Reclaiming History (380 page)

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It was one thing for the FBI, acting within its jurisdiction to investigate domestic subversion, to use illegal means to do so. But prior to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s front-page article in the December 23 and 24, 1974, editions of the
New York Times
, it was not publicly known that the CIA, with no jurisdiction domestically, had been illegally spying on American citizens since the Nixon administration. Hersh’s articles caused President Gerald Ford to order CIA Director William Colby to report to him “within a matter of days” on the published allegations. (
New York Times
, December 23, 1974, pp.1, 19;
New York Times
, December 24, 1974, pp.1, 4) Hersh’s explosive revelations are widely credited with Ford’s creation of the Rockefeller Commission on January 4, 1975, to determine whether the CIA was exceeding its statutory authority.

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These dalliances started before his presidency, with his affair in 1941 with the married (separated) and beautiful, honey-blonde Inga Arvad (former Miss Denmark and Miss Europe), who for a time was erroneously suspected of being a Nazi spy, and continued into 1962 with Judith Campbell Exner, and 1963 with a stunning, Elizabeth Taylor–resembling call girl, Ellen Rometsch, whom Bobby Kennedy quietly deported back to Germany.

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If the truth be told, many in Dallas, the most conservative large city in Texas, viewed Kennedy as a “pinko” (colloquial for Communist) and didn’t even want him to come. (But as long as he was coming, they, the conservatives, wanted to be in charge.) How could Kennedy possibly be viewed as a Communist? In these circles, said Dallas Democratic political organizer Elizabeth Forsling Harris, “anybody who had any interest in what might be called social equality,” or thought the government should serve “the needs of all the people, was, ipso facto, a Commie” (HSCA Record 180-10078-10272, Deposition of Elizabeth Forsling Harris before HSCA on August 16, 1978, pp.8, 49).

†The decision may have been helped by a report from Winston G. Lawson, the Secret Service White House advance agent for the trip, to Gerald Behn. Although he did not make a recommendation for the Trade Mart over the Women’s Building, after visiting both buildings on the morning of November 13 Lawson told Behn that the Trade Mart had two security advantages over the Women’s Building. Number one, the internal security system at the Mart barred entry to everyone other than lessees of commercial space at the building and their customers. Number two, there was no kitchen at the Women’s Building, so the food would have to be brought in from the outside. (4 H 336–338, WCT Winston G. Lawson; 11 HSCA 517)

^*
The murder of Kennedy remains the only murder ever of a president who was under Secret Service protection.

^*
In 1963 it was not the practice of the Secret Service to check out, in advance, buildings along the routes a presidential motorcade took (HSCA Record 180-10074-10392, HSCA interview of Dallas SAC Forrest Sorrels on March 15, 1978, p.4; WR, p.664). James Rowley, the chief of the Service, told the Warren Commission, “Except for [an] inauguration or other parades involving foreign dignitaries accompanied by the president in Washington, it has not been the practice of the Secret Service to make surveys or checks of buildings along the route of a presidential motorcade…With the number of men available to the Secret Service and the time available, surveys of hundreds of buildings and thousands of windows is not practical…In accordance with its regular procedure, no survey or other check was made by the Secret Service, or by any other law enforcement agency at its request, of the Texas School Book Depository Building…prior to the time the president was shot.” Rowley went on to say that since the assassination, “there has been a change in this regard.” (5 H 467)
Interestingly, Forrest Sorrels recalls that while driving the motorcade route with Winston Lawson prior to the actual motorcade, when they turned from Main Street to Houston, Lawson “was startled to see the building facing us. He asked me what building it was and I told him it was the book warehouse” (HSCA Record 180-10074-10392, HSCA interview of Forrest Sorrels on March 15, 1978, p.4).

†Contrary to the suggestion of Palamara, and the belief of many, even if the bubbletop had been on the limousine it would not have prevented the assassination because, as noted earlier in the book, it was only a plastic shield at that time, furnishing protection only against inclement weather (WR, p.2; HSCA Report, p.183 note 2). The decision not to use the bubbletop was made at Love Field right after Air Force One landed there from Fort Worth. Secret Service agents wanted the bubbletop to be used because they were expecting rain, but Kennedy didn’t want the bubbletop, and presidential assistant Bill Moyers, on the phone from Austin, Texas, told the Secret Service, “Get that Goddamned bubble [top] off unless it’s pouring rain.” (HSCA Record 180-10078-10272, Deposition of Elizabeth Forsling Harris before HSCA on August 16, 1978, p.28)
Remarkably, although the FBI had a bulletproof car for its director in 1963, the Secret Service did not have the foresight or common sense to have one for the president of the United States (LBJ Record 177-10001-10237, Telephone conversation between LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover, November 29, 1963, pp.7–8).

