Surrounded by Enemies (17 page)
Read Surrounded by Enemies Online
Authors: Bryce Zabel
The aftermath of Dallas had not been American journalism’s finest hour. By and large, the nation’s press corps capably covered the immediate excitement of gunfire, funerals and trials, but they had shown little appetite to get beneath the surface of the story. Someone else could do that — the Dallas jury, the Warren Commission, now JCAAP — and the media would be content to report the findings and the process of arriving at them. This was a hundred percent true for the television networks, and the nation’s newspapers weren’t much different.
Perhaps that is why the financially struggling magazine
Top Story
became the lightning rod and the facilitator for a political explosion. Bob Dylan might have nailed the motivation with his impending release,
Highway 61 Revisited
, which included the classic anger anthem, “Like a Rolling Stone.” The singer/songwriter’s lyric summed up
Top Story
’s situation nicely: “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
By the winter of 1965, the investigative reporting team of Stan Altman and Adam Berkowitz were stymied internally and externally. The older, more conservative Altman felt it was probable that Lee Harvey Oswald, despite suspicions to the contrary, was just a disaffected Communist-sympathizer who wasn’t as good a shot as he thought he was. The younger Berkowitz embraced conspiracy theory like a duck to water. He had spoken to at least a dozen direct witnesses from Dealey Plaza who had told him to his face that at least some of the shots came from in front of the motorcade. That meant two or more shooters, and that meant conspiracy.
While the reporters held daily, often angry, debates, their work product suffered. Since the rule they operated under was that they would only write what they agreed on, and they agreed on practically nothing, they found themselves reduced to covering White House news conferences and attending JCAAP hearings, even the dull ones.
The State of the Union and the inaugural speeches had not exactly been riveting either. What they didn’t know, however, but were soon to be the first to find out was that the inaugural announcement of the impending visit to the Soviet Union by the President had changed everything.
On January 24, 1965, just four days after Kennedy’s “Second Chance” speech, the reporters were contacted by a potential source who claimed to have access to secret files and asked to meet just one of the reporters. The rendezvous was arranged in a Sambo’s restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland at 8 p.m. Berkowitz drew the assignment because Altman, a married man, was under an ultimatum from his wife to be home in time for dinner with his children that night or face unspecified but disastrous consequences to his marriage.
The man sitting in the orange vinyl booth wore sunglasses he refused to take off, and Berkowitz guessed he must have been in his mid-fifties. He also refused to give his name, instructing the young reporter to instead assign him one. Berkowitz, a movie fan, pulled the name “Strangelove” out of the cinematic zeitgeist, referencing a now-classic film that had made a marked impact on him when it was released the previous year. The man said something that Berkowitz found quite odd: “Do you think I am a homosexual, sir?” Berkowitz assured him that he had no opinion on the matter and was simply a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
, a film about the madness of nuclear war. To that statement the man replied, “Madness was not using the superior weapons we had in 1962 to destroy the Soviet Communists when the advantage was ours.”
After arguing with the waitress over whether he should be charged extra for ordering an omelet with tomatoes instead of potatoes, Strangelove then offered up the reason for requesting the meeting with Berkowitz. He had access to the FBI files on the President, and they made clear that the nation’s chief executive was nothing more than a “moral degenerate.” He offered a manila envelope with a single file in it. He asked Berkowitz to share it with his partner Altman, and satisfy themselves that it was the real deal. They would be contacted again to see if they had the stomach to do the hard work that needed to be done. With that, he dismissed Berkowitz and dined alone on his nighttime breakfast.
The memo Strangelove had given Berkowitz was explosive. It dealt with FBI surveillance of German-born Ellen Rometsch, who in 1963 had allegedly begun an affair with President Kennedy. She was being investigated at the time as a possible East German spy and, as the report indicated, she’d been a member of the Communist party before coming to the United States. She was also, it was alleged, a prostitute, who had been brought into the White House under the nose of the Secret Service and had sexual relations with Kennedy in the White House pool area. Supposedly, certain Republicans on Capitol Hill and other reporters had become aware of this in the fall of 1963, when Rometsch was suddenly deported at the request of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and allegedly paid hush money.
Altman and Berkowitz checked the memo out as discreetly as they could, and both became convinced that whether or not its contents were a hundred percent accurate, the memo itself was legitimate. They began to gather notes on the many allegations of extramarital affairs that had been swirling around John Kennedy going back to his days in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Some but not all of these they had heard whispers of before.
In the 1960s, reporters still looked the other way when it came to presidential romantic dalliances, believing they were private matters and even, perhaps, that a President must be allowed an extraordinary amount of personal leeway to relax in whatever way he saw fit. The problem with the Rometsch memo was that it raised questions about JFK's judgment that went beyond his right to enjoy a private life. The Secret Service had never been allowed to search Rometsch before her clandestine meetings with Kennedy. Had she been so inclined, she easily could have caused him physical harm or even killed him. Certainly, she could have held him up for blackmail.
