Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (34 page)

My best friend at the time in the journalism world was David Chandler, who had been on the
States-Item
with me and then went to work for Time-Life as a reporter for
Life
magazine. He was on the inside of the Garrison investigation at the time that we broke the story and was thinking that he had an exclusive for
Life
about Garrison’s investigation. He was also there during all the talking about Clay Shaw and why Garrison thought he should arrest Clay Shaw. Thereafter he would have nothing
to do with Garrison, because he said it was such a ridiculous piece of phony logic that he used to try to get Clay Shaw as another headline-producing event.

I believe the Mob was the best possibility of a conspiracy, and there may have been some other elements involved such as the Teamsters—that’s what I believe—possibly even some disillusioned right-wing Cubans: some elements of the thing that Garrison kept presenting here and there and yonder as individual theories, like fourteen Cubans shooting from the storm drains. That was one of the theories du jour. Every day there was something new, so it became harder and harder to give any credence to Garrison. However, I do think there was a conspiracy, and I think that, because of Garrison, it was never fully uncovered. I think the Mob put together a scheme that he was part of. That’s what I think.

I do feel that Marcello was treated unfairly in several instances by the feds. There was one trial, for example, involving a nightclub called The Crash Landing. The evidence and the witnesses presented by the federal prosecutor in that case were such a put-up job that it was obvious to everybody in the courtroom and certainly obvious to the journalists covering the thing. I did some reporting on that after the fact, and one or two of the witnesses stated that. The federal judge in the case said: “I agree with what was said by the media last night—that the witnesses are suspect.” That was one example of how Marcello was treated unfairly. I think he was deprived of his civil rights when he was deported to Guatemala. They just grabbed him, put him on a plane, and dropped him in Guatemala, and if it hadn’t been for one of his friends, Lisa Mosca, the owner of Mosca’s Restaurant, he might still be cooling his heels down there. She
sent him money. She was able to get him a big sum of money, and he was able to get back into the country as a result of her help. There are lots of reasons to think Marcello has been treated unfairly in many instances because if an ordinary citizen were treated that way, there’d be a public outcry. Whether he facilitated a conspiracy, I don’t know. I really don’t.

I’m a Yellow Dog Democrat. I’ve never voted for a Republican, and I love my life. Kennedy was a wonderful image for America at a certain period in our history that was well needed, very much needed. We needed a heroic character and someone to fall in love with politically, and he seemed to fit that bill perfectly. I don’t think he was the greatest president we’ve ever had. Despite all we’ve learned, I still think he was a good man. I think he had enormous challenges to face while he was president, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. He made a terrible mistake with the Bay of Pigs, probably. He should have followed through on the commitment. He made some enemies then, and Bobby Kennedy made a whole lot more enemies for him with his pursuit of the Teamsters Union and several other avenues of investigation that he worked on. Given the John Kennedy I know today, including all of his peccadilloes with women, I would still vote for him.

Mike Kettenring

In the 1960s Mike Kettenring was a reporter for WDSU television in New Orleans, but in the summer of ’63 he worked at Reilly Coffee, where one of his coworkers was a twenty-three-year-old machine greaser named Lee Oswald. At WDSU Kettenring worked on the Oswald investigative team, interviewing many Cubans in New Orleans, and in 1967 he covered the Garrison-Shaw trial. In later years he served as news director then general manager of WSMV-TV in Nashville—often cited as the best station in the nation—before becoming a man of the cloth.

W
e worked together at Reilly Coffee Company during the summer before the assassination, and I walked with him a couple or three times. He was a fellow worker. He was sullen, low-grade anger, a loner. Didn’t really join in, certainly wasn’t going to come talk with me. The few times I had conversations with him, I had to go to him. We’d mostly kibitz. The only thing we ever talked about that related to the assassination was he told me that he had lived in Russia; I just thought that was a lie, that he was just trying to inflate himself. I just dismissed it.

After the summer, the next time I saw him was on television after the assassination, right before he was gunned down, and I’m looking at him and saying, “My God, that’s Lee.” I thought,
He’s an angry enough man, he probably did it
. Like so many people, we all remember where we were when we heard about the assassination, but it’s become part of me because it wasn’t just being stunned at the assassination, it was: “I know him, and, yes, I believe he may very well have done that. He could have done that.”

I was in a student council meeting at college, and my immediate thought was
Camelot’s gone. We’re in trouble
. In my opinion, that’s exactly what happened to our country. We got in trouble because Arthur died
and Camelot fell. We lost innocence. We went immediately from
Leave It to Beaver
to
Easy Rider
and
Apocalypse Now
. We went from June Cleaver, sweet little June, to strident women legitimately looking for their rights—but very stridently. We went from Martin Luther King and nonviolence to H. Rap Brown and burning cities down. We went from saluting our war veterans to spitting in their faces. We literally went from innocence, from childhood to adolescence, and it was an ugly adolescence. It was with a great deal of anger and attitude.

It was obviously a confluence of [many] things, but I think the level of anger, the attitude that the country took on was far greater because we had lost our great hero. We went from being a country that John Kennedy called us to serve—“Go into the Peace Corps. Don’t ask what you can get from the country, but what can you give to the country?” And all of a sudden, it was a “me” country. We lost that sense of hero worship, someone who would lead us to serve. I’m a priest in my life, and all great religions, every one of them, stress service. That’s what humanity is all about, we think. John Kennedy thought that. He had some problems in his life. I wish he would have come to me for confession for one or two of those little sins, but he was a great man because he understood leadership and he understood service, that people who serve come together. We didn’t come together after his death. We split wide apart.

