The Posthumous Assassination of JFK Part II

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The Posthumous Assassination of JFK Part II

The three threads are these: 1) That the Kennedys ordered Castro’s assassination, despite the verdict of the Church Committee on the CIA’s assassination plots. As I noted last issue, the committee report could find no evidence indicating that JFK and RFK authorized the plots on Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, or Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. 2) That the Kennedys were really “bad boys,” in some ways as bad as Chicago mobsters or the “gentleman killers” of the CIA. Although neither JFK nor RFK was lionized by the main centers of the media while they were alive, because of their early murders, many books and articles were written afterward that presented them in a sympathetic light, usually as liberal icons. This was tolerated by the media establishment as sentimental sop until the revelations of both Watergate and the Church Committee. This “good guy” image then needed to be altered since both those crises seemed to reveal that the Kennedys were actually different than what came before them (Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers) and what came after (Nixon). Thus began a series of anti-Kennedy biographies. 3) That Marilyn Monroe’s death was somehow ordained by her “involvement” with the Kennedy “bad boys.” Again, this was at first a rather peculiar cottage industry. But around the time of Watergate and the Church Committee it was given a lift, and going back to a 1964 paradigm, it combined elements of the first two movements into a Gothic (some would say grotesque) right-wing propaganda tract which is both humorous and depressing in its slanderous implications, and almost frightening in its political and cultural overtones. Egged on by advocates of Judith Exner (e.g. Liz Smith and Tony Summers), this political and cultural time bomb landed in Sy Hersh’s and ABC’s lap. When it blew up, all parties went into a damage control mode, pointing their fingers at each other. As we examine the sorry history of all three industries, we shall see that there is plenty of blame (and shame) to be shared. And not just in 1997.

As we saw in Part One of this article, as the Church Committee was preparing to make its report, the Exner and then Mary Meyer stories made headlines in the Washington Post. These elements—intrigue from the CIA assassination plots, plus the sex angles, combined with the previous hazing of Richard Nixon over Watergate—spawned a wave of new anti-Kennedy “expose” biographies. Anti-Kennedy tracts were not new. But these new works differed from the earlier ones in that they owed their genesis and their styles to the events of the mid-seventies that had brought major parts of the establishment (specifically, the CIA and the GOP) so much grief. In fact we will deal with some of the earlier ones later. For now, let us examine this new pedigree and show how it fits into the movement outlined above.

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------------------ CHURCH COMMITTEE RECORDS HAVE NEVER BEEN RELEASED ---


The Church Committee

What precipitated these posthumous and personal attacks on the Kennedys? Something happened in the seventies that necessitated the “second assassination” from the right — i.e. the use of scandal to stamp out Kennedy’s reputation and legacy. That something was the Church Committee. Belated revelations about the CIA’s role in Watergate, and later of the CIA’s illegal domestic operations created a critical firestorm demanding a full-scale investigation of the CIA. The fallout from Watergate had produced large Democratic majorities in both houses of congress via the 1974 elections. This majority, combined with some of the moderate Republicans, managed to form special congressional committees. The committee in the Senate was headed by Idaho’s Frank Church. Other leading lights on that committee were Minnesota’s Walter Mondale, Colorado’s Gary Hart, Tennessee’s Howard Baker, and Pennsylvania’s Richard Schweiker.

As writers Kate Olmsted and Loch Johnson have shown, the Church Committee was obstructed by two of the CIA’s most potent allies: the major media and friendly public figures. In the latter category, Olmsted especially highlights the deadly role of Henry Kissinger. But as Victor Marchetti revealed to me, there was also something else at work behind the scenes. In an interview in his son’s office in 1993, Marchetti told me that he never really thought the Agency was in danger at that time. He stated that first, the CIA had infiltrated the staff of Church’s committee and, second, the Agency was intent on giving up documents only in certain areas. In Watergate terminology, it was a “limited-hangout” solution to the problem of controlling the damage.

The Escape Route

The issue that had ignited so much public interest in the hearings had been that of assassination. CIA Director Bill Colby very clearly drew the line that the CIA had never plotted such things domestically. Colby’s admission was a brilliant tactical stroke that was not appreciated until much later. First, it put the focus on the plots against foreign leaders that could be explained as excesses of anti-communist zealotry (which is precisely what the drafters of Church’s report did). Second, all probes into the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK would be off-limits. The Church Committee would now concentrate on the performance of the intelligence community in investigating the death of JFK; not complicity in the assassination itself. This distinction was crucial. As Colby must have understood, the Agency and its allies could ride out exposure of plots against Marxists and villains like Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. The exposure of domestic plots against political leaders would have been lethal.

Colby’s gambit, plus the strictures put on the investigation as outlined by Marchetti above, enabled the intelligence community to ride out the storm. The path chosen for limited exposure was quite clever. The most documentation given up by the CIA was on the Castro assassination plots. Further, the Agency decided to give up many documents on both the employment of the Mafia to kill Fidel, and the AM/LASH plots, that is, the enlistment of a Cuban national close to Castro to try and kill him. Again, not enough credit has been given to the wisdom of these choices. In intelligence parlance, there is a familiar phrase: muddying the waters. This means that by confusing and confounding the listener with diverse and prolific amounts of information, the main point becomes obfuscated. Since none of the Mafia plots succeeded, one could claim they were ineffectual. The huge amount of publicity garnered by them could eventually be deflected onto the Mob’s role in them and not the Agency’s. The AM/LASH plots, exposed in even more copious documentation, could be used in a similar way. If Castro knew about these plots within his midst, couldn’t he then claim turnabout and use the same tactics by employing a Communist in the U.S. to kill Kennedy? This, or a combination of the two, has been what suspect writers like Jean Davison and Jack Anderson have been foisting on the public for years.

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