"Lone Nutter" Brent Cooper, writing on Quora, gets one thing right, the USSR was extremely unhappy over the death of JFK. Afterall, JFK had just signed the Nuclear Test Ban treaty and was asking Congress in the winter of 1963-1964 to SELL EXCESS WHEAT to the Soviets!
“Lone Nutter” Brent Cooper on Quora on how did the Soviet Union react to JFK’s assassination
https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-Soviet-Union-react-to-JFKs-assassination
Brent Cooper:
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YEKATERINA SINELSCHIKOVA writes that in the USSR, the assassination of Kennedy was a major problem, one that was tackled in all possible ways.
It was a warm, sunny day as the motorcade of the 35th U.S. President moved along Elm Street in Dallas, Texas. The car roof had been removed to give people a glimpse of their chosen one. Having exchanged a few words with his wife Jacqueline, Kennedy turned to the crowd and waved a couple of times. A moment later, at precisely 12:30 CST, two of three shots fired from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository struck the president, who died half an hour later in the hospital.
The news of the assassination sent shockwaves across the entire world, including the Soviet Union. General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev was awakened by an aide with the words: “Kennedy’s been killed!” According to some accounts, the first thing he asked was: “Did we have anything to do with it?”
Soviet fears
The Soviet leader’s puzzling question had a certain logic to it. As it soon turned out, the accused Lee Harvey Oswald had connections with the USSR (see our article here for details).
He had lived there for two years, applied unsuccessfully for Soviet citizenship, married a Russian woman, become disillusioned with the socialist system, and then, in 1962, a year before the assassination, returned to his homeland. When the news broke, the KGB held a series of emergency meetings. Reports declassified in 2017 say that the head of the KGB residency in New York, Colonel Boris Ivanov, told his team that Kennedy’s assassination was a “problem.”
And more trouble was expected. Under Kennedy, relations between the superpowers had entered a partial thaw. Back in May 1963, five months before his assassination, Kennedy had stated: “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
He had even expressed a wish to work with the Soviet Union to put a man on the Moon. John Logsdon, a former member of Nasa’s Advisory Council, said that Kennedy suggested it to Khrushchev, but the Soviet leader refused.
Now that the U.S. president was dead, the Soviet leadership feared that radical anti-Soviet forces could take advantage of the situation. Archival documents indicate that the Kremlin was “in a state of shock and turmoil”: “The Soviet leadership was concerned that in the absence of a [U.S.] leader, some irresponsible general might launch a missile strike on the USSR.”
Let the church bells ring
The news spread like wildfire, and by morning everyone in the Soviet Union knew about the killing of Kennedy. The young, handsome, wealthy, pro-peace president and his glamorous wife were admired by the Soviet people. His assassination brought tears to many eyes. “Church bells rang in memory of President Kennedy,” recalled a U.S. intelligence source who was in Russia at the time.
On Nov. 23, 1963, the newspaper Nedelya splashed Kennedy’s portrait over its entire front page. And although photos of such size were usually reserved only for members of the Presidium, the decision was approved by the Presidium itself — they too were in mourning.
In the book Nikita Khrushchev: Reformer, the memoirs of the Soviet leader’s son, Sergey Khrushchev
states that his father fell to his knees and sobbed over the killing. In life,
JFK had been a hope for the Soviet Union; in death, he was a major problem.
Disowning Oswald
According to declassified documents based on reports of U.S. agents in the USSR, the Kremlin believed that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy of ultra-right elements dissatisfied with the Kennedy administration and led by then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed power after the assassination. This position coincided with the 1966 investigation of Erling Harrison, the district attorney for New Orleans. Nevertheless, the opinion that the assassination was in some way linked to the USSR (as well as Cuba) was very widespread in the U.S. and fanned by the media. The Kremlin decided that it had to defend itself.
“Only a maniac could think that ‘leftist forces’ represented by the U.S. Communist Party could have killed President Kennedy,” a U.S. Department of Justice report expounds the position of the then Soviet leadership.
As for Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet political class began to call him “a neurotic maniac disloyal to his country and everyone else.” The KGB washed its hands of him. It seized all photos of him from former friends in Minsk, as well as letters, recalls Professor Ernst Titovets, who, as a medical student in the 1960s, knew Oswald.
