JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (113 page)

When Johnson repeated his refusal to sign into law the necessary presidential support for aid to Indonesia at a National Security Council meeting on January 7, 1964,
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it became clear that Sukarno no longer had a friend in the White House. Its new occupant was in fact hostile to Sukarno and the independent nationalist policies he espoused. In the months following Johnson’s accession to the presidency, the U.S. government cut off economic aid to Indonesia.
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However, a significant exception to the end of U.S. funding was military aid to the Indonesian Army under the rising control of Major General Haji Mohammad Suharto.
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With the covert support of the U.S. military, Suharto was preparing to overthrow Sukarno.

In 1964, when Kennedy had planned to make a friendship visit to Indonesia, under Johnson, “the level of hostility and mutual recrimination between the United States and Indonesia rose.”
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In the year following, as economic aid for Sukarno’s projects ceased, the Pentagon funneled new military aid for CIA-connected operations in the Indonesian Army under the control of Sukarno’s “least loyal components.”
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As the CIA and the Pentagon built up Sukarno’s opponents in the army, corporate leaders sensed a new day for business in Indonesia. In April 1965, the U.S.-based corporation, Freeport Sulphur, anticipated Sukarno’s overthrow by half a year, reaching “a preliminary arrangement with Indonesian officials for what would become a $500 million investment in West Papua copper.”
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In October 1965, the enemy that Sukarno had learned to fear most, the CIA, finally succeeded in toppling his government. Ralph W. McGehee, a CIA agent for 25 years, has summarized in his book,
Deadly Deceits
, the CIA’s elimination in 1965-66 of both the government of Sukarno and the Communist Party of Indonesia that was represented in it:

“The Agency seized this opportunity [of a failed October 1965 coup attempt by junior Indonesian military officers] to overthrow Sukarno and to destroy the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which had three million members. As I wrote in
The Nation
, ‘Estimates of the number of deaths that occurred as a result of this CIA [one word deleted by the CIA, which censored McGehee’s article] operation run from one-half million to more than one million people.’”
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The U.S. government quickly provided weapons in response to the Indonesian army’s November 6, 1965, request “to arm Moslem and nationalist youth in Central Java for use against the PKI.” The army’s stated purpose, shown by U.S documents and interviews with Indonesian army intelligence chief, General Sukendro, was “to eliminate the PKI.”
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As admitted later by the former deputy CIA station chief in Indonesia, the CIA had helped U.S. Embassy officials in Jakarta compile death lists of thousands of members of the Communist Party of Indonesia.
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The death lists were then turned over to the Indonesian army command, which used them for its systematic massacre. The CIA, working through the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia, kept track of those who were killed or captured, checking off the names on the list one by one.
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Robert Martens, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, stated twenty-five years after taking part in this process: “It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”
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Sukarno was at first made a figurehead in the new military government, then placed under house arrest until he died in 1970.
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In the year between John Kennedy’s assassination and the CIA-instigated overthrow of the Indonesian government and massive purge of suspected Communists, President Sukarno received a second visit from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. At Kennedy’s urging, Sukarno agreed to a politically difficult cease-fire in a dispute with Malaysia.
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When RFK had left, Sukarno’s American biographer, Cindy Adams, asked the Indonesian president what he thought of Bobby Kennedy. She reported his response, which included his opinion of John Kennedy as well:

“Sukarno’s face lit up. ‘Bob is very warm. He is like his brother. I loved his brother. He understood me. I designed and built a special guest house on the palace grounds for John F. Kennedy, who promised me he’d come here and be the first American President ever to pay a state visit to this country.’ He fell silent. ‘Now he’ll never come.’

“Sukarno was perspiring freely. He repeatedly mopped his brow and chest. ‘Tell me, why did they kill Kennedy?’”
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In the years that followed, as he witnessed the subversion of his government and the slaughter of his people, Sukarno must have extended his question: Why did they kill Kennedy? Why did they kill my people? Why did so many cooperate in the killing?

These are questions for us all.

When John Kennedy died, Nikita Khrushchev was left without a partner in his hope to end the Cold War. In their public statements and secret communications, Kennedy and Khrushchev had engaged in a deeply contentious but ultimately transforming dialogue. The Soviet leader was emptied of hope by the loss of the man he had thought, as he wrote to him after the Missile Crisis, would “be able to receive a mandate at the next election.”
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It would have given them a total of six more years of struggle and work for peace. “At our times,” he said hopefully to Kennedy after their improbable coming together in the worst of times, “six years in world politics is a long period of time.”
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But it was to be only a year, part of which they squandered. After resolving the Missile Crisis, they struggled again for precious months over a test ban, accomplished it with the help of Pope John and Norman Cousins, then struggled again—but always with an eye to the future. When the year passed and Kennedy was suddenly struck dead, there was no future. Khrushchev knew the hope he and his great adversary had realized together, at a moment of peril, was also dead.

