JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (96 page)

The C-54’s landing strip by the Trinity River was on the perimeter of Oak Cliff. Where the CIA plane taxied in a half-circle and paused to pick up the second Oswald and his Cuban-looking partner was 1.3 miles from El Chico’s parking lot. The man like Oswald whom T. F. White saw sitting in the CIA-connected car on El Chico’s lot at 2:00 p.m. was a five-minute drive from the point where the CIA plane would meet him at 3:30 p.m. He had plenty of time to reconnect with his handler, change into his highway worker coveralls, and rendezvous with the C-54, while his more visible counterpart went to jail—and two days later, to death.

Robert Vinson has said that since November 22, 1963, “Every time I’d see an article on the assassination, I stop and wonder if I have the answer to this puzzle. Could this small piece of information fit into the larger picture to help us learn what happened?”
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Thanks to the pieces of information presented by Mayor Wes Wise, auto mechanic T. F. White, concession stand operator Butch Burroughs, hobby shop owner Bernard Haire, and Air Force Sergeant Robert Vinson, we now have a larger picture of the way in which two men played the role of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. The interlocking testimonies of Wise, White, Burroughs, Haire, and Vinson have given us a back-stage view of the double Oswald drama directed by the CIA.

The man who announced President Kennedy’s death to the world at Parkland Hospital on the afternoon of November 22 was Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff. Shortly before his own death four decades later, Malcolm Kilduff told me in an interview that President Kennedy made a powerful statement to him on Vietnam just before they departed for Texas.
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Kilduff said he came into the Oval Office the morning of November 21 to prepare the president for a press briefing. Kilduff discovered that JFK’s mind was instead on Vietnam.

Kennedy said to Kilduff: “I’ve just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We’re losing too damned many people over there. It’s time for us to get out. The Vietnamese aren’t fighting for themselves. We’re the ones who are doing the fighting.

“After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. There’s no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.”
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What Kennedy meant was clear, Kilduff said:

“There is no question that he was taking us out of Vietnam. I was in his office just before we went to Dallas and he said that Vietnam was not worth another American life. There is no question about that. There is no question about it. I know that firsthand.”
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In his final hour at the White House, Kennedy was focused on his decision to withdraw from Vietnam, a process he had already begun by National Security Action Memorandum 263 on October 11, 1963. As he told his friend Larry Newman in Hyannis Port on October 20, “This war in Vietnam—it’s never off my mind, it haunts me day and night.”
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Vietnam would leave his mind only when a bullet entered it.

Precisely how Kennedy would have followed up on NSA 263 to continue his Vietnam withdrawal we don’t know. But there are clues to his thinking.

The first clue is his discovery that peace was an election issue. The ovations he received on his September speaking tour from even conservative audiences whenever he mentioned the test ban treaty showed him the people were ahead of the government on peace. The terror of the Missile Crisis, followed by the hope of the test ban treaty, had disrupted Cold War propaganda and ideology. Kennedy saw that, at least outside Washington, D.C., people were living with a deeper awareness of the ultimate choice they faced. Nuclear weapons were real. So, too, was the prospect of peace. Shocked by the Cuban Missile Crisis into recognizing a real choice, people preferred peace to annihilation.

Kennedy knew a Vietnam withdrawal was vital to his détente with Khrushchev. Now thanks to popular support for the test ban, he was coming to see how a withdrawal could even help spark his campaign for reelection, especially against his most likely opponent, the notoriously bellicose Barry Goldwater.

Looking back at that hopeful time five years later,
New York Times
writer Tom Wicker observed that Goldwater offered “a natural opening for Kennedy to sound a peace theme that could be greatly amplified if a settlement in Vietnam allowed some or all” of the U.S. soldiers there to return home in an election year.
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As Goldwater began to emerge as the Republican presidential candidate, Kennedy could see the election shaping up as a referendum on war and peace. His withdrawal from Vietnam would fit right into such a scenario.

JFK’s private statements for the withdrawal he had already authorized were becoming more forceful and concrete by the day. After telling his Marine Corps Chief of Staff General David Shoup on November 11 he was “getting out of Vietnam,”
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the next day he said to his most vocal critic on Vietnam, Senator Wayne Morse, that Morse was “absolutely right” in his rejection of the war, adding:

“I’m in the midst of an intensive study which substantiates your position on Vietnam. When I’m finished, I want you to give me half a day and come over and analyze it point by point. Wayne, I’ve decided to get out. Definitely!”
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JFK’s statement to Kilduff on the day before the assassination, that “Vietnam is not worth another American life,” and that “after I come back from Texas, that’s going to change,” combined passion with urgency. Kennedy seemed on the verge of making his withdrawal a matter of public policy.

He knew that he had a ripe international moment to make his stand public. In a little-noticed article, UN Secretary General U Thant revealed later that after the fall of the Diem government in November 1963, “he suggested to the United States that it promote a coalition government in Saigon that would include a number of non-Communist Vietnamese political exiles, especially those who had taken refuge in Paris.”
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The
New York Times
reported: “this suggestion did not bear fruit, one reason being that the Paris group of exiles decided against returning to Saigon.”
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Another, unmentioned reason was that the president who was open to U Thant’s suggestion was then assassinated. His successor had no interest in it.