In a joint press statement, the USSR Foreign Ministry and the KGB declared that Oswald had never been in contact with the Soviet authorities, and that the killers should be sought in the U.S. A secret note for the Politburo highlighted the Kremlin’s willingness to provide information on Oswald, should the U.S. request it. But after talks with U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, it was never published. “It is clear from everything that the U.S. government has no wish to involve us in this matter or to engage in a fight with the extreme right; it clearly prefers to bury the matter as quickly as possible... I believe that this point should be taken into account in further reports by our press,” wrote Anastas Mikoyan, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, in a secret letter.
In the end, misinformation and fake news came into play. In the 1960s, Soviet intelligence spread rumors about CIA links to the Kennedy assassination, and paid U.S. lawyer Mark Lane, author of several controversial bestsellers about the Kennedy assassination (such as Rush to Judgment, 1966), to whip up talk of alleged CIA involvement and other conspiracy theories. This is described in detail in documents held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, UK.
All this lessened the attacks on the Soviets. And an escalation of the recent Cuban Missile Crisis, much feared in the USSR, did not materialize. Subsequent investigations found no evidence of Soviet involvement in the assassination. In 1999, in Cologne, Germany, Russian President Boris Yeltsin handed over to U.S. President Bill Clinton 80 pages from the Soviet secret archive relating to Oswald and the Soviet Union’s reaction to the assassination. “I want to thank you for this unexpected and important gift,” stated Clinton at the time.
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Doyle Whitehead: Lyndon Johnson and his people were drunk, laughing and celebrating on Air Force One in the hours following JFK’s murder
“Doyle Whitehead: Memories of serving three U.S. presidents on Air Force One” by Ruth Laney for Country Roads on October 24, 2016
https://countryroadsmagazine.com/art-and-culture/history/doyle-whitehead/
As a steward on Air Force One, Doyle Whitehead saw the making of history, such as this moment when Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Doyle Whitehead vividly recalls where he was on November 22, 1963, when he learned that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. He was aboard Air Force One (AF1) watching the presidential motorcade on television.
Riding in a slow-moving motorcade through the streets of Dallas, Kennedy was fatally struck when three shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository on Elm Street. His wife Jacqueline, wearing a pink Chanel suit and matching pillbox hat, was seated beside him. Riding with them were Texas governor John Connally, who was wounded, and his wife Nellie. The Lincoln Continental raced to Parkland Hospital, where doctors made a futile attempt to save Kennedy’s life. At 1 pm, he was pronounced dead.
Confusion reigned as Kennedy’s staff tried to absorb the shocking news. “We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Whitehead said in a recent interview. “We thought we might be under attack. Everything was in such chaos—you can just imagine.”
Whitehead, one of four stewards assigned to the president’s plane, had flown with JFK on every mission, including to Vienna in 1961 and Berlin in 1963, both important milestones for the JFK administration. That morning, he had flown from Fort Worth to Love Field in Dallas, where JFK and Jackie were greeted by an adoring crowd. Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his entourage had made the trip on Air Force Two.
After the shooting, said Whitehead, Johnson, now president, boarded the plane and went straight to the cockpit, ordering pilot James Swindal to take off. According to Whitehead, Swindal refused. “I flew him [Kennedy] here, and I’m going to fly him home,” the pilot said.
About 2:45 pm, a bronze casket carrying Kennedy’s body was brought aboard. “The bulkhead and six seats had to be removed to get him on the plane,” said Whitehead. Jackie Kennedy, still in her pink suit covered with blood, appeared to be in shock. “I asked her if she wanted to change clothes, but she said no,” Whitehead recalled.
After U. S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas Sarah Hughes (a longtime friend) had sworn in Johnson, with a stunned Jackie at his side, the plane took off. Whitehead retreated to the cabin where the president’s casket lay. Inside were Jackie and her Secret Service agent Clint Hill.
“Now comes the bad part,” said Whitehead. “Johnson and his people celebrated on the plane ride back to Washington. He was a heavy drinker. He drank about half a fifth of Cutty Sark [Scotch] on the flight back. They were laughing and talking about ‘what we gon’ do now.’ They were so loud we had to shut the door so Jackie wouldn’t hear them.”
Washington was in mourning. On Sunday, November 24, Kennedy’s new mahogany casket was placed in the Capitol rotunda. Jackie invited the AF1 crew to share their grief. “It was a crew of eighteen people,” said Whitehead. “She gave us one hour with the casket. She came in for just a few minutes and told us how much he enjoyed Air Force One. He loved that airplane.”
