Robert Morrow message to David Talbot, Oliver Stone and Jim DiEugenio - Yes, CIA/military intelligence murdered JFK, but Lyndon Johnson orchestrated the JFK assassination because LBJ was acutely aware that the Kennedys were out to utterly destroy Lyndon Johnson in the fall of 1963 (not merely dropping LBJ from the 1964 Democratic ticket). For more information on this merely read the rest of my blog.
Web link: Unredacted
- Episode 6 - Transcript (maryferrell.org)
Rex Bradford
interviews David Talbot – May 2, 2007: Robert Kennedy’s Views on and the CIA’s
role in the JFK assassination
Unredacted Episode 6:
Transcript of Interview with David Talbot
David Talbot is the founder of Salon.com and author of the new
book Brothers: The Hidden History of the
Kennedy Years. The book delves into the reaction of Robert Kennedy to his
brothers murder and his subsequent political odyssey, and also paints a picture
of JFK at war with his national security bureaucracy. This interview was
conducted by Rex Bradford on 2 May 2007.
Go to this Unredacted episode's main page for additional
resources.
Listen to the interview while
reading: (52 min) – see web link above
REX: This is Rex Bradford and we’re here with Unredacted again,
and my guest today is David Talbot, who is a founder and former editor-in-chief
of Salon.com, and has also writtten for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and other
magazines, and most recently, he’s the author of a new book entitled Brothers:
The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, which is going on sale May 8th.
Welcome, David.
DAVID: Hi Rex, thanks.
REX: Sure. I read your book over the weekend, and found it fascinating.
It reminded me in parts of Arthur Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His
Times, although unlike that book, yours kept veering into the assassination
of President Kennedy, and particularly his brother, Bobby’s, reaction to it,
and I think that’s where you have some new information which really hasn’t made
it out there previously. I was wondering if we could start by talking about
what happened in the aftermath of JFK’s murder. What did Bobby do?
DAVID: Sure. And I’m glad and honored to hear you compare my
book with Schlesinger’s epic biography of Robert Kennedy, because what I was
trying to do was not just write another conspiracy book with Brothers,
but to tell what I thought - and of course still is - an epic American drama. I
wanted to focus on some of the darker events of the 1960s, specifically JFK’s
assassination and the turmoil within his administration, but to do it through the prism
of Bobby Kennedy, his brother, who was his devoted protector, his political
watchman, his attorney general. It always intrigued me what Bobby did or didn’t
do to look into this monumental crime, the death of his brother, and so that’s
what motivated me.
In some ways, it’s a grand human interest story as much as it's
a book about the conspiracy to kill the President; but of course, that’s what
Bobby immediately concluded, as I say in my first chapter, on the afternoon of
November 22nd, 1963. He
immediately thought that the death of his brother did not just involve Lee
Harvey Oswald, he thought it was a plot, and the area he looked into
immediately was the CIA’s secret war on Cuba, which of course was part
of his own portfolio in the Kennedy administration. So it was a secret war that
he was very knowledgeable about, and he knew the violent tensions that were
boiling within this world, and he immediately connected Oswald, I think to the
assassination, and to the secret war.
REX: You retell the story where he called Harry Williams, who was with journalist Haynes
Johnson, and said “one of your boys did it.” What’s your take on that
conversation?
DAVID: Right. Well, of course, that’s been a hotly debated
question for years now among assassination researchers, and my take on it, after
interviewing Haynes Johnson, the Washington reporter who was with Harry Ruiz
Williams in the hotel room when Bobby told Ruiz Williams this - and this was
Haynes’ original interpretation as well - was that Bobby knew the name Oswald
by then, that Oswald had been arrested in Dallas, and instead of connecting
Oswald to the pro-Castro Communist movement, as the CIA and FBI was
aggressively trying to portray him as at that point, Bobby rejected that view
of Oswald and instead connected him to the anti-Castro underground.
When he said to Harry
Ruiz Williams, “one of your guys did it,” he meant an anti-Castro militant, and
in a sense was saying “one of our guys did it,” because Bobby
was in charge of that movement. My speculation about this, and this
part is, of course, pure speculation, is that whoever constructed the plot
against JFK knew that they would have to immobilize Robert Kennedy. That was a
very important aspect of their operation, because he was the most aggressive
investigator in America, and they knew how devoted to JFK he was. He was going
to be coming after them immediately.
I think one of the ways
they did immobilize him was by planting the seed of doubt immediately that he
had failed his brother in some way, that it was his responsibility that his
brother had been killed, because this was the secret
operation that he was supposed to be in charge of.
REX: So, in some sense, the story that Johnny Roselli and his
associates floated in late ’66 that plots against Castro tracked back to Bobby
Kennedy was at least in a sense true?
