| Fri Nov. 22, 2013 3:00 AM PST
Oswald was the lone shooter, but there was a plot involved in the president's death—and it was in plain sight.
Like many late-year boomers, I grew up fascinated by the speculation, poring over the latest "revelations" and initially believing the worst—at one point, when I was 13, my best friend and I called Parkland Hospital in Dallas and asked to be connected to the wing where the supposedly still-alive Kennedy was being housed—but I came to conclude that much of the conspiracy-mongering was bunk. In Slate, Fred Kaplan does an excellent job chronicling his own similar trajectory, so I won't detail my conversion. But as I spent more time investigating and reporting national security matters, I came to the realization that government officials, spies, and operatives tend not to be sufficiently competent to pull off the murder of a president (with a well-placed patsy as the fall guy!) and then mount a subsequent and wildly effective cover-up. Still, I've resisted getting drawn too far into the Kennedy conspiracy debates—a true black hole. But if you're asking, I do believe that Kennedy was likely killed as the result of underhanded alliances and government misdeeds. It's just that what transpired was more nuanced than a CIA-Mafia-Castro-Soviet-Lyndon-Johnson plot.
I assume that Oswald shot the president. That loses me many JFK truthers. But the story of
what brought this one man to the sixth floor of the Texas Book
Depository is what's important and probably indeed the tale of an actual
conspiracy—one that was in plain sight at the time.
Oswald was obsessed with Cuba and a public advocate for Fidel Castro's regime. In the summer of 1963, he opened a New Orleans outpost of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro organization. He tried to infiltrate a local anti-Castro group, and on August 9, 1963, he was arrested on Canal Street, after scuffling with three anti-Castro Cuban exiles. (More than a week later, he debated one of the Cuban exiles on the radio.) He printed up leaflets proclaiming "Hands Off Cuba"—a reference to Kennedy administration's campaign against the Castro regime.
What wasn't as clear was how Kennedy and his brother Bobby were prosecuting a secret war against Castro. In early 1962, the Kennedy White House approved Operation Mongoose, a plan cooked up by Brigadier Gen. Edward Lansdale that included economic warfare, psychological operations, and paramilitary action aimed at toppling Castro. The CIA station in Miami took the lead. (Years ago, I wrote a biography of Ted Shackley, who was the station chief at the time.) All sorts of wild plans were devised by Cuban exiles and their handlers for blowing up things inside Cuba and fomenting rebellion on the island. And, of course, there was the occasional plot to kill Castro.
But not much was immediately achieved on the boom-and-bang front. Toward the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bobby Kennedy ordered Lansdale to cease all planning for sabotage and paramilitary operations. He didn't want any "crackpot" individuals taking actions that could cause bigger problems. In early 1963, Operation Mongoose was terminated. Though Kennedy, as part of the resolution of the missile crisis, had pledged the United States would not invade Cuba, the CIA was ordered to keep devising paramilitary operations against Castro, and it continued working with its favorite exile groups. (One CIA official asked if an exploding seashell could be deposited in a spot where Castro went skin-diving.) On June 19, 1963, President Kennedy approved a program of major sabotage with the goal of encouraging resistance to Castro within Cuba. The CIA drafted a list of targets: power plants, oil refineries, railroad tracks, highways, and factories. The Miami station revved up its operations—with results. CIA-backed commando groups composed of exiles attacked an oil facility in Casildo Harbor and then assaulted a large sawmill on the coast of Oriente province.
This sabotage campaign was not acknowledged by the White House or widely known by the American public. But the Cuban leader routinely accused the aggressive imperialists of the north of mounting assaults on his island nation. His charges were occasionally reported in the US media, but generally dismissed as commie propaganda. Yet his accusations were often dead-on accurate. In one long tirade, Castro claimed that the CIA was using a 150-foot-long ship called the Rex in attacks against Cuba and that it was berthed in Palm Beach. He was correct. But this charge never became big news. (The CIA responded by drawing up plans to sell the vessel to another cut-out corporation and rename it.) The US media did not report that Cuba was indeed under assault by CIA-backed raiders.
