nothing was more opposed to the great current of American Cold War politics sweeping everyone to oblivion than was a dialogue with Fidel Castro. Anti-communism had become a dogmatic theology that paralyzed even the thought of such a conversation. For Americans, the unthinkable was not the act of waging nuclear war but the act of talking with the Communist devil who ruled the island nation ninety miles from Florida, who was in fact key to stopping a nuclear holocaust. We can recall the reluctance of Merton’s Miami correspondent, Evora Arca de Sardinia, and her Cuban exile community to consider the idea of paying a ransom to Castro, even to free family members who were his prisoners from the Bay of Pigs. To the anti-Castro émigrés in Miami, that would have meant compromising with the satanic incarnation of an evil, Communism, in a way that would violate their theology, ethics, and loyalty. At the level of national politics, America’s Cold War theology was enforced by excommunication. One couldn’t talk with the devil in Havana and remain in communion with the gods of Washington.

No one in the United States knew this political fact of life better than President John F. Kennedy. To be seen as open in any way to the thinking of Fidel Castro was, as Kennedy knew well, a death sentence in U.S. politics, especially for a president. Yet that was precisely the “little truth of inestimable value for the light we cannot see,” envisioned by Merton in his last Cold War Letter, that Kennedy cultivated during the final months of his life.

For John Kennedy’s fifth Bay of Pigs was in essence a return to the Bay of Pigs. His fifth alienation from his CIA and military advisers came from his risk-filled turn toward dialogue with an even more irreconcilable enemy than Nikita Khrushchev: Fidel Castro.