DAVID: In a literary sense, in a metaphorical sense, right. Roselli
was right, and of course that’s what they were signaling to Bobby. Of course,
Bobby rejected the concrete facts of what they were alleging. Bobby did, I
believe - as he said to many people - he thought he’d shut down the murder
plots against Castro, the CIA/Mafia plots. What he did know, in a larger,
metaphorical sense, is that he might have been responsible because this was the
area of government his brother put him charge of and this was where the plot
had come from, so he hadn’t seen it coming.
Bobby, people called him JFK’s “constant watchman.” Well, he
thought this had been a lapse on his part, that he hadn’t protected his
brother, and I think he went to his grave feeling a great sense of guilt about
that.
REX: What did you find out that was new about RFK’s reaction in
the days after Dallas?
DAVID: Well, how aggressive he was immediately that day, working
the phones at his home in Hickory Hill - the Civil War era mansion where he
lived. He was always
loathe to have any protection at all until the day he was shot, but he allowed
his aides, people like Ed Guthman, to surround his house with Federal Marshals.
He thought that they were coming for him next. The sense of drama, of
tension, of crisis, I think that gripped the Kennedy circle and the government
as a whole that day is just palpable.
He immediately connects
the plot to the secret war on Castro. He then
tells family this a couple days later at the White House. He starts using
surrogates like Walter Sheridan, a former FBI agent, to begin hotly pursuing
every lead that he can. When Jack Ruby shoots Oswald down on camera on national
television, he immediately
has Sheridan looking into Ruby’s mafia connections, and within 24 hours of the
shooting, Sheridan’s reporting back to him that he found evidence that Ruby has
been paid off in Chicago by associates of teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, who is,
of course, Bobby’s great nemesis.
So, already they’re seeing this as a CIA-Mafia operation. I
believe that they’re seeing it as an operation that was masterminded within the
government, but some of the sleazier aspects were carried out by the mafia.
REX: So, Ruby, who the Warren Commission would later call
someone who was “keenly interested in policemen and their work,” Bobby knew
right away that wasn’t who Ruby was?
DAVID: Exactly. He rejected that, and I actually found not only
evidence that Sheridan was reporting back to him about Ruby’s mob connections,
but he was getting secret correspondence from informers that was pointing Bobby
in the same direction. There was one letter I saw, from somebody that I quote
in the book, saying “Jack Ruby is a notorious trigger man.” “Finger man” I
think is what they call him, for the mob, and that he is a frequent guest, and
he names a mafia nightclub, I believe, in Southern California where Ruby used
to hang out. This information, I think, was coming to Bobby from a number of
different directions within hours of the Oswald hit.
REX: Before we leave the immediate aftermath of Dallas, one of
the stories you tell in the book is a more detailed retelling of a story that first appeared
in One Hell of a Gamble, and this is Bobby sending, and
Jackie I guess, sending a personal emissary to Moscow, which is an amazing
story, and one that didn’t really get picked up too much in the press - which
is maybe not unusual in this case. I wonder if you might summarize that story?
DAVID: Yes, I’m glad again you’ve highlighted that. I was amazed when I first
read that account in the book by Russian historian Alexander Fursenko and
American historian Timothy Naftali, came out a number of years ago, because as
you say, the media didn’t pick up on it although the book was reviewed very
positively.
It was within days - a
week after the assassination, Bobby and Jackie send a close family friend, a
confidante named Bill Walton, a former Time magazine war correspondent who then
became a painter and was very close to both Jack and Jackie in the White House;
JFK made him his Fine Arts Commissioner. He was
on his way anyway to Moscow, for JFK as part of JFK’s broadening peace mission
with the Soviet Union, and this was going to be part of an artistic exchange
mission Walton was going to go on. Bobby goes to him and says, “look, go ahead
with this mission,” because Walton thought he should cancel it at that point
after Jack’s death. But
Bobby and Jackie say no, and go ahead and take a secret message to Georgi
Bolshakov, who was the Soviet agent who had been stationed in Washington during
the early years of the Kennedy administration, who they used as a “back channel”
to Khrushchev and they established a confidential relationship with.
Walton meets with him, because
Bobby tells him “don’t go to the U.S. Embassy first,” because he doesn’t trust
the people there, specifically our U.S. Ambassador there, Foy Kohler, who was
an anti-Kennedy guy, and staunch anti-Communist. He says, “meet directly
with Bolshakov at a restaurant,” which they do, “and pass him this
information.” The information that the Kennedys pass to the Soviet agent is,
“look, don’t worry. We know you guys didn’t kill JFK, despite what the
intelligence agencies in the U.S. are trying to promote.” What they tell him is
remarkable. They say that
“the plot was a high political conspiracy that came out of, that was based in
the U.S.” That it was a domestic plot, not a foreign plot, and that “someday
I’m going to run for President, and if I win, I’m going to resume my brother’s
policies of detente towards the Soviet Union.”
To me this is a remarkable message because here’s Bobby Kennedy,
who was once a counsel for Joe McCarthy, a staunch anti-Communist himself
coming from his Irish-Catholic background like McCarthy. And yet, at this point
in his life, he is clearly
putting more trust in the Soviet government at the height of the Cold War than
he is in his own government, which he now has great distrust for, at
least parts of it. I think that is a remarkable episode.
