Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (53 page)

By 1963, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was tightly controlled by
one man-the strange and officious bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover. Even the
Secret Service had become but a small and relatively powerless agency
compared to the Bureau, although the Service was much older than the
FBI. No one but Hoover has ever held so much power for so long in the
history of the United States.

With the death of Kennedy, the power of the presidency fell to Hoover's
long-time friend, Lyndon B. Johnson. Between Hoover, the tyrant of the
FBI, and Johnson, who as commander-in-chief controlled the military,
these men had the power to manipulate any investigation into the
assassination.

The many and varied contacts between the FBI and the accused assassin
cause great suspicion among assassination researchers. These suspicions
are heightened in light of the numerous and well-documented instances of
FBI mismanagement of the postassassination investigations. It can now be
demonstrated that the Bureau suppressed evidence, destroyed evidence,
fabricated evidence, and intimidated witnesses. Any of these acts committed by a private citizen in the course of a criminal investigation would
result in severe penalties.

Both the FBI and the Secret Service were chided for inadequately
protecting Kennedy by both the Warren Commission and the House Select
Committee on Assassinations.

Due to the many connections between the Bureau and Lee Harvey
Oswald, coupled with a wealth of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence, it
appears almost certain to most researchers that Oswald was working as an
informant for the FBI in the months preceeding the assassination-an
allegation that even the Warren Commission took seriously. However,
since the FBI furnished most of the investigative evidence to the Commission, the question of Oswald's involvement with the Bureau could not be
resolved. Considering the Bureau's ability to substitute records, alter
documents, lose important evidence, and intimidate witnesses, it would be
most surprising if any concrete evidence of Oswald's connection to the
FBI should surface at this late date.

Both the FBI and the Secret Service failed to respond to several
warnings concerning the assassination and the subsequent slaying of
Oswald.

While evidence suggesting that elements within both the Bureau and the
Secret Service may have played some role in the actual assassination can
be disputed, there is no question that serious and suspicious manipulation
of evidence occurred after the event. This fact, coupled with the unresolved connections between Oswald and the Bureau and the well-known
hatred of the Kennedys by both Hoover and Johnson, causes most researchers today to regard certain agents within both the FBI and the Secret
Service as prime suspects in the plot to kill Kennedy.

[Who is] the one man who has profited most from the assassination-your
friendly President, Lyndon Johnson.

-Jim Garrison

By the fall of 1963, President John F. Kennedy had acquired more
domestic enemies than just irate anti-Castro Cubans, fearful mob bosses,
and disgruntled intelligence operatives.

Both big business and supporters of states' rights felt threatened by the
new Kennedy brand of federalism-the wielding of total power from
Washington.

Hatred of Kennedy also was being fomented among those people opposed to the growing civil-rights movement, particularly in the old confederate states, which included Texas.

Into this caldron of century-old passions stepped Kennedy the politician, hoping to find a middle ground between the radical activists-both
black and white.

Kennedy friend Theodore Sorensen wrote: "Jack Kennedy . . . knew
comparatively little and cared little about the problems of civil rights and
civil liberties. "

However, during the presidential campaign of 1960, Kennedy found it
expedient to chastise the Eisenhower administration for not doing more to
end segregation, despite the fact that two civil-rights bills were passed
during that time, the first such major legislation since the Emancipation
Proclamation.

In his 1961 inaugural address, Kennedy spurred on the expectations of
millions of black Americans when he said:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe
alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans
.. . one unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those
human rights to which this nation has always been committed and to
which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Such rhetoric was effective for Kennedy. During the 1960 election,
blacks responded to the support of Kennedy by Dr. Martin Luther King.
They turned out a hefty 78 percent vote for the Massachusetts senator.

By 1962, polls showed Kennedy ranked only behind King himself in
popularity among black Americans despite the fact that immediate action
by Kennedy on civil rights was limited.

