Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (42 page)

After Roscoe White’s death in 1971, his son, Ricky White, claimed to have found a military footlocker belonging to his father. In it, Ricky claimed, was a handwritten diary in which his father supposedly admitted to shooting JFK and some never-before-seen photos of the assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald. When Ricky later went to sell the footlocker, he discovered that the diary and photos were missing.

About a year later, Ricky White claimed to find a metal artillery powder canister in his grandmother’s attic that contained Roscoe White’s Marine Corps service papers and his dog tag, as well as three messages written in military style and addressed to an individual code-named Mandarin. Former Marine sniper Craig Roberts claims to have seen the messages and verified that the number in the top right-hand corner of each was identical to Roscoe White’s Marine Corps serial number.
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Roberts declared the “facts ring true: Roscoe White was in Lee Harvey Oswald’s platoon in Japan and later in the Philippines; Roscoe White worked in the intelligence community; he had access to a Dallas police uniform complete with badge; his serial number matched that of the message addressee number; and finally, the messages were of standard military format down to the last detail.”
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Roberts noted the messages were sent in September 1963, while Roscoe White was waiting to start the Dallas Police Academy and was still associated with William Harvey’s ZR/RIFLE project. The messages called for White to be prepared to eliminate a national security threat in Dallas, assumed to be a reference to JFK. Roberts insists he has personally inspected the three messages and believes them to be authentic, with the format, content, and composition of the messages exactly as he would expect, given his extensive military experience as a sniper.

Richard Nixon did not want the American public knowing he was in Dallas, Texas, on November 23, 1963, when JFK was assassinated. Otherwise, why would he have invented several different versions of the story? L. Fletcher Prouty, the retired US Air Force colonel who was the real-life
model for the “Mr. X” character played by actor Donald Sutherland in Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie,
JFK
, notes Nixon told three different stories designed to cover up the truth that he was in Dallas at the very moment JFK was killed.
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In a
Reader’s Digest
article that appeared in the November 1964 issue, Nixon claimed he boarded an airplane in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, and that the airplane arrived on time, at 12:56 p.m. local time in New York. “I hailed a cab,” Nixon said in the
Reader’s Digest
article. “We were waiting for a light to change when a man ran over from the street corner and said that the President had just been shot in Dallas.” So, in the first version, Nixon claims he was in the air when Kennedy was shot and a man told him the news.

In the November 1973 issue of
Esquire
magazine Nixon said he attended a Pepsi-Cola convention in Dallas, leaving on the morning of November 22, 1963, on a flight from Love Field back to New York. In this second version, Nixon claims he caught a cab and headed for New York City, when the cab missed a turn, throwing the taxi off the freeway. A woman came screaming out of a house, and when Nixon rolled down the window of the taxi, the woman told him JFK had been shot in Dallas.

In the third version that Nixon provided Jim Bishop for his book,
The Day Kennedy Was Shot
, reporters met Nixon’s plane from Dallas and Nixon gave an interview before anyone knew JFK had been shot. “[Nixon] was barely out of the airport when one of the reporters got the message: ‘The President has been shot in Dallas,’” Bishop wrote.
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Prouty later learned the truth was that at the exact time JFK was shot, Nixon was yet in Dallas, attending a Pepsi-Cola Company convention on behalf of his Wall Street law firm, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander, & Mitchell. Nixon was there representing outside counsel to work with Harvey Russel, Pepsi-Cola’s general counsel. Further documenting this was a news story the
Dallas Morning News
ran on November 22, 1963, entitled “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.” The
Dallas Morning News
also printed a picture of Nixon staying in the Baker Hotel at 1400 Commerce in downtown Dallas, six blocks from the spot where JFK was assassinated. The newspaper reported Pepsi-Cola had rented the entire third floor of the hotel for their “convention” that included a suite for Pepsi heiress and movie star actress Joan Crawford, a suite for attorney Richard Nixon, and
various rooms for Pepsi executives and unnamed dignitaries.

