JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (61 page)

[
206
]. Adamson,
Oswald’s Closest Friend,
vol. 6, pp. 31-35. Mary Bancroft,
Autobiography of a Spy
(New York: William Morrow, 1983).

[
207
].
Oral History of Mary Bancroft
(Columbia University, 1972), p. 243. Cited by Adamson,
Oswald’s Closest Friend,
p. 34. Bancroft also refers to her friendship with Ruth Forbes Paine (later Young) in
Autobiography of a Spy
, pp. 54-61.

[
208
].
WCH
, vol. 2, p. 386.

[
209
]. It was at Allen Dulles’s repeated suggestion in the 1960s that Mary Bancroft wrote her
Autobiography of a Spy
, memorializing their covert work together in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Bancroft’s book was based on her OSS reports written specifically for Dulles, her spy mentor and lover in Switzerland during the war. When Dulles was fired as CIA director by Kennedy in 1961, he took Bancroft’s reports with him into retirement, placing them in a filing cabinet in his home.

After his death in 1969, the CIA confiscated the filing cabinet and everything in it. Two years later, in response to Bancroft’s personal appeal, then CIA director Richard Helms returned her OSS spy reports. Bancroft then wrote her World War II memoir, mentioning only fleetingly in a final chapter her continuing contacts with Allen Dulles up to his death.
Autobiography of a Spy
, pp. 290-91.

Mary Bancroft’s
Oral History
acknowledges her simultaneous postwar alliances with Allen Dulles and
Time-Life-Fortune
magnate Henry Luce: “Mary enjoyed seeing Dulles mad over Luce. One night Mary creeped back to Dulles’ apartment when Allen called to Mary: ‘Have you been with Luce all this time?’ Mary fired back: ‘Yes!’” Drawn from
Oral History
, p. 310. Cited by Adamson,
Oswald’s Closest Friend,
p. 29.

[
210
].
WCH
, vol. 3, p. 3.

[
211
]. Barbara LaMonica, “All in the Family (the Paines),” Conference Abstract, Coalition on Political Assassinations,
Opening the Files: JFK, MLK, RFK
; Washington, D.C., October 18-20, 1996.

[
212
]. George Cotter, “Spies, Strings and Missionaries,”
The Christian Century
(March 25, 1981), p. 321.

[
213
]. “Executive Agents are business people, religious personnel, technical experts or scholars sent abroad to collect intelligence on matters bearing upon issues of particular importance to American foreign interests.” Barbara LaMonica, “William Avery Hyde,”
The Fourth Decade
(November 1997), p. 11.

[
214
]. William A. Hyde, “End of-Tour Report,” August 8, 1967; located by researcher Steve Jones in the AID Library, Washington, D.C.; LaMonica, “William Avery Hyde,” p. 10.

[
215
]. “Security File on Sylvia Hyde Hoke,” 7/30/71; CIA File Number 348 201; Inclusive Dates: 1955-1971; NARA Document ID Number 1993.07.24.08:39:37:560310.

[
216
]. The inclusive dates on Sylvia Hyde Hoke’s CIA Security File, 1955-1971, indicate she had already been employed by the CIA for eight years by the time of her sister Ruth’s September 1963 visit at her Falls Church, Virginia, home. Ibid.

[
217
].
WCH
, vol. 3, pp. 3-4.

[
218
]. Ruth Paine’s Testimony before the Orleans Parish Grand Jury, April 18, 1968, p. 57.

[
219
]. Ibid., p. 58.

[
220
]. Ibid., 56-57.

[
221
].
Warren Report
, pp. 14-15. The neighbor identified by Ruth Paine as having mentioned the job opening, Linnie Mae Randle, said, contrary to Paine’s testimony, “I didn’t know there was a job opening over there [at the Texas School Book Depository].”
WCH
, vol. 2, p. 247.

[
222
]. Affidavit of Robert L. Adams, August 4, 1964.
WCH
, vol. 11, p. 481.

[
223
]. Ibid.

[
224
]. Ibid. There is evidence that if Lee Oswald had been informed about the much higher-paying, permanent job at Trans Texas, he would probably have applied for it. Marina Oswald testified that after Lee took the Book Depository job, he was still answering want ads because he “wanted to get something better.”
WCH,
vol. 1, p. 68.

[
225
].
WCH
, vol. 9, pp. 389-90.

[
226
]. Adams Affidavit, ibid.

[
227
]. Marina Oswald Porter’s Testimony before the Orleans Parish Grand Jury, February 8, 1968, pp. 69-70.

CHAPTER FIVE

Saigon and Chicago

At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nikita Khrushchev said something totally unexpected to his Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko. He said, “We have to let Kennedy know that we want to help him.”
[1]

As Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, describes that surprising moment, his father hesitated to use the word “help” in response to John Kennedy’s plea for precisely that. When Khrushchev did say the word aloud, it forced him to ask himself: Did he really want to
help
his enemy Kennedy?

