This prompted me to ask the obvious questions about Memphis and April of 1968.
“My association with the Kennedy brothers was a thing of the past by then,” Harlow replied. “I quit right after the Adolphus, which pretty much guaranteed Kennedy a second term, pocketing all the money the Kennedy’s owed me and walked away while there was still a door to go through. You can’t do what I’d been doing and not eventually get a bullet in the back because somebody decides they can’t take the risk that you might talk down the road. Look at it: assassinations, faking evidence, brokering deals with Mafia kingpins, swindling Texas oil millionaires; I was lucky to still be alive as it was, it was time to get while the getting was good. I had more than enough money to be set for life, and I had another good reason. I’d married Helen two years before, she’d been my secretary ever since I’d gone into business for myself, and she was pregnant with the first of our four children in the fall of ’64. You can’t be in this kind of business and have a family, for me it was no choice. So I put everything in her name, bought a nice house here in Florida, got a job as a private investigator for a big law firm and settled into the good life as a middle-aged suburban husband and father, doing 4th of July barbecues, Little League, and all the rest. It has been a nice life, and I don’t miss the old one.
But as for Memphis in ’68, I put that squarely on Marcello; Bobby never did give him the pardon as per the deal you arranged, that was just Bobby being stubborn, so Carlos felt he was due some payback because he’d come through on his end and the Kennedys hadn’t on theirs. And more to the point, he and his fellow bosses had survived eight years under JFK, they weren’t about to risk another eight under a treacherous RFK; so they paid a pair of shooters to nip the problem in the bud. They probably used the same guy I had for backup in Dallas. As for King, there’d been a fifty thousand dollar contract on his head for years, put up by some Georgia businessmen who thought segregation was God’s will. J.B. Stoner was their contact man, and I figure Marcello took him up on it and killed two birds with one stone. Bobby and King were dead before they hit the pavement in Memphis and two fall guys were dead a day later when they were cornered by the police. There was a nice trail of evidence linking them to white supremacist groups, which leads me to believe somebody was following my playbook. It was just plain hubris that led Bobby to try and succeed his brother, convinced he had to finish Jack’s work, along with the fact that Bobby couldn’t stand the thought of LBJ succeeding JFK.
It had taken Vance Harlow more than an hour to tell his story, and it was more than I could process at the moment, too many names, dates and allegations to keep straight. But one detail did stick in my mind during the telling, one little thing he’d left out, either intentionally or by simply forgetting. “Where were you on November 22nd, 1963?” I asked. “Where were you when you called Robert Kennedy at his home in Virginia? Those calls can be traced pretty easily, and I don’t believe you would make that kind of mistake, so you’d have to use a safe phone, one which couldn’t be found just anywhere.”
Harlow smiled and nodded. “That’s why you are such a success, Colonel. You see what others don’t; you hear what others miss. On the morning in question, I was inside the Dallas, Texas, field office of the FBI, sitting at a desk in a small side office all to myself, with a phone at my disposal. Why was an ex-agent long gone from active service afforded such privileges? Because Cartha DeLoach had called the agent in charge and told him to give me whatever I asked for within reason. Why would the deputy director of the FBI make such a call? Because for 30 years, J. Edgar Hoover had vacationed annually in Florida, where he regularly indulged his passion for betting on the horses and won not a small sum of money. This was a problem since the track he frequented was secretly owned by a Mafia front, and most of the races were fixed, something which would have been mighty embarrassing to the Director if had become public knowledge. There was a reason why the Hoover never went after organized crime and that’s because the Mafia had the goods on him. I was able to get my hands on a transcript from a wiretap of Santos Trafficante telling Johnny Rosselli he doesn’t have a thing to worry about from the FBI because they have proof Hoover won over ten grand on fixed races. The original recording was destroyed on J. Edgar’s orders, but not before I transcribed it. No door in the Bureau was closed to me, but I do want to apologize for something you never knew Colonel, for months after the get together at the Adolphus, you were kept under surveillance by some of Hoover’s best. I needed to know who among those there that night might be talk and the Director was happy to oblige after I told him all about what happened Hotel Adolphus the man did love a secret so, and he needed all the leverage possible if and when Kennedy attempted to force him to retire. I couldn’t have that. I was happy to learn that not a one of you let slip a single word of what went on, not the lawyer who worked for LBJ, the kid who couriered the money down from Washington, not the blonde chick who came with Harbinson, and most certainly not you, Colonel. You all knew you had a good thing going, although I had a worrisome moment when the kid who brought the money went out to California after the election to visit the blonde chick. I was worried they might be in cahoots in some scheme to shake down some of the involved parties, especially when she spent the night in his hotel room after their second date. But it turns out they were just crazy in love, a happy ending for one and all.
