Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (55 page)

After studying the government's evidence carefully, author Sylvia Meagher
concluded: "Despite the [Warren] Commission's reliance on the testimony
of Marina Oswald, compelling evidence virtually excludes the use of the
Carcano rifle in the attempt on the life of General Walker."

And even if Oswald was responsible for the Walker shooting, there is
evidence that he did not act alone.

Walter Kirk Coleman, who in 1963 was a fourteen-year-old neighbor to
Walker, told police he heard the shot and, peeking over a fence, saw some
men speeding down the alley in a light green or light blue Ford, either a 1959 or 1960 model. Coleman also said he saw another car, a 1958
black Chevrolet with white down the side in a church parking lot adjacent
to Walker's house. The car door was open and a man was bending over the
back seat as though he was placing something on the floor of the car.

At the time of the Warren Commission, Coleman was not called to
testify and, in fact, told Walker he had been ordered not to discuss the
incident by authorities.

Just prior to the Walker shooting, two of the general's aides saw
suspicious activity around the general's home. Walker aide Robert Surrey
said on April 6, he saw two men prowling around the house, peeking in
windows. Surrey said the pair were driving a 1963 dark purple or brown
Ford with no license plates.

And Walker aide Max Claunch told researcher Gary Shaw that a few
nights before the shooting incident he noticed a "Cuban or dark-complected
man in a 1957 Chevrolet" cruise around Walker's home several times.

The problems with the official version of the Walker shooting as well as
the many unfollowed leads in this area are troubling to assassination
researchers.

On January 14, 1963, George Wallace was sworn in as governor of
Alabama, pledging: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever."

By late spring, a voter registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi, had
grown into full-blown civil-rights demonstrations through much of the
South. Thousands of arrests were made. The volatile situation, inflamed
by shooting and bombing incidents, reached a climax in August when Dr.
Martin Luther King led some two hundred fifty thousand people in a
Freedom March on Washington. Here he proclaimed: "There will be
neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his
citizenship rights."

The march took place less than three months after President Kennedy
had finally submitted his own civil-rights bill in Congress. Resistance to
Kennedy's plans was widespread although a June 1963 Gallup poll indicated 59 percent of the population approved of the President and his
programs.

On June 12, 1963, Georgia senator Richard B. Russell promised other
southern senators:

To me, the President's legislative proposals are clearly destructive of the
American system and the constitutional rights of American citizens. I
shall oppose them with every means and resource at my command. . . .

Within six months, Russell was sitting as a member of the Warren
Commission charged with finding the truth of Kennedy's death.

One government employee who watched the famous Washington monu ments become surrounded by demonstrators was FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover. The strange and obsessed Hoover was particularly anxious over
King and his civil-rights movement. The aging director not only saw his
essentially southern way of life threatened but was convinced that King's
organization was being directed by Communists.

William Sullivan, at the time Hoover's man in charge of intelligence
operations for the Bureau, wrote:

Hoover told me that he felt that King was, or could become, a serious
threat to the security of the country. He pointed out that King was an
instrument of the Communist Party, and he wanted it proved that King
had a relationship with the Soviet bloc. Hoover also made it clear that
he wanted evidence developed that would prove that King was embezzling or misusing large sums of money contributed to him and his
organization.

According to Sullivan, FBI agents jumped to please the director. He
wrote: "We gave him what he wanted-under the threat of being out on
the street if we didn't agree."

Hoover's vendetta continued against King until the black leader was
himself cut down by an assassin's bullet in 1968. Behind this vendetta was
Hoover's secret counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO, one of
whose purposes was "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize" King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Also secretly targeted for careful scrutiny under this program was
President Kennedy and Hoover's own boss, Attorney General Kennedy.
According to Sullivan:

Hoover was desperately trying to catch Bobby redhanded at anything
.. . and was always gathering damaging material on Jack Kennedy,
which the President, with his active social life, seemed more than
willing to provide.

One of Hoover's chief fears was being fired by the Kennedys, a fear with
some substance. The Kennedys both hated and feared the powerful Hoover
and made little effort to conceal the fact that he was to be replaced after
Kennedy won the 1964 election. Robert Kennedy even told interviewer
John Bartlow Martin: "[Hoover] is rather a psycho . . . I think [the FBI] is
a very dangerous organization.. .. He's senile and frightening."

Both Kennedy brothers eventually supported King and the civil-rights
program as they came to realize that its adoption as official policy was
inevitable.

As Kennedy biographer John H. Davis pointed out: ". . . the most
potentially dangerous enemy to emerge from Kennedy's civil rights policy
was the FBI and its director."

From the ranks of angered segregationists came one man with a prophetic vision of Kennedy's death.

On November 9, 1963, a Miami police informant named William
Somersett met with Joseph A. Milteer, a wealthy right-wing extremist who
promptly began to outline the assassination of President Kennedy.

