JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (111 page)

Warnings from a male caller saying Oswald would be killed in the morning were also received twice by the Dallas County Sheriff’s office around 2:15 a.m. Sunday
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and once by the Dallas FBI office at 2:30 a.m.
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In spite of this series of warning calls to the FBI, the Dallas Police, and the Sheriff’s Department, perhaps all from Jack Ruby, the authorities, instead of transferring Oswald secretly, repeated the process of the midnight press conference. The prisoner’s transfer to the county jail became a second media circus, this one ending in an ambush. Through a press gauntlet, Oswald’s police guards once again led him (whether knowingly or not) right into the vicinity of a waiting Ruby.

If the purpose of Ruby’s phoning the police had been to obstruct his ability to carry out a higher order, the Dallas authorities did not prove helpful. They, too, seem to have had higher orders.
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They in effect gave Ruby an even easier opportunity to kill Oswald Sunday morning than they had Friday night. This time Ruby did not hesitate.

Kennedy was warned repeatedly in the days before Dallas about going into its hostile political environment. His friend Larry Newman said later, “You know, they talked for three weeks about him being shot in Texas! And they tried to talk him out of it, right to the last minute. But he just said, ‘If this is the way life is, if this is the way it’s going to end, this is the way it’s going to end.’”
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On the danger of his being assassinated, Kennedy liked to quote the passage in Ecclesiastes, “There is a time to be born, and a time to die.”
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However, at other moments the president was less stoical about what he felt might happen on his trip to Texas. As the day approached, he kept repeating his apprehensions to Senator George Smathers: “God, I hate to go out to Texas. I just hate to go. I have a terrible feeling about going. I wish I could get out of it.”
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On the night of November 20, the eve of his departure, John and Jacqueline Kennedy held their annual judicial reception at the White House. Early in the evening, while over five hundred employees from the Department of Justice and the White House waited their turn downstairs, the Kennedys received the Supreme Court Justices and their wives upstairs. The guests came in their finest formal attire. The gala event would be John Kennedy’s last in the White House. As described by William Manchester in
The Death
of a President
, it reminds one of the Russian ball on the eve of war in Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
. The light of that last night at the Kennedy White House, like the glitter of the waltzing Russian aristocracy, could not hold back the darkness.

Ethel Kennedy watched her brother-in-law, the president, from across the room. While JFK made the requisite social comments to the circle around him, Ethel realized, as she told Manchester later, “that something very grave must be on his mind. He had leaned back in the rocker, his hand cupped under his chin, and was gazing out with hooded gray eyes.”
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At that moment Chief Justice Earl Warren called over to him, “Texas is going to be rough, Mr. President!”
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Kennedy made no response. As his sister-in-law could see, he had withdrawn to a place in his mind.

“Why,” she wondered, “is Jack so preoccupied?”

Ethel walked over and greeted him. As long as she had known Jack Kennedy, no matter how great the stress he was under, he had always responded to her.

“Not now,” she said. “For the first time in thirteen years he was looking right through me.”
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To what degree Kennedy was then preoccupied with his trip to Texas, we do not know. We do know that on the trip itself he kept talking about his death as imminent, while adding there was nothing to be done about it.

On Friday morning, November 22, while he and Jacqueline were in their Fort Worth hotel suite, JFK read a threatening full-page advertisement addressed to him in the
Dallas
Morning News
. Under a bold headline, “
WELCOME MR.
KENNEDY
,” the ad was bordered in black, like a funeral notice. It stated:

“Because of your policy, thousands of Cubans have been imprisoned, are starving and being persecuted—with thousands already murdered and thousands more awaiting execution and, in addition, the entire population of almost 7,000,000 Cubans are living in slavery.”

Hatred, in response to his decisions in the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, was staring up at him.

The ad went on to ask Kennedy: “Why have you approved the sale of wheat and corn to our enemies when you know the Communist soldiers ‘travel on their stomachs’ just as ours do? Communist soldiers are daily wounding and/or killing American soldiers in South Viet Nam.”
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His wheat sale to the Soviet Union had come back to haunt him.

He finished reading the ad, placed by a group calling itself “The American Fact-Finding Committee.”
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He handed it to his wife.

As Jacqueline read it, the blood draining from her face, he said to her, “We’re heading into nut country today. But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”
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“You know,” he said, “last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president.” He paused.

“I mean it. There was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” Kennedy pointed his right hand like a pistol at the wall, moving his thumb as the hammer. “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase, and melted away in the crowd.”
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In two subliminal scenes, JFK had sketched the assassinations of both himself that same day in Dealey Plaza and of another president (in the making) four and a half years later, his brother, Bobby, the night he would get jostled by the crowd in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb a system and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate cover-up.

