JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (88 page)

In Khrushchev’s letter to the president, the Soviet chairman followed Kennedy’s lead in his UN address by proposing in turn that they together use the test ban treaty, that “has injected a fresh spirit into the international atmosphere,” as their opening “to seek solutions of other ripe international questions.” He then singled out projects that the two of them could work on: “conclusion of a non-aggression pact between countries of NATO and member states of the Warsaw Pact, creation of nuclear free zones in various regions of the world, barring the further spread of the nuclear weapon, banning of launching into orbit objects bearing nuclear weapons, measures for the prevention of surprise attack, and a series of other steps.”
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“Their implementation,” Khrushchev wrote, “would clear the road to general and complete disarmament, and, consequently, to the delivering of peoples from the threat of war.”
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Khrushchev’s vision, as inspired by the test ban treaty, corresponded in a deeply hopeful way to Kennedy’s American University address. In his letter, Khrushchev was signaling his readiness to work with Kennedy on a host of projects. If the two leaders should succeed as they had on the test ban treaty, in only a few of Khrushchev’s suggested projects, they would end the Cold War.

However, following Ambassador Kohler’s negative comment, the State Department doubted if Khrushchev’s letter even deserved a response from the president. A State Department memorandum sent from “Mr. Klein” to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy again dismissed the Khrushchev letter: “With reference to the message from Khrushchev on the signing of the test ban treaty, the Department generally is reluctant to make a substantive reply. Should there be a polite response?”
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Someone, presumably McGeorge Bundy, wrote “Yes” under the typed question.

The State Department then prepared a “polite,” two-paragraph “Suggested Reply from the President to Khrushchev,” and sent it back on October 20 to McGeorge Bundy. He scribbled, “Approved, let’s get it out” on the cover memorandum. But, unlike other documents seen and approved by the president himself, there is no indication on this one that it was seen by anyone except National Security Adviser Bundy.

It is at this point that the final Khrushchev-to-Kennedy letter, and the president’s minimal response approved by McGeorge Bundy, were filed into limbo by the State Department. For the month remaining until Kennedy’s death, nothing at all was sent to Khrushchev. His hopeful, open-ended letter to Kennedy on their next possible steps together was simply left hanging.

Two and one-half weeks after Kennedy’s assassination, a terse, official explanation was put on record for this abrupt ending of a correspondence that, if allowed to continue, could have ended the Cold War. A White House “Memo for Record” was typed up on December 9, 1963. It stated that the draft reply approved by Bundy was never sent to Khrushchev “due to clerical misunderstanding in the State Department.”
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The unsigned memorandum then observed: “When it was learned on December 4, 1963 that a reply had not gone forward, the State Department recommended, and Mr. McGeorge Bundy concurred, that no reply need be made at this time.”
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Since John Kennedy was dead, it would have been difficult for the State Department and Bundy to send Khrushchev an apology in Kennedy’s name (or anyone else’s), attempting to explain the “clerical misunderstanding” that had ended their correspondence. Moreover, had Khrushchev learned of this “clerical misunderstanding,” he would have had further reason to question just what kind of support the president was getting from his own government in the month before his assassination.

After following the baffling trail of this aborted end to the Kennedy–Khrushchev correspondence, historian Michael Beschloss commented: “Waiting in Moscow for Kennedy’s reply, Khrushchev might have wondered why Kennedy had not responded to his cordial letter about new opportunities for peace. As the weeks passed in silence, his dark imagination may have begun to take over: was the president about to turn his back on the emerging détente?”
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Fortunately, however, Khrushchev knew better than that, because Kennedy had used a surreptitious means to reassure him. The Soviet chairman knew through a back-channel message from Kennedy that the president had not given up at all on their mutual hopes for peace. Kennedy let Khrushchev know at the end of September that he did indeed want to move forward with the Soviets on disarmament talks, but that he had to do so secretly.

Thanks to the opening of Moscow archives following the fall of the Soviet Union, we can now begin to see the Soviet side of this subterranean tale of Cold War leaders in communication. Drawing on previously top-secret Soviet documents, authors Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali discovered that “on September 30, 1963, John Kennedy through his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, had attempted to reestablish a confidential channel to the Soviet leadership.”
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As we recall, it was Pierre Salinger who in the fall of 1961 received for Kennedy the first secret letter from Khrushchev, rolled up in a newspaper by a Soviet “magazine editor” who was in reality a member of the KGB, the Soviet secret police. Now Kennedy, through Salinger, was reversing the process.

Vladimir Semichastny, the Moscow head of the KGB, reported to Nikita Khrushchev on October 2, 1963, that Kennedy wanted to reopen the secret channel between them, using Salinger and a Washington-based KGB agent as the conduit. Kennedy’s people had recommended Colonel G. V. Karpovich, a known KGB officer in the U.S.S.R.’s Washington Embassy, as an undercover messenger between JFK and Khrushchev.
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As Fursenko and Naftali confirmed from the Soviet documents, Khrushchev then “approved the use of the KGB as an intermediary to exchange proposals [with Kennedy] that could not go through regular diplomatic channels.”
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Kennedy’s secret September 30 initiative to Khrushchev preempted in a shrewd way the State Department’s (deliberate or inadvertent) termination of his formal correspondence with the Soviet leader. The president was well aware of how few people in his administration he could trust with his peacemaking messages to their Communist enemies. As he was forced to do repeatedly with his Cold War bureaucracy, he simply bypassed the State Department’s resistance to his dialogue with Khrushchev in the fall of 1963 by creating an alternative means of communication.
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Nevertheless, although the tactic was a familiar one for Kennedy, the means he sought out for his final effort to explore peace with Khrushchev is startling. For JFK to have to rely in the end not on his own State Department but on the Soviet secret police to convey secure messages of peace between himself and Khrushchev speaks volumes. Because of his turn toward peace, the president had become almost totally isolated in his own government before he made his trip to Dallas.