“What is really amazing is how everyone kept their mouths shut all these years, especially back in the 70’s when everything else that went on in the shadows during the Kennedy years was being investigated. And if you ask me who killed Daniel Ellsberg for leaking all the secrets, I would give you a list of fifty names and say ‘pick one.’ My name was on one list to be subpoenaed, but no one knew where to find me, and I still had more than a few friends in high places to protect me. Not that I would have told them a damn thing anyway; when Nixon came in, the lid got screwed back on tight, he had as much to lose as anyone if his fellow Republicans ever found out how he’d screwed over Goldwater when their man was literally a scandal away from the White House. Then again, Jack Kennedy was ten times the politician Goldwater was, so you can say he never really had a chance. Anyway, it’s all done now.”
Harlow’s tale left me at a loss for words at the audacity of its revelations and implications…almost. I asked him why; why the deceiving, the lying and the double crossing?
“It’s simple,” he answered, “for the money. It’s why anyone does anything. Look, I was the best there ever was at doing dirty work - nobody before or since has ever been able to touch me when it comes to doing the kind of shit work men in tailor-made suits who sit in high offices behind cherry wood desks need to have done but don’t have the guts to do themselves. And I had the right to be well paid for doing it. I liked Jack and Bobby Kennedy, actually think they did some good things for the country, some things which needed to get done as opposed to Goldwater and my old boss, J. Edgar, who would have taken the country back to the 1890’s if they’d had their way. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have let Oswald put a bullet through Jack’s head in Dallas if it had meant more money in my pocket. My father spent a lifetime walking behind a mule’s ass in Oklahoma, three of my children graduated college with degrees in law and engineering, while the fourth one joined your blessed Marine Corp and was just promoted to Captain last year. I look at them and have not one damn regret for anything I’ve done to make their lives better.”
The afternoon was growing long while the day was getting short, but I had one more question.
“Why talk now, and why tell me?”
“Because they’re all gone,” he answered. “Most of them or the ones who would be hurt the most, like Jack and Bobby, if what I know became public. And I’ll be joining them soon enough, got some bad news back in the winter - happens to all of us if we live long enough. So I came to a decision that somebody needed to be told, somebody who would understand and who I trusted; there weren’t many who fit both bills but you, Colonel. I’m appro
aching the end of my days, and have come to doubt the wisdom of taking my secrets to the grave; it’s the kind of thing only a dying man thinks about. I apologize if this is a burden, Colonel, I truly do, but I’ve got no doubt you can handle it. You can stop recording now, I’ve said it all.”
We were done.
The two of us chatted for a little while longer, catching up on some mutual acquaintances from back in the day, the few still with us. He mentioned Carlos Marcello had recently suffered a stroke and was forced to give up being the big boss in New Orleans at long last. After awhile, Mrs. Harlow came out and asked if I’d stay for dinner, I politely declined and packed away the tapes, saying it was time for me to leave. Vance Harlow walked with me to the waiting cab when it arrived and shook my hand before I got in. “I trust you, Colonel,” he said before shutting the door. “Always did.” They were the last words he spoke to me, four months later Harlow was dead, leaving me with the burden of his story.