Intelligence agencies in that state have advantages over us ordinary citizens in controlling our government. The CIA, FBI, and their intelligence affiliates in the armed forces have resources and aspirations, as revealed by the president’s assassination, that go far beyond our moral imagination. In his increasingly isolated presidency, John Kennedy had a diminishing power over them. Partly because of our naiveté as citizens, he was killed by covert-action agencies and the conspiracy covered up by them, with relative ease and legal impunity. It was the beginning of a deadly process. Even before his assassination took place, there was evidence that those in command of our security agencies may have already been thinking about whom they might have to kill next for the sake of the nation.

A prime candidate was the president’s brother—his possible successor in the White House in the years to come, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

On Thursday, November 21, as John and Jacqueline Kennedy were arriving on Air Force One in Houston to begin their Texas tour, Wayne January was at Red Bird Air Field in Dallas preparing a DC-3 aircraft for flight. In this narrative, we have already encountered January, who the day before had refused to charter a flight for November 22 to a suspicious young couple, accompanied by a man January later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald.

Wayne January was working on the DC-3 all day Thursday with the pilot who was scheduled to fly it out of Dallas on Friday afternoon.
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It was their third day on the job. Working together on a project they both enjoyed—preparing an extraordinary machine for flight—the two men had become friends. Wayne had also become curious about the background of his friend, who said he had been born in Cuba, though Wayne could detect no trace of an accent. The man said he had been in the Cuban Air Force, where he achieved a high rank.
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Except for his work with January, the pilot kept totally to himself, refusing Wayne’s invitations to eat out with him. The pilot confined himself to eating sandwiches with Wayne by the plane.
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Wayne became more curious. He asked the pilot about the well-dressed man who had bought the plane from a company January co-owned. The man had carried out the transaction with January’s partner by phone. The buyer had made only one appearance at the airfield, when he came with the pilot on Monday.

The pilot described his boss as “an Air Force colonel who deals with planes of this category.”
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The colonel had bought the plane on behalf of a company known as the “Houston Air Center.” January would learn later that the Houston Air Center was a front for the CIA.
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As revealed by the plane’s archived papers, the aircraft had originally been a troop transport version of the DC-3, also known as a C-47, made in the Second World War and sold by the government to a private airline after the war.
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It was now being sold back to the government for use as a covert CIA aircraft.

As Wayne and the pilot continued talking during their lunch break Thursday, Wayne suddenly found himself in a twilight zone, learning more about secret government operations than he ever wanted to know. The moment of transition came after a pause in their conversation. The other man sat leaning against a wheel of the plane, eating his sandwich. He was silent for a time, mulling over something in his mind.

Then he looked up and said, “Wayne, they are going to kill your president.”
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As Wayne January described this scene three decades later in a remarkable faxed letter to British author Matthew Smith, he tried to convey his utter incomprehension of the man’s words. When Wayne asked the pilot what he meant, the man repeated, “They are going to kill your president.”

Wayne stared at him.

“You mean President Kennedy?”

The man said yes.

While Wayne kept trying to make sense of his words, his co-worker revealed that he had been a pilot for the CIA. He was with the CIA in the planning of the Bay of Pigs. When many of his friends died there, the planners and survivors of the operation bitterly blamed John and Robert Kennedy for not providing the air cover the CIA claimed they had promised.

Wayne asked if that was why he thought they were going to kill the president.

The man said, “They are not only going to kill the President, they are going to kill Robert Kennedy and any other Kennedy who gets into that position.”
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Wayne thought he was beginning to catch on. His friend had gone off the deep end. Wayne tried to say so in a polite, circumspect way.

The pilot looked at him. “You will see,” he said.

The two men went back to work. They were behind schedule, with less than twenty-four hours left to complete their task. “My boss wants to return to Florida,” the pilot said. There was room in the plane for more passengers than his boss. Wayne and the pilot were reinstalling twenty-five seats in it.
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The DC-3 had to be ready to take off from Dallas by early afternoon the next day, Friday, November 22.

In the course of their work, the pilot made another memorable remark. “They want Robert Kennedy real bad,” he said.

“But what for?” Wayne asked.

“Never mind,” the man said, “You don’t need to know.”
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Thanks to the two men’s joint efforts, they succeeded in having the plane ready to go early Friday afternoon. By 12:30 p.m., all the DC-3 lacked was fuel—and whoever would soon get aboard it to depart from Dallas.

As they finished up their work, there was a commotion by the terminal. A police car took off at high speed. Wondering what was up, Wayne walked back to the terminal building. The driver of a passing car slowed down and shouted at him, “The President has been shot!”

Wayne went into the building. He listened to a radio until he heard the announcement that President John F. Kennedy was dead.

He walked back to the DC-3. It had received its fuel. The pilot was putting luggage on the plane. Wayne asked him if he had heard what had happened. Without pausing from his loading, the pilot said he had, the man on the fuel truck had told him.

Then he said, “It’s all going to happen just like I told you.”
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