Reclaiming History (284 page)

The document also says that “Soviet officials were fearful that without leadership, some irresponsible general in the United States might launch a missile at the Soviet Union.” The declassified FBI document goes on to say that Soviet officials said that “Lee Harvey Oswald had no connection whatsoever with the Soviet Union. They described him as a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else.” The document quotes a second “reliable” source as saying that

Nikolai T. Fedorenko, the Permanent Representative to the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, held a brief meeting with all diplomatic personnel employed at the Soviet Mission on November 23, 1963 [in New York City]. During this meeting, Fedorenko…stated that Kennedy’s death was very much regretted by the Soviet Union and had caused considerable shock in Soviet Government circles. Fedorenko stated that the Soviet Union would have preferred to have had President Kennedy at the helm of the American Government. He added that President Kennedy had, to some degree, a mutual understanding with the Soviet Union, and had tried seriously to improve relations between the United States and Russia. Fedorenko also added that little or nothing was known by the Soviet Government concerning President Lyndon Johnson and, as a result, the Soviet Government did not know what policies President Johnson would follow in the future regarding the Soviet Union.
*

Since the Soviets didn’t know what they could expect of Johnson, do those conspiracy theorists who actually believe the Soviet Union was behind Kennedy’s assassination want us to believe that, in effect, the Soviets said, “Let’s kill Kennedy so we can find out”? I’m being facetious, but only to demonstrate how inconceivable it would be for the Soviets to murder Kennedy when they would have no way of knowing if his successor would be worse than Kennedy, particularly when U.S.-Soviet relations under Kennedy were relatively good.

Perhaps more tellingly (since, as indicated, any Soviet plot to kill Kennedy would have to involve the KGB), this second source said that Colonel Boris Ivanov, “chief of the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) Residency in New York City” (presumably the Soviet embassy in New York City, most of whose officials could be expected to be KGB),

held a meeting of KGB personnel on the morning of November 25, 1963. Ivanov informed those present that President Kennedy’s death had posed a problem for the KGB and stated that it was necessary for all KGB employees to lend their efforts to solving the problem. Ivanov stated that it was his personal feeling that the assassination…had been planned by an organized group…[and] that it was therefore necessary
that the KGB ascertain
with the greatest possible speed
the true story surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination
. Ivanov stated that the KGB was interested in knowing all the factors and all of the possible groups which might have worked behind the scenes to organize and plan this assassination.
⁴²

It really sounds as if the KGB and Khrushchev and the Soviet Union were behind the assassination after all, doesn’t it? Along these same lines, we all know that before Gorbachev, the Soviet media, most prominently the Soviet newspapers
Pravda
and
Izvestia
, were simply a propaganda arm of the Communist Party and never published anything harmful to its interests. Indeed,
before
anything but routine, benign news was published, the Communist Party had to first clear it. Yet the September 28, 1964, edition of
Pravda
and the September 21, 1965, edition of
Izvestia
had large articles criticizing the Warren Commission’s conclusion that there was no conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination.
⁴³
Why would agents
(Pravda, Izvestia
) of the conspirators (Soviet Union, KGB) behind Kennedy’s assassination want to criticize a report that concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy? Wouldn’t you think they’d want to remain as quiet as a painting on a wall?

Quite apart from the fact that no evidence has ever surfaced connecting the Soviet Union or KGB in any way with Kennedy’s murder—and indeed, all the evidence points to the exact opposite—simple common sense, that rarest of attributes among conspiracy theorists, tells us the Soviets never would have sponsored Kennedy’s assassination. And no one articulated this common sense better than Secretary of State Dean Rusk in his testimony before the Warren Commission.

Rusk: “I have not seen or heard of any scrap of evidence indicating that the Soviet Union had any desire to eliminate President Kennedy nor in any way participated in any such event. Standing back and trying to look at that question objectively despite the ideological differences between our two great systems, I can’t see how it could be to the interest of the Soviet Union to make any such effort. Since I have become secretary of state I have seen no evidence of any policy of assassination of leaders of the free world on the part of the Soviets, and our intelligence community has not been able to furnish any evidence pointing in that direction. I am sure that I would have known about such bits of evidence had they existed but I also made inquiry myself to see whether there was such evidence, and received a negative reply. I do think that the Soviet Union, again objectively considered, has an interest in the correctness of state relations. This would be particularly true among the great powers, with which the major interests of the Soviet Union are directly engaged.”

Warren Commission counsel: “Could you expand on that a little bit so that others than those who deal in that area might understand fully what you mean?”