But anyone paying close attention—and listening to Castro—knew what was going on. If not aware of all the details, he or she would have the sense that a secret war was being waged by Kennedy against Castro. Oswald presumably was such a person. There was a real reason for him to proclaim, "Hands Off Cuba"—and, thus, reason for him to feel enmity toward the president of the United States. (On November 22, near the moment Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting a Cuban agent in Paris and presenting him with a ballpoint pen rigged to contain poison for an attempted assassination of Castro.)
There are those who postulate that Oswald's pro-Castro street activism was designed as a cover to hide his true motivation. Perhaps anti-Castro Cubans pissed off with Kennedy plotted a presidential assassination that they could pin on a pro-Castro operative to rally support for more direct US action against Castro. (At the time, however, Kennedy and his aides were approving sabotage action against Cuba.) Yet given Oswald's assorted (and mind-bending) actual and possible interactions—with KGB officials, with pro- and anti-Castro Cubans, with FBI officials, with a businessman who was interviewed by the CIA, with folks connected to the New Orleans mob—it's possible to imagine almost any conspiracy and find a possible Oswald link to back it up. After all, he was a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union and un-defected and returned to the United States—and then two months before the assassination tried to return to Russia via Cuba. In early 1963, he attempted to assassinate a retired right-wing general who was famous for his screeds against communism.
Oswald was something of a Zelig. His past offers plenty of data points for anyone peddling an unofficial account of the Kennedy assassination. But in the swirl of supposition, there are hard and fast facts. The Kennedy conspiracy to undo Castro—via internal rebellion, paramilitary action, or assassination—did exist. It wasn't a secret to Castro and his devotees. And in the last months of his life, Oswald at times was fixated on the Cuban issue. His public actions were those of a passionate and committed fan of Castro and the revolution. (The CIA, not surprisingly, would not reveal Kennedy's get-Castro campaign to the Warren Commission, which was set up to investigate the assassination; consequently, the American public would not be able to fully evaluate Oswald's actions.)
Five decades later, it's doubtful that the mysteries of the Kennedy assassination—including Oswald's motivation or motivations—will be fully resolved. The assassin was an odd and unstable fellow who never found a comfortable place in the Cold War world. He might not have fully understood all that drove him to shoot a president and shock a nation. So how can we? But if we're compelled to make sense of this history-changing and heinous act, then an obvious starting place is the not-too-secret secret war on Cuba. It may well be that John Kennedy, the charismatic leader who embodied a new era and a changing time, did die as the result of a conspiracy—a conspiracy that involved the most powerful men in the world and that originated in his own office in the White House. And if this is the closest we can get to the truth so many years down the road, it still offers an important—and painful—lesson that deserves attention: Once the dogs of war (or secret war) are unleashed, there's no telling where they will run.
Oswald was obsessed with Cuba and a public advocate for Fidel Castro's regime. In the summer of 1963, he opened a New Orleans outpost of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro organization. He tried to infiltrate a local anti-Castro group, and on August 9, 1963, he was arrested on Canal Street, after scuffling with three anti-Castro Cuban exiles. (More than a week later, he debated one of the Cuban exiles on the radio.) He printed up leaflets proclaiming "Hands Off Cuba"—a reference to Kennedy administration's campaign against the Castro regime.
All sorts of wild plans were devised by
Cuban exiles and their handlers for fomenting rebellion on the island.
And, of course, there was the occasional plot to kill Castro.
Kennedy's antipathy toward Castro was no secret. In the first months
of his presidency, the CIA-backed assault at the Bay of Pigs was an
embarrassing failure for Kennedy and the agency. The Cuban Missile
Crisis of October 1962 justifiably caused a public freak-out across the
United States. It was clear that Kennedy had a Cuban problem.What wasn't as clear was how Kennedy and his brother Bobby were prosecuting a secret war against Castro. In early 1962, the Kennedy White House approved Operation Mongoose, a plan cooked up by Brigadier Gen. Edward Lansdale that included economic warfare, psychological operations, and paramilitary action aimed at toppling Castro. The CIA station in Miami took the lead. (Years ago, I wrote a biography of Ted Shackley, who was the station chief at the time.) All sorts of wild plans were devised by Cuban exiles and their handlers for blowing up things inside Cuba and fomenting rebellion on the island. And, of course, there was the occasional plot to kill Castro.
