JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (49 page)

As would be his attitude after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy, as Sorensen said, “permitted no gloating by any administration spokesman and no talk of retribution.”
[27]
He was especially gracious toward Roger Blough, whom he subsequently invited often to the White House for consultations.
[28]
When asked by a reporter at a press conference about his “rather harsh statement about businessmen,” JFK revised his infamous s.o.b. remark. He said that his father, a businessman himself, had meant only “the steel men” with whom he had been “involved when he was a member of the Roosevelt administration in the 1937 strike.”
[29]

This explanation would not win the hearts of business leaders. As they knew, JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., while a businessman himself, had also been President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a former Wall Street insider who knew the system, the senior Kennedy had cracked down on Wall Street profiteers. Some of the financial titans of the thirties regarded JFK’s father as a class traitor, “the Judas of Wall Street,” for his work on behalf of FDR.
[30]
It was in the light of Joseph Kennedy’s fight to initiate government controls over Wall Street, and the opposition he encountered, that he made his all-businessmen-are-s.o.b.’s remark to JFK.

That opinion of his father, President Kennedy told the press, “I found appropriate that evening [when] we had not been treated altogether with frankness . . . But that’s past, that’s past. Now we’re working together, I hope.”
[31]

It was a vain hope. John and Robert Kennedy had become notorious in the ranks of big business. JFK’s strategy of withdrawing defense contracts and RFK’s aggressive investigating tactics toward men of power were seen as unforgivable sins by the corporate world. As a result of the president’s uncompromising stand against the steel industry—and implicitly any corporation that chose to defy his authority—a bitter gap opened up between Kennedy and big business, whose most powerful elements coincided with the military-industrial complex.

The depth of corporate hostility toward Kennedy after the steel crisis can be seen by an unsigned editorial in
Fortune
, media czar Henry Luce’s magazine for the most fortunate. The editors of
Fortune
knew the decision to raise steel prices had been made by the executive committee of U.S. Steel’s board of directors. It included top-level officers from other huge financial institutions, such as the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, the First National City Bank of New York, the Prudential Insurance Company, the Ford Foundation, and AT&T.
[32]
When Roger Blough handed U.S. Steel’s provocative press release to the president, he did so on behalf of not only U.S. Steel but also these other financial giants in the United States. The
Fortune
editorial therefore posed an intriguing question: Why did the financial interests behind U.S. Steel announce the price increase in such a way as to deliberately “provoke the President of the U.S. into a vitriolic and demagogic assault?”
[33]

With the authority of an insider’s knowledge that it denied having,
Fortune
answered its own question: “There is a theory—unsupported by any direct evidence—that Blough was acting as a ‘business statesman’ rather than as a businessman judging his market.” According to “this theory,” Kennedy’s prior appeal to steel executives not to raise prices, leading to the contract settlement between the company and the union, had “poised over the industry a threat of ‘jawbone control’ of prices. For the sake of his company, the industry, and the nation, Blough sought a way to break through the bland ‘harmony’ that has recently prevailed between government and business.”
[34]

In plainer language, the president was acting too much like a president, rather than just another officeholder beholden to the powers that be. U.S. Steel on behalf of still higher financial interests therefore taunted Kennedy so as to present him with a dilemma: he either had to accept the price hike and lose credibility, or react as he did with power to roll back the increase and thereby unite the business world against him. His unswerving activist response then served to confirm the worst fears of corporate America:

“That the threat of ‘jawbone control’ was no mere bugaboo was borne out by the tone of President Kennedy’s reaction and the threats of general business harassment by government that followed the ‘affront.’”
[35]

Thus the steel crisis, in
Fortune
’s view, threatened to propel an activist, anti-business president toward a fate like that of Julius Caesar. As Shakespeare had it, Caesar was warned of his coming assassination by a soothsayer: “Beware the ides of March.”
Fortune
gave Kennedy a deadly warning of its own by the title of its editorial: “Steel: The Ides of April.”

Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department continued its anti-trust investigation into the steel companies. U.S. Steel and seven other companies were eventually forced to pay maximum fines in 1965 for their price-fixing activities between 1955 and 1961.
[36]
The steel crisis defined John and Robert Kennedy as Wall Street enemies. The president was seen as a state dictator. As the
Wall Street Journal
put it in the week after Big Steel surrendered to the Kennedys, “The Government set the price. And it did this by the pressure of fear—by naked power, by threats, by agents of the state security police.”
[37]
U.S. News and World Report
gave prominence in its April 30, 1962, issue to an anti-Kennedy article on “Planned Economy” that suggested the president was acting like a Soviet commissar.
[38]

Attorney General Robert Kennedy became a symbol of “ruthless power” to the business titans he treated so brusquely, whose corporations he then found in violation of the law. Media controlled by the same interests adopted the characterization of RFK as ruthless until his murder six years
later.

As John Kennedy became persona non grata to the economic elite of the United States, his popularity increased elsewhere. He said on May 8, 1962, to a warmly welcoming convention of the United Auto Workers:

“Last week, after speaking to the Chamber of Commerce and the presidents of the American Medical Association, I began to wonder how I got elected. And now I remember.

