JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (80 page)

Paine said she became curious about the letter in the first place because Oswald had moved something over his handwritten draft, apparently to keep her from reading it while he was typing. Yet she then describes him as having left the draft sitting out on her desk for days, thereby giving her the opportunity to copy it, take it, and hide it until she could give it to the FBI. According to Paine, Oswald had become oblivious of the draft he had supposedly been anxious to keep her from seeing.
[53]

Apart from the inconsistencies in Ruth Paine’s story, there is a more serious question at issue. The draft of Oswald’s letter that Paine claimed she hid from him and gave to the FBI has, as a result, been put on record by the Warren Commission as the more definitive version of the letter that was received by the Soviet Embassy four days before President Kennedy’s assassination. The words that the writer crossed out in the draft have been used to reinterpret the typed letter, in terms of Oswald’s intentions. Yet the draft stands in significant contrast to the provocative letter that was sent to the Soviets. Moreover, the draft shows internal evidence of having been written by someone other than Oswald, perhaps even months after the typed version of the letter. The purpose of such a forged, more innocuous “draft” would have been to defuse the explosive Oswald–Soviet Mexico City connection that Lyndon Johnson rejected and that, on close examination, could lead dangerously back to the CIA.

In an article comparing the letter that the Soviet Embassy received with its supposed draft, researcher Jerry Rose pointed to an odd reversal of the differences in spelling between the two documents, both supposedly written by the notoriously bad speller, Oswald.
[54]
While the handwritten version has only three errors that are corrected in the typed letter, there are twice as many changes from correct to faulty spelling. The results are the opposite of what one would expect to see in the transition from a draft to a more carefully done, typed version. In terms of composition, it looks as if the typewritten version preceded the draft.

More significantly, the paragraphs in the draft are rearranged so as to de-emphasize Oswald’s contacts with the Soviet and Cuban embassies, emphasizing instead his differences with the FBI.
[55]
The draft has also replaced words that suggested a Soviet conspiracy, “time to complete our business” (conjuring up a sinister “business” with “comrade Kostin”/Kostikov and the Soviet Embassy that was never explained in the typewritten letter) with words that provide an innocent explanation, “time to assist me” (an “assistance” whose nonconspiratorial travel purpose is explained in the draft with the crossed-out words, “would have been able to get the necessary documents I required”).
[56]

Using the draft as its means of interpretation, the
Warren Report
tried to explain away the all-too-revealing Oswald letter that the Soviet Embassy received on November 18: “Some light on [the letter’s] possible meaning can be shed by comparing it with the early draft. When the differences between the draft and the final document are studied, and especially when crossed-out words are taken into account, it becomes apparent that Oswald was intentionally beclouding the true state of affairs in order to make his trip to Mexico sound as mysterious and important as possible.

“. . . In the opinion of the Commission, based upon its knowledge of Oswald, the letter constitutes no more than a clumsy effort to ingratiate himself with the Soviet Embassy.”
[57]

By reading the typed letter in terms of its very different draft, the Warren Commission tried to reduce the explosive meaning of the letter sent to the Soviet Embassy to nothing more than an Oswald ego-trip. What could be seen as a probably fraudulent, dangerously revealing letter was explained away in retrospect by another probably fraudulent, also revealing draft of the same letter.

The equally suspicious, “original” handwritten draft that had become the interpretive key to what Oswald wrote to the Soviet Embassy then became accessible to only one person. The members of the Warren Commission decided to give the original document, supposedly written by Oswald, back to Ruth Paine, at her request. They did so in May 1964, four months before they issued their official report drawing on that same document as key evidence.
[58]

The Warren Commission included some of the shrewdest lawyers in the country, headed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. They knew the legal importance of preserving the evidence in the assassination of the president of the United States. They nevertheless authorized almost immediately, at the request of the privileged witness who introduced it into evidence, the return to her of a handwritten letter she claimed to have taken secretly from the reputed assassin, just before he (supposedly) sent its conspiratorial, typed version to the Soviet Embassy.

The Warren Commission then cited in its
Report
the draft it no longer possessed to cover up the fraudulent Oswald letter that was designed to set up the Soviets. However, because it left too obvious a trail, the letter to the Soviet Embassy still threatened ultimately to blow open the CIA’s conspiracy against both President Kennedy and the Soviet Union.

How real was the threat to use President Kennedy’s assassination as the justification for an attack on Cuba and the Soviet Union?

When we take off our Warren Commission blinders, we can see that the letter sent to the Soviet Embassy was designed to implicate the Soviets and Cubans in the murder of the president of the United States. That was the apparent tactic of a twofold, winner-take-all plot: a plot to assassinate the president who was prepared to negotiate an end to the Cold War, intertwined with a deeper plot to use fraudulent proof of the U.S.S.R.’s and Cuba’s responsibility for that assassination so as to justify the option of preemptive strikes on those same two Communist nations.

President Kennedy encountered that kind of push for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union from the beginning of his presidency. While such a “winning strategy” was becoming a top-secret, military priority, the pressures on Kennedy to approve it were so intense that it took a contemplative monk in the silence of his Kentucky monastery to recognize and articulate the truth.