REX: It really is. This is late ’63, and I think your book and a
few others before it have told a story which challenges some of the Cold War
mythology about Kennedy. You hear over and over again the inaugural speech
about “paying any price” and so forth. And over the years, certainly many
people have told a quite different story about a Kennedy administration that -
particularly during the second half, after the Missile Crisis, but even before
- was searching for a way to maintain peace in the world up against the
military and CIA establishment that was on a different page.
This is much too big a topic for this interview, but I wonder if
you might touch upon that, or talk about any of the interesting interviews you
conducted with insiders for your book that might shed some more light on that?
DAVID: Absolutely. I think that’s a key theme of my book, because after Bobby comes to the
conclusion that there’s a plot and starts to look into the sources of the plot,
then I have to explain why Bobby felt the way he did, where these
suspicions came from. So the next two chapters, or three chapters, of my book,
I look into the administration itself, and the explosive tensions within the
Kennedy administration.
What I think sparked these tensions is that Kennedy, by the
second - certainly by the final year, the third year - of his administration is moving very
decisively towards reaching a detente with the Soviet Union, and ending the
Cold War years before that finally happened; also opening a peace back channel
with Castro, who was his arch-nemesis in this hemisphere.
I think, as Kennedy
told his friend, Bill Walton - the person who later went to Moscow for Jackie
and Bobby - he said "I'm almost a 'peace at any price' President."
Robert McNamara told me that his epitaph, JFK always wanted his epitaph to be "he kept the
peace," and McNamara said he did, against enormous odds. He was
under constant pressure, from the Bay of Pigs on, to engage with a Communist
enemy somewhere in the world, whether it was Berlin, or Laos, or Cuba, or
Vietnam, he was under
enormous pressure to have a nuclear war from some of the more zealous members
of the National Security establishment, like Curtis LeMay, the head of the Air
Force, who Kennedy thought was completely unhinged.
The context of the times - people who didn't live through it can
hardly appreciate how terror-filled it was. 9/11 pales in comparison to this.
Here you have the head, a member of the Joint Chiefs, World War II hero, Curtis LeMay with his finger on
the button of an enormous nuclear arsenal going to a party in late 1961, I
believe in July of 1961 in Georgetown, sitting next to the wife of a U.S.
senator, and he tells her blithely, "there's going to be a nuclear war
with the Soviet Union before the year's over." Completely
dumbfounded and terrified, the woman says, "well, is there anywhere I can
take my children and grandchildren to be safe?" He says, "well, most
American cities, most major cities are going to be obliterated, but maybe you
can find some spot out west in tumbleweed territory where you can be safe."
LeMay seriously thought you could have a nuclear war with the
Soviet Union and actually win, as long as you ended up with more nuclear
weapons at the end of the war than the enemy did.
REX: It seems like he and some other people of that period felt
that it was inevitable. I mean, some might have been more relishing the idea
than others, but ...
DAVID: That's right. McNamara told me that [LeMay thought] it was inevitable, and that if
you had to fight it, you should fight it sooner rather than later, because
America did have, despite the Missile Gap campaign issue that Kennedy ran on in
1960, in 1961, the U.S. had enormous nuclear superiority over the Soviets and
so that's where the pressure came from, from the military.
REX: On that topic, wasn't July '61 when there was a somewhat
obscure National Security meeting in which it was presented to Kennedy that the
Missile Gap was in the U.S. favor and increasing, and there would come a time before long when a first
strike would be a viable option?
DAVID: That's right. The pressure starts to build then, as
Kennedy and the Pentagon realize that they do have this massive superiority
over the Soviets.
REX: Now, you know -
DAVID: No, go ahead.
REX: I was going to refocus back on Cuba in the same vein
because there are certainly a lot of people who have studied the Kennedy
administration in a fair amount of detail that take a different view on the
Kennedy brothers' involvement and knowledge of the plots to kill Castro. For instance, the AMLASH plot in
'63, where Rolando Cubela was recruited in Bobby Kennedy's name. Now, you
certainly take the view that this was done behind his back. Other people will
think, "well, Fitzgerald is a social friend of the Kennedys, they must
have worked out something behind the scenes." How is someone
supposed to parse the truth in the larger question, and in that plot in
particular?
DAVID: There's been a whole new wave of revisionist work done by
people who are, for the most part, in the anti-Kennedy camp, who think that
they were - and these are both liberals and conservatives - who believe the
Kennedys were guilty of a number of sins, and one of them was being overly
aggressive about Cuba, and going so far as to recruiting Mafia henchman to try
to assassinate Fidel Castro. I don't see any evidence of that.