Finally, an excruciating eleven days later, Berkowitz received a phone call. “Mr. Berkowitz,” said the voice. “This is your Doctor Strangelove.”
The nation soon had a new soap opera. It was called the Joint Commission on the Attempted Assassination of the President. The hearings were open, except for frequent closed-door sessions when the CIA and other intelligence assets testified in ways that might impact national security, a situation that occurred by their estimation, every time they were called before the committee.
Still, the seemingly endless parade of eyewitnesses, police officers, government insiders, Mafia bosses, Cuban activists, Soviet experts, and agents of the FBI and Secret Service made for compelling viewing. The hearings were telecast live to the nation by the fledgling ABC network, something that was akin to political catnip for the committee members of both political parties, jostling for position and visibility. Chairman Magnuson nearly wore out his gavel trying to keep the egos in check.
During the hearings, Secret Service agent Robert Bouck testified about the existence of tape recording systems in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room and the President’s living quarters on the second floor of the White House, and a separate Dictabelt recording system for use on the telephone lines in the President’s office and his upstairs bedroom. All had been installed in the summer of 1962.
Lawyers for JCAAP immediately requested tapes of conversations before and after the Dallas ambush. The White House nearly as immediately turned them down, citing executive privilege — if the conversations of the President of the United States were no longer considered confidential, the President’s attorneys claimed, it would create a chilling effect on the Oval Office, causing advisers to be less free in their advice to the nation’s chief executive. That, they argued, could have a detrimental effect on his decision-making ability. The White House recorded these conversations for their own use and review, not for the inspection of Congress.
It seemed like a reasonable argument, and for the moment, there were enough Democrats on the committee who agreed that the situation went no further.
One of the men glued to the television set during all this was famed newsman and former Warren Commission member Edward R. Murrow, who was in the last days of his life. He had been battling cancer since a malignant tumor had caused the removal of his left lung in October 1963, after a lifetime of smoking up to seventy cigarettes a day. He had been in and out of the hospital ever since, but he’d been discharged from New York Hospital at the beginning of April and had gone home to die. On April 25, just two days before he passed away, Murrow allowed himself to smoke a final cigarette while watching the hearings and told his wife Janet that “they won’t let this President finish.”
In May of 1965, a single ticket to the rematch between Muhammad Ali (no longer known as Cassius Clay) and Sonny Liston had appeared in an envelope under the door of Steve Berkowitz’s modest Georgetown apartment. He and Frank Altman drove up to Lewiston, Maine, where the fight was to take place. Ali was now publicly embracing the Nation of Islam, some adherents of which were widely suspected of having just assassinated Malcolm X, and there were rumors that Ali might be murdered in retaliation. It was a tense and sober fight, held in a very small-town ice rink.
Altman was a huge boxing fan, and Berkowitz barely knew Sonny Liston from Sonny Bono. Nonetheless, Altman had to sit in his car a few blocks away from the venue, while Berkowitz took his seat inside, as he suspected, next to the man known as Strangelove. The fight ended with Ali knocking out Liston in the first round. As the stunned crowd began to leave, Strangelove nodded under Berkowitz’s seat where a manila envelope could be seen. “Champions fall,” he said, and departed.
On the way back from Maine, Berkowitz drove while Altman read aloud from the almost three dozen documents from Strangelove, each one seemingly more scandalous than the next. Hearing them spoken in a speeding car gave the documents a thrilling urgency to Berkowitz. He slammed at the dashboard, more than once shouting, “The floodgates are open!” They were also closed, as it turned out, as Strangelove was never heard from again.
Altman knew that none of what the documents contained was yet deemed publishable by the standards of journalism as practiced in the mid-1960s, where the private lives of public officials were not considered to be of sufficient importance to merit disclosure. “Roosevelt and Eisenhower had their mistresses that the public never heard about,” he shrugged. “And the medical stuff, hell, Roosevelt was a cripple for his entire twelve years in office.”
“I now realize that this was completely different,” Altman wrote in
Top Story
’s 1988 anniversary coverage, “because of the magnitude and the questions it raised, but it took me a few days to get there.”
It wasn’t just the falling of the barrier of past journalistic standards that bothered the older reporter. It was the powerful emotions he began to feel about President Kennedy, emotions he had never associated with a politician.
Indeed, when Frank Altman came to bed early in the morning after reading all the documents, his wife took one look at him and asked, “What are you so sad about, Frankie?”
Just as the government has always been plagued by leaks, the nation’s fourth estate has not been immune. Through sources that have never been made public but are assumed to have emanated from the FBI, the White House advisers came to know that Altman and Berkowitz were up to something they didn’t like. They heard, discreetly and indirectly, that John Kennedy’s sex life was the subject of daily discussion at
Top Story
and possibly the
Washington Post
. The
Post
published
Newsweek
magazine,
Top Story
’s direct competition.
President Kennedy met privately with his brother to discuss this rumored turn of events. Bobby considered the matter carefully and concluded, “Jack, we always knew this could happen.”