I was a reporter at the time, and I was part of a little three-person investigative unit that looked into these things. Everyone we talked with was a typical New Orleanian—off the wall. We interviewed a man at the time, David Ferrie. He came in for the interview with pieces of orange carpet taped
above his eyes because he had no hair and he wanted to be interviewed with eyebrows. Only in New Orleans, I submit, would that happen.

Jim Garrison was an egomaniac. I covered the trial, the Clay Shaw trial. Every day, I got up and I said, “Today’s the day there’s going to be a little bit of smoke coming out of his gun. There’s going to be something today.” Never happened, but he would go before the cameras after court, every day, and keep saying how he had all the evidence in the world to prove that this was a conspiracy and that Clay Shaw was deeply involved in it. Never found a single piece of evidence as a reporter about any of that. Jim Garrison: a big, tall, imposing man physically, but he just had this ego. He wanted to be on the world stage, and I believe with every fiber of my being that’s why he did it.

He picked on Clay Shaw because Shaw was easy. He was a gay man at the time when being a gay person was not widely accepted, and he felt he could use that to his advantage. Clay Shaw was an involved person in the New Orleanian business community and in the social and cultural communities as well, so the movers and shakers of New Orleans all knew Clay Shaw. If he could tie Clay Shaw to the assassination, he would be bringing down a person who had clout in the city. Until the very end, virtually the entire city felt that Jim Garrison had evidence to prove what he was saying—to the very end. The jury came back right away because there was nothing there, literally nothing there.

Carlos Marcello was on my beat at the time, so I frequently talked at him. If he was getting off a plane, I was there. He never responded to my questions. All I wanted at that point was to find out how deeply involved he was in the Mafia. There was little question that he ran criminal activities, but there was no evidence that he was like the Mafia dons in New
York. There was no evidence that he was involved in anything that was violent, no evidence that he committed murders. That was an aspect of it that I wanted to explore, and then, when the assassination occurred, questions arose as to whether the Mafia was behind Lee Harvey Oswald. Then I wanted to interview him about that.

This was pretty much like the Clay Shaw trial. We found nothing to link Carlos Marcello to the Kennedy assassination. Marcello was part of the fabric of Louisiana. Louisiana was comfortable with criminals running their government. They were comfortable with criminals having deep influence within the city, and I think that if you asked one hundred people in New Orleans, “Was Carlos Marcello a criminal?” one hundred people would tell you, “Yes, he was.” If you asked them, “Should he be going to jail?” probably one hundred of them would say, “No.” Conspiracy and intrigue are part of the culture of the city. Still are today, even more so back then. Conspiracies intrigue New Orleanians in a way they don’t intrigue lots of other people in our country, and it was easy for them to believe there was a conspiracy to kill the president.

I couldn’t find anything that indicated Marcello had any problems with the president. He may have had it, but we couldn’t find anything of that nature. I think Carlos Marcello always felt like he didn’t get a fair shake, that when he was deported it was on the flimsiest of reasons. That certainly got under his skin, and when the Kennedy assassination occurred and he was being linked with it, that got under his skin as well. It just rankled him. I think he felt it was unjust. Now maybe a Mafia person saying, “This is unjust” is pushing the envelope just a little bit, but I think that’s how he felt.

Pretty early on, I was convinced I would not [unravel it] because we kept running into
brick walls. There wasn’t anything really substantive that we could find, and I was the rookie on this three-person team. The other two were really seasoned, veteran reporters, very good reporters. We just didn’t find anything.

I got a call one night from one of Carlos Marcello’s lieutenants, telling me, “Mr. Marcello has finally agreed. He’s going to talk with you. You got to show up at two o’clock tomorrow morning at the parking lot at Smiley’s Restaurant on Jefferson Highway.” I worried about that, didn’t tell my wife I was going. I slipped out, and I got there, waited about two hours. No one showed up. Never knew whether it was a friend pulling my leg or whether it was Marcello pulling my leg, but, no, I never got the interview.

Marcello never told his side of the story because the world wouldn’t have believed him. He was a Mafia don. He ran a Mafia family, and who was going to believe the Mafia don coming out and saying, “I didn’t have anything to do with this”?

I think the chances are so small that we can dismiss them. I never say never, but the chances are so small that I would be shocked. I’d be shocked. It’s fifty years. A conspiracy? Somebody would have talked by now. Somebody on their deathbed would have talked about it. Someone would have written a book to make lots of money about it. To think that anyone who was involved in a conspiracy was going to keep his or her mouth shut for fifty years? Boggles my imagination.

I believe the Warren Commission. I believe there was no conspiracy. There’s nothing that we surfaced to indicate there was a conspiracy, and other than the huge number of books that came out with conspiracy
theories in them, mainline media and television news did a good job, because I don’t think television news ever really pushed the conspiracy theory.

President Kennedy was a man of vision. He was a man deeply steeped in service. He founded the Peace Corps. God bless, it’s still here today. He looked upon everyone who had rungs of the ladder to climb as someone to help, as someone to serve. I am a priest, and my God doesn’t judge any of us on the last bad thing we do, doesn’t judge us on the worst thing that we do. He judges us on the totality of what we do. Add up all the morally good and neutral on this side of the scale and the bad on that side of the scale, and John Kennedy is still a hero.

Well, maybe not at twenty-nine, thirty-nine, or forty-nine would I have still thought him a hero, but at sixty-nine, with the reflection of sixty-nine years, yes, I would, and how we all change in life. I have changed, and I no longer look at judging a person on the narrowest part of his life but on the totality of his life. It’s what I think is so wrong with cable news today, because that’s what we do in cable news. We try to tear everyone down into the worst thing they’ve done rather than looking with perspective at the totality of what they’ve done.