JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (14 page)

Kennedy’s rejection of “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war” was an act of resistance to what President Eisenhower had identified in his Farewell Address as the military-industrial complex. “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” Eisenhower had warned three days before Kennedy’s inauguration, “is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government ...”

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
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What Eisenhower in the final hours of his presidency revealed as the greatest threat to our democracy Kennedy in the midst of his presidency chose to resist. The military-industrial complex was totally dependent on “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” That Pax Americana policed by the Pentagon was considered the system’s indispensable, hugely profitable means of containing and defeating Communism. At great risk Kennedy was rejecting the foundation of the Cold War system.

In his introduction at American University, President Kennedy noted the standard objection to the view he was opening up: What about the Russians?

“Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world government—and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it.”

He then countered our own prejudice with what Schlesinger called “a sentence capable of revolutionizing the whole American view of the cold war”: “But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs.”

Kennedy’s turn here corresponds to the Gospel insight: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Luke 6:41).

The nonviolent theme of the American University Address is that self-examination is the beginning of peace. Kennedy was proposing to the American University graduates (and the national audience behind them) that they unite this inner journey of peace with an outer journey that could transform the Cold War landscape.

“Every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward—by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.”

Thus ended Kennedy’s groundbreaking preamble, an exhortation to personal and national self-examination as the spiritually liberating way to overcome Cold War divisions and achieve “not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” In his American University address, John Kennedy was proclaiming a way out of the Cold War and into a new human possibility.

One pawn in the Cold War who needed a way out before it was too late was a young ex-Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald.

In following Kennedy’s path through a series of critical conflicts, we have been moving more deeply into the question: Why was John F. Kennedy murdered? Now as we begin to trace Oswald’s path, which will converge with Kennedy’s, we can see the emergence of a strangely complementary question: Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?

On October 31, 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been discharged two months earlier from the U.S. Marine Corps in California, presented himself at the American Embassy in Moscow to Consul Richard E. Snyder. Oswald said his purpose in coming was to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He handed Snyder a note he had written, in which he requested that his citizenship be revoked and affirmed that “my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
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According to the Warren Report, “Oswald stated to Snyder that he had voluntarily told Soviet officials that he would make known to them all information concerning the Marine Corps and his specialty therein, radar operation, as he possessed.”
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To the Soviet officials who received his offer, Oswald said he “intimated that he might know something of special interest.”
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The Soviets had reason to think Oswald knew “something of special interest.” From September 1957 to November 1958 Oswald had been a Marine Corps radar operator at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan. Atsugi, located about thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo, served as the CIA’s main operational base in the Far East. It was one of two bases from which the CIA’s top-secret U-2 spy planes took off on their flights over the Soviet Union and China. The U-2 was the creation of the CIA’s Richard Bissell, also the main author of the Bay of Pigs scenario. Bissell worked closely on the U-2’s Soviet overflights with CIA director Allen Dulles. Radar operator Oswald was a small cog in the machine, but he was learning how it worked. From his radar control room at Atsugi, where he had a “crypto” clearance (higher than “top secret”), Oswald listened regularly to the U-2’s radio communications.
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After Atsugi, Oswald was reassigned as a radar operator to Marine Air Control Squadron No. 9 in Santa Ana, California, which was attached to the larger Marine Air Station in El Toro. Oswald continued to have access to secret information that would have been of interest to a Cold War enemy. Former Marine Corps Lieutenant John E. Donovan, who was Oswald’s officer in the Santa Ana radar unit, testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald “had the access to the location of all bases in the west coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding units’ radio and radar.”
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However, Donovan’s knowledge of Oswald’s connection to the top-secret U-2 was clearly off limits for his Warren Commission questioners. Their avoidance of the U-2 puzzled Donovan. Wasn’t Oswald’s possible access to top-secret U-2 information a critical issue to probe in relation to his defection? Donovan told author John Newman years later that, at the end of his testimony, he asked a Warren Commission lawyer, “Don’t you want to know anything about the U-2?” The lawyer said, “We asked you exactly what we wanted to know from you and we asked you everything we wanted for now and that is all. And if there is anything else we want to ask you, we will.” Donovan asked a fellow witness who also knew Oswald’s U-2 connection, “Did they ask you about the U-2?” He said, “No, not a thing.”
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On May 1, 1960, six months after Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, a U-2 was shot down by the Soviets for the first time. The downing of the U-2, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, wrecked the Paris summit meeting between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev. Gary Powers later raised the question whether his plane may not have been shot down as a result of information Oswald handed over to the Soviets.
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Powers’s question was at least reasonable. It reinforces the case that Oswald’s volunteering all the information he had as a Marine radar specialist to the Soviets was an apparently criminal act.