The problem was that no plan existed for what to do when that arrived, said JFK. Bobby countered that there was a plan but it was best that he not know what it was. The President agreed, “Just make sure it’s a good plan.” Even at their moment of maximum danger, there was a soldier’s joking bravado.
Although it was not necessarily important where the leak originated, the President had allowed the impasse with J. Edgar Hoover to continue without his resignation or firing. The arrogant FBI director had left the Oval Office that day with only the slim promise that he would think about the President’s request to step down and get back to him. The President concluded for his brother’s benefit, “I guess now we have our answer.” Hoover’s retaliation was to use his files as a weapon.
Fearing a phone call from journalists asking to confirm or deny these reports, the Kennedys decided to move up the President's scheduled visit to Moscow. No responsible journalistic organization would dare publish such scandal, they felt, if the President of the United States was on foreign soil negotiating matters of global peace with a nuclear-armed adversary.
Both John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev had survived attempts to remove them from office over the past year and a half, and each knew just how precarious his grip on power truly was. Khrushchev actually felt that had Kennedy been killed in Dallas, the impact would have extended all the way to Russia and led to his own removal by the Politburo. They both had reasons to change the subject and keep it changed as fast as possible.
Khrushchev had been to the United States before, back in September of 1959. He had debated Vice President Nixon, visited Hollywood, and even been barred from going to Disneyland, supposedly for security reasons. Now it was Kennedy’s turn to visit the Soviet Union.
In mid-May, with JCAAP nearing the end of its hearings, and journalists in Washington sitting on a bombshell of sexual misconduct, President Kennedy stepped off a plane in Moscow and shook hands with Premier Khrushchev. The two men had already traveled a unique path together, from Cold War nuclear adversaries who nearly incinerated the planet, to men who understood that the mission of their times was to create the architecture of peace. They had been communicating regularly by private correspondence, the substance of which was known only to each other and their translators. They had achieved a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and started talks on global disarmament. Those talks had been scuttled by Kennedy’s close call in Dallas and Khrushchev’s close call with the Soviet Politburo.
They needed a big idea but one that would not set their generals off, as disarmament talks seemed to do. They needed to “Trojan Horse” peace into the public discussion. They needed the moon.
The idea was already on the table, just dying for lack of support. Back on September 20, 1963, President Kennedy had spoken before the United Nations Eighteenth General Assembly. In that speech, he had extended an invitation to the Soviet Union to join with the United States in a joint mission to the moon. At the end of that address, Kennedy said: “In a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity — space — there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts.”
Why, the President asked, should the United States and the Soviet Union conduct parallel efforts that would include “duplication of research, construction and expense?” He laid out a proposal for a joint series of space missions, which, if enacted would, he said, “require a new approach to the Cold War.”
Khrushchev told Kennedy at the time that he could not accept the offer even if he wanted to. Kennedy needed to win reelection, but Khrushchev needed to put down an insurrection from his own internal enemies who thought he had backed down and lost the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
Now, two years later, the timing seemed to be right. Both men knew that a space race to the moon would be economically prohibitive and accomplish nothing. Better to share the costs and turn it into a win-win.
After four days and three nights touring the Soviet Union side-by-side, Kennedy and Khrushchev faced the press together. They proposed the Joint Lunar Exploration Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. They would join forces, share costs, and crew missions together. Sometime before 1970, they hoped, a Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut would both set foot on the moon together. Kennedy let his former foe Khrushchev have the first word:
Space offers no problems of sovereignty; the members of the United Nations have already foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure?
Khrushchev laid out the full legal framework. The man who’d slammed his shoe on his desk in the United Nations years before was now using the U.N.’s mission and charter as his own rationalization for action. Kennedy followed with the poetry.
Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries can work together in the conquest of space. They will look back at the Earth while standing on the surface of the moon and they will see a fragile world that deserves the full measure of our devotion. While showing that Humankind can leave the Earth, we will also demonstrate why we must always return to our home.
The only thing standing in the way of such a peaceful and cooperative enterprise was the approval of the Soviet Politburo and the American Senate.
For the most part, the Joint Lunar Exploration Treaty was embraced by Americans as a good idea. Conservative Republicans derided Kennedy’s advocacy of the program and referred to him as “Moonbeam Jack,” although the phrase never seemed to catch on outside of their own political circles.
The real opposition came from within. The military establishments of both the Soviet Union and the United States were staunchly opposed. Both viewed implementation of the treaty as putting them in the unacceptable position of sharing treasured national technological advances with their rivals. Both sides worried that rockets that could take men to the moon could also carry nuclear weapons to the cities of their enemies.
After watching the coverage of Kennedy and Khrushchev on a live satellite feed out of Moscow, General Curtis LeMay turned to his fellow military careerists and said, “that treaty will pass over his dead body,” while pointing at Kennedy. When asked to confirm this statement shortly before his death in 1990, LeMay said that it had been a slip of the tongue and he meant the conventional use of the phrase.