JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (5 page)

June 25, 1963
: Lee Harvey Oswald is issued a United States passport in New Orleans, twenty-four hours after his application and one year after his return from defecting to the Soviet Union. On his passport application, he identifies his destination as the Soviet Union.

July 25, 1963
: In Moscow, on behalf of President Kennedy, U.S. negotiator Averell Harriman agrees with Soviet negotiators to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, outlawing nuclear tests “in the atmosphere, beyond its limits, including outer space, or under water, including territorial waters or high seas.”

July 26, 1963
: President Kennedy makes a television appeal to the nation for support of the test ban treaty, quoting Nikita Khrushchev on a nuclear war they both hope to avoid: “The survivors would envy the dead.”

August 9-10, 1963
: Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested in New Orleans while passing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. He and three anti-Castro Cuban exiles, who confront him and tear up his leaflets, are charged with disturbing the peace. After Oswald spends the night in jail, he meets privately with New Orleans FBI agent John Quigley. Oswald’s street theater discredits the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and prepares the ground for his portrayal in November as a pro-Castro assassin of President Kennedy.

August 24, 1963
: Presidential advisers Roger Hilsman, Averell Harriman, and Michael Forrestal draft a telegram to newly appointed Saigon ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge that conditionally authorizes U.S. support of a coup by rebel South Vietnamese generals. President Kennedy, who is in Hyannis Port, endorses the telegram. He soon regrets the hasty policy decision that puts the U.S. government on record in support of a coup.

September 12, 1963
: At a National Security Council meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff again present a report evaluating a projected nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, in a time scheme of 1964 through 1968. President Kennedy turns the discussion to his conclusion: “Preemption is not possible for us.” He passes over without comment the report’s implication that the remaining months of 1963 are still the most advantageous time for the United States to launch a preemptive strike.

September 20, 1963
: In an address to the United Nations, President Kennedy expresses the hope that the Limited Test Ban Treaty can serve as a lever for a just and lasting peace. In a meeting with UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, he approves U.S. diplomat William Attwood contacting Dr. Carlos Lechuga, Cuba’s UN ambassador, to open a secret dialogue with Premier Castro.

In El Paso, Texas, U.S. counterintelligence agent Richard Case Nagell, who has met with Kennedy assassination planners, walks into a bank and fires two pistol shots into a plaster wall just below the ceiling. He waits outside to be arrested and tells the FBI, “I would rather be arrested than commit murder and treason.”

September 23, 1963
: At a party arranged as a cover by television newscaster Lisa Howard, William Attwood meets Carlos Lechuga. Attwood tells Lechuga he is about to travel to the White House to request authorization from the president to meet secretly with Premier Castro. The meeting’s purpose would be to discuss the feasibility of a rapprochement between Havana and Washington. Lechuga expresses great interest.

September 24, 1963
: In Washington, William Attwood meets with Robert Kennedy, who tells Attwood to continue pursuing with Lechuga a secret meeting with Castro but to seek a less risky location than Cuba.

The Senate approves the Limited Test Ban Treaty by a vote of 80 to 19.

September 27, 1963
: Attwood meets Lechuga at the UN Delegates’ Lounge, saying he is authorized to meet with Castro at a site other than Cuba. Lechuga says he will so inform Havana.

In Mexico City, a man identifying himself as Lee Harvey Oswald visits the Cuban and Soviet consulates, displaying leftist credentials and applying for immediate visas to both Communist countries. When suspicious employees put him off and escort him outside, he flies into a rage, creating memorable scenes.

September 28, 1963
: The man identifying himself as Oswald returns to the Mexico City Soviet Embassy, renewing his request for a quick visa to the Soviet Union. When Soviet officials offer him forms to fill out, he becomes even more agitated than on the previous day. He places a revolver on the table, saying it is necessary for his protection. He is again escorted to the door.