That hope included a trip by John Kennedy to the Soviet Union. Indonesia was not the only controversial country JFK had decided to visit. In his last conversation with his old friend, British ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, the president said he “had made up his mind to visit the Soviet Union at the first suitable moment.”
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In another final conversation with a close friend, artist William Walton on November 19, the president said “he intended to be the first U.S. president to visit the Kremlin, as soon as he and Khrushchev reached another arms control agreement.”
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President Kennedy knew the political impact his visiting the Soviet Union would have on the Cold War. It would end it. Jacqueline Kennedy would have accompanied her husband on such a journey of reconciliation.
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The Kennedys would have been greeted by Nikita Khrushchev and the Russian people with the kind of welcome that would have ended the Cold War resoundingly, fulfilling Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s hopes and those of the majority of people in the United States and the U.S.S.R. The people of both countries had been shaken by the Missile Crisis, then inspired by the test ban treaty. They were eager for peace. However, at the end of November 1963, Khrushchev, instead of standing with Kennedy at the gateway of realizing that hope, stood alone.

Soon after Kennedy’s murder, a man Press Secretary Pierre Salinger described as “a high official of the Soviet Embassy in Washington”
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told Salinger over a private lunch how Khrushchev had reacted to the assassination. He had first wept, then withdrew into a shell. “He just wandered around his office for several days, like he was in a daze,” the Soviet official said.
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The president’s assassination placed the Kennedy family in the peculiar position of feeling they could trust the Russians, supposedly their enemies, more than they could their own government. Their new sense of where their real friends lay had followed the president’s own realization of what was, for him, a fatal truth. He had known for some time he had more in common with his enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, than he had with his own people in the CIA and the Pentagon. Kennedy and Khrushchev knew their world had turned upside down following the Missile Crisis, making their outward belligerence a thin cover for their having become secret allies. They were still struggling on many fronts but now had a new, shared mission—to end a conflict, the Cold War, that neither wanted and that they now knew, from their immersion together in an imminent holocaust, could doom the human race. In the process of their collaboration, friends had become enemies, and enemies friends. The Kennedy family’s quiet shift of trust in the same direction immediately after Dallas has been revealed by recently unearthed evidence of their having then sent a secret messenger to Moscow. He was JFK’s close friend, painter William Walton, in whom he had confided his decision to visit the Soviet Union.

William Walton, artist and former journalist, was a unique intimate of both John and Jacqueline Kennedy. He was also close to Robert Kennedy, having been a key political organizer with him on behalf of his brother. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Walton gave several months of his life to working full-time with RFK for JFK.
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John Kennedy so trusted his writer-artist friend that he invited Walton to be his only companion in a critical pre-election meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt.
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At the same time, Jacqueline so enjoyed Walton’s company that he often spent time with both Kennedys in their home. The three of them watched the 1960 presidential election returns together.
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On the day before Kennedy’s inauguration, the president-elect used Walton’s Washington home as his office for his final appointments and meetings before moving into the White House.
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In early December 1963, William Walton traveled to Moscow on behalf of Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy to convey a secret message to the Soviet leaders about President Kennedy’s assassination. Walton used an already scheduled trip, at JFK’s request “to visit Moscow to meet Soviet artists,”
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as a cover for his revised purpose of telling the Russians what the Kennedys thought lay behind Dallas. The Kennedys’ message to the Russians was retained in top-secret Soviet intelligence archives. It was discovered in the 1990s by researcher-writers Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, who then reported it in their 1997 book on the Cuban Missile Crisis,
“One Hell of a Gamble.”
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Walton conveyed the Kennedys’ secret assessment of the assassination to Georgi Bolshakov, the journalist/intelligence agent who had been their most trusted Soviet confidant in the months around the time of the Missile Crisis. In Washington, working out of the Soviet Embassy, Georgi Bolshokov had met repeatedly with Attorney General Robert Kennedy in secret to convey questions and concerns between Chairman Khrushchev and President Kennedy.
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In Moscow after the assassination, he was in a corresponding position to relay Walton’s discreet information to Chairman Khrushchev.

The Kennedys informed Bolshakov through Walton that, “despite Oswald’s connections to the communist world,” they believed “there was a large political conspiracy behind Oswald’s rifle” that came from a different source. In their view, “the President was felled by domestic opponents.” He had been, the Kennedys thought, “the victim of a right-wing conspiracy.”
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Walton added that the Russian leaders should have no illusions that Lyndon Johnson would continue JFK’s work for peace. Johnson, Walton said, would be “incapable of realizing Kennedy’s unfinished plans.”
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The new president’s “close ties to big business would bring many more of its representatives into the administration,” whose adverse impact on hopes for peace Chairman Khrushchev would understand.
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Walton also conveyed to the Kremlin leadership through Bolshakov that Robert Kennedy would remain as attorney general only through 1964, then seek an elective office. Walton mentioned the governorship of Massachusetts, whereas RFK would actually be elected a New York senator the next fall. In any case, it would be in preparation, Walton said, “for an eventual run for the presidency.” As the archived Soviet notes for their conversation recorded, “Walton, and presumably Kennedy, wanted Khrushchev to know that only RFK could implement John Kennedy’s vision and that the cooling that might occur in U.S.–Soviet relations because of Johnson would not last forever.”
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On Monday, November 25, 1963, Deputy Soviet Premier Anastas Mikoyan was Nikita Khrushchev’s personal representative at John Kennedy’s funeral in Washington. At the White House afterwards, Jacqueline Kennedy noticed Mikoyan moving toward her in the reception line—and as she recounted later, he “was trembling all over” and “looked terrified.”
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