Although Kennedy had promised to end segregation in federal housing,
it was nearly two years after taking office, with violent racial incidents
increasing across the nation, before he took action.

Kennedy dawdled until June 1963, before sending his own civil-rights
bill to Congress and even this did not pass until after his death, when the
measure was adroitly maneuvered through Congress by President Lyndon
Johnson.

Furthermore, in an attempt to appease the anti-civil-rights forces, Kennedy made several appointments that greatly angered his black supporters.
For example, he named William H. Cox to a federal judgeship. Cox, a
close friend to conservative Mississippi senator James Eastland, immediately attempted to block a Justice Department-sponsored voter registration
drive in Mississippi.

In May 1961, one month after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion and at a
time when Kennedy was preparing to journey to Europe for an historic
meeting with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, King and twelve other "Freedom Riders" left Washington, D.C., for New Orleans to test the desegregation of public facilities along the way.

According to Kennedy biographer John H. Davis, the President asked
the activists not to go ahead with the ride for fear it might cause him
embarrassment during his European trip. To which the black leaders
replied: "But we have been embarrassed all our lives."

By the end of May, the riders had grown to fill two buses, which left
behind a trail of violence: In Aniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed,
while in Birmingham the other was met by a gang of whites who beat the
occupants with pipes for more than ten minutes before police arrived.
After entering Montgomery, the riders were attacked by a mob of a
thousand while a local police official looked on stating: "We have no
intention of standing guard for a bunch of troublemakers coming into our
city."

In both Birmingham and Montgomery, FBI agents were on hand jotting
down notes while the passengers were beaten and clubbed. Even when one
of Attorney General Kennedy's top aides, John Seigenthaler, was knocked
unconscious by the angry Montgomery mob, the agents were not moved to
action.

Angered and moved by the bloodshed, Robert Kennedy-with the reluctant approval of the President-ordered out several hundred federal marshals to protect the riders as interstate travelers.

On May 21, the National Guard was ordered into Montgomery after a
black church meeting was beseiged by an angry white mob.

By May 23, the Freedom Ride was resumed with the addition of
marshals, but ended in Jackson, Mississippi, where all of the riders were
arrested and jailed for entering a "white" restroom and failing to obey
local police officers. This historic "ride" was soon followed by "Freedom Flights" and "Freedom Trains" and the civil-rights movement continued
to gain momentum.

By September 1961, acting on a request by President Kennedy, the
Interstate Commerce Commission adopted rules banning segregation on
buses and in terminals.

While the Kennedys certainly did not invent the problem and, in fact,
joined the push for civil rights belatedly and reluctantly, they nevertheless
were the first major American leaders to fully address the problem and
appeal for wisdom and restraint from both blacks and whites.

And despite its faint beginnings, some of the most dramatic accomplishments of the Kennedy administration were in the area of civil rights.
Blacks for the first time were appointed to major government jobs as well
as judgeships; civil-rights laws aimed at ending voter discrimination and
public segregation were vigorously enforced by the Kennedy Justice Department despite a recalcitrant J. Edgar Hoover, and an executive order
was issued creating a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity headed
by Vice President Johnson.

But racial problems continued. One of those persons who may have
been moved to action by John Kennedy's political rhetoric was a black Air
Force veteran named James Meredith. The day after Kennedy's inaugural
address, Meredith applied for enrollment to the segregated University of
Mississippi but was rejected.

In his fourth attempt to enroll, Meredith arrived in Oxford, Mississippi,
on September 30 accompanied by three hundred U.S. marshals. He was
met by a crowd of about twenty-five hundred segregationists and students
who turned Meredith and his supporters away with bricks and bottles. The
marshals responded with tear gas, and a bloody night-long riot ensuedleaving two people dead and more than 375 injured, including 166 federal
officers.

The violence was quelled by the arrival of three thousand Army and
National Guard troops and Meredith was enrolled on October 1 under the
protection of marshals who remained with him until his graduation in
August 1963.

