JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (102 page)

Nevertheless, Kennedy went ahead with the wheat sale “to the enemy.” Today an almost forgotten act at the end of his presidency, at the time neither the decision nor the process was easy. Yet, as Sorensen noted, “In time he overcame attempted Congressional restrictions, attempted longshoreman boycotts, Soviet haggling about freight rates, disagreements between Agriculture and State, disagreements between Labor and Commerce, disputes over financing and a host of other obstacles.”
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Now marching to a different drummer than his advisers were, Kennedy had chosen the wheat sale as still another initiative for peace. It was not only the right thing to do, as proclaimed in the ancient scriptures he heard in church on Sunday. It was also another way to mark an end to the Cold War.

JFK had reached a point in his presidency where a popular groundswell had begun to support his initiatives for peace. As in the case of the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, the American public supported the wheat sale as another hopeful step with the Russians. Peace had become an issue that would not hinder the president’s reelection, but would ensure it. Unlike Kennedy’s Cold War government, Americans in the heartland were increasingly prepared to walk with the president toward a more livable future.

In that hopeful fall of 1963, it was not only President John F. Kennedy who was turning toward peace. The people were turning with him.

Discerning what the scapegoat of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, was thinking in his jail cell on Friday, November 22, and Saturday, November 23, is no easy task. Yet we have clues. They include his few public statements, his attitude toward his interrogators, and his attempt Saturday night to make a critical phone call. From these clues we can see the awakening and turning of a mind trained by his government to obey orders blindly. Oswald was resisting the role into which he had been maneuvered in the execution of the president. He may have pondered in his cell the strange irony of his now having been accused of assassinating a president he admired.

Lee Oswald had become personally interested in the life and vision of Kennedy. On July 1, 1963, as library records reveal, he checked out of the New Orleans Public Library William Manchester’s cameo of Kennedy,
Portrait of a President
.
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He followed it up two weeks later by reading JFK’s own
Profiles in Courage
.
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He became so interested in Kennedy that when he returned
Portrait of a President
to the library he took out another book,
The White Nile
by Alan Moorehead, only because Manchester mentioned in passing that the president had read it recently.
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Oswald told his wife, Marina, as she revealed later, that he “liked and approved of the President and believed that for the United States in 1963, John F. Kennedy was the best President the country could hope to have.”
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He listened intently on their radio to Kennedy’s speeches that summer, especially his July 26 address to the nation on the test-ban agreement.
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JFK warned of a war that would not only end the country but would leave “a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors.”
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Lee explained to his non–English-speaking wife that the president was making an appeal for disarmament.
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He told her “some critics blamed Kennedy for ‘losing’ Cuba,” whereas in fact the president “would like to pursue a better, more gentle policy toward Cuba but was not free to do as he wished,”
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as Oswald knew personally from seeing the CIA’s marshaling of anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy sentiment among its paid Cuban exiles.

On the night after he heard JFK warn the country of an inconceivable war, Oswald gave a talk of his own warning of an inconceivable danger within the country. His cousin, Eugene Murret, had invited Lee to speak at the Jesuit House of Studies, Spring Hill College, in Mobile, Alabama, where Eugene was a seminarian. The topic, as suggested by Eugene, was “contemporary Russia and the practice of Communism there.”
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As Lee outlined his speech in advance, he found himself going beyond his topic. Thanks to the preservation of his handwritten notes, we can understand the speech better than his actual audience did, several of whom recalled from it months later for the Warren Commission only Oswald’s mundane description of life in Russia.
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Oswald may not even have said in his speech what he wrote more boldly in private. He laid out there the danger to the country (which he served secretly as an intelligence agent) of its being overcome by a military coup.

Understood in terms of his notes, this may have been, in contrast to his statements to the New Orleans media, the only non–CIA-dictated speech of Oswald’s summer. He at least planned to say what he actually believed, not what he was ordered to say in public to create a pro-Castro, pro-Soviet image of himself. In fact, what he wrote in the text of his speech to the seminarians warned against the implications of what he was acting out in public. He began:

“Americans are apt to scoff at the idea that a military coup in the U.S., as so often happens in Latin American countries, could ever replace our government. But that is an idea that has grounds for consideration.”
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In his thinking, Oswald was flying below the radar of his intelligence handlers. He had broken through their thought barriers. He pushed ahead to ask where in the armed forces a prospective coup d’état against the elected government would most likely originate:

“Which military organization has the potentialities of executing such action? Is it the army with its many conscripts, its unwieldy size, its scores of bases scattered across the world? The case of Gen. [Edwin] Walker shows that the army, at least, is not fertile enough ground for a far right regime to go a very long way.”
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Oswald was familiar with the case of General Edwin Walker, an army general relieved of his command by the Kennedy administration for indoctrinating his troops with an anti-communist program of speeches and literature. After he was admonished for propagandizing his soldiers, Walker resigned from the army and retired to Dallas, where he became a leader in the anti-communist John Birch Society.
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Soon after Oswald’s death, the president’s presumed assassin would be accused on shaky grounds of having tried to kill Walker the previous spring—an allegation then used by the Warren Commission to shore up the equally shaky evidence supporting Oswald’s capacity to kill Kennedy.
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In his speech notes, Oswald dismissed the danger of an army coup led by a demagogue such as Walker as being too unwieldy.

