Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  To further specify Oswald’s motivations, we are left to educated guesses. But we can safely say that those who knew most about Oswald’s Mexico City visit—people such as Win Scott, U.S. Ambassador Thomas Mann, or Al Haig—were unanimous in believing that Oswald likely became mixed up in some sort of intrigue. Their higher-ups, especially Lyndon Johnson, had likewise seen enough. Rightly or wrongly, Johnson quickly concluded that it was best for the U.S. and the world if Oswald’s possible foreign connections were simply left uninvestigated, or cursorily examined. Had an investigation of any integrity been authorized, it would have become apparent, at the very least, that the ardent pro-Castro Oswald had been privy to Kennedy secrets from the exile-hotbed of New Orleans.

  Oswald’s shooting of John F. Kennedy has been portrayed by some as an accident of history. Certainly to the Soviets, and to the Americans, Oswald seemed an inconsequential figure before the assassination. Neither of these sophisticated countries had much use for him, or took him seriously. The Soviets and the Americans rebuffed him, and repeatedly marginalized him. Cuban diplomats, likewise fearing accusations of involvement, may have steered clear of Oswald as well.

  Given what has been reported about his contacts and surroundings, though, Cuban intelligence agents may have challenged Oswald to be the man of action he apparently vowed to be. Logic dictates that, with Castro’s regime and very life being threatened by the Kennedys, a quick fix in the form of a bullet would not have been unwelcomed in certain Cuban circles.

  It is, of course, easy to oversimplify Oswald. But, based on an examination of the last period of Oswald’s life, he can be understood. Like everyone who frequented Lafayette Square in New Orleans, Oswald was aware of the administration’s most sensitive efforts training a Cuban exile force that would launch a re-invasion from Central America. Oswald, we know, was upset over U.S. policy towards Cuba. We know he wanted to change it—to, in some way, hinder, delay, or cancel the U.S. invasion of Cuba he saw coming soon. We know that he regarded assassination as a way to accomplish that change. And we now know he had already demonstrated his capacity for political violence in trying to kill retired General Edwin Walker, a visible, vocal opponent to civil rights.

  Moreover, it is clear from the mounting record (please read the three appendices for additional clarification) that, in committing the assassination, Oswald had means (a powerful rifle and considerable shooting skills), a motive (to prove his worth to the Cubans, or to put an end to the invasion plans unfolding in New Orleans), and opportunity (he was in Dallas when the president came to the city).

  During the summer of 1998, as this book was going to press, the U.S. Secret Service released an extensive report, “Preventing Assassination,” which studied all 83 people who had attacked or tried to attack an American political figure between 1938 and 1998. Its chief conclusion: Americans’ stereotypical views of assassins are entirely off-base. Assassins, the Secret Service concluded, are not deranged madmen, or lonely losers obsessed with their targets. Nor do their attacks usually follow verbal threats.

  Lee Harvey Oswald combined all the traits the Secret Service identified: 1) he considered more than one target (Eisenhower, Walker, Kennedy); 2) he had suffered a trauma (his wife had thoroughly rebuffed him, as had the U.S., the Soviet Union, and possibly Cuba); 3) he clearly suffered from emotional problems (recall his suicide attempt after first arriving in the Soviet Union); 4) he chose a prominent victim (no one was better known in the world than President John F. Kennedy); and 5) he came to see assassination as necessary to stop the U.S.’ planned invasion of Cuba.

  After reviewing the mountain of new evidence, including the rather startling conclusions of the Secret Service, even skeptics, and especially those who accepted the accuracy of the Warren Commission’s findings, must conclude something they never thought truly possible—that Oswald acted at least in part for political reasons, and that, in murdering John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald clearly thought he was acting on Cuba’s behalf. This single conclusion— that Lee Harvey Oswald was operating on November 22, 1963, for political purposes—in and of itself, alters our view of history.

  Similarly, it is quite possible to prove, to a moral certainty, why Oswald’s possible foreign connections were not more intensively investigated. The Warren Commission itself wasn’t so much a coverup as a deliberately limited investigation. The hours and days immediately after the Kennedy assassination were full of uncertainty and terror. In a world that already seemed so dangerous (the superpowers had come nearly to a nuclear exchange the year before), even the President of the United States was not safe. In America, fear and anger ran extraordinarily high.

  For both Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, for very different reasons, the Warren Commission was a necessary evil, and both opted to make the best of a potentially bad situation. Having the Commission reach the quick, tentative conclusion that a lone nut had committed the act served both their purposes. Virtually all of Johnson’s experience and instincts made him primarily interested in domestic, not foreign, matters. He never relished the idea of being a wartime president. His passion was saved for domestic matters, from Medicare, to education, to civil rights.

  Robert Kennedy had little use for Johnson, but concluded from the start that it was more important to him and his family to cover up the secret war against Cuba than to find out who had killed his brother, and why. For Bobby, it was quite useful to have the country and world conclude that the assassination was the act of a crazy man, not that of someone operating for political reasons.

