Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (56 page)

Business and political leaders began to regret that the winner of the 1960
presidential election had not been Richard M. Nixon.

Most Americans remember Richard Milhous Nixon as the only U.S.
president to resign his office under the threat of certain impeachment.

Few know of or recall Nixon's connection with the Kennedy assassination, including the fact that Nixon was in Dallas the day Kennedy died but
couldn't recall that fact three months later when interviewed by the FBI.

Born January 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, California, Nixon was a selfmade man who reached the pinnacles of power after struggling up from a
background of meager financial circumstances.

Nixon wanted to attend Harvard like young Kennedy, but was forced to
settle for California's Whittier College, where he honed his skills as a
debater. He went on to graduate from Duke University Law School in
Durham, North Carolina, then unsuccessfully tried to join the FBI.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Nixon took a job with the tire-rationing
department of the Office of Price Administration in Washington. It is
interesting that Nixon's lifelong friend, Florida entrepreneur Charles "Bebe"
Rebozo, began his profitable career selling recapped tires. Although Nixon
has claimed he did not meet Rebozo until 1948 while vacationing in
Florida after the Hiss case, some researchers say the pair were in contact
during the war.

Later in the war, Nixon enlisted in the Navy and served in the South
Pacific, where on one island he built a small shack used for high-stakes
gambling and drinking.

In 1946, Nixon successfully ran for Congress after labeling his opponent, incumbent congressman Jerry Voorhis, a "friend of the Communists." With his anticommunist credentials, Nixon was immediately named
to the House Un-American Activities Committee where his name became
nationally known due to his part in the Alger Hiss case.

By 1950, the ambitious Nixon was ready to run for a Senate seat. His
opponent was a liberal former Hollywood actress named Helen Douglas.
Nixon painted Douglas as a friend of communism and dubbed her the "pink
lady." He accused her of voting with a "notorious Communist-line congressman" from New York, failing to mention that Nixon himself had
voted with this same congressman 112 times. Such campaign tactics
earned Nixon the epithet "Tricky Dick." But they also proved effective.
Nixon beat Douglas by nearly seven hundred thousand votes.

The man most responsible for Nixon's smear tactics was his close friend
and campaign manager Murray Chotiner, a lawyer who represented ranking mobsters and who had connections leading back to reputed New
Orleans Mafia chief Carlos Marcello and Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa.

In 1952, after only six years in politics, Nixon became vice president
under Dwight Eisenhower, thanks to the support of his political mentor,
former New York governor Thomas Dewey, and his undermining of the
favorite-son candidacy of fellow Californian, Earl Warren.

Throughout the Eisenhower years, the war-hero president snubbed Nixon
both politically and socially. In 1960, when Eisenhower was asked what
major decisions Nixon had participated in, he caustically replied: "If you
give me a week, I might think of one."

But Nixon was busy building up his own power base with men of
dubious backgrounds.

In his memoirs, mobster Mickey Cohen wrote that he gave Chotiner
$5,000 for Nixon's 1946 congressional campaign and raised $75,000 from
Las Vegas gamblers for Nixon's 1950 Senate race.

Furthermore, Ed Partin, a former aide to Jimmy Hoffa turned government informant, detailed a meeting between Hoffa and New Orleans mob
boss Carlos Marcello at the height of the 1960 presidential campaign:

I was right there, listening to the conversation. Marcello had a suitcase
filled with $500,000 cash which was going to Nixon. It was a halfmillion-dollar contribution. The other half [of a promised $1 million]
was coming from the mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.

Nixon's organized-crime contacts apparently continued even after he
resigned the presidency in disgrace. During a 1975 golf tournament at La
Costa Country Club in California, Nixon's golfing companions included
Allen Dorfman, a mob-Teamster financial coordinator, and Tony Provenzano,
a former Teamster official and convicted Mafia killer.

It has been revealed by investigative authors Carl Oglesby, Howard Kohn, David Scheim, and others that Nixon was a frequent visitor to Cuba
during the early 1950s and was in contact with confederates of organizedcrime financial wizard Meyer Lansky.