I put the tapes in a safety deposit box and tried to forget about them without much success. At times I tried to convince myself they might be the fantasy of an aged mind in a dying body. At one point, I tried to track down Harlow’s co-conspirators to try and get some corroboration. I discovered Ferrie and Bannister had not survived the 60’s, but learned that George de Mohrenschildt was in an assisted living facility in Houston, sadly, when I visited him in the spring of 1993, he could no longer remember what he had for breakfast much less if he’d known a man named Vance Harlow thirty years before. I even made a discreet inquiry at the guarded New Orleans mansion where Carlos Marcello had lived for decades, giving the man who answered the door my name and telling them I was an old associate of Mr. Marcello’s whom he hadn’t seen in many, many years. I made a point to drop a few names, but it got me nowhere, I was told Mr. Marcello no longer received visitors.
So I gave up on finding any validation for Harlow’s claims. Then in July and August of 1994 came the 38-day conflict which became known as the Third World War, when an uprising against an aging Communist autocracy in East Germany escalated into an attack by the Warsaw Pact on West Germany, which prompted a response by NATO. The subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Communist empire in the wake of a limited nuclear exchange brought immediate comparisons to how Kennedy handled the crisis of 1964, when he kept a super-power confrontation from going from bad to worse to the point where Leeds, England and Kazan, Russia were reduced to flaming ruins by a pair of 20 megaton warheads. After that, it did not feel right to sully the legacy of a President being hailed as a visionary leader right when it appeared history was giving him a full vindication.
To be honest, I let those tapes sit so long because I didn’t know how I truly felt about their revelations. The 1964 invasion of Cuba has never stopped being controversial, on the far left, it has continually been denounced as an act of criminal aggression; it’s the reason why many liberals running for office will not mention the name of John F. Kennedy to this very day. It’s also the reason why he is now venerated by the heirs of Goldwater on the right; to them, he is the liberator of Cuba, the President who stood firm for eight years against Stalin’s heirs in the Kremlin. I’ve read Kennedy’s Crimes by Howard Zinn, which excoriates the President for his imperialistic foreign policy, and Man on the Wall by Pat Buchanan, who credits JFK with winning the Cold War. In neither book does the President John F. Kennedy I knew appear, not the shrewd politician or the cautious commander in chief. In both books, the events of November 22nd, 1963 are merely a footnote.
I went back to Havana earlier this year; I saw the statue of JFK in the harbor and walked down the avenue named for him. It was a testament to his popularity with a majority of the Cuban people that when Raul Castro came back after years in exile in Africa and was elected President of Cuba in a democratic election, he made no attempt to remove the statue or change the name honoring the man who destroyed his brother’s revolution. It says something about the way things worked out that while Castro was President, the largest Wal-Mart outside of the United States opened in Havana.
I finally came to a decision on what to do with the tapes on the day I got back from Cuba. I would tell the story of the Kennedy years exactly as I experienced them and how I came to understand it all in later years. Did the Kennedy brothers conspire and then fake an assassination attempt to create a justification for starting a war? There are only the words of a dying man saying so much was true. So, I’ll tell the story in the same manner I came to it; and I’ll trust we’ll be a mature enough people to decide what is true and what really matters.
Both Kennedy brothers are buried at Arlington Cemetery, not far from the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. That they were warriors, there can be no doubt, but the cause for which they battled the fiercest, either for the nation they swore an oath to protect or their own naked political ambitions, is the question.
I doubt we’ll ever get a final answer.
The End
About the Author
F.C. Schaefer is an avid reader who put down the book he was reading one day and picked up a pen and paper to try his hand at writing one and found he liked doing it. He is the indie author of BEATING PLOWSHARES INTO SWORDS: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR along with the horror novels CADEN IS COMING and BIG CRIMSON.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 44