Whitehead, who had been a steward on AF1 since the Eisenhower years, wondered what lay ahead. Even when asked to stay on, he wasn’t sure he wanted to work for Johnson, who had a reputation for being difficult. Today Whitehead tells stories of LBJ ordering a plane to take off without his wife Lady Bird when she ran a few minutes late and tossing daughter Luci’s excess luggage onto the tarmac. “He was mean and demanding, but at times he was jovial.”
How Whitehead came to hobnob with presidents as a young man is a story that seems to amaze even him. “I guess God intended for me to be there,” he said. “I grew up on a hundred-acre farm in rural Gloster, Mississippi. We were dirt poor; we raised what we ate.”
[Read: Richard Lipsey was an eyewitness to the autopsy of President John F. Kennedy]
After graduating from Oxford High School in 1954, Whitehead had trouble finding a job. The Korean War had ended a year earlier, and veterans were given preferred status. “The closest employment within fifty miles was in Natchez—the Armstrong Tire and Rubber plant, a paper mill, an asbestos-siding plant. Fifty, sixty, seventy-five people applied for every job. They’d come out and say, ‘We gon’ hire two, and they gon’ be veterans.’
“I said, ‘Okay, I’ll be a veteran.’ I went to the [U.S. Army] recruiting office. I wanted to be a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division. The recruiter said, ‘It will be six months before I can get you in a class.’
“The Air Force guy said, ‘I can get you out today.’ So I joined the Air Force. I was in basic training, and I planned to go to school to be a heavy-equipment operator. But the Air Force had a dire need for air-traffic specialists for long flights to dangerous areas. They told us we would draw hazard pay. I would draw thirty dollars a month extra, and I needed the money.
“They had forty volunteers and they used a physical exam to do the elimination. I was five-feet-nine and weighed 132. I could put a hundred-pound bag on my shoulder and walk across a plowed field. I was one of twelve selected. My first assignment was to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington. I went to Greenland, Saudi Arabia, the Azores. We were flying back and forth, moving troops.”
Whitehead recalled a harrowing experience when he had been in the Air Force for only six months. “It was 21 December 1954. We were coming from the Azores to Bermuda, an eight-hour flight. We were hauling freight and corpses. We got just about to the point of no return [halfway through the flight] when an engine went out on the right side. After another hour, the other engine on the right side went out. We were continually dropping. We had to jettison everything, including our own baggage, into the ocean. The corpses were the only thing we did not throw out. The landing was good. I felt like getting down on my knees and kissing the ground.”
In 1958, Whitehead joined the VIP Unit in Washington. “They needed twelve people to be stewards on three jets. These were the first three Boeing 707s, with four stewards in each crew. I wound up making that twelve. I stayed four months, going through an expanded background investigation. I had to have Top Secret clearance.
“I was still young and green and learning and eager. In 1959, President Eisenhower’s plane was scheduled to leave in two hours when one of his stewards had a heart attack. They pushed me up on Ike’s airplane and we flew Mamie to Denver. I stayed for the remainder of the Eisenhower regime.”
When JFK became president in 1961, he invited Whitehead to be on his crew. “He was a jewel, completely different from Johnson,” said Whitehead. “He loved that airplane, and he loved us. In one of the rare moments he didn’t have a lot on his mind, he asked for a beer. I gave him a Heineken. The glass held ten ounces. He asked, “What do you do with the other two ounces?’ I said, ‘We throw it away.’ We weren’t allowed to drink while on duty.”
Whitehead recalled the president’s teasing him about the name of his high school. “He would tell people, ‘Did you know I have a steward on my plane who went to Oxford?’”
JFK was rumored to have had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, and Whitehead said the actress flew on AF1 twice. “She was listed as a secretary, not by name. She was a beautiful person to look at as long as she kept her mouth shut. She talked off the wall a lot, especially if she’d had a drink.”
Whitehead recalled slipping forbidden candy to young Caroline Kennedy, whose stern British nanny Maude Shaw wouldn’t allow the children to indulge their sweet tooth. “Caroline called me Whitey,” he said.
Whitehead flew with LBJ only through mid-1966. “A lot of things went into that decision. I was never home on holidays or special days, and LBJ was a terrible person to work for.”
In 1966, Whitehead got a one-year assignment to Vietnam, where the U.S. had combat troops. “That was the only thing I ever did in the military. We would do resupply missions. I was flying dignitaries into and out of Vietnam, all over the country. My one year there, I flew 665 hours in a combat zone.”