Further documenting Nixon in Dallas, on Friday morning, November 22, 1963, the
Dallas Herald Times
published a story noting that the previous evening Nixon was a guest at the Empire Room of the Statler Hilton, along with a group from Pepsi-Cola that included “the chic and glamorous as ever Joan Crawford.” When Nixon entered the room, the Don Ragon Band was playing “April in Portugal,” a song Nixon said was his wife’s favorite. The newspaper further reported that Nixon and Crawford sat ringside in the Empire Room during the dinner show and drew tremendous applause when introduced.
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The Pepsi meeting in Dallas on November 22, 1963 was interrupted by the announcement JFK had been shot. With that deeply disturbing news, the convention session Nixon was attending broke up. Nixon returned to his hotel room and was driven later that afternoon to Love Field by a Pepsi-Cola official named DeLuca.
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Don Fulsom, a longtime White House reporter and former United Press International Washington bureau chief, has credited Nixon’s ties to the JFK assassination as his greater cover-up, one that worked, compared to the cover-up Nixon attempted over Watergate—Nixon’s final cover-up that unraveled as he resigned the presidency on August 4, 1974.
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The morning after the JFK assassination, Nixon called a meeting in his New York apartment of top Republican leaders to assess how JFK’s murder would change the possibilities of Nixon running for president.
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Even when they were both US Senators, Nixon resented JFK for the attention he got from a loving press, attention that Nixon felt reflected the privileges including an Ivy League education that JFK enjoyed because his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was wealthy. In 1960 Nixon was convinced Chicago mayor Richard Daley had stolen enough votes at the order of Kennedy family boss, Joseph P. Kennedy, and with the help of Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana to tip the narrow balance of the presidential election away from Nixon.

By the time of the JFK assassination, the mob’s 1960 honeymoon with JFK was over, and Giancana had abandoned JFK, feeling betrayed by Bobby Kennedy’s war against the Italian and Jewish mobs in the east. Giancana maintained the JFK assassination had taken months to mastermind and dozens of men were involved, planning the assassination hit for several different cities, including Chicago, Tampa/Miami, Los Angeles,
and Dallas. Giancana claimed that ultimately JFK had to be lured to Dallas because Dallas afforded the best opportunity for a successful assassination. “Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson knew about the whole damn thing,” Giancana wrote about the JFK assassination, disclosing both Richard Nixon and LBJ had met with him in Dallas several times prior to the JFK hit to discuss the assassination planning.
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Giancana insisted the JFK assassination was a joint mob-CIA action, done with the approval and complicity of both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. “The politicians and the CIA made it real simple,” Giancana said. “We’d each provide men for the hit.… I’d oversee the Outfit [organized crime] side of things and throw in Jack Ruby and some extra backup and the CIA would put their own guys on to take care of the rest.” Giancana further claimed Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, the brother of former CIA deputy director Charles Cabell, made sure security along the motorcade in Dallas was lax at best. Charles Cabell also had a grudge with JFK because he was one of the CIA officials JFK forced to resign in January 1962 after the Bay of Pigs invasion. Giancana specifically mentioned Roscoe White as one of the shooters, and he insisted both Lee Harvey Oswald and Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit were part of the conspiracy, with Oswald unbeknownst to him having been marked to play the role of the patsy.
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According to Giancana the actual hit came down on November 22, 1963, from a CIA command center operated out of a hotel. They coordinated with field operatives via state-of-the-art walkie-talkie telecommunications equipment at that time available only to government spooks. Inconspicuously positioned along the motorcade route, spotters with unseen field communications gear reported the progress of the JFK limo to alert sniper teams positioned for action. The best shooters were reserved for final shots planned to occur as the limo approached the sweet spot of the kill zone, along Elm Street before the final curve of the street into the triple underpass.

“And the rest is history,” Giancana bragged. “For once, we didn’t even have to worry about J. Edgar Hoover.… He hated the Kennedys as much as anybody, and he wasn’t about to help Bobby find his brother’s killers. He buried his head in the sand, covered up anything and everything his ‘Boy Scouts’ found.”