He continued: “For the same reasons of size and disposition the Navy and air force is also to be more or less disregarded. Which service then, can qualify to launch a coup in the USA? Small size, a permanent hard core of officers and few bases is necessary. Only one outfit fits that description and the U.S.M.C. is a right wing infiltrated organization of dire potential consequences to the freedoms of the U.S. I agree with former President Truman when he said that ‘The Marine Corps should be abolished.’”
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Although Oswald had been in the Marines, his description of a likely institution for a coup fits the CIA, which was then manipulating him, more than it does the Marine Corps. In a similar way, his inaccurate Truman quotation conveys Truman’s (and Oswald’s) sense of a very real danger to democracy that lay elsewhere than in the Marines. Although President Truman was wrongly accused by critics of wanting to abolish the Marine Corps,
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he did in fact speak up later—after Oswald’s death—as if the CIA presented the same kind of internal threat to freedom that Oswald warned against. In his thoughts, Oswald was again skirting an unspeakable truth in a strangely prophetic way.

On December 22, 1963, one month to the day after JFK’s assassination, Former President Truman published a very carefully worded article in the
Washington Post
warning the American people about the danger of the CIA taking over the government. He wrote:

“I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA . . .

“For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

“We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”
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Truman’s warning, with its ominous post-assassination timing, was greeted by total silence.
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Had it been noticed and heeded, the controversial ex-president might have been accused more justly this time of trying to abolish the CIA, since he did indeed want to abolish its covert activities. President Harry Truman had himself established the CIA in 1947, but not, he thought, to do what he saw it doing in the fall of 1963.

Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired as CIA director, was alarmed that Truman’s CIA warning might get noticed.
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On April 17, 1964, Dulles took a break from his Warren Commission business. He met privately with Truman at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and urged him to retract his CIA critique. Dulles put his own version of the meeting on record for the CIA. On April 21, he sent a secret memorandum to his longtime CIA colleague, General Counsel Lawrence Houston.
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He alleged that Truman had disowned the article published over his name as being foreign to his thinking. Dulles claimed that when he showed the president the
Washington Post
piece, Truman “seemed quite astounded by it. In fact, he said that this was all wrong. He then said that he felt it had made a very unfortunate impression…

“At no time did Mr. Truman express other than complete agreement with the viewpoint I expressed and several times said he would see what he could do about it, to leave it in his hands. He obviously was highly disturbed at the
Washington Post
article.”
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Dulles was lying for the record. The plainspoken president meant what he wrote about the CIA and would repeat it. Truman’s published words were faithful to the preliminary notes (preserved in the Truman Library) that he had written by hand on December 1, 1963, three weeks before his article appeared:

“[The CIA] was not intended as a ‘Cloak & Dagger Outfit’! …

“It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President informed on what was going on in the world at large and the United States and its dependencies in particular.

“It should not be an agency to initiate policy or to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized.”
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Ignoring the pressures of Allen Dulles, President Truman restated his radical critique of the CIA in a letter written six months after the
Washington Post
article. The managing editor of
Look
magazine had sent Truman the latest
Look
featuring a piece on the CIA. Truman wrote back:

“Thank you for the copy of
Look
with the article on the Central Intelligence Agency. It is, I regret to say, not true to the facts in many respects.

“The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the president. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.”
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Lee Harvey Oswald was caught up totally in what Truman termed the CIA’s “strange activities.” Yet, as we can see from Oswald’s admiration of John Kennedy and his notes for his speech to the Jesuits, he rejected the idea of a coup against the president. He in fact warned against one. As his intelligence mentors were pulling him more deeply into the plot against Kennedy, Oswald in his own mind was moving in the opposite direction—in support not of the plotters but of the president.

What, then, was Oswald to do?

In the light of his awakening conscience, his strange request from his New Orleans jail cell on August 8 to speak with an FBI agent after his leafleting arrest takes on further meaning. By that time, two weeks after he wrote his speech notes warning of a coup d’état, Oswald was working in the midst of the CIA’s Kennedy-hating Cuban exile community, some of whose key members such as Sergio Arcacha Smith had been commandeered by the Agency for the assassination of the president. Oswald himself was being led step by step into his scapegoat role, with his New Orleans arrest as a pro-Castro leafleter serving as a key element in the scenario.