One of those involved in that bloody incident was a former Army
general named Edwin A. Walker who was to later be connected with Lee
Harvey Oswald.

About 9:10 P.M. on April 10, 1963, Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker was
narrowly missed by a rifle bullet that crashed through a first-floor window
and slammed into a wall of his fashionable Dallas home.

Seventeen months later the Warren Commission concluded that Walker's assailant was none other than Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. This conclusion has increasingly been called into question as
more information about this event has become known.

By the fall of 1963, Walker was notorious in Dallas, a city known for
the conservatism of its leadership. A native Texan born in 1909, Major
General Walker was commander of the U.S. Army's 24th Division stationed in West Germany, where he used his position to indoctrinate his
troops with right-wing propaganda, including the assertion that both the
U.S. government and the military had come under "Communist control."
The Korean War hero once declared: "We must throw out the traitors, and
if that's not possible, we must organize armed resistance to defeat the
designs of the usurpers and contribute to the return of a constitutional
government. "

Ordered to stop this practice, Walker instead resigned from the Army in
1961 and returned to the United States where he began making political
speaking tours. He even made an unsuccessful bid for governor of Texas
in 1962, losing to John Connally.

On September 30, 1962, Walker was in Oxford, Mississippi, aligned
with those who were trying to prevent the university enrollment of James
Meredith. After Walker was charged with being a ringleader of the violent
Oxford mob, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered that he be held
temporarily in a mental institution.

By 1963, Walker was back in Dallas and had become a prominent figure
in right-wing political activity there, particularly in the John Birch Society.
In a 1964 interview with this author, Walker outlined his beliefs:

The United Nations charter, which is only eight pages, should have
been placed before [the American public] to study. Very few . . . have
even seen the Fulbright Memorandum or the Walter Reuther Memorandum submitted to Attorney General Kennedy upon his request... .
very few had even seen these papers or the U.N. declaration on racial
discrimination, the U.N. term for integration. This paper declares that
the whole world will integrate. I do not know where such authority
comes from or who it represents. I can realistically predict that no one
living today will see six hundred million Chinese integrated with one
hundred million Japanese, Turks integrated with Greeks, or Mohammedans
with Israelis. . . . A cause for America first and last and always is
essential to our existence. All organizations which are implementing
such a cause are in the best interest of the country and are needed. The
Birch Society is doing a great job in educating people and exposing such
memoranda as I have referred to previously.

Walker's connections in the months preceding the assassination are both
convoluted and intriguing.

A driver and aide to Walker in the fall of 1963 was the brother of Larrie
Schmidt, who along with Bernard Weissman, authored the infamous "Wel come Mr. Kennedy to Dallas ... " ad that ran in the Dallas Morning
News the morning of November 22. The ad, which carried a heavy black
border, asked twelve loaded questions of Kennedy ending with "Why
have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the `Spirit of Moscow'?" Financial contributors to this anti-Kennedy ad included oilman
H. L. Hunt's son, Nelson Bunker Hunt; Joseph Grinnan, volunteer coordinator for the local John Birch Society; and H. R. "Bum" Bright, former
owner of the Dallas Cowboys. The ad was signed "The American FactFinding Committee," but Weissman admitted to the Warren Commission
that the group was "formed strictly for the purpose of having a name to
put in the paper."

It is noteworthy that Nelson Hunt's interests apparently ran to violent
extremes. A former Hunt family security man, ex-FBI agent Paul Rothermeil,
has claimed he was approached by Nelson Bunker Hunt while working for
H. L. Hunt. Rothermeil said the younger Hunt wanted help in forming a
paramilitary organization that would eliminate opponents with a "gas
gun" imported from Europe. (Victims of this exotic weapon reportedly
appear to have suffered a heart attack.) Rothermeil said Hunt planned to
recruit this private army from General Walker's Dallas Birch Society
group. Hunt has denied Rothermeil's allegation, claiming, "I think you'll
find he's CIA."