Rusk: “Yes. I think that although there are grave differences between the Communist world and the free world, between the Soviet Union and other major powers, that even from their point of view there needs to be some shape and form to international relations, that it is not in their interest to have this world structure dissolve into complete anarchy, that great states and particularly nuclear powers have to be in a position to deal with each other, to transact business with each other, to try to meet problems with each other, and that requires the maintenance of correct relations and access to the leadership on all sides. I think also that although there had been grave differences between Chairman Khrushchev and President Kennedy, I think there were evidences of a certain mutual respect that had developed over some of the experiences, both good and bad, through which these two men had lived. I think both of them were aware of the fact that any chairman of the Soviet Union and any president of the United States necessarily bear somewhat special responsibility for the general peace of the world; indeed, without exaggeration, one could almost say the existence of the Northern Hemisphere in this nuclear age. So that it would be an act of rashness and madness for Soviet leaders to undertake such an action as an act of policy.
*
Because everything would have been put in jeopardy or at stake in connection with such an act. It has not been our impression that madness has characterized the actions of the Soviet leadership in recent years. I think also that it is relevant that people behind the Iron Curtain, including people in the Soviet Union and including officials in the Soviet Union, seem to be deeply affected by the death of President Kennedy. Their reactions were prompt, and I think genuine, of regret and sorrow. Mr. Khrushchev was the first to come to the embassy to sign the book of condolences. There were tears in the streets of Moscow. Moscow Radio spent a great deal of attention to these matters.”
⁴⁴

In short, Russia had absolutely nothing to gain but much to lose in killing Kennedy.

Though Rusk’s reasoning is impeccable and cannot be controverted, the Warren Commission did not rely alone on such common sense. As it stated (and the volumes of the Commission demonstrate), the Commission “examined all the known facts regarding Oswald’s defection, residence in the Soviet Union, and return to the United States. At each step the Commission sought to determine whether there was any evidence which supported a conclusion that Soviet authorities may have directly or indirectly influenced Oswald’s actions in assassinating the President,”
⁴⁵
but it could not find any such evidence.
⁴⁶
The HSCA, after its own thorough investigation, stated its belief that on the basis of the evidence it had seen, “the Soviet Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”
⁴⁷

Even were we to imagine the unimaginable, that the Soviets wanted to murder Kennedy, they obviously would have employed someone who was stable, not completely unstable like Oswald. Also, to distance themselves from the vile deed as much as possible, they would have chosen someone with no known previous contact or association with them, not a Marxist who had defected to their country just a few years earlier. With respect to this same issue of distancing, a foreigner in the Soviet Union, as Oswald was, cannot marry a Soviet citizen without the permission of the Soviet government.
⁴⁸
If the KGB had any intention of using Oswald as its agent to kill Kennedy, it makes little sense that it would have allowed him to marry Marina
and
take her with him back to America. The KGB would know that having a Russian wife would most likely increase the probability of surveillance or interest in him by U.S. intelligence during the height of the cold war, which would not be beneficial to its plans. A Russian wife would even, necessarily, make Oswald more conspicuous to his neighbors (again, incompatible with its interests), and would even decrease his freedom of movement and mobility.
⁴⁹

Indeed, if the KGB did send Oswald, as a secret agent, to America in June of 1962 for the apparent purpose, as some conspiracy theorists would want us to believe, of assassinating Kennedy, would it have allowed him, right up through the summer of 1963, to draw attention to himself and continue to be openly Marxist (passing out pro-Castro leaflets on the streets of New Orleans and proclaiming his Marxism on New Orleans radio, etc.)? Such a proposition is too absurd to even comment on.

The initial belief, exemplified by an FBI Teletype, that the right wing in America, scalding angry at Kennedy for his pro–civil rights stance, was responsible for Kennedy’s death didn’t last very long—the seventy-five minutes between the time of the assassination at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, and the arrest of Oswald, an avowed Marxist as the only suspect, at 1:45 p.m. that day.
¹

Actually, at the beginning Kennedy was not a particularly aggressive advocate of expanding civil rights in America. In fact, during the better part of his short presidency, civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King frequently expressed their dissatisfaction with the insufficient vigor with which they felt Kennedy was legislatively promoting their agenda. He was, for example, completely silent on civil rights in his January 20, 1961, inaugural speech.
²
*
But civil rights have never been the sole concern of the nation’s black population. Certainly, for most of the disproportionate number of blacks living in poverty, their lowly economic condition is of perhaps even more immediate concern to them. And Kennedy had said eloquently in his speech that “if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” How much of a jump was it for a black man to conclude that someone who wanted to help the poor would also be mindful and protective of his civil rights? A 1962 national poll among blacks showed that next to Martin Luther King, John Kennedy was their favorite public figure,
³
and they took his death particularly hard. “When my father died,” a black New York City cabdriver told the
New York Times
right after the assassination, “I didn’t shed a tear until the funeral was almost over. When Mr. Kennedy died, I cried so much I couldn’t drive this cab. I didn’t know I could love a white man that much.”
⁴