Yet Khrushchev knew from his secret correspondence with the U.S. president that the two men agreed on Noah’s Ark as a crucial symbol of their common predicament in the nuclear age. The precarious boat in which they and all of humanity were living on a sea of conflict had to stay afloat.

After a short silence inspired by the sense of his word, “help,” Khrushchev repeated it to a wondering Gromyko:

“Yes, help. We now have a common cause, to save the world from those pushing us toward war.”
[2]

In that grace-filled moment, Nikita Khrushchev, his new partner John Kennedy, and the world with them, went from darkness to dawn.

What especially moved Khrushchev to help Kennedy by withdrawing the Soviet missiles from Cuba was Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin’s description of his meeting with Robert Kennedy. The president’s brother was exhausted. Dobrynin could see from Robert Kennedy’s eyes that he hadn’t slept for days. RFK told him the president “didn’t know how to resolve the situation. The military is putting great pressure on him, insisting on military actions against Cuba and the President is in a very difficult position . . . Even if he doesn’t want or desire a war, something irreversible could occur against his will. That is why the President is asking for help to solve this problem.”
[3]

In his memoirs, Khrushchev reported a further, chilling sentence from Robert Kennedy’s appeal to Dobrynin: “If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.”
[4]

Sergei has described his father’s thoughts when he read Dobrynin’s report relaying the Kennedys’ plea: “The president was calling for help: that was how father interpreted Robert Kennedy’s talk with our ambassador. The tone of the conversation was evidence of the fact that to delay could be fatal. The temperature in the Washington boiler had apparently reached a dangerous point and was about to explode.”
[5]

Half a world apart, in radical ideological conflict, both Kennedy in his call for help and Khrushchev in his response had recognized their interdependence with each other and the world. They suddenly joined hands. After threatening to destroy the world, the two enemies turned to each other in desperation and grace. Instead of annihilation, they chose, in Khrushchev’s words, “a common cause, to save the world from those pushing us toward war.”

Khrushchev’s decision to help Kennedy in the Missile Crisis was reciprocated by Kennedy’s helping Khrushchev by the American University address, which led in turn to their signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Both men were ready for more cooperation. Neither wanted the Cold War to continue.

The deepening Kennedy–Khrushchev détente was the larger context of the unfolding plot to assassinate Kennedy. It had become clear to America’s power brokers that the president of their national security state was struggling with his Communist opponent not so much over who would win the Cold War as on how to end it. From a national security standpoint, the president had become a traitor.

In the fall of 1963, Kennedy, like Khrushchev, had been given new eyes. JFK saw everything in relation to the threat of annihilation he and the Soviet premier had retreated from the previous fall and the hope of peace they had discovered. The Cold War was receding. The moment was ripe with hope. Now was the time to make politics obedient to that hope.

On September 20, 1963, two months and two days before his death, Kennedy spoke to the United Nations. He took the opportunity to return to a theme of his American University address—pursuing a strategy of peace through a step-by-step process.

“Peace,” he said, “is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures. And however undramatic the pursuit of peace, that pursuit must go on.”
[6]

In the wake of the test-ban agreement, he identified the time as one of huge responsibility:

“Today we may have reached a pause in the cold war—but that is not a lasting peace. A test ban treaty is a milestone—but it is not the millennium. We have not been released from our obligations—we have been given an opportunity. And if we fail to make the most of this moment and this momentum—if we convert our new-found hopes and understandings into new walls and weapons of hostility—if this pause in the cold war merely leads to its renewal and not to its end—then the indictment of posterity will rightly point its finger at us all. But if we can stretch this pause into a period of cooperation—if both sides can now gain new confidence and experience in concrete collaborations for peace—if we can now be as bold and farsighted in the control of deadly weapons as we have been in their creation—then surely this first small step can be the start of a long and fruitful journey.”
[7]

Kennedy challenged the Soviet Union to join the United States in developing a new means of security:

“I would say to the leaders of the Soviet Union, and to their people, that if either of our countries is to be fully secure, we need a much better weapon than the H-bomb—a weapon better than ballistic missiles or nuclear submarines—and that better weapon is peaceful cooperation.”
[8]

As a concrete step in peaceful cooperation, he suggested a joint expedition to the moon, a project that could involve not only the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. “but the representatives of all our countries.”
[9]
However, neither American nor Soviet military leaders, jealous of their rocket secrets, would look on his idea with enthusiasm. Kennedy was pushing the generals and scientists on both sides of the East–West struggle. He knew that merging their missile technologies in a peaceful project would help to defuse the Cold War. It was part of his day-by-day strategy of peace.