Milteer was a leader of the arch-conservative National States Rights
Party as well as a member of other groups such as the Congress of
Freedom and the White Citizen's Council of Atlanta. Somersett had infiltrated the States Rights Party and secretly recorded Milteer's conversation.

The tape, later turned over to Miami police, recorded Milteer as saying,
"(During Kennedy's impending visit to Miami) You can bet your bottom
dollar he is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans, there are so many
of them here. . . . The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him
... From an office building with a high-powered rifle . . . He knows he's
a marked man."

Somersett said, "They are really going to try to kill him?" Milteer
responded, "Oh, yeah, it's in the works . . . (An investigation) wouldn't
leave any stone unturned there, no way. They will pick up somebody
within hours afterward . . . just to throw the public off." Captain Charles
Sapp, head of Miami's Police Intelligence Bureau, was concerned enough
with Milteer's remarks to alert both the FBI and the Secret Service.

Again, apparently no word of this right-wing plot reached Secret Service
agents involved in Kennedy's Dallas trip. Sapp in later years, however,
recalled that plans for a Miami motorcade were scrapped and the President
instead flew to a scheduled speech by helicopter.

On the day of the assassination, Milteer telephoned Somersett, saying he
was in Dallas and that Kennedy was due there shortly. Milteer commented
that Kennedy would never be seen in Miami again.

While the House Select Committee on Assassinations was unable to
confirm Milteer's presence in Dallas during the assassination, it also failed
to prove he was elsewhere. Texas researcher Jack White claims to have
located a photograph of a man bearing a striking resemblance to Milteer
standing in the crowd near the Texas School Book Depository.

Back in Miami after the assassination, Milteer again met with Somersett
and said, "Everything ran true to form. I guess you thought I was kidding
you when I said he would be killed from a window with a high-powered
rifle. . . . I don't do any guessing." Milteer said not to worry about the
capture of Oswald, "because he doesn't know anything." "The rightwing is in the clear," added Milteer. ". . . the patriots have outsmarted the
communist group in order that the communists would carry out the plan
without the right-wing becoming involved."

The FBI questioned Milteer on November 27 and he denied making any
such statements. And while some information of the Milteer incident was
belatedly turned over to the Warren Commission, there is no mention of
Milteer in its Report or 26 volumes. Before the prophetic Milteer could be
questioned further about his apparent foreknowledge of Kennedy's assassination, he died after receiving burns when a heater exploded in a vacation
cabin.

The Milteer episode raises a number of questions, not the least of which
is why his specific knowledge of a threat agianst the president-taperecorded by a police agency-was not passed along to Bureau and Secret
Service personnel in Dallas?

But the racial unrest that rocked the United States in the 1960s was not
President Kennedy's only domestic problem. He was being verbally attacked not only by poor minorities with rising expectations, but also by
wealthy businessmen who felt threatened by his announced social reforms.

Big business was already leery of Kennedy, who as a senator had
opposed the Taft-Hartley law aimed at curbing the power of labor unions
and who as president had failed to consult the business world before
making certain appointments. The fears of big business increased in the
spring of 1962 when Kennedy used the power of the presidency to force
U.S. steel manufacturers to roll back recent price increases.

Kennedy already had served notice on the giant steel companies in
September 1961, when he sent a letter to industry leaders warning them
against any price increases. In his letter, Kennedy rationalized:

The steel industry, in short, can look forward to good profits without an
increase in prices. Since 1947, iron and steel common stocks prices
have risen 397 percent; this is a much better performance than common
stock prices in general.

On April 6, 1962, at the request of the federal government, the Steelworkers Union agreed to limit its wage demands to a ten-cents-an-hour
increase beginning that summer. Then on April 11, U.S. Steel and five other
major steel companies announced a 3.5 percent hike in the cost of steel.

Incensed, Kennedy told the news media:

The American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in
which a tiny handful of steel executives, whose pursuit of private power
and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility, can show such
utter contempt for the interest of 185 million Americans.

Administration officials suggested an FBI investigation and on April 13,
the Defense Department awarded a $5 million contract to a smaller steel
firm that had not raised prices. The next day, the six major firms announced
their price increase had been rescinded.

The denunciation of the steel executives by Kennedy sent shock waves
through the business community. A U.S. News and World Report editor
wrote:

What happened is frightening not only to steel people but to industry
generally. . . . President Kennedy had the public interest at heart in
acting as he did, but the results may not in the long run be what he
intended them to be.

Other results of the Kennedy administration were infuriating corporate
executives. Mergers were becoming widespread in the business world and
Attorney General Kennedy and his trust busters were taking a dim view of
them.

During 1963, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division won forty-five
of forty-six cases; asked a federal court to force General Motors Corporation to dispose of its locomotive business while charging the firm with
monopolizing the manufacture and sale of intercity buses; and ordered
General Dynamics to drop a division dealing with industrial gases.