At 10:30 a.m. on November 22, 1963, Sheriff Bill Decker held a meeting in preparation for the President’s visit to Dallas that day. Decker had called together all his available deputies, about one hundred men.
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They included the plainclothes men and detectives who were especially important to the president’s safety as he passed through the streets of Dallas. Decker gave his assembled officers an unusual order.

The Sheriff said they “were to take
no
part whatsoever in the security of that [presidential] motorcade.” The Sheriff told his officers they were simply “to stand out in front of the building, 505 Main Street, and represent the Sheriff’s Office.”
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Sheriff Decker gave the order of noninvolvement to his security teams just two hours before the president’s assassination in Dealey Plaza, which was just outside the window of the sheriff’s office.
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As Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig later reflected back on the sheriff’s words, he realized that Decker had withdrawn the Dallas County component of President Kennedy’s security at the motorcade’s most vulnerable location only a few feet away.
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Dealey Plaza was characterized by tall buildings, fences, and sewer openings. Sniper teams could take their pick. The hairpin turn from Houston to Elm Street would slow the limousine to a crawl, making the president an almost stationary target for crossfire from many possible angles. What was in effect a sniper’s gallery represented a tremendous challenge for security police. The withdrawal of JFK’s security made Dealey Plaza the ideal ambush site, set up with the help of those responsible for the president’s protection.

Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry, like Sheriff Bill Decker, gave a critical order that would also keep his officers away from Dealey Plaza during the president’s perilous passage through it. William Manchester, in his book
The Death of a President
, noted that Curry told his officers “to end supervision of Friday’s crowd at Houston and Main, a block short of the ambush, on the ground that traffic would begin to thin out there.”
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The truth lay deeper. Chief Curry, in his book
JFK Assassination
File
, gave a more authoritative reason than the anticipation of light traffic for his cutting short the president’s security one block too soon. He said he was simply following the orders of the Secret Service: “The Dallas Police Department carefully carried out the security plans which were laid out by Mr. Lawson, the Secret Service representative from Washington, D.C.”
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Chief Curry and Sheriff Decker gave their orders withdrawing security from the president
in obedience
to orders they had themselves received from the Secret Service. Curry and Decker in Dallas were carrying out orders from Washington. As the House Select Committee on Assassinations put it, it was the Secret Service that “defined and supervised the functions of the police during Kennedy’s visit [to Dallas].”
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The Secret Service also made a critical change in the protection the president would normally receive from his motorcycle escorts. Following past precedents, the Dallas Police had made plans at a preliminary meeting (not attended by the Secret Service) to assign motorcycle escorts “alongside the President’s car,”
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thereby partially screening the president from any gunfire. However, at a Dallas Police Department/Secret Service coordinating meeting held on November 21, the Secret Service changed the plan. The motorcycle escorts were pulled back from their positions alongside the limousine (where they shielded the president) to positions in the rear (where they were not a hindrance to snipers).
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The reason given for this stripping of security from the president was that he didn’t want his motorcycle security. Police Captain Perdue W. Lawrence, the Dallas officer for escort security, testified to the Warren Commission on the Secret Service rationale for the change made at the November 21 meeting: “I heard one of the Secret Service men say that President Kennedy did not desire any motorcycle officer directly on each side of him, between him and the crowd, but he would want the officers to the rear.”
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The Secret Service advance man from Washington, Winston G. Lawson, who attended the November 21 meeting, explained to the Warren Commission: “It was my understanding that [the president] did not like a lot of motorcycles surrounding the car . . . if there are a lot of motorcycles around the President’s car, I know for a fact that he can’t hear the people that are with him in the car talking back and forth, and there were other considerations I believe why he did not want them completely surrounding his car.”
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It is puzzling, however, why JFK had the “desire,” explained by the Secret Service after his death, to withdraw his motorcycle security only in Dallas. The day before in Houston, he apparently had no such desire, since the Secret Service (according to its own report on the Houston presidential visit) deployed motorcycles there in its normal way alongside the presidential limousine.
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The House Select Committee on Assassinations drew the reluctant conclusion:

“Surprisingly, the security measure used in the prior motorcades during the same Texas visit show that the deployment of motorcycles in Dallas by the Secret Service may have been uniquely insecure . . . it may well be that by altering Dallas Police Department Captain Lawrence’s original motorcycle plan, the Secret Service deprived Kennedy of security in Dallas that it had provided a mere day before in Houston.”
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Even more critically, the Secret Service withdrew the protection of its agents normally stationed on the back of the presidential limousine. If the agents had been at their usual posts on the limousine, holding the hand rails on the car, they could have obstructed gunfire or thrown themselves on the president when the shooting began. But they, too, had been withdrawn in Dallas. They were reassigned to the car following the limousine, where they were useless in preventing the assassination. During the shooting of the president, the Special Agent in Charge of the follow-up car, Emory Roberts, actually ordered his agents “not to move even after recognizing the first shot as a shot.”
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To his credit, Agent Clint Hill disobeyed Roberts’s order by instead running after the limousine and climbing on it, but too late to help the president.
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