One Kennedy biographer, Richard Reeves, attributed his lassitude about civil rights not to his being unsympathetic to the plight of blacks in America, but more to his being, at bottom, a politician, and polls showed that the majority of Americans wanted to proceed slowly in the area of civil rights, the nation’s temperature for civil rights change being lukewarm at best. “For Kennedy, civil rights, Negro demands, were just politics, a volatile issue to be defused.” Reeves also notes that Kennedy’s blue-blood roots had not given him the knowledge and feelings about the deep suffering of many blacks in America that one with a more proletarian background might have. (“The only Negro he spent time with” for fourteen years prior to his becoming president, per Reeves, was his valet, George Thomas.)
⁵
As author Victor S. Navasky wrote, “The civil rights program of the new Administration was more limited than John Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric would have suggested or than civil rights activists hoped.”
⁶

However, the aristocratic president, whose penchant for philosophy, poetry, and the arts made him beloved by the eastern intellectual cognoscenti, had an instinctual concern for the less fortunate, the natural extension of his patrician sense of
noblesse oblige
. In other words, Kennedy’s heart was in the right place, and he did, finally, in a televised speech to the nation on the evening of June 11, 1963—two and a half years into his presidency—speak forcefully for the first time of the “moral crisis” in America of blacks not having the same rights as whites. He stated, “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” He said, “I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores and similar establishments…I am also asking Congress to authorize the Federal Government to participate more fully in lawsuits designed to end segregation in public education.”
⁷
“Kennedy was the first president,” civil rights leader John Lewis observed, “to say the issue of race was a
moral
issue. That tied him to the black community forever.”
⁸
Indeed,
Look
magazine observed, Kennedy “was the first President since Lincoln to marshal all his authority for the cause of the Negro.”
⁹
Although Kennedy’s speech was cobbled together almost at the last moment and contained repetition, even some ad lib by JFK, it was one of his very finest moments, one of the most powerful and important (yet surprisingly unheralded) civil rights speeches ever given by a public figure.
*

Even before June 11, 1963, however, as we saw earlier in this book, on September 30, 1962, Kennedy and his brother Robert, the attorney general, had dispatched U.S. marshals and troops to “Ole Miss,” the University of Mississippi at Oxford, to escort a black, James Meredith, into the administration building to enroll (his fourth attempt) over the opposition of the segregationist governor, Ross Barnett, and rioters shouting, “Two-four-one-three, we hate Kennedy.”

Although an interracial group of 230,000 Americans marched in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963,
†
to urge Congress to enact Kennedy’s comprehensive civil rights legislation (the march was culminated by King’s “I have a dream…” oration), the proposed legislation, which would be the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, was never enacted during the Kennedy presidency. That would have to wait until Kennedy’s successor, ironically a southerner, shepherded through Congress the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But certainly, the seeds of racial equality and justice, brought to fruition during LBJ’s presidency, had been planted very firmly during the Kennedy years, and it was said by many that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “memorial” to the slain president.
‡

Despite Kennedy’s efforts to fog up their view, it was very clear to the nation’s racists, primarily in the Ku Klux Klan–infested South, whose side he was on, and they of course developed a strong hatred for him. It wasn’t just the conviction among racists and reactionaries that blacks were still chattels to be owned and used by the white man, but the abiding belief that any social measures to improve their lot would take this country in the inevitable direction of socialism and hence, in their mind, Communism. (“Integration is Communism inspired,” Mississippi’s Governor Ross Barnett charged.) In the middle of the cold war with Communist Russia, this was another reason for the Far Right’s hatred of Kennedy. As if that were not enough, there was the fear among the radical Right that a progressive administration like Kennedy’s would ultimately turn this nation over to the United Nations, a one-world government controlled, they believed, by international Jews.

The most powerful group in the Far Right during this period, claiming a membership of 100,000, was the John Birch Society. Headed by Robert Welch, the society advocated segregation, an invasion to liberate Cuba, and the abolition of foreign aid. The society’s principal
bête noire
was Communism, and it kept files on “Comsymps,” all those they suspected were Communists or Communist sympathizers. The Minutemen was a smaller paramilitary group of around 25,000 members who were training in camps around the country, preparing to provide armed resistance to what they predicted was an imminent Communist invasion. They had recently declared Dallas an “impregnable” city, vowing to trap the Reds in the desert surrounding Dallas with their “guerilleros.”
¹⁰
The yet smaller Ku Klux Klan, with its murderous antipathy for blacks, only accepted into its ranks “loyal citizens born in the United States, Christian, white, with high morals, of the Protestant faith, believing in Americanism and the supremacy of the white race.” All three of these groups, as well as religious groups like the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, viewed Kennedy as a threat to America and its values, and actively fomented opposition and venom against him and his administration. This is why many of them rejoiced in his death. “Kennedy died a tyrant’s death,” Richard Ely, president of the ultraconservative Memphis Citizens Council, said after the assassination. “He encouraged integration, which has the support of Communism. He was a tyrant.”
¹¹