When Fidel Castro gained power in Cuba, Lansky was one of those mob
chieftains who wanted him overthrown. An attempt with CIA officers
to plan an invasion of Cuba was initiated by Eisenhower's White
House Political Action Officer, Richard Nixon. In his book Six Crises,
Nixon wrote: "The covert training of Cuban exiles by the CIA was due in
substantial part, at least, to my efforts. This had been adopted as a policy
as a result of my direct support."

Before the invasion could be launched, a serious snag occurred for Nixon
and his backers-he lost the election of 1960 to John F. Kennedy.

Rather than bide his time waiting for the next presidential election,
Nixon ran against Pat Brown for the governorship of California in 1962.
He was handily defeated, especially after news broke of a secret $200,000
loan from billionaire Howard Hughes to Nixon's brother.

Within two years, Nixon was back on the political stage, campaigning
for Republican candidates. GOP stalwarts repaid this activity by again
nominating Richard Nixon for president in August 1968. By then, of
course, both John and Robert Kennedy were dead.

During the Nixon years, his friends in organized crime were not forgotten. The Nixon administration intervened in at least twenty trials of crime
figures, ostensibly to protect "intelligence sources and methods."

In 1973, Nixon's attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, denied an FBI
request to continue an electronic surveillance operation that was beginning
to penetrate connections between the Mafia and the Teamsters.

Neither did Nixon forget his friend Jimmy Hoffa, whom he pardoned in
1971 despite recommendations against such action.

But of all Nixon's possible crime connections, the most intriguing
involves Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1975, Trowbridge Ford, a political science associate professor at College of the Holy
Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, was poring over a stack of recently
released FBI documents. Ford was astonished to discover a memorandum
written by a Bureau staff assistant to a government panel looking into
organized-crime activity in 1947. The memo stated:

It is my sworn statement that one Jack Rubenstein of Chicago, noted as
a potential witness for hearings of the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, is performing information functions for the staff of Congressman Richard Nixon, Republican of California. It is requested Rubenstein
not be called for open testimony in the aforementioned hearings.

Later in 1947, Chicago's Rubenstein moved to Dallas and shortened his
name to Jack Ruby.

The idea that Jack Ruby had worked for Nixon should have set off the national news media. Instead, FBI officials told Ford that the document he
discovered was a fake and the story was quickly dropped. Of course, in
accepting the Bureau's explanation of the memo, one must wonder why a
"fake" document was contained in FBI files and how many other such
fakes are yet residing with the Bureau?

By the early 1980s, Ford told this author he had studied literally
thousands of genuine FBI documents and had slowly come to the conclusion that the Nixon-Ruby memo was probably legitimate. Legitimate or
not, the matter raises even more suspicion when viewed with Nixon's
presence in Dallas the day Kennedy died.

On November 20, 1963, Nixon arrived in Dallas, where a Carbonated
Bottlers' convention was being held. A newsman from the Dallas Times
Herald interviewed Nixon and wrote:

The former Vice President arrived in Dallas Wednesday night to attend
a board meeting of Pepsi-Cola Company, which is represented by his
New York law partnership. He plans to leave Dallas Friday morning a
few hours before the arrival of President Kennedy. Mr. Nixon said that
although he planned to talk by telephone to several Dallas Republican
leaders, he had no plans for a formal meeting with them.

Interestingly, researcher Richard Sprague examined Pepsi-Cola corporate records and found no board meeting was held in Dallas in 1963.

The connections and politics of Pepsi-Cola deserve serious attention
from assassination researchers. The soft-drink company's advertising was
handled by J. Walter Thompson, the giant public relations firm that also
worked to sell the Pentagon's brand of "peace."

Nixon was longtime friends with Pepsi-Cola President Don Kendall and,
as president, it was Nixon who opened the lucrative Soviet soft-drink
market to Pepsi. A Justice Department investigation into this transaction
revealed that a "high government official had all the red tape done away
with so Pepsico could obtain the Soviet franchise without any competition."