The annual report
The United States in World Affairs
, published for the Council on Foreign Relations, noted for the period just before Kennedy’s assassination the emergence of “new proposals for a negotiated settlement involving the reunification of all of Vietnam, as envisaged in the 1954 agreements, and its neutralization on something like the Laotian pattern.”
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The neutralization proposals came not only from U Thant but also from the Communist government of North Vietnam. The
Manchester Guardian
reported that after the fall of Diem, Hanoi “was willing to discuss the establishment of a coalition neutralist government in Saigon.”
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The National Liberation Front in South Vietnam supported and encouraged such negotiation to end the war. On November 8, 1963, the NLF’s radio station broadcast an appeal for the “opening of negotiations between various interested groups in South Vietnam, in order to arrive at a cease-fire and a solution to the great problems of the country.”
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Looking back at these proposals, which Kennedy would have weighed carefully, U Thant later commented: “In my view, there was a very good possibility in 1963 of arriving at a satisfactory political solution.”
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To get a sense of JFK’s attitude toward these neutralization proposals the week before he went to Dallas, we can recall the strict instructions he gave repeatedly to Roger Hilsman the previous spring and summer. Hilsman said:

“[Kennedy] began to instruct me, as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, to position ourselves to do in Vietnam what we had done in Laos, i.e., to negotiate the neutralization of Vietnam. He had made a decision on this. He did not make it public of course, but he had certainly communicated it to me as I say, in four-letter words, good earthy anglo-saxon four-letter words, and every time that I failed to do something [in a way] he felt endangered this position, he let me know in very clear language.”
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Toward the end of November 1963, the time had suddenly become ripe for an end to the Vietnam War, along the lines envisioned by John F. Kennedy and in a way that seemed politically feasible in both a national and international context. This was the concrete situation in which JFK told Malcolm Kilduff, in disgust at more American casualties and only minutes before his departure for Dallas, “Vietnam is not worth another American life,” and “after I come back from Texas, that’s going to change.”

When Malcolm Kilduff announced the death of President Kennedy at Parkland Hospital the next day, he was announcing also in effect the death of over 50,000 American soldiers and three million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians from a war that would continue until 1975.

Who or what assassinated President John F. Kennedy?

In the course of experimenting in the dark truth of JFK’s death, the ongoing, deepening historical hypothesis of this book has been that the CIA coordinated and carried out the president’s murder. That hypothesis has been strengthened as the documents, witnesses, and converging lines of inquiry have pointed more conclusively at the CIA. Yet understanding that the CIA coordinated the assassination does not mean that we can limit the responsibility to the CIA. To tell the truth at the heart of darkness in this story, one must see and accept a responsibility that goes deeper and far beyond the Central Intelligence Agency.

The CIA was the coordinating instrument that killed the president, but the question of responsibility is more systemic, more personal, and more chilling. Thomas Merton described it rightly as the unspeakable. Let us continue to follow the story as far as we can, in the hope that the unspeakable, if not spoken, can at least be glimpsed in the shadows.

At 12:38 p.m. on Friday, November 22, 1963, Doctor Charles Crenshaw burst into Trauma Room One of Parkland Hospital where a mortally wounded President Kennedy had just been brought in on a gurney. Dr. Crenshaw, a resident surgeon, had been alerted by phone that the president had been shot and was on his way to Parkland.

The first person Crenshaw saw in Trauma Room One was Jacqueline Kennedy.

“She was standing,” he said, “just inside the door in pensive quietness, clutching her purse, her pillbox hat slightly askew. She turned and gazed at me, then refocused her attention on her husband. The look on her face forever marked my memory. Anger, disbelief, despair, and resignation were all present in her expression . . .

“Drying blood caked the right side of Jacqueline’s dress and down her leg. Her once-white gloves were stained almost completely crimson. If she hadn’t been standing, I would have thought she had been shot, too.”
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Crenshaw said decades later that of all the people he had seen in his career grieving over trauma victims, he “never saw or sensed more intense and genuine love than Jacqueline showed at that moment toward her dying husband.”
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While Crenshaw assisted the other doctors, he stood by the president’s waist. It was then that he “noticed a small opening in the midline of his throat. It was small, about the size of the tip of my little finger. It was a bullet entry wound. There was no doubt in my mind,” he said, “about that wound, as I had seen dozens of them in the emergency room.”
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Because the wound was impairing JFK’s ability to breathe, Dr. Malcolm Perry “decided to perform a tracheotomy [a surgical incision followed by the insertion of a tube] on the President’s throat, where the bullet had entered his neck.”
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When the doctors had exhausted their ways to save the president’s life, Crenshaw walked behind John Kennedy’s head. He was shocked by what he saw. The right rear of Kennedy’s brain was gone.

“It looked,” he said, “like a crater—an empty cavity. All I could see there was mangled, bloody tissue. From the damage I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that the bullet had entered his head through the front . . .”
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At 12:52 p.m., even the most sensitive machine in Trauma Room One could detect no sign of a heartbeat in the president. Dr. Crenshaw helped two other doctors cover the body with a sheet.

Twenty-one out of twenty-two witnesses at Parkland Hospital—most of them doctors and nurses, trained medical observers—agreed in their earliest statements that JFK’s massive head wound was located in the right rear of his skull, demonstrating a fatal head shot from the front.
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The exit wound in the back of his skull was unforgettable. Crenshaw said it “resembled a deep furrow in a freshly plowed field.”
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