With the heavy migration of southern blacks—who felt there had to be more to life than cotton, spirituals, and the Ku Klux Klan—to large northern cities disrupting the calcified social structure of these cities (with resultant riots), and the South continuing to resist integration in each and every public facility, the 1960s was a period of almost unparalleled civil strife between blacks and whites in America. Blacks, particularly in the South under the leadership of Martin Luther King, were demanding their share of the American dream, and white supremacists were not only resisting, but resorting to murder to prevent it, much of the violence occurring right in the months preceding Kennedy’s assassination. On April 23, 1963, William L. Moore, a thirty-five-year-old white mailman and World War II veteran from Binghamton, New York, bearing a sign on his back urging equality for blacks, was shot to death along a remote stretch of highway near Colbran, Alabama. Moore, known for his “one-man marches,” was on his way from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to deliver a letter (found on his body) to Governor Barnett, which said, “The white man cannot truly free himself until all men have their rights.” On June 12, 1963, the descendant of a southern shareholding family, Byron De La Beckwith, shot and killed Medgar W. Evers, the secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, as he was walking in his driveway to the front door of his home in Jackson. And on September 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, four KKK members detonated a bomb at a black Baptist church, killing four young girls and injuring twenty parishioners. (The killings continued after Kennedy’s death. For instance, on June 21, 1964, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a deputy sheriff delivered three civil rights workers, two northern whites and a black Mississippian, to a squad of Ku Klux Klansmen, who gunned them to death.)

Though there had not yet been any murders in Dallas directly traceable to the civil rights movement, the city was widely perceived as being a hub of right-wing fanaticism. Among other things, it was the home of oil magnate H. L. Hunt, a Kennedy critic who funded conservative causes, and Major General Edwin A. Walker, a leader of the John Birch Society in Dallas whom Kennedy, as we saw earlier in this book, had relieved of his command in West Germany for distributing right-wing literature to his troops, prompting Walker to resign from the military.
*
Byron Skelton, a national Democratic committeeman from Texas concerned about the president’s safety, wrote Attorney General Robert Kennedy seeking to dissuade his brother from coming to Texas. Indeed, as noted earlier, a month before the assassination, Adlai Stevenson had spoken in Dallas at a United Nations Day celebration, and leaving the auditorium was confronted by an angry mob of hecklers, one of whom crashed her sign down on top of his head, another expectorating on him. The next day, Stevenson spoke to Kennedy assistant Arthur Schlesinger about the “very ugly and frightening” atmosphere in Dallas and wondered whether the president should travel there.
†
But political considerations outweighed the fears. As previously indicated, in October,
Newsweek
reported that Kennedy’s position on civil rights had cost him 3.5 million votes, and that no Democratic president had been so disliked in the South.
¹²

It was amidst this highly charged and combustible atmosphere that Kennedy, trying to shore up his image in the South, came to Dallas on November 22, 1963, and the Far Right predictably greeted him with its vitriol. It started the previous day and continued throughout the morning of the assassination when five thousand throwaway handbills captioned “Wanted for Treason” were distributed on the streets of Dallas. As set forth in seven numbered paragraphs, among the many “treasonous activities against the United States” that Kennedy was wanted for was “turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations,” giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots,” and appointing “Anti-Christians to Federal office.”
¹³
The author of the handbill was one Robert A. Surrey, a business and political associate of retired General Walker.
¹⁴
Naturally, when Kennedy was shot, the instinctive reaction of a great many was that it must have been at the hands of his political enemy, the radical Right. Leftist Thomas G. Buchanan, perhaps hyperbolizing a bit, wrote that before Oswald’s arrest, Kennedy’s death “had been universally attributed to southern white-supremacy fanatics.”
¹⁵

And the immediate response of the FBI clearly illustrates its belief (before Oswald was arrested) that the Far Right was behind the assassination: agents called H. L. Hunt and told him that his and his family’s lives would probably be threatened “as a result of the president’s death,” and urged him to leave town (Dallas) at once. Although the head-strong Hunt “objected strenuously,” his chief of security, former FBI agent Paul Rothermel, ordered plane tickets for Hunt and his wife and they departed for Washington, D.C., Hunt saying that rather than go into hiding somewhere, “I believe I can do better going to Washington to help Lyndon. He’s gonna need some help.”
¹⁶
A Teletype from FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., to all FBI field offices just over an hour after the shooting assumed that the right wing was responsible for Kennedy’s murder, directing all field offices to “immediately establish whereabouts of…all known Klan and hate group members, known racial extremists…[who] may possibly have been involved.”
¹⁷
And the Atlanta FBI office immediately “ascertained the whereabouts” of Joseph Milteer (see later text), J. B. Stoner, and Melvin Bruce, all prominent members of the militant Far Right.
¹⁸