This visit to the Soviet Embassy becomes a repeated reference during incriminating phone calls by “Oswald,” wiretapped and transcribed by the CIA, in which the speaker associates himself with a Soviet assassination expert working at the embassy. When it is pointed out that the phone caller speaks broken Russian, whereas Oswald is fluent in the language, the CIA claims the audiotapes are no longer available for voice comparisons because they were routinely erased.

September 30, 1963
: President Kennedy reopens a secret channel of communication between himself and Nikita Khrushchev, via Press Secretary Pierre Salinger and a Washington-based Soviet Secret Police agent. He thereby circumvents a State Department he can no longer trust for his communications with the Soviet leader.

October 11, 1963
: President Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 263, making official government policy the withdrawal from Vietnam of “1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963” and “by the end of 1965 . . . the bulk of U.S. personnel.”

October 16, 1963
: After a successful job referral by Ruth Paine, Lee Harvey Oswald begins work at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

October 24, 1963
: French journalist Jean Daniel interviews President Kennedy, before Daniel’s trip to Cuba to interview Premier Castro. Kennedy speaks warmly of the Cuban revolution led by Castro, but asks Daniel if Castro realizes that “through his fault the world was on the verge of nuclear war in October 1962.” Kennedy asks Daniel to tell him what Castro says in reply, when Daniel returns from Cuba at the end of November.

October 31, 1963
: Fidel Castro’s aide Rene Vallejo speaks by phone with Lisa Howard. Through Vallejo, Castro offers to expedite the process of meeting with William Attwood by sending a plane to pick up Attwood in Mexico. Attwood would be flown to a private airport in Cuba, where he would talk confidentially with Castro, then be flown back immediately. Howard conveys this to Attwood, who alerts the White House.

November 1, 1963
: Rebel South Vietnamese army units, supported by the CIA, encircle and bombard President Diem’s presidential palace in Saigon. Diem and his brother Nhu flee from the palace in darkness. They take refuge in the Saigon suburb of Cholon.

In Chicago, the Secret Service arrests two members of a four-man sniper team suspected of planning to assassinate President Kennedy during his visit to Chicago the following day. The other two snipers escape. Thomas Arthur Vallee, a mentally damaged ex-Marine working in a building over Kennedy’s motorcade route, is monitored by the Chicago Police.

November 2, 1963
: From his refuge in Cholon, Diem phones Ambassador Lodge and the coup generals. He surrenders, requesting for Nhu and himself only safe conduct to the airport and departure from Vietnam. Rebel general Minh sends a team of five men to pick up the two men. The armored personnel carrier into which Diem and Nhu descend delivers their dead, bullet-sprayed bodies to the generals’ headquarters.

At the White House, President Kennedy is handed a telegram from Lodge informing him that Diem and Nhu are dead and that the coup leaders claim their deaths are suicides. Kennedy rushes from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face.

Forty minutes later, White House press secretary Pierre Salinger announces President Kennedy’s trip to Chicago has been cancelled. While the two suspected snipers are questioned at Chicago Secret Service headquarters, potential assassination scapegoat Thomas Arthur Vallee is arrested. The other two alleged snipers remain at large in Chicago. Only Vallee is ever identified publicly.

November 5, 1963
: William Attwood briefs President Kennedy’s National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy on Premier Castro’s concrete offer to expedite a meeting with Attwood as Kennedy’s representative. Bundy then updates Kennedy on Castro’s proposal. Kennedy says Attwood should sever his formal relation with the government as a precaution, so as to meet with Castro under the cover of his former work as a journalist.

November 18, 1963
: Rene Vallejo talks by phone with William Attwood, while Fidel Castro listens. Attwood says a preliminary meeting is essential to identify what he and Castro will discuss. Vallejo says they will send instructions to Cuban ambassador Carlos Lechuga to set an agenda with Attwood for his meeting with Castro.