When you read the
testimony of somebody like Richard Helms, who was effectively running the CIA,
despite the fact that John McCone was Director in name
at least during the Kennedy period, after Dulles was fired. Helms, if he had
the evidence, he would have loved to present it to the Church Committee when he
testified there in the late '70s when they were pursuing this question of
assassination plots against foreign leaders. He dances around it in a very
slippery way, but at the end of the day, he can't provide them with the
evidence, he says, "Robert Kennedy would have liked us to do that. We
thought we were doing what he wanted us to do." But, at the end of the
day, when the senators said, "well, did he ever tell you to do this?"
No. He could provide no evidence that he was ever told to do this by the
Kennedys.
So, there was a lot of winking and nodding on the part of these
CIA officials like Helms when they testify about this, but at the end of the
day, they were never able to provide evidence, solid evidence that the Kennedys
were pushing them to assassinate Castro. In fact, both JFK and Bobby, in their lifetime, told
associates - very close aides - on a number of occasions, that they thought
they had stopped these plots.
I believe that that's the case. That they actually believed in
the famous meeting that Bobby had in May of 1962, I believe in the Attorney
General's office, where he confronts two high-ranking CIA officials, who tell
him about these plots, and he caustically tells them, "I hope in the future you'll have the
decency to tell the Attorney General of the United States if you are
collaborating with gangsters."
I interviewed John
Siegenthaler, who was Bobby Kennedy's right hand man at the Justice Department, when he had that meeting, he was present at that meeting, at
least at the beginning. He saw Bobby's fury when the CIA officials notified him
about these Mafia plots was genuine. You have to put yourself in Bobby's shoes.
Here's a man who made his name in public life as an anti-crime crusader. He
loathed these Mafia chieftans, who he was constantly running up against as a
rackets investigator in the '50s and then as Attorney General. The idea that
the U.S. government would be collaborating with people like this on anything,
let alone the assassination of a foreign leader was just appalling to someone
like Robert Kennedy.
There was no love lost
between Castro and the Kennedys, and Bobby - particularly after the Bay of Pigs
- when he was put in charge of Cuba by his brother, clearly would have liked to
get rid of Castro through a number of means. But I
think, what their "dream scenario" was was that they could foment a
guerrilla uprising - just the way Castro had come to power - within Cuba, that
would spark a popular unrest that would lead to the toppling of the Castro
regime. That was their dream scenario. I don't think it was realistic, as they
found out, Castro had too much popular support of his own. That's what they
were aiming for. Their efforts, like Operation Mongoose and others, were aimed
at not assassinating or decapitating the Castro government.
REX: Around the same time as the AMLASH plots was when a second
track on Cuba opened up. Journalist
Lisa Howard was involved in the early stages of putting together Kennedy
associates with Castro associates to try to see if an accomodation could be
worked out, and you write about this in your book. You also include the news
that her phone was tapped, and therefore the CIA would have been aware of this.
Where did you find that out?
DAVID: Her
key ally in this effort to bring peace between Washington and Havana was a U.N.
diplomat named William Attwood. He'd actually been an old acquaintance of JFK's
back in prep school days, where they had actually been interested in the same
girl, who figures prominently in Kennedy's life later, Mary Meyer. Mary Pinchot
Meyer.
In any case, Jack and Bill Attwood had known each other for
years, Attwood becomes a roving foreign correspondent for Look magazine, he
works for Adlai Stevenson, and then he switches camps and he joins Kennedy, and
he becomes a diplomat in the Kennedy administration.
Lisa Howard, who knew
Attwood, began working with him - very quietly - to establish this back channel
negotiation - she actually became Castro's mistress, as I write, in that
process. Attwood goes to the Kennedys, he
gets the green light to do this. Everyone thought that Bobby, given how
hot-headed he was about Castro, would have nixed this. No, he tells them that "it's a great idea,
let's just make sure it doesn't leak," because he realizes that if
it leaks to the Washington press corps, the Kennedys will come under fire from
the hard-liners and it will all be over.
They do try to keep it as quiet as possible, they're trying to
determine where the meeting should be held - should it be held at the U.N., or
in Cuba, or maybe even in Mexico - so the eyes of the press don't focus on it.
Attwood later - he died in the late 80s of heart disease - but before he died, he gave a
number of very interesting interviews which I came across, in which he says he
believed that it did leak, and that it leaked because his phones at the U.N.
were tapped by the CIA.
REX: I see.
DAVID: There's
good reason to believe that Lisa Howard would have been under surveillance as
well because she was in fact being debriefed by the CIA whenever she came back
from Havana on these trips.
In any case, Attwood was convinced of this, that the CIA got
wind of these secret negotiations, and he went on to say, even more explosively, that once
it did start to leak into some of the more volatile areas of the National
Security circles that were very upset with the Kennedys for not being more
aggressive against Cuba that this set off a chain reaction that led to
Kennedy's assassination.
So, for a major establishment figure, which is what William Attwood was - he later
went on to become publisher of Newsday, the newspaper in Long Island -
this is a pretty remarkable thing to say that he - again, one more person
besides Bobby Kennedy from these elite government circles - he thought the plot to kill JFK
came out of the secret war against Castro.