  Knowing all that we know, it might be considered quite strange that Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy agreed on something so important. Johnson, who hated Robert Kennedy, surely had reason to expose the Kennedys’ secret war — he could have permanently destroyed Robert Kennedy’s political viability in the process. And, with clean hands on the subject of Cuba, he must have been sorely tempted to do so.

  But he made the early judgment that the nation needed stability. Cutting off the Warren Commission’s investigation made good sense to him. A wider, deeper investigation, he knew, would deprive him of a needed sense of control. If he had required the FBI, the CIA, and the Warren Commission to meticulously investigate the possible anti-U.S. reasons that motivated Oswald to act, the Warren Commission might well have turned up convincing evidence that Oswald acted to stop a coming invasion of Cuba, and continued assassination attempts on Castro, which Oswald had stumbled upon while in New Orleans.

  Had he publicly recited just some of the evidence of Oswald as a Castroite, Lyndon Johnson might have been forced to wage a war of retaliation against Cuba. The cycle of violence might have continued, and grown exponentially. Johnson was smart enough to realize that such a war, while easily justifiable, was best avoided because, he thought, it could plunge the world into a nuclear holocaust. In retrospect, we suspect that the Soviet Union probably would not have used nuclear weapons on the U.S. civil population—that it would have had second thoughts about doing so—and may not have been willing to again use nuclear weapons to defend Cuba. But, in that Cold War climate, the level of mistrust on both sides was outsized. Neither nation trusted the other to refrain from hitting the nuclear button. We can be feel especially grateful that, in such an atmosphere, President Johnson did not take a hawk-like approach towards Cuba. Excoriated for escalating the Vietnam War, Johnson deserves great praise for his restraint immediately after the assassination.

  In so acting, Johnson made a momentous decision that worked in the short-term and long-term interests of the U.S. and the world. It also served the interests of the Kennedy family, sparing denunciation by generations of the American people. Kennedy, it turns out, had precipitated the missile crisis with his secret Cuban war, then convinced the world that the U.S. had been the innocent victim of communist aggression in the western hemisphere.

  But President Johnson’s decision, however essential, badly served the long-term relationship of the U.S. government and its people. In the view of
many historians, President Kennedy made an inestimable contribution to the U.S. by encouraging the nation’s best and brightest to work, at least part of their careers, in government. How sad it is that the reckless and secret war he and his brother waged against Castro, which had to be covered up in the wake of JFK’s death, produced 35 years of active mistrust of the U.S. government.

  How fitting, somehow, that Cuba played such a huge, unsung role in Watergate, which added to public mistrust.

  And how ironic, too, that Oswald accomplished his chief goals of changing American policy towards Cuba, and rising to heroic proportions in Cuban eyes. A politically-motivated assassin does not usually produce his hoped-for results. Usually, a nation’s second-in-command can be counted on to continue the policy of his immediate predecessor. In 1963, there was little reason to doubt that Johnson would have continued the Kennedys’ policy towards Cuba. By the same token, there was no reason to doubt that Raul Castro would continue his brother’s policies had Fidel been assassinated. Oswald shot against the grain, and succeeded, from a policy standpoint, far beyond realistic expectations.

  It is worth noting that the mid 1960s were a far simpler, more innocent, less skeptical age—an age when the media was less aggressive and less antagonistic toward presidents. In this current period of intense media competition, it is unimaginable that such presidential miscalculations and misdeeds as the Kennedy brothers committed on Cuba would go unscrutinized, or that leads from Mexico City, or links from Oswald’s New Orleans neighborhood that traced right to Robert Kennedy, would not be pursued.

  To Fidel Castro, the assassination offers both benefits and concerns. The Cuban leader could contribute greatly to history if he would finally discuss his agents’ true dealings with Oswald, either inside or outside the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. The case has been firmly established here that the Kennedys recklessly went after Castro personally. Today, 35 years since the secret war and the assassination, the likelihood of U.S. repercussions is infinitesimal, while the lessons to be learned from Castro could be extensive.

  Early in his administration, Castro sought the help of the U.S., and was rebuffed. He formed an alliance with the Americans’ chief rival (the Soviet Union), thus antagonizing the U.S. In what amounted to a carryover from the previous presidential administration, a fearful U.S. sponsored an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba in 1961. Finally, because turning back communism’s advance was the chief tenet of U.S. foreign policy, and because it had been embarassed by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Kennedy administration launched an undeclared war against Cuba, and repeatedly sought to assassinate Castro. With Soviet help, Castro protected himself and his nation, several times warning the U.S. to desist, other times trying to quietly strike a peaceful resolution of the dispute. (In foreign affairs, as in domestic law, self-defense greatly mitigates against the crime of murder.)