“I said last week to the Chamber that I thought I was the second choice for President of a majority of the Chamber; anyone else was first choice.”
[39]

John Kennedy, the son of a rich man who had fought Wall Street in the Roosevelt administration, was beginning to sound like a class heretic himself. He told the U.A.W.: “Harry Truman once said there are 14 or 15 million Americans who have the resources to have representatives in Washington to protect their interests, and that the interests of the great mass of other people, the hundred and fifty or sixty million, is the responsibility of the President of the United States. And I propose to fulfill it.”
[40]

After the steel crisis, President Kennedy felt so much hostility from the leaders of big business that he finally gave up trying to curry their support. He told advisers Sorensen, O’Donnell, and Schlesinger, “I understand better every day why Roosevelt, who started out such a mild fellow, ended up so ferociously anti-business. It is hard as hell to be friendly with people who keep trying to cut your legs off.”
[41]
If
Fortune
’s editors were right in seeing a deliberate provocation of Kennedy, the instigators had succeeded in alienating the business elite from the president, and vice versa.

JFK joked about what his corporate enemies would do to him, if they only had the chance. A year after the steel crisis, he learned before giving a speech in New York that elsewhere in the same hotel “the steel industry was presenting Dwight D. Eisenhower with its annual public service award.”

“I was their man of the year last year,” said the president to his audience. “They wanted to come down to the White House to give me their award, but the Secret Service wouldn’t let them do it.”
[42]

For the dark humor to work, Kennedy and his audience had to assume a Secret Service committed to shielding the president. However, as Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden had learned before he left the White House detail, the S.S. agents around Kennedy were joking in a more sinister direction—that they would step out of the way if an assassin aimed a shot at the president.
[43]
In Dallas the Secret Service would step out of the way not just individually but collectively.

In his deepening alienation from the CIA, the Pentagon, and big business, John Kennedy was moving consciously beyond the point of no return. Kennedy knew well the complicity that existed among the Cold War’s corporate elite, Pentagon planners, and the heads of “intelligence agencies.” He was no stranger to the way systemic power worked in and behind his national security state. But he still kept acting for “the interests of the great mass of other people”—and as his brother Robert put it, to prevent “the specter of the death of the children of this country and around the world.” That put him more and more deeply in conflict with those who controlled the system.

We have no evidence as to who in the military-industrial complex may have given the order to assassinate President Kennedy. That the order was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency is obvious. The CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it.

According to the
Warren Report
, Lee Harvey Oswald told the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on October 31, 1959, that his new allegiance was to the U.S.S.R. He said he had promised Soviet officials he “would make known to them all information concerning the Marine Corps and his specialty therein, radar operation, as he possessed.”
[44]
However, the
Warren Report
did not mention that in the Marine Corps Oswald had been a radar operator specifically for the CIA’s top-secret U-2 spy plane. By not admitting Oswald’s U-2 or CIA connections, the Warren Commission avoided the implications of his offering to give “something of special interest” to the Soviets.
[45]
Oswald was either a blatant traitor or, as his further history reveals, a U.S. counterintelligence agent being dangled before the Russians as a Marine expatriate.

The head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Branch from 1954 to 1974 was James Jesus Angleton, known as the “Poet-Spy.” As an undergraduate at Yale in the early forties, Angleton had founded a literary journal,
Furioso
, which published the poetry of Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, and Archibald MacLeish. After he went on to Harvard Law School, Angleton was drafted into the U.S. Army. He became a member of the Counterintelligence Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), World War II predecessor to the CIA. The OSS and CIA suited Angleton perfectly. Counterintelligence became less a wartime mission than a lifelong obsession. For Angleton, the Cold War was an anti-communist crusade, with his CIA double agents engaged in a battle of light against darkness.

Investigative journalist Joseph Trento testified in a 1984 court deposition that, according to CIA sources, James Angleton was the supervisor of a CIA assassination unit in the 1950s. The “small assassination team” was headed by Army colonel Boris Pash.
[46]
At the end of World War II, Army Intelligence colonel Pash had rounded up Nazi scientists who could contribute their research skills to the development of U.S. nuclear and chemical weapons.
[47]
The CIA’s E. Howard Hunt, while imprisoned for the Watergate break-in, told the
New York Times
that Pash’s CIA assassination unit was designed especially for the killing of suspected double agents.
[48]
That placed Pash’s terminators under the authority of counterintelligence chief Angleton. Joseph Trento testified that his sources confirmed, “Pash’s assassination unit was assigned to Angleton.”
[49]

In the 1960s, Angleton retained his authority over assassinations. In November 1961, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Bissell, directed his longtime associate William Harvey to develop an assassination program known as “ZR/RIFLE” and to apply it to Cuba, as the Senate’s Church Committee later discovered.
[50]
Among the notes for ZR/RIFLE that Harvey then scribbled to himself were: “planning should include provisions for blaming Sovs or Czechs in case of blow. Should have phony 201 [a CIA file on any person “of active operational interest”]
[51]
in RG [Central Registry] to backstop this, all documents therein forged and backdated.”
[52]
In other words, in order to blame an assassination on the Communists, the patsy should be given Soviet or Czechoslovakian associations. (Oswald’s would be Soviet and Cuban.) An appropriately fraudulent CIA 201 personnel file should be created for any future assassination scapegoat, with “all documents therein forged and updated.” Harvey also reminded himself that the phony 201 “should look like a CE [counterespionage] file,” and that he needed to talk with “Jim A.”
[53]