But not much was immediately achieved on the boom-and-bang front. Toward the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bobby Kennedy ordered Lansdale to cease all planning for sabotage and paramilitary operations. He didn't want any "crackpot" individuals taking actions that could cause bigger problems. In early 1963, Operation Mongoose was terminated. Though Kennedy, as part of the resolution of the missile crisis, had pledged the United States would not invade Cuba, the CIA was ordered to keep devising paramilitary operations against Castro, and it continued working with its favorite exile groups. (One CIA official asked if an exploding seashell could be deposited in a spot where Castro went skin-diving.) On June 19, 1963, President Kennedy approved a program of major sabotage with the goal of encouraging resistance to Castro within Cuba. The CIA drafted a list of targets: power plants, oil refineries, railroad tracks, highways, and factories. The Miami station revved up its operations—with results. CIA-backed commando groups composed of exiles attacked an oil facility in Casildo Harbor and then assaulted a large sawmill on the coast of Oriente province.
This sabotage campaign was not acknowledged by the White House or widely known by the American public. But the Cuban leader routinely accused the aggressive imperialists of the north of mounting assaults on his island nation. His charges were occasionally reported in the US media, but generally dismissed as commie propaganda. Yet his accusations were often dead-on accurate. In one long tirade, Castro claimed that the CIA was using a 150-foot-long ship called the Rex in attacks against Cuba and that it was berthed in Palm Beach. He was correct. But this charge never became big news. (The CIA responded by drawing up plans to sell the vessel to another cut-out corporation and rename it.) The US media did not report that Cuba was indeed under assault by CIA-backed raiders.
But anyone paying close attention—and listening to Castro—knew what was going on. If not aware of all the details, he or she would have the sense that a secret war was being waged by Kennedy against Castro. Oswald presumably was such a person. There was a real reason for him to proclaim, "Hands Off Cuba"—and, thus, reason for him to feel enmity toward the president of the United States. (On November 22, near the moment Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting a Cuban agent in Paris and presenting him with a ballpoint pen rigged to contain poison for an attempted assassination of Castro.)
There are those who postulate that Oswald's pro-Castro street activism was designed as a cover to hide his true motivation. Perhaps anti-Castro Cubans pissed off with Kennedy plotted a presidential assassination that they could pin on a pro-Castro operative to rally support for more direct US action against Castro. (At the time, however, Kennedy and his aides were approving sabotage action against Cuba.) Yet given Oswald's assorted (and mind-bending) actual and possible interactions—with KGB officials, with pro- and anti-Castro Cubans, with FBI officials, with a businessman who was interviewed by the CIA, with folks connected to the New Orleans mob—it's possible to imagine almost any conspiracy and find a possible Oswald link to back it up. After all, he was a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union and un-defected and returned to the United States—and then two months before the assassination tried to return to Russia via Cuba. In early 1963, he attempted to assassinate a retired right-wing general who was famous for his screeds against communism.
Oswald was something of a Zelig. His past offers plenty of data points for anyone peddling an unofficial account of the Kennedy assassination. But in the swirl of supposition, there are hard and fast facts. The Kennedy conspiracy to undo Castro—via internal rebellion, paramilitary action, or assassination—did exist. It wasn't a secret to Castro and his devotees. And in the last months of his life, Oswald at times was fixated on the Cuban issue. His public actions were those of a passionate and committed fan of Castro and the revolution. (The CIA, not surprisingly, would not reveal Kennedy's get-Castro campaign to the Warren Commission, which was set up to investigate the assassination; consequently, the American public would not be able to fully evaluate Oswald's actions.)