In the fall of 1969, Whitehead was assigned to a worldwide goodwill tour with astronauts Neil Young, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, who had flown to the moon on Apollo 11 in July. “We wanted to show them to the world. We went to twenty-four different countries, thirty-three different cities. The press chartered a plane to follow us around.”
In November 1970, said Whitehead, “I flew with Mrs. Kennedy to Charles de Gaulle’s funeral. I asked her for President Kennedy’s rocking chair, and she gave it to me. It was a folding chair with cushions to support his back. It went with him on the plane. He’d sit in it when he was preparing to give a speech. After he was assassinated, the archives got everything off that airplane—sheets, towels, anything he had touched—except for that chair. I took it off the aircraft and stored it in my office in case somebody called for it. When we flew to France, I asked Jackie if I could have it, and she gave it to me.”
Whitehead’s last mission was with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In January and May 1974, Kissinger engaged in “shuttle diplomacy,” short flights among Middle East capitals to deal with the fallout of the October 1973 war. “Every day we went to Damascus, Syria, and back. Every fifth day we went to Alexandria, Egypt. Dr. Kissinger was friendly but absent-minded. He’d go to the bathroom and forget to zip his pants up. We had to look him over before he got off the airplane.”
Whitehead, now eighty, lives with his wife Barbara in Busy Corner, Mississippi. Last summer, he visited the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at the Wright-Patterson base near Dayton, Ohio. Its exhibits include SAM 26000, better known as Air Force One, which Whitehead flew on during the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson. He estimates that he flew nearly ten thousand hours during his career.
“When I became a steward in 1959, I had only been out of high school for five years,” he said. “I pole-vaulted myself from a hundred-acre farm to Air Force One in five years.”
Air Force Steward Doyle Whitehead says Lyndon Johnson drank about “a fifth of Cutty Sark” on the flight back from Dallas to Washington, D.C. on the day of the JFK assassination. Which is the equivalent of drinking 10 beers in 2 hours which would give a 220 pound man a blood alcohol content level of .138 far above drunk driving levels (.08 in most places).
Did Texans cheer the Kennedy Assassination? By John Aravosis
https://fr-film.net/v-did-texans-cheer-the-kennedy-assassination-XWibVgLTA2s.html (link not active)
John Aravosis
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I was watching a recent episode of the Antiques Roadshow on PBS, and saw a woman selling some of her Kennedy memorabilia. She was a staffer in John F. Kennedy's White House press office in the 1960s, and was showing the auction expert some of her White House wares when she mentioned, as an aside, that on the plane back from Dallas the day Kennedy was shot and killed, the Texas delegation was "a little happy" about Kennedy being dead. I was taken aback, watched it again, and sure enough -- that's what she said. We discuss this in this segment from my podcast, the UnPresidented Podcast.
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John Aravosis
John Aravosis posted on Twitter on March 17, 2018 about a former press aide to JFK who had to ride on Air Force Two with the Texas delegation back to Washington, DC. She told Antiques Road this year that the Texas delegation was "A LITTLE HAPPY ACTUALLY" at JFK having his brains blown out in Dallas.
[I do not have this woman's name but someone needs to get it! – Robert Morrow]
Twitter link
https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/975180914186768384 (link not active)
after JFK's murder in Dallas as they flew back to Wash D.C.
https://www.pbs.org/video/antiques-roadshow-appraisal-1961-1963-john-f-kennedy-archive/
Her is her additional interview on JFK and what he was like
https://www.pbs.org/video/antiques-roadshow-owner-interview-1961-1963-john-f-kennedy-archive/
A Kennedy staffer was on the plane of the Texas delegation (meaning Lyndon Johnson’s people) on the plane ride back to Washington, D.C. from Dallas and she reports “THEY WERE A LITTLE HAPPY ACTUALLY. SOME OF THEM, YEAH.”
Here is the quote of the female JFK staffer about her experiences on Air Force Two with the Johnson delegation on the flight back to Washington, D.C. after JFK had been murdered. I do not have her name but she was basically some sort of an assistant to Pierre Salinger (not on Dallas trip) and JFK.
Female Pierre Salinger staffer for JFK, who was on Air Force Two for the ride back to Dallas. This had been Lyndon Johnson’s plane and it was filled to the brim with his staffers and friends:
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I went back on the back up plane and in that case it was also the Texas delegation going back with me. It was not a very good flight. They were a little happy actually. Some of them, yeah.
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