Yet when Oswald returned to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after working for over a year at a Soviet factory in Minsk, he was welcomed back by American officials with open arms. Not only did the United States make no move to prosecute him, but the embassy gave him a loan to return to the country he had betrayed.
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The toleration of Oswald’s apparent treason extended to his later obtaining a new passport overnight. On June 25, 1963, Oswald was miraculously issued a passport in New Orleans twenty-four hours after his application.
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He identified his destination as the Soviet Union.
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After analyzing this strange history in her classic work on the Warren Commission,
Accessories after the
Fact
, Sylvia Meagher concluded: “Decision after decision, the [State] Department removed every obstacle before Oswald—a defector and would-be expatriate, self-declared enemy of his native country, self-proclaimed discloser of classified military information, and later self-appointed propagandist for Fidel Castro—on his path from Minsk to Dallas.”
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The process would, of course, be reversed in Dallas. There Oswald would be arrested and killed quickly, before he could say what he knew of the president’s murder. In Dallas whatever light Oswald might cast on the assassination would be switched at once into darkness.

The Warren Commission dealt with the U.S. government’s odd toleration of the apparently treasonous Oswald, first of all, by a selective reading of his history. When the authors of the
Warren Report
mentioned Oswald’s work in the Marine Corps as a radar operator, they neglected to point out that the future defector had a “Crypto” clearance, which was higher than “Top Secret,” and that his work immersed him in information about the CIA’s super-secret U-2 flights.
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By omitting such facts, the government’s story was able to sidestep questions arising from Oswald’s offer of U-2 information to the Soviet Union, his defection to that Cold War enemy, and his wondrous acceptance back into the good graces of the U.S. government.

According to the
Warren Report
, Lee Harvey Oswald had been a lone assassin in the making for years, “moved by an overriding hostility to his environment.”
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In the government’s story, Oswald became a defector to Russia, a Fair Play For Cuba Committee demonstrator in New Orleans, and a presidential assassin for psychological reasons: “He does not appear to have been able to establish meaningful relationships with other people. He was perpetually disconnected with the world around him. Long before the assassination he expressed his hatred for American society and acted in protest against it.”
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The
Warren Report
portrayed Oswald as a young man alienated from society who then became an angry Marxist, abandoned his country, and killed its president. In the
Report
’s conclusion on Oswald’s motivation, the commission attributed his assassin’s impulse to a megalomania tinged with Marxism: “He sought for himself a place in history—a role as the ‘great man’ who would be recognized as having been in advance of his times. His commitment to Marxism and communism appears to have been another important factor in his motivation.”
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If we turn from
Warren Report
psychology to Cold War history, why was the ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald not arrested and charged a year and a half before the assassination when he came back to the United States from the Soviet Union, where he had announced at the American Embassy in Moscow that he would hand over military secrets (about U-2 flights) to the Soviets? Whereas in Dallas Oswald would be arrested and murdered before we knew it, on his preceding odyssey as a traitor in and out of Russia and back to the United States he overcame government barriers with an almost supernatural ease. What was the secret of Oswald’s immunity to prosecution for having criminally betrayed the United States at the height of the Cold War? How did this unrepentant enemy of his country merit treatment as a prodigal son, embraced by his government with financial help and preferential passport rulings while he continued to proclaim allegiance to the USSR and Cuba?

A solution to the mystery was suggested by former CIA agent Victor Marchetti, who resigned from the Agency in disillusionment after being executive assistant to the Deputy Director. The CIA fought a legal battle to suppress Marchetti’s book
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
. In regard to Oswald, Marchetti told author Anthony Summers of a CIA-connected Naval intelligence program in 1959, the same year Oswald defected to the USSR: “At the time, in 1959, the United States was having real difficulty in acquiring information out of the Soviet Union; the technical systems had, of course, not developed to the point that they are at today, and we were resorting to all sorts of activities. One of these activities was an ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] program which involved three dozen, maybe forty, young men who were made to appear disenchanted, poor American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about. Some of these people lasted only a few weeks. They were sent into the Soviet Union, or into eastern Europe, with the specific intention the Soviets would pick them up and ‘double’ them if they suspected them of being U.S. agents, or recruit them as KGB agents. They were trained at various naval installations both here and abroad, but the operation was being run out of Nag’s Head, North Carolina.”
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The counterintelligence program described by Marchetti dovetails with the Oswald story. It provides an explanation for the U.S. government’s indulgence of his behavior. That Oswald was in fact a participant in such a program was the belief of James Botelho, his former roommate in Santa Ana. Botelho, who later became a California judge, stated in an interview with Mark Lane that Oswald’s Communism was a pose. Botelho said: “I’m very conservative now [in 1978] and I was at least as conservative at that time. Oswald was not a Communist or a Marxist. If he was I would have taken violent action against him and so would many of the other Marines in the unit.”
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