REX: That was one of the fascinating things for me in reading
your book: the number of statements, both in books and interviews, and various
other sources from Kennedy intimates and people involved in the Administration
to the effect that they knew that the Kennedy assassination was a plot and even
had inklings as to what was behind it. Compared to what we sort of have in the
general public was that there's been just this complete silence of a
generation, and in fact they haven't gone on to write 300 page books about the
topic, or 400 page books about the topic.
I'm curious, you talked to a number of these people, and
collected a few more stories and I wonder if you might discuss that whole
business of the silence of
the Kennedy generation?
DAVID: Yes, including unfortunately, some of the Kennedy circle
themselves, these men who were devoted to the Kennedy brothers - most of them
were men - who Bobby called his "band of brothers," the ones who
worked in the Justice Department. That's another thing I was intrigued by -
what did these men do or did not do to solve the crime of the century?
Particularly the ones who had a legal background, who were investigators who
worked with Bobby at the Justice Department, and by and large, these men,
unfortunately, did nothing, despite the fact that many of them did have deep
suspicions, if not knowledge of what had happened in Dallas. I'm thinking specifically of men
like Kenny O'Donnell, JFK's top White House aide, who was riding ten feet
behind the President's limousine in Dallas, and saw that shots clearly came
from the front - the Grassy Knoll area as well as the back. He and Dave Powers,
another White House aide both testified to that. But he was told to keep quiet
by the FBI - Kenny O'Donnell - and he did. He later said that he felt very
guilty about this, and we know from Tip O'Neill's memoir that it was disturbing
him years later.
But, people
like Arthur Schlesinger clearly had great suspicions and misgivings. Dick
Goodwin, Frank Mankiewicz, Adam Walinsky, there's a long line of people that
I've spoken to who expressed their feeling that Oswald was not the full story
in Dallas. Very few of these men spoke out, and you know, I talked the
the comedian, the political
satirist Mort Sahl in my book, who I found very interesting, who sacrificed his
own career - he was making over a million dollars a year as one of America's
top comedians at that time. He sacrificed that to volunteer for Jim Garrison in
New Orleans as an unpaid volunteer. He suddenly, his gigs, his appearances on
Johnny Carson start to dry up, because people didn't want to hear him talk
about the conspiracy to kill JFK. He knew these Kennedy people, he
socialized with them, he had been a speechwriter for Jack in 1960 and he
confronted them sometimes, and said, "you know, what the hell are you
doing?" He believed
these people kept wanting to be invited to these Georgetown parties, and
I think that's unfortunately what happened with the Washington elite in
general, I don't want to pin it all on the Kennedy circle. This was true
throughout the Washington elite.
You have a situation where the Washington elite clearly - and I'm talking about the very
top people: LBJ, Richard Nixon, Ben Bradlee - all had deep suspicions that
something very dark and terrible had happened in Dallas and chose to keep quiet
about it. The American people instinctually in their gut, in their
wisdom, understood the same thing, and you have, within a very short time of
the Warren Commission being released, the American people, the public opinion
starting to shift, and believing there was a conspiracy. Of course, polls routinely show
that anywhere from 70 to 80 percent of the American people nowadays, or even
higher, believe there was a conspiracy. So you have the elite believing
that, you have the public at large believing that. The only people that keep
clinging to the Warren Report at this stage, the lone gunman theory, are the media gatekeepers,
for whatever reason, and that's what I think is enormously frustrating today.
REX: Is that to avoid saying "we were wrong for 43
years?"
DAVID: That certainly was the case up through the Dan Rather generation who bought
into the Warren Report - they didn't want to admit their mistakes. I
think that's true. But now you have to the new generation of media people, and
a kind of cyncism and snide reaction to any book that alleges there was anyone
other than Lee Harvey Oswald behind the plot to kill President Kennedy. It's appalling to me because the
Europeans, the foreign press, obviously have seen this differently for decades.
The American people see it differently. As I say, the political elite in our
own country whisper among themselves, at their own dinner parties in the '60s
that they knew that what the Warren Report was saying was a lot of bunk. But, the media gatekeepers still
haven't caught up with this wisdom.
REX: I get a sense from reading the stuff that's all over the
Internet these days that there's a phenomenon of late going on these last few
years, where the fact that the Warren Commission and the FBI laid down this
vast body of evidence implicating Oswald, and that the counter-evidence exists
outside these official channels, that over time, as people realize less and
less what that era was all about, and what the FBI and Warren Commission may have
been all about, there's less appreciation for that, and people focus more and
more on the ballistics evidence and the medical evidence - which itself is a
mess - but, to give an example: Your book is coming out this month at the same
time as Vincent Bugliosi
is publishing a 1500-page version of Case Closed, which is
going to prove in exhaustive detail that the physical evidence and the other
evidence says that Oswald did it himself.
So, I think it's a little more than just journalists defending
themselves. They have a very creaky, but nonetheless gigantic body of work to
fall back on.