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In his 1973 book,
20 Years in the Secret Service: My Life with Five Presidents
, Rufus W. Youngblood, one of sixteen Secret Service agents in the Dallas motorcade, writes that “as a Secret Service agent you are constantly on the alert for the individual who somehow does not fit” (Youngblood,
20 Years in the Secret Service
, p.12).

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Fourteen months later, Gerald Behn, the special agent in charge of the White House’s Secret Service detail at the time of the assassination, was demoted by Rowley. It is not known whether the demotion was related to the assassination, but a demotion right after the assassination would have been more likely to be construed that way, and if, indeed, Behn was demoted because of the assassination, this may have been the reason why Rowley waited over a year.

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In fact, at the time Khrushchev was ousted as Soviet premier on October 15, 1964, informed sources said that his constant rift with Peking (now Beijing), which gave every indication of heading toward a showdown, was the pivotal issue in his downfall. Not that the Soviet hierarchy wanted to get muscular with the West, but clearly China did not like Khrushchev, subjecting him to vitriolic personal attacks, and his successor, Leonid I. Brezhnev, a protégé of Khrushchev’s, said even before he became premier that the Soviet-Sino split had to end. (
New York Times
, October 16, 1964, p.14;
New York Times
, October 17, 1964, p.1)

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In what has to be one of the most interesting and, at least to me, funny lines ever to come out of the CIA’s storied history,
the CIA director himself
, William Colby, after calling Angleton “supersensitive,” had to confess that although he did not suspect Angleton and his staff of engaging in improper activities, he “just could not figure out what they were doing at all” (Colby and Forbath,
Honorable Men
, pp.334, 364). Colby would eventually fire Angleton, after the latter’s thirty years with the agency. Author David Martin would say of Angleton that he fulfilled public fantasies of the master spy, looking and sounding like a character out of a Graham Greene or John le Carré novel. (Martin,
Wilderness of Mirrors
, photo section, pp.211–214).

†However, Angleton did not believe—nor is there any evidence that Golitsyn tried to convince him—that Oswald was acting under the control of the KGB when he killed Kennedy.

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Among other things, the CIA has acknowledged that Nosenko was confined (at one time, in a ten-by-ten-foot cell) at secure CIA locations from April 1964 through October 1967, during which time he was intermittently interrogated, was under “constant visual observation,” and “did not have access to TV, radio or newspapers.” Nosenko was in “solitary confinement” during this three-and-a-half-year period. (
Los Angeles Times
, March 8, 1976, p.1; ten-by-ten-foot cell: Gest, Shapiro, Bowermaster, and Geier, “JFK: The Untold Story of the Warren Commission,” p.37). His contact with other people “was limited to Agency personnel from April 1964–December 1968” (12 HSCA 544–545). Richard Helms, the CIA deputy director of plans and CIA director during this period, wrote that “despite what has been reported in some of the literature, [Nosenko] was never drugged or subjected to any form of physical abuse, and was regularly examined by an Agency doctor” (Helms with Hood,
Look over My Shoulder
, p.243).

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That this “reliable” informant seemed to have good information was corroborated by Thomas Hughes, the director of intelligence and research at the State Department, who sent a memo to Secretary of State Dean Rusk the day after the assassination setting forth what his office had picked up from its international sources. In addition to saying that “the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries displayed the same sense of shock as the rest of the world at the assassination of President Kennedy” and that “Soviet media gave considerable and sympathetic coverage to the tragedy, including for the first time a Telstar transmission,” he said that “at the same time there were signs of uncertainty about the course which President Johnson will follow” (WC Record 179-40005-10409, November 23, 1963).
What little the Soviets could have known of Johnson from his few public pronouncements could not have sounded, to them, too congenial to their interests. For instance, on June 2, 1960, in Washington, D.C., Johnson said, “Mr. Khrushchev does not understand that Americans of whatever their political creed—Republican or Democrat—will stand united against him in his effort to divide the country and weaken the hopes of freedom.” And in Berlin, on August 19, 1961, he said, “The Communist dictatorship has the power temporarily to seal a border, but no tyranny can survive beyond the shadow of its own evil strength.” (
New York Times
, November 24, 1963, p.7)

