JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (55 page)

Lodge rejected Rusk’s suggestion: “I believe that such a step has no chance of getting the desired result and would have the very serious effect of being regarded by the Generals as a sign of American indecision and delay. I believe this is a risk which we should not run.”
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Rusk tried again the next day, wiring Lodge: “Purpose of this message is to explore further question of possible attempt to separate Diem and the Nhus. In your telegram you appear to treat Diem and the Nhus as a single package . . .” Rusk said he would be glad to have Lodge’s thoughts “on whether further talks with Diem are contemplated to continue your opening discussions with him.”
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However, Lodge was in no mood to talk with the man he regarded as his diplomatic enemy in a game of “chicken.” He was determined to carry out his Luce-induced strategy against Diem. In a rebuttal telegram to Rusk, Lodge lectured the Secretary of State (and through him the president) that removing the Nhus “surely cannot be done by working through Diem. In fact Diem will oppose it . . . The best chance of doing it is by the Generals taking over the government lock, stock and barrel.” He concluded: “I am contemplating no further talks with Diem at this time.”
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In another wire to Lodge on September 3, Rusk pressed the issue further: “In this situation feeling here is that it is essential that central negotiations should be conducted directly with Diem and that you should proceed to a first meeting as soon as in your judgment you think it is desirable . . . We should be inclined to press for earliest such meeting.”
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Again Lodge deflected his orders from the president, replying to Rusk: “If I correctly understand instructions, they are based on a very different reading of the situation here and the possibilities than my own and my colleagues.”
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Lodge repeated that he would continue to put off a meeting with Diem.

Kennedy was becoming exasperated, at both Lodge’s mulishness and at his own folly in not having heeded his brother Robert’s warning against his appointing Lodge ambassador. Thanks to that appointment, he now had not only a stubborn South Vietnamese president to deal with but an equally stubborn American ambassador. Lodge was even resistant to the suggestion that he take the obvious diplomatic step of talking with Diem. JFK knew the chances of Diem’s sidelining the Nhus or reforming his government were miniscule. But the president had another objective in mind in his eleventh-hour efforts to appeal to Diem, an objective he realized Henry Cabot Lodge was not going to facilitate. He wanted to save Diem’s life.

To the Cold War establishment, Ngo Dinh Diem was becoming disposable. Washington’s Cold War leaders had been divided for some time over the merits of retaining Diem as their client “democratic” head of state for the Vietnam War. However, as a result of Diem’s disastrous repression of the Buddhists, the factions were moving toward consensus. It was becoming obvious that Diem, an incompetent despot, had to go. Kennedy was under mounting pressure from the more liberal side of his government, the State Department, to end Diem’s flagrantly authoritarian rule by a coup. In that respect, State’s leading coup advocates, Harriman and Hilsman, had put themselves in an unlikely alliance with the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Helms.

When Helms was asked by Harriman to approve the August 24 telegram to Lodge since CIA Director John McCone (a Diem supporter) was out of town, the Deputy Director of Plans did so without hesitation. It was the CIA’s career tactician Helms, not Kennedy’s appointee McCone, who was running the Agency’s covert operations—in this case beyond McCone’s knowledge or control. McCone was a figurehead out of the CIA’s covert-action loop. Helms felt no need to seek out, or defer to, McCone’s judgment when it came to the CIA’s endorsing (and facilitating) a coup in South Vietnam. “It’s about time we bit this bullet,” Helms told Harriman,
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in direct conflict with what McCone would say to Kennedy on his return to Washington. But it was Helms who was literally calling the CIA’s shots, not McCone.

Kennedy wanted to save Diem’s life from the looming generals’ coup that had picked up a steamrolling momentum not only in South Vietnam (with Lodge pushing it) but also from opposite sides of the U.S. government in Washington. As a senator, John Kennedy, like Mike Mansfield, had helped bring Diem to power in South Vietnam. Regardless of Diem’s downward path since then, Kennedy did not want to see him killed in a coup, especially one he was condoning. Because he was surrounded by people he couldn’t trust, Kennedy called in an old friend to help him try to save Diem’s life.

Torby Macdonald had been Jack Kennedy’s closest friend at Harvard. Like Kennedy, Macdonald was Irish Catholic, a second son, an athlete (Harvard football team captain), and an avid reader. Torby was at Jack’s side through severe illnesses at Harvard. He also helped his physically less talented friend practice long hours catching passes on the Harvard football field and backstroking in the indoor swimming pool. Both men had sharp wits. They enjoyed each other’s company immensely. In time they became political comrades in Washington. Torbert Macdonald was elected a Massachusetts member of the House of Representatives in 1954, with Senator John Kennedy’s support. When Kennedy was elected president, Macdonald remained his closest friend in Congress.
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It was to Torbert Macdonald, perhaps the man JFK trusted most after his brother Robert, that the president turned in the fall of 1963 to help him try to save the life of Diem.

Kennedy commissioned Macdonald to go to Saigon to appeal personally to Diem on behalf of the president. Macdonald was to bypass the CIA, the State Department, and Henry Cabot Lodge, in order to make an urgent personal appeal to the South Vietnamese president to take the steps necessary to save his life. Macdonald would fly in and out of Saigon on military, not civilian, planes to maintain as much secrecy as possible,
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with the assistance of the one arm of Kennedy’s government, the military, whose command still maintained a lingering (though lessening) support for Diem. Macdonald’s preparations for his mission and the trip itself were carried out in total secrecy, with no known written records. Kennedy’s biographer, Herbert S. Parmet, discovered the hidden story after Macdonald’s death in 1976. It was revealed to Parmet by Macdonald’s lover, Eleanore Carney, identified in Parmet’s
JFK: The Presidency of John F.
Kennedy
only as a confidential source.
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Her report was confirmed by Torbert Macdonald, Jr., who said his father told him about the secret journey,
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and by Macdonald’s administrative assistant, Joe Croken.
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Kennedy’s aide Michael Forrestal provided further confirmation. He had briefed Macdonald for the trip.
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As JFK wished, Torbert Macdonald met with Diem. He presented Kennedy’s personal plea that Diem remove the Nhus from power and that he himself take refuge in the American Embassy in Saigon.