In a speech in Miami, President Kennedy issues a challenge and a promise to Premier Castro, saying that if Cuba ceases being “a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other American Republics,” “everything is possible.”

In Washington, the Soviet Embassy receives a crudely typed, badly spelled letter dated nine days earlier and signed by “Lee H. Oswald” of Dallas. The letter seems to implicate the Soviet Union in conspiring with Oswald in the assassination of President Kennedy that will occur four days later. Soviet authorities recognize the letter as a forgery or provocation and decide to return it to the U.S. government, whose FBI agents had already opened and copied the letter on its way into the embassy.

November 19-20, 1963
: Fidel Castro meets for six hours with Jean Daniel at his Havana hotel to learn more about a dialogue with Kennedy. After Daniel recounts Kennedy’s endorsement of the Cuban revolution and his accusation that Castro almost caused a nuclear war, Castro explains the reasoning for the introduction of Soviet missiles in Cuba—to deter the imminent U.S. invasion that he feared. Reassessing Kennedy, he expresses the hope that Kennedy will win reelection and become the United States’ greatest president—by recognizing there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas.

November 20, 1963
: At Red Bird Air Field in Dallas, a young man and woman try to charter a plane for Friday afternoon, November 22, from Wayne January, owner of a private airline. From their questions, January suspects they may hijack the plane to Cuba. He rejects their offer. The man he sees waiting for the couple in their car he recognizes two days later from media pictures as Lee Harvey Oswald.

In Eunice, Louisiana, heroin addict Rose Cheramie tells Louisiana State Police lieutenant Francis Fruge that the two men with whom she stopped at the Silver Slipper Lounge that night, on a drive from Miami to Dallas, plan to kill President Kennedy when he comes to Dallas.

November 21, 1963
: Before leaving on his trip to Texas, President Kennedy, after being given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam, says to Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff: “After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. Vietnam is not worth another American life.”

November 22, 1963
: At 12:30 p.m., with security having been withdrawn from the surrounding area and the presidential limousine, President Kennedy is driven around a dogleg turn to a virtual stop in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, where sniper teams assassinate him by crossfire.

While Fidel Castro and Jean Daniel are having lunch together in Varadero Beach, Cuba, they receive the news of Kennedy’s death in Dallas. Castro says, “Everything is changed. Everything is going to change.”

When the president’s body is brought to Parkland Hospital, Dallas, twenty-one witnesses see a massive head wound in the right rear of his skull, evidence of a fatal head shot from the front. At a press conference, Dr. Malcolm Perry repeatedly describes an entrance wound in the front of the throat, further evidence of shooting from the front.

Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested in the Texas Theater at 1:50 p.m., following the murder of Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit at 1:15 by a man whom witnesses identify as Oswald. At 1:53 p.m., a man resembling Oswald is also arrested in the Texas Theater and taken out a different door. At 3:30 p.m., an Oswald double is flown out of Dallas on a CIA C-54 cargo plane.

During the president’s autopsy held at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland, Admiral Calvin Galloway, hospital commander, orders the doctors not to probe the throat wound. X-rays taken that night show an intact rear skull, where a large occipital fragment of the president’s skull, which will be found the next day in Dealey Plaza, was blown out—proving the X-rays are fraudulent, created to disguise a massive exit wound in the rear.

At 11:55 p.m. on the third floor of Dallas Police headquarters, CIA-connected nightclub owner Jack Ruby, whom a witness saw deliver a gunman to the grassy knoll that morning, is given access to the doorway where prisoner Lee Harvey Oswald is about to be brought by police to a midnight press conference. Ruby (with a revolver in his pocket) fails to shoot Oswald.

November 24, 1963
: At 11:21 a.m., an armed Jack Ruby is again given access to the prisoner Lee Harvey Oswald, this time as Oswald is brought from the basement to the garage of Dallas Police headquarters while being transferred to the Dallas County Jail. Ruby shoots Oswald to death at point blank range, as seen on television by millions.