DAVID: Yes. And to tell you the truth, Rex, that wasn't the
point of my book - to pore over the ballistics evidence and to go through the
minutia of Dealey Plaza once again and sort that all out. Again, what I was
looking at was what Bobby Kennedy himself thought happened and what he was
doing to solve the crime.
What my sense from my own research - you know, you can prove
anything, and lawyers particularly can prove anything. There is enough evidence
out there on both sides for you to present what sounds like a plausible case,
either for Oswald as the lone gunman, or for a conspiracy. I just think from my
own readings of the voluminous evidence we now have because of the JFK Review
Act, the government documents that were released as a result of that
legislation, and the exhaustive work done by researchers over the years, Peter
Dale, and many of whom are still working on this. Peter Dale Scott and Jeff Morley and many, many others on
both sides of the issue. I think that any reasonable person at this
point has to come to the conclusion that there was more than one shooter in
Dealey Plaza, that there's ample evidence of that, and that there was a
cover-up, that the Warren Commission, which relied almost entirely on FBI and
the CIA as its investigative arms was led down a path by those two
organizations, who were not interested in solving the crime. It wasn't the
intent of the Warren Commission to solve the crime. We know from the tapes and the conversations
between Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover within hours of the assassination -
the intent was to put the public's mind to rest - that's what it was
meant to do, rather than to solve the crime.
And we also now know because of the excellent work done by a
sub-committee of the Church
Committee under Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania and Gary Hart of Colorado in
the late '70s, then shortly after that the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, that these two Congressional committees - which have now
disappeared in the mists of time - they did do a more thorough and credible
investigation, and they both came to the conclusion that there was a
conspiracy. They weren't able to connect all the dots because they didn't have
the time or resources unfortunately to do that. They definitely said there was a conspiracy, but people
have forgotten that. The final word from the Federal government, in a
sense, at least from Congress, is that Dallas was a conspiracy.
REX: Schweiker himself
said on national TV about 30 years ago that "the Warren Commission has
fallen apart like a house of cards."
DAVID: That's right.
REX: Someone forgot to
tell the New York Times, I think. You have an amazing quote in the book along
these lines, I believe attributed to Robert Kennedy that "if the American
people knew the truth about Dallas, there would be blood in the streets." I wonder if you think that people like Earl Warren - and Bobby
Kennedy for that matter - in the early days afterwards viewed the alternative
to convicting Oswald of the crime to be a civil war?
DAVID: I do think that. Some of this is a bit speculative, but
that's my reading of one of Bobby's motives for staying quiet in the months and
years after the assassination.
He gave a tepid
endorsement of the Warren Report whenever he was asked to comment on it,
although he was always a little cagey about the way he did it. He would say
things like "well, I haven't read it," or, in
Mexico City when asked about it on a trip there in 1964, he said
"well," he "endorsed it as far as it went." So there was
always a clause he would tack on that signals, I think, the fact that he wasn't
embracing it wholeheartedly or without reservation. I think that he was
concerned about a number of things that prevented him wholeheartedly, I think,
from denouncing the Warren Report and telling the American people publicly what
he really felt.
There was a terrific
publication called Minority of One, published by an Auschwitz survivor named
Menachem Arnoni that was one of the great political
journals that was published in the U.S. in the 1960s, and people tend to forget
it. I didn't even know it existed and I come out of journalism. Arnoni was one of the first
people to write this. He wrote a provocative essay in January, 1964 - soon
after the assassination - in which he said, "let's assume for the moment
that LBJ and Bobby Kennedy both know that Dallas was a plot, and it involved
part of the National Security establishment, part of the military - high
ranking officers. If that's the case, then to move against these people before
Bobby, even Johnson's hold on government is consolidated, it could spark a
civil war, with one set of troops shooting at another set of troops in
the streets of America."
So, that appalling, I think, kind of scenario - I do believe
that was an accurate reading of Bobby's mind, to an extent - one reason why he
might have held back from aggressively denouncing the perpetrators of the plot
at that point. He always told people that he was waiting to get back to the
White House, when he would have his hands on the machinery of government,
before he reopened the case into his brother's death, and I think that's what
he was doing.
REX: That was my next question. So, your take is that he would
have done so had he become President?
DAVID: I think there's no doubt. Several of his close aides have told me this, including
Richard Goodwin and Frank Mankiewicz. I think that's what he was signaling to
students at CalState Northridge when he, in the frame of his presidential campaign
in 1968 in California, when he was heckled by students, you know, "we want
to know who killed President Kennedy!" which was always the
question he was horrified to hear, and he tended to avoid. But he did answer
that question, and I've listened to the audio tape - it was a radio broadcast
of that day, of that rally. For years it's been assumed - and I think just
because people have only read the transcript, not listened to it, the back and
forth between him and the students. It was assumed for years that it was just
one more pro forma endorsement of the Warren Report that Bobby was giving that
day. He kind of chastises the students for being rude and says, "I've seen everything in
the Archives, I endorse the Warren Report," but what he also says is
"the Archives will be opened at the proper time." That's what gets
the cheers from the crowd. "I believe they should be open."