Macdonald warned Diem: “They’re going to kill you. You’ve got to get out of here temporarily to seek sanctuary in the American Embassy and you must get rid of your sister-in-law and your brother.”
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Diem would not budge.

“He just won’t do it,” Macdonald reported back to the President. “He’s too stubborn; just refuses to.”
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As Kennedy was trying to save Diem’s life while going along with a coup that would take it, Lee Harvey Oswald was gaining employment at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. He got the job that would place him strategically right over the president’s parade route through the intercession of Marina Oswald’s friend Ruth Paine, a housewife with connections.

It was through CIA asset George de Mohrenschildt that Ruth Paine had met Lee and Marina Oswald. When Warren Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler asked Ruth Paine if Marina Oswald had ever mentioned George de Mohrenschildt to her, Paine answered, “Well, that’s how I met her.” She said her meeting with Marina occurred at a February 1963 party in Dallas.
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De Mohrenschildt had helped arrange the party, which took place at the home of a friend.
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Ruth Paine attended it especially to meet Marina. As a student of the Russian language, Ruth wanted to meet somebody with whom she could practice.
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George de Mohrenschildt brought the Oswalds to the party.
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Ruth Paine then spent part of the evening conversing in Russian with Marina.
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De Mohrenschildt told the Warren Commission, “I noticed immediately that there was another nice relationship developed there between Mrs. Paine and Marina.”
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Ruth followed up her introduction to the Oswalds by letters, phone calls, and visits to Marina in particular.

In late April, Ruth convinced Marina to move into Ruth’s house in Irving, a suburb of Dallas, for two weeks, while Lee went ahead “to look for work” in New Orleans—the context where he would be sheep-dipped by U.S. intelligence that summer as a follower of Fidel Castro. Marina’s living with Ruth Paine would become a more permanent arrangement in the fall. It was supported from the beginning by Ruth’s husband, Michael Paine, then separated from Ruth and their two young children and living in his own apartment. When Lee Oswald said he was settled in New Orleans, Ruth with her children drove Marina and her fourteen-month-old daughter June down to New Orleans, again with the encouragement and financial support of Michael Paine.

By the time George de Mohrenschildt dropped out of the Oswalds’ lives in April 1963, Ruth and her husband, Michael Paine, had taken de Mohrenschildt’s place as Marina’s and Lee’s Dallas sponsors. De Mohrenschildt’s sponsorship was sanctioned by the CIA. Three hours before his death in 1977 in Florida by an apparently self-inflicted shotgun blast, George de Mohrenschildt revealed in an interview that he befriended Lee Harvey Oswald at the encouragement of Dallas CIA agent J. Walton Moore, with whom he had been meeting regularly for years.
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In return for his shepherding of Oswald, de Mohrenschildt asked for and received a discreetly facilitated $285,000 contract with dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier to do a geological survey in Haiti.
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De Mohrenschildt did no geological survey in Haiti, but still deposited over $200,000 in his bank account.
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When de Mohrenschildt left Dallas in April for Haiti (stopping off in Washington, D.C., for a meeting with CIA and Army intelligence officials),
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Ruth and Michael Paine stepped into his place as the Oswalds’ Dallas benefactors.

It was as if de Mohrenschildt had handed off the Oswalds to the Paines like a football in a reverse end run. When the Dallas play-action began, the Oswalds were being carried by a prominent White Russian anti-communist. As de Mohrenschildt with CIA assistance left the Dallas action for Haiti, the Oswalds were suddenly in the hands of a Quaker-Unitarian couple who belonged to the ACLU. If it was in fact a handoff, one trick play in a larger game plan, its sleight of hand was so successful that when the game was over, hardly anyone even remembered this one critical play.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover apparently did notice, however, that there was a de Mohrenschildt-Paine parallel of a classified nature whose public revelation could threaten the credibility of the Warren Commission. Hoover wrote a letter to head Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin on October 23, 1964, urging him not to release certain FBI “reports and memoranda dealing with Michael and Ruth Paine and George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt.” Hoover warned Rankin: “Making the contents of such documents available to the public could cause serious repercussions to the Commission.”
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Who, then, were Michael and Ruth Paine?

When the Oswalds came under the protective wings of the Paines, Michael Paine was working as a research engineer with a defense contractor, Bell Helicopter, in Fort Worth, Texas.
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Paine acknowledged in his testimony to the Warren Commission that his job had a security clearance but claimed, “I don’t happen to know what the classification is.”
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However, Michael Paine was no ordinary Bell Helicopter engineer. His stepfather, Arthur Young, with whom he worked previously, was the inventor of the Bell Helicopter—a fact discovered by researchers thirty years after the Kennedy assassination.
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By heritage Michael Paine was well connected in the military-industrial complex.

Michael Paine’s mother, Ruth Forbes Paine Young, was connected to Allen Dulles. Descended from the blueblood Forbes family of Boston, Ruth Forbes Paine Young was a lifelong friend of Mary Bancroft, who worked side by side with Allen Dulles as a World War II spy in Switzerland and became his mistress.
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Mary Bancroft said in an oral history interview that she “knew the mother of Michael Paine where Oswald stayed. She was Ruth Forbes, a very good friend of mine.”
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