  The brothers Kennedy, for personal and political reasons, refused Castro’s overtures and did not sufficiently protect themselves from his threats. When Oswald voluntarily appeared, offering, on his own, to remove President Kennedy from the scene, Cuban agents had to have been delighted. In a best-case scenario—one where Oswald succeeded and Cuba’s official involvement was unprovable —the U.S.’ secret war against Cuba would be abruptly halted. Far better at the game of deniability than the the Kennedys, Castro had little to lose, and everything to gain, by pushing Oswald’s buttons, by telling him of the American attempts on his life and his government, by merely suggesting through underlings that Cuba’s leader would appreciate his efforts.

  As I see it, my job has been to research the newly enlarged historical record, come to grips with it, and document what I learned and how I learned it. Put as succinctly as possible, I draw five, well-supported and critical conclusions:

  Oswald did it.

  He did it for Cuba.

  President Lyndon Johnson and then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, for different reasons, undertook a coverup of his motives, but both acted because of the need to coverup the Kennedys’ secret war against Cuba.

  Despite tantalizing leads about a possible Cuban conspiracy with Lee Harvey Oswald, the fact that those leads weren’t followed when fresh may forever keep us from conclusively ruling a conspiracy in or out. This is one of the great enduring tragedies of the coverup.

  In the wake of the coverup, President Johnson aborted an imminent invasion of Cuba.

  In an event as gripping as the Kennedy assassination, there is a compelling desire to determine what great truths can be learned—what lessons there are to take away and apply. The Church Committee thought the lesson was to persuade Congress to pass tough oversight legislation to control the nation’s intelligence apparatus. The Committee was naive. The legislation was enacted, and five years later “Iran-Contra” reared its ugly head.

  But there are at least two important lessons to be learned from this tragedy. Playing the game of political assassination is an extremely dangerous business. Virtually every foreign leader, even of outwardly terrorist nations, refrains from assassination attempts on other foreign leaders.

  Not that there aren’t great temptations. The President of the United States, especially a charismatic one, commands such obsequiousness that there will always be a Des FitzGerald or an Oliver North willing to skirt the law to make the chief happy. If and when these national leaders appear, the population would be well-advised to restock the fallout shelters.

  Second, if presidents choose to live dangerously, as John F. Kennedy did, it may cost them their lives—even if they think they can somehow insulate themselves from their government’s official decisions. The immutable law of agency, it turns out, cannot be ignored. Other nations are likely to impute to a U.S. president the actions of his or her apparent agents. Thus, heads of state who countenance the murder of other foreign leaders can begin a never-ending series of top-level assassinations likely to throw their nations and, potentially the world, into turmoil or conflict.

  In recent times, our lack of historical perspective has given rise to imprudent calls for the assassination of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein—most notably by Bill Clinton’s youthful former advisor, George Stephanapoulos. Unlike Stephanapoulos, the CIA’s Richard Helms is no stranger to historical dilemmas. Helms recently advised, “President Kennedy organized his entire administration to get rid of Castro. Where is Castro? Right where he used to be. It isn’t so easy to get rid of these fellas.”20

  As Robert Kennedy came to realize after his brother’s assassination, all political foes need not be demonized to Hitlerian proportions, or pursued as such. The moral questions are easy—the ends do not justify the means—and the risks are just too great.

  The Biblical words of a noted religious leader may be simple and ancient, but the cautionary advice is doubtlessly eternal: “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.”21

  APPENDIX A

  OSWALD’S SHOOTING OF THE PRESIDENT

  Any attempt to prove Oswald’s guilt as the lone Dealey Plaza shooter is certain to invite criticism from Oswald’s diminishing yet enthusiastic group of defenders. A brief appendix on a subject that could alone fill hundreds of pages will likewise invite scrutiny. I would prefer not to address the subject at all, but the decision represents a “Catch 22”: not to address the actual shooting might lead to speculation that I was unaware of details that, some believe, detract from my thesis, while to address it with the space it deserves would drag down the narrative thrust of the Kennedy-Cuba story. The better course, I’ve decided, is to give a thumbnail sketch of the work I’ve undertaken that shows Oswald to be the lone shooter.

  It should be stated at the outset that in over twenty years of research, I have reviewed virtually all the available research material (both pro and con), and interviewed numerous first-hand witnesses, some speaking for the first time. In addition, advice has been sought from scores of scientists in fields such as ballistics, forensics, and physics. To those who choose to question this summary of my findin
gs, other works and references that deal with the subject in detail are cited. In addition, a partial listing of interviewees follows this essay. The function of this discussion is only to summarize the findings—findings that are powerful not only in their unanimity, but in the eminence of their sources.

  Skeptical readers are invited to question my sources and judge for themselves. (Hint: if readers wish to enter this morass, they should do so only by contacting first-hand sources.) It should also be noted that from the time of the assassination until the early 1980s, I was among those who doubted Oswald’s lone guilt in the shooting. But that was before I was able to interview in detail the scientific experts