So he's walking a
tightrope here. On one hand that if he said,
"the Warren Report is a sham," that would be the screaming headlines
throughout the world the next day. All the issues that he's running on, Vietnam, civil rights, poverty,
will be completely forgotten and the rest of his campaign will be dominated by
"Bobby rejects Warren Report." He did not want that to happen
to his campaign, he didn't want to run on his brother's assassination, but he
wanted to quietly reopen the assassination as soon as he had the power.
So what he had to do was to signal to the students - he always
respected college students - that he was going to do the right thing, but he had to do it in a subtle
enough way that it wouldn't set off a media firestorm.
REX: Interesting. I'd like to switch forward because there's
been some more recent news in the 43-year-old murder, and you've been involved
in some of the news. Shane O'Sullivan, of BBC Newsnight, last fall put out a
story that three high-level CIA officials were present at the Ambassador Hotel
when RFK was killed. You and Washington Post reporter Jeff Morley then started
tracking down the story. Can you tell us about that?
DAVID: Yeah, I think it's a fascinating episode in Kennedy
research. As you say, a young filmmaker named Shane O'Sullivan went on the air
- on the BBC - in November, with a startling report alleging that David
Morales, George Joannides, and a fellow named Gordon Campbell - and the first
two have long been connected in research circles to Dallas - were caught on
camera at the Ambassador Hotel the night Bobby was killed in Los Angeles. He
showed clips of news footage and still photographs that were taken that night
and identified them as these three men, three CIA officials who were connected,
again, to the Agency's secret war on Castro. Well, this was a kind of
"holy shit" moment, because if that was the case, then you're connecting
the same people who might have JFK to the people who might have killed RFK.
So I was in the finishing stages of my book, but I felt this had
to be looked into before I sent my book off to the publisher, so Jeff Morley and I got an
assignment from The New Yorker to look into it. With the New Yorker's
resources, we were able to criss-cross he country, going from Miami to Northern
California, Arizona and Washington and New England, and talked to a number of
people to pin down whether or not these three CIA agents were indeed there.
Well, unfortunately for Shane, and those who believed the story,
we found that it simply wasn't true. Gordon Campbell - the person he identified as Gordon Campbell - turned
out to be a U.S. Army official who had been attached to the CIA's JMWAVE
station in Miami, but he had died in 1962, so of course it was impossible for
him to show up in 1968 at the Ambassador.
We also found, finally - and I'm actually looking at these photographs right now -
excellent photographs taken of David Morales around 1968. We've only had
a very kind of rudimentary photo of him for the most part, that was taken out
of a Cuban newspaper - and it's even in my book because I wasn't able to get
these other photos in time - and so we weren't able to really get a good sense
of what David Morales looked like until now. And if you compare these new
photos that we now have in our possession - Jeff Morley and I, we've seen four photos of Morales from
that period - it's clearly not the man in the news footage at the Ambassador
Hotel. The physical characteristics are just completely different. People who
knew him well say the same thing when they look at Shane O'Sullivan's report
and these photos.
The same is true of
George Joannides. We also found good photos of Joannides taken around the same
time, and again, it's simply not the man caught on camera at the Ambassador.
On the other hand, David Morales has told - before he died - he told his attorney Robert
Walton, and he told a good friend, who I did interview again, that he was in
Dallas and Los Angeles at the times of the assassinations. He went further with
his attorney and told him that he played a role in it. He did tell his friend
Reuben Carbajal, who again, I interviewed, that the CIA killed JFK. So
it wasn't complete lunacy for Shane O'Sullivan to assume that this might have
been David Morales caught on camera. We have other evidence that Morales was
connected to these assassinations, but these photographs or news footage that
Shane used in his films simply don't corroborate it.
REX: It would certainly
be the height of brazenness for three high-level CIA officials to be in the
ballroom while planning that murder.
DAVID: Absolutely. I
think they were more careful than that.
REX: You bring up David Morales, and I wanted to also bring up a
very new story about the confession
of Howard Hunt and his naming of people, including Morales, as having been involved
in the JFK assassination.
Apparently Hunt, in 2004 mailed a tape to his son, Saint John,
who I believe just last night put it on the air on a national radio station,
and there's been - Saint John has sort of talked about the story, about what
his father had told him over the last couple months, and I'm curious what your
take is on all of that.
DAVID: I find it an important new development. I think that the
response that assassination researchers often get from people who are skeptical
is, "well, if there had been a plot in Dallas, someone would have
talked." That's the
famous line, "someone would have talked." Well, the fact is, a
number of people did talk, beginning
with Lee Harvey Oswald, who cried out to the press, "I'm a patsy!"
and he wanted to talk more before he was shot and killed. Some of these
people who did begin to talk did meet sudden, violent ends. Johnny Roselli, the
gangster who was the link between the mob and the CIA in the secret war on
Castro, he was testifying to the Church Committee and was talking when he
suddenly ended up being killed, chopped into pieces, and stuffed into an oil
drum, and thrown into the waters off Miami.