Five decades later, it's doubtful that the mysteries of the Kennedy assassination—including Oswald's motivation or motivations—will be fully resolved. The assassin was an odd and unstable fellow who never found a comfortable place in the Cold War world. He might not have fully understood all that drove him to shoot a president and shock a nation. So how can we? But if we're compelled to make sense of this history-changing and heinous act, then an obvious starting place is the not-too-secret secret war on Cuba. It may well be that John Kennedy, the charismatic leader who embodied a new era and a changing time, did die as the result of a conspiracy—a conspiracy that involved the most powerful men in the world and that originated in his own office in the White House. And if this is the closest we can get to the truth so many years down the road, it still offers an important—and painful—lesson that deserves attention: Once the dogs of war (or secret war) are unleashed, there's no telling where they will run.
If You Liked This, You Might Also Like...
New York Times May Have Been First Doubters of JFK Plot
I blogged yesterday about Time magazine's commendable skepticism about the alleged terror plot targeting JFK airport in New York City....Who Shot JFK?
35 Years And CountingU.S. Intelligence Spending Now Higher Than During the Cold War
CIA spending in particular has exploded since 9/11.Cuba's Mysterious Ultra-Deep-Water Oil Rig Surfaces
The first deep-water rig off Cuba appears to be drilling on the edge of the Florida Straits—a swift-water connector between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/kennedy-assassination-conspiracy-oswald-cuba
The Kennedy Assassination and Pursuing 'What It Stopped'
Posted: 11/22/2013 7:39 pmIt's impossible to know for sure whether the Warren Commission Report was correct, or whether the House Select Committee on Assassinations was correct. We'll never know precisely what happened 50 years ago today in Dallas, conspiracy or not, as President Kennedy's motorcade traveled down Elm Street toward the triple underpass.
That said, there's nothing wrong with speculating -- with having a hunch about how and why it happened; whether the plot might've been one lone nut or many conspirators working in tandem. But anyone who says they know for sure should be greeted with incredulity.
In his book, titled Kennedy, Ted Sorensen, speechwriter and special counsel to President Kennedy, wrote, "I must ask to be excused from repeating the details of that tragedy. How and why it happened are of little consequence compared to what it stopped."
Too often in these past 50 years, our all-too-human impulse is to pursue the murder mystery. The "how and why" almost always takes precedent over "what it stopped."
Nevertheless, like so many others, I spent time looking into the details of the assassination. Eventually, I thought I had attained a modest sense of what happened. I thought maybe that it was the Mafia seeking to regain a financial stake in Cuba, and so, fueled by a sense of pre-RICO invincibility, it targeted President Kennedy who stood in the way of liberating the island from Fidel Castro and returning it back to the unfettered cash geyser it had been under the Batista regime. Oswald, who had almost certainly been recruited into the anti-Castro movement, had been sent to the Soviet Union as a defector purely for show to make it appear as if he was a communist in order to later infiltrate Cuba and become part of the arsenal of assassination possibilities against Castro. Instead, the plot against Castro was redeployed to target the chief executive of the United States.
Whatever.
In the process of reading too many volumes about the assassination, I stumbled onto some of the more crackpot theories, several of which you've probably heard about.
There was the book by Dan Robertson, Definitive Proof: The Secret Service Murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, claiming that Secret Service Agent William Greer accidentally shot the president. Definitive proof? Hooey.
There was The Last Investigation, by the late Gaeton Fonzi, in which the author, a former staffer on the House Select Committee, ghoulishly determined that the slain president's head was being held together with a mysterious metal clamp for some reason after the president's body had been secretly absconded from Air Force One and replaced with a lookalike. Also hooey.
There was the dum-dum bullet theory, claiming the president was shot in the head with a rubber bullet, there was the doctored Zapruder film theory, there was the Kennedy-is-still-alive theory and, of course, the space aliens killed the president theory.
And there was the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink conspiracy theory dramatized by Oliver Stone in JFK. While, as a movie, it remains one of my all-time favorites, the metatheory presented in the movie was as ridiculously vast as it was totally implausible, involving a cast of hundreds of conspirators, and, in many places, outright falsehoods about Jim Garrison's investigation and prosecution of Clay Shaw.