Pepsi went on to help those who had helped the company. In 1973,
President Kendall formed the Save the Presidency Committee, which
sought to protect Nixon from the wrath of Watergate investigations.

It is especially interesting to note that Cartha DeLoach, the FBI
official who was chief liaison between Director Hoover and President
Lyndon Johnson, later joined Pepsi-Cola.

With Nixon in Dallas was Pepsi Cola heiress and actress Joan Crawford.
Both Nixon and Crawford made comments in the Dallas newspapers to
the effect that they, unlike the President, didn't need Secret Service
protection, and they intimated that the nation was upset with Kennedy's
policies. It has been suggested that this taunting may have been responsible for Kennedy's critical decision not to order the Plexiglas top placed
on his limousine on November 22.

Nixon also caused a stir in Dallas when he suggested that Lyndon
Johnson would be dropped from the 1964 Democratic national ticket.
Quoted in the November 22, 1963, Dallas Morning News, Nixon said:

... we must remember that President Kennedy and his advisers are
practical politicians.... Lyndon was chosen in 1960 because he could
help the ticket in the South. Now he is becoming a political liability in
the South, just as he is in the North.

On the morning of November 22, Nixon was driven to Love Field in
Dallas, where he boarded American Airlines Flight 82 for New York. Less
than two hours after Nixon left, Air Force One landed at Love Field with
the doomed Kennedy.

Three months later, the Warren Commission asked the FBI to investigate Marina Oswald's allegation that her husband had tried to kill Nixon
during a visit to Dallas. The FBI report dealing with Nixon's interview
stated:

On February 28, 1964, the Honorable Richard M. Nixon, former Vice
President of the U.S., was contacted by Assistant Director in charge of
the New York Office, John F. Malone, and furnished the following
information:

Mr. Nixon advised that the only time he was in Dallas, Texas, during
1963 was two days prior to the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy.

The question of whether Nixon was merely forgetful or dissembling in
his comment to the FBI might have been cleared up by yet another Bureau
report entitled "Letter of FBI of June 29, 1964, concerning Richard
Nixon." However, this document was reported missing from the National
Archives in 1976.

Nixon's recollection improved during a 1967 interview with journalist
Jules Witcover. Speaking about the assassination, Nixon said:

I was in a taxicab when I got the news. I had been in Dallas attending a
meeting. I flew back to New York the next morning. It must have
happened just as my plane was landing. My cab stopped for a light in
Queens and a guy ran over and said, "Have you got a radio? The
President's been wounded." I thought, "Oh, my God, it must have been
one of the nuts." A half hour later I got to my apartment and the doorman
told me he was dead. I called J. Edgar Hoover and asked him, "What happened? Was it one of the nuts?" Hoover said, "No, it was a Communist."

The supposed attack on Nixon by Oswald undoubtedly is one of the
more ludicrous incidents of the Warren Commission investigation-and it is a prime example of the unreliability of Marina Oswald's testimony.

In early February 1964, when Marina Oswald first testified to the
Commission, she failed to mention the incident when asked if her husband
had expressed any hostility toward any official of the United States. In
June, her memory jogged by an FBI report from Oswald's brother, Robert,
she said that just a few days before Oswald left for New Orleans on April
24, 1963, he put on a good suit after reading a morning newspaper. She
told the Commission:

I saw that he took a pistol. I asked him where he was going and why he
was getting dressed. He answered, "Nixon is coming. I want to go and
have a look."
. . . I called him into the bathroom and I closed the door
and I wanted to prevent him and then I started to cry. And I told him
that he shouldn't do this, and that he had promised me.

She told the Commission she locked him in the bathroom to prevent him
from trying to shoot Nixon. However, as confirmed by an FBI investigation, the bathroom-like most others-locked from the inside. Accordingly, in a subsequent interview with the Commission, Marina amended
her story by saying she held the bathroom door for hours to prevent
Oswald from leaving.

The Commission, upon learning that Nixon was not even in Dallas at
any time near this incident, decided that Marina may have been mistaken
and that the target of Oswald's pistol may have been Vice President
Johnson, who had visited Dallas on April 23.