In the first half of 1962 as the Cuban Missile Crisis drew nearer, Thomas Merton shared his intuition about the increasing danger of a U.S. preemptive strike with as many people as he could. It was a recurring theme in his mimeographed manuscript,
Peace in the Post-Christian Era
, that he sent to a host of friends (including Ethel Kennedy). He wrote in that prophetic text: “There can be no question that at the time of writing what seems to be the most serious and crucial development in the policy of the United States is this indefinite but growing assumption of the necessity of a first strike.”
[59]

As Merton sensed rightly from the hills of Kentucky, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C., were in fact pressing their young commander-in-chief, John F. Kennedy, to support the strategic necessity of a first strike. They first did so in the summer of 1961, in a National Security Council meeting whose significance remained deeply hidden until the declassification of a top-secret document in 1994. Economist James K. Galbraith, the son of Kennedy’s friend and ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, co-authored an article that used the newly disclosed document to expose the nuclear first-strike agenda of Kennedy’s military chiefs.
[60]

At the July 20, 1961, NSC meeting, General Hickey, chairman of the “Net Evaluation Subcommittee” of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented a plan for a nuclear surprise attack on the Soviet Union “in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.”
[61]
Other presenters of the preemptive strike plan included General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA director Allen Dulles. Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s military aide, Howard Burris, wrote a memorandum on the meeting for Johnson, who was not present.

According to the Burris memorandum, President Kennedy raised a series of questions in response to the first-strike presentation he heard. He asked about a preemptive attack’s likely damage to the U.S.S.R., its impact if launched in 1962, and how long U.S. citizens would have to remain in fallout shelters following such an attack.
[62]
While the Burris memorandum is valuable in its revelation of the first-strike agenda, it does not mention Kennedy’s ultimate disgust with the entire process. We know that fact first from its disclosure in an oral history by Roswell Gilpatric, JFK’s Deputy Secretary of Defense. Gilpatric described the meeting’s abrupt conclusion: “Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it.”
[63]

Kennedy’s disgusted reaction to this National Security Council meeting was also recorded in books written by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., McGeorge Bundy, and Dean Rusk.
[64]
None of them, however, identified the first-strike focus of the meeting that prompted the disgust. They describe the meeting in only the most general terms as “the Net Evaluation, an annual doomsday briefing analyzing the chances of nuclear war” (Schlesinger)
[65]
or “a formal briefing on the net assessment of a general nuclear war between the two superpowers” (Bundy).
[66]
However, as much as JFK was appalled by a general nuclear war, his walkout was in response to a more specific evil in his own ranks: U.S. military and CIA leaders were enlisting his support for a plan to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

Kennedy didn’t just walk out. He also said what he thought of the entire proceeding. As he led Rusk back to the Oval Office, with what Rusk described as “a strange look on his face,” Kennedy turned and said to his Secretary of State, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
[67]

“And we call ourselves the human race” was directed especially at the “we,” himself included, who had been seriously discussing a preemptive nuclear strike on millions of other humans, at least until he was so revolted by the process that he had to leave the room. His walkout could not have pleased his military and CIA chiefs.

Nevertheless, the judgment Kennedy made, “And we call ourselves the human race,” continued to apply to himself, as he became increasingly ensnared in his national security state’s nuclear war plans.

In the late winter of 1962, Thomas Merton was finishing writing
Peace in the Post-Christian Era
, at the same time as Kennedy was being overcome by mounting Cold War pressures. Merton could see what was happening. He wrote then that “the influence of the hard school is more and more evident. Whereas President Kennedy used to assert that the United States would ‘never strike first’ he is now declaring that ‘we may have to take the initiative’ in the use of nuclear weapons.”
[68]

What Merton was alluding to was an alarming statement Kennedy had made in March 1962 to journalist Stewart Alsop for a
Saturday Evening Post
article. What Alsop wrote from his JFK interview was:

“Khrushchev must
not
be certain that, where its vital interests are threatened, the United States will never strike first. As Kennedy says, ‘in some circumstances we might have to take the initiative.’”
[69]

Kennedy’s statement shocked Khrushchev. As soon as JFK’s first-strike quote was headlined across the world, the Kremlin ordered a special military alert.
[70]
When Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, visited Khrushchev in Moscow in May, the chairman told Salinger how disturbed he was by the statement.

Salinger replied that Kennedy had meant only “our options in the event of a major conventional attack [by the Soviet Union] on Western Europe.”
[71]
It was true the article had placed Kennedy’s remarks in that context. Even so, the implications of a first use of nuclear weapons in any conflict went far beyond Europe.

Khrushchev, who had spoken warmly of Kennedy up to that point, dismissed Salinger’s defense of him. He said, “Not even Eisenhower or Dulles would have made the statement your president made. He now forces us to reappraise our own position.”
[72]

Khrushchev then made just such a “reappraisal.” Two days after Salinger left Moscow, while Khrushchev was on a trip to Bulgaria, he thought for the first time of installing nuclear missiles in Cuba.
[73]
His idea was, first of all, to deter the United States from invading Cuba. After all, the United States had its missiles in Turkey, on the border of the Soviet Union.
[74]
But it was Kennedy’s first-strike statement that helped spark Khrushchev’s reappraisal of the Soviet position.

During Salinger’s long talks with Khrushchev in May 1962, the Soviet leader also made it clear that he and Kennedy could choose together a different path from the perilous one they were then taking (which would climax five months later in the Missile Crisis). He recounted for Salinger with satisfaction his and Kennedy’s peaceful resolution of the tanks crisis at the Berlin Wall in 1961, which we have already seen.