But what compelled me to learn more about what might've happened in Dallas was no different than so many others. How could a lone, mixed up weirdo with a bizarre past do this to the President of the United States -- and to us? There were so many unexplained loose ends and unanswered questions. Something wasn't adding up. It was like a real-life murder mystery with the highest imaginable stakes. It was irresistible.
However, what ultimately changed my perception of both the Kennedy presidency and his assassination was chance meeting with Ted Sorensen. While he refused to take public credit for his speechwriting, Mr. Sorensen was responsible for President Kennedy's most memorable speeches, including the inspirational American University commencement address, a personal favorite of mine. He co-wrote the president's immortal 1961 inaugural, which included the "Ask not what your country can do for you..." line. He also wrote the president's televised remarks informing the nation about the quarantine of Cuba in response to the installation of Soviet missiles there. As the story goes, he was simply unable to author a back-up speech calling for air-strikes.
As a writer myself, I naturally jumped at the chance to visit with him and his wife at his Manhattan apartment.
Ted Sorensen in the Oval Office with President Kennedy.
We talked business for most of the meeting. But then, as the serious conversation began to wind down for the afternoon, the topic of Washington, DC came up and I mentioned that my Dad was once the acting inspector general of the Treasury Department; his office looked out over the east lawn of the White House. Matter-of-factly, I noted that after I was born, I lived with my parents at the River House, an apartment complex across the highway from the Pentagon.
Mr. Sorensen's face lit up and he smiled, "That's where I lived when I worked for the president."
My mind raced, "The president... Kennedy. He's talking about John F. Kennedy. Of course he is. He worked for President Kennedy." For some reason, until that moment, it hadn't really sunk in.
Not only was the meeting with Mr. Sorensen a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for which I will always be grateful, but there I was, sitting in the living room of perhaps the closest adviser to President Kennedy, second only to Bobby. If that wasn't enough, this brief stanza in our conversation added a previously absent dimension of tangibility, of human reality to the Kennedy era and the assassination. I shared something in common, in a non-professional sense, with a man who was one of Kennedy's most prominent voices -- a man who, more than nearly anyone else, possessed a deep understanding of the president's mind, motivations and goals -- a man who was one of the chief architects of the Kennedy vision that had inspired so many Americans.
And he was in the White House on that terrible day. He had endured the sudden death of his president and the agenda they, together, had crafted.
Since that day in New York City, I really haven't cared about who killed President Kennedy. Instead, I tend to think about what the Kennedy administration might've achieved had it been able to fully pursue its agenda.
Because I wasn't born until eight years after the assassination, I never really had the personal connection and insight of older Americans who lived through it. Now, having spent time with Mr. Sorensen, I almost exclusively contemplate what he and others in the president's inner circle must've felt on this day and the days that followed 50 years ago and how utterly soul-crushing it must have been, not only because of the death of this man they knew, but for the death of what they could have achieved under his leadership.
If nothing else, the very continuity and steadiness of the presidency was lost. In its wake, 11 years of comparative darkness ensued. From 1963 through 1974, America was dragged through a war, corruption and more senseless assassinations, culminating in a crisis within the White House itself. As a nation we still haven't quite overcome the cynicism that bled out of that dark ride.
It's cold comfort to think that had Kennedy lived, we might've sidestepped much of the darkness and death, as well as the subsequent cynicism, since after all the promise of the too-brief Kennedy presidency represented the opposite of what ended up happening: inspirational leadership with the idealism of "peace for all time" as its primary aim. We lost the opportunity to see it through to its logical conclusion. November 22, 1963 disrupted and indeed cut down the natural order of things.
But perhaps now, 50 years later, we can begin to set aside the often morbid obsession with the "how and why" of the assassination and instead share a renewed pursuit of "what it stopped."
Cross-posted at The Daily Banter.
Click here to listen to the Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show podcast.
BobCesca.com Blog with special thanks to Colleen Kirby.
Follow Bob Cesca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bobcesca_go
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/the-kennedy-assassination_b_4326709.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications