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As Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev said in a Teletyped letter to Washington at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, “Only lunatics or suicides, who themselves want to perish,” would risk a nuclear war (Thomas, “Bobby at the Brink,” p.56).
Few knew the character of the Russian bear as well as George Kennan, the American diplomat who studied the Soviet Union and its leadership for years. In his famous “Long Telegram” from the American embassy in Moscow in 1946 to his superiors at the State Department in Washington, D.C., he said, “Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany is…not adventuristic…
It does not take unnecessary risks
” (Kennan,
Memoirs, 1925–1950
, p.557).

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Kennedy’s brother RFK, the nation’s attorney general, was always more outspoken and passionate about civil rights than the president, turning the power of his office to the vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws in the South after his original emphasis on organized crime.
From all I have read, it seems that JFK was much more easy-going and less intense than his younger brother, Bobby, for whom the adjective “ruthless” was frequently used, and who had his severe detractors as well as his even more dedicated followers. On the matter of RFK’s being intense and passionate, syndicated columnist David Broder wrote, “His distinguished quality was his capacity for what can only be called moral outrage. ‘That is unacceptable,’ he said of many conditions that most of us accepted as inevitable—so long as we and ours were spared their damage. Poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, prejudice, crookedness, conniving—all such accepted evils were a personal affront to him…He cared passionately about his family, his country, and this world, and he was prepared to play his part in the drama of his times, no matter what it might be or what it might cost” (David Broder, “The Legacy of Robert Kennedy,”
Dallas Times Herald
, May 31, 1978). Tom Billings, JFK’s close friend, recalled that when RFK gave a stirring civil rights speech in May of 1961 at the University of Georgia at Athens, JFK “wasn’t too happy…He said it wouldn’t do him any good to bring that kind of civil rights talk directly into the heart of the South” (Beschloss,
Crisis Years
, p.304). On the other hand,
Look
senior editor Laura Berquist wrote, “I first began trailing [Kennedy] in 1956, just after he’d lost the nomination for Vice-President. Democratic insiders pooh-poohed his quest for the presidency as impossible—he was too rich, too glamorous, had too much father…But in Columbia, South Carolina, a conservative bastion, I heard him [Berquist doesn’t give the year] speak out on civil rights with a ferocious, startling candor. I knew then he was better than the glamour image that dogged and often irked him” (Berquist, “John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” p.35).

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Because of the speech’s importance, for those who are interested, most of its text appears in an endnote. What made the speech particularly remarkable is that, as indicated, it was prepared within just hours of its delivery, 8:00 p.m. EST. Earlier in the day, JFK had been watching television reruns of U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach’s encounter in 100-degree heat with the Alabama segregationist Governor George Wallace “at the schoolhouse door” of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Katzenbach was seeking the peaceful admission, pursuant to a court order, of two black students to the all-white university, and Wallace, who had campaigned for governor on the slogan of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” refused to step aside. (Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard in the late morning and Wallace stepped aside only when an Alabama National Guard brigadier general, Henry Graham, confronted Wallace at the door in midafternoon and said, “Governor Wallace, it is my sad duty to inform you that the National Guard has been federalized. Please stand aside so that the order of the court may be accomplished.”) Kennedy decided, “I want to go on television tonight.” As late as one hour before the speech, Kennedy was asking his aides to help him with ideas and articulations for his address. (Reeves,
President Kennedy
, pp.518–521; HSCA Report, p.32)
Kennedy had already let the good folks of Alabama know that its segregationist philosophy did not sit well with him. Nothing is more important to Alabamians, even today, than the fortunes of their college football team at Tuscaloosa. And before the 1963 Orange Bowl in Miami, President Kennedy visited the locker room of the integrated Oklahoma Sooners. He did not visit Coach Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide, which was still all-white. (Will, “Eleven Men and Sic ’Em,” p.88)