CIA officials, who had long been rumored be be connected to the
JFK plot, they too began
to talk at the end of their lives before they died, including David Phillips,
David Morales, as I said earlier, and now, most recently, as you mentioned,
Howard Hunt.
Howard Hunt, of course, is a legendary figure within
intelligence circles in the U.S., most famous for his role as the mastermind,
or at least leader, of the burglary team at Watergate, which utilized some of
the same people - Cuban exiles who'd long been a part of the sort of more
shadowy enterprises of the CIA. Hunt, who has been in ailing condition the last
few years of his life, as you say, under encouragement and goading from his
son, Saint John Hunt, finally did begin to talk.
He actually published a
book in January, American Spy, in which he, in kind of an O.J - a
strange O.J. speculative way - says "well, if the CIA killed Kennedy, this
is how it might have happened." With his
son, with whom he was originally collaborating with on this book, he went
further, as you say. On an audio tape and in handwritten notes - which I have
seen and heard - and in a videotape, and what he says - more explosively - in
this material, is "I
was invited to a CIA safehouse in 1963 in Miami, where David Morales was
present. I was taken there by Frank Sturgis" - who was a
mob-related figure who he later recruited for the Watergate burglary team - and
at this CIA meeting, the plot to kill JFK, which was referred to as "the
big event," was discussed, and Hunt was invited to join the plot. But,
according to Hunt, he declined to play an active role, because he heard that William Harvey, who was
also involved in the plot - William Harvey was another notorious CIA official,
a well-known Kennedy hater who's long been rumored to also have been
connected to the assassination plot - and when he heard that Harvey was
involved, he thought Harvey was an unreliable drunk - he was, he had drinking
problems - so, Hunt claimed he chose not to play an active role in the plot for
that reason. Not because
it was wrong, but because Harvey was involved (laughs).
He did say though, and this is an exact quote, he did play a
"benchwarmer" role in the plot, and that people would bring him
information and he would, I guess, play the role of consultant with them.
So it was one more
strange, somewhat veiled confession by a very key CIA official, and these confessions
all point in the very same direction, whether it's David Phillips, David
Morales, Howard Hunt - they point in the same direction that Bobby was looking
into himself: to a plot that involved the CIA and
gangsters in southern Florida, the same people that were working to kill
Castro, had turned their efforts against JFK.
REX: You know, coming back to journalism, I guess it struck me -
I can understand people believing Howard Hunt, believing it might be partially
true, but spinning things - he talks about LBJ for instance - or disbelieving
him altogether. But what I
had trouble even understanding was a guy of Howard Hunt's notoriety, that this
story has not made it - I scoured The Washington Post and The New York Times
today - and not a peep.
DAVID: Yeah, you can say what you will, exactly. I think The L.A. Times and
Rolling Stone have been the only publications that have done stories on this
now. You can say what you will, as you say, about him. That he was a
spin artist, that he was doing it for money near the end of his life, but on
the other hand, here's a
guy who always tried to pin Dallas on the Soviets and on Castro. That was the
party line at the CIA, and he very much stayed close to it throughout much of
his life. But suddenly, he's saying something very different, and it's
self-implicating. He's implicating himself in the plot, maybe not
directly - he wasn't pulling the gun - he had active foreknowledge of the plot
according to this, and he played some kind of peripheral role in it.
Well, that to me is news. Again, a good
reporter looks into it and says, "well, here's the other side. Here's
people who say he was a liar, that he was doing it for money, whatever." But at least you report what
Howard Hunt said to his own son before he died. I think it's remarkable that
these kind of stories disappear down the media's "black hole," and it
happens again, and again, and again. And this is what I find so
frustrating, as a journalist.
REX: David, apparently you're going on a national book tour in a
few days, and I wish you luck on that. Where are you headed?
DAVID: Thanks, Rex. Yeah, I'm starting with New York, I'm going
to be on the Charlie Rose show, which is taped Monday, I'm not sure what day it
will actually air, but that's this coming Monday. Then I'm going to be on Terry
Gross' show Fresh Air the following day, and again, I'm not
sure when it will actually be broadcast.
So I'll be in New York, Boston, Miami, Washington, Chicago,
Dallas, and then up the West Coast, from LA to San Francisco, Portland, and
Seattle. So I have a website that I'd love for you to link to on Salon, and my
author appearances are listed there, so I'd love to see anyone who's interested
show up at the book stores where I'm speaking, and I'd love to continue the
conversation.
Despite the media's intransigence and stubbornness on this
issue, I look forward to the opportunity to raise some of these issues once
again, because I do think they're still unresolved, and it's a wound that's a
dark wound, that grew within the American political culture throughout my
lifetime, and I think it's had enormously damaging effects on our generation.
REX: Well, good luck on breaking through the media "black
hole," and it's been a pleasure talking to you.
DAVID: Thanks so much, Rex.