“I remember [JFK] saying that the CIA frequently did things he didn’t know about, and he was unhappy about it. He complained that the CIA was almost autonomous. He told me he believed the CIA had arranged to have Diem (South Vietnam) and Trujillo (Dominican Republic) bumped off. He was pretty well shocked about that. He thought it was a stupid thing to do, and he wanted to get control of what the CIA was doing.’”

—Senator George Smathers, quoted in
The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond,
1976
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In the final months, [JFK] spoke with friends about his own death with a freedom and frequency that shocked them. Some found it abnormal. Senator George Smathers said, “I don’t know why it is, but death became kind of an obsession with Jack.”

—Senator George Smathers, quoted in James W. Douglass,
JFK and the Unspeakable
, 2008
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J
FK WAS DEEPLY MOVED
by the poem “Rendezvous,” a poem about death. Written by Alan Seeger, who graduated from Harvard in 1910 and volunteered for the French Foreign Legion before the United States entered World War I, the poem first seems to prefigure his own death. Seeger was killed on July 4, 1916, at Belloy-en-Senterre, attacking a French position. The poem ends:

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Writing about Seeger’s poem and the profound meaning it had for JFK, James W. Douglass commented, “John Kennedy had been listening to the music of death for years.”
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Kennedy lived much of his life in pain. He suffered from Addison’s disease and had a degenerative back ailment that plagued him for life. Presidential historian Robert Dallek, after gaining access to a collection of JFK papers for the years 1955–1963 that contained various medical records, including X-rays and prescription records, revealed Kennedy “was taking an extraordinary variety of medications: steroids for his Addison’s disease; painkillers for his back; anti-spasmodic for his colitis; antibiotics for urinary-tract infections; antihistamines for allergies; and, on at least one occasion, an anti-psychotic (though only for two days) for a severe mood change that Jackie Kennedy believed had been brought on by anti-histamines.” Kennedy’s charismatic appeal rested heavily on the image of youthful energy and good health he projected. Dallek concluded it was a myth. The real story was more heroic—the story of “iron-willed fortitude in mastering the difficulties of chronic illness.”
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JFK became dependent on Max Jacobson, better known as “Dr. Feelgood”—a doctor who had emigrated from Germany to New York and who gave JFK injections of amphetamines and pain killers that made him less dependent on crutches. Among those he trusted, Jack (JFK) could be seen occasionally during the middle of a meeting calmly taking a syringe and injecting himself into his thigh, passing the needle straight through his pants—an act he performed without comment, not breaking a sentence as he kept stride with the conversation. Dallek commented that JFK’s medical ailments in a strange way contributed to his demise. He wore a corset-like back brace every day, and after an initial shot hit him in the back, the corset held him upright, positioning him perfectly for the final fatal headshots.

Jack’s preoccupation with death may have been due to the fact that he knew he would almost certainly become a cripple in old age, confined to a wheelchair. When JFK was told that an assassination plot was underway,
that he would be shot by a high-powered rifle from a tall building, Jack took the information stoically. Rather than take extraordinary precautions to protect his safety, he commented matter-of-factly that sometimes a person has no choice but to do what they must do. Still, as his rendezvous with death approached and the calendar entered November 1963, news from South Vietnam did not permit Jack Kennedy to view the potential of an assassination attempt in a fateful or stoic manner. Suddenly, the prospect he might be assassinated, and soon, became all too real a prospect for JFK to dismiss. The emotional impact of the realization of his impending death finally hit JFK uncharacteristically hard.

On Saturday, November 2, 1963, less than three weeks away from his own assassination, President John F. Kennedy was deeply disturbed to learn that South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his younger brother Ngo Dinh Nhu had been arrested and killed by the South Vietnamese army. They were victims of a CIA-engineered coup led by South Vietnamese Maj. Gen. Duong Van Minh. The moment JFK heard Diem had been killed, he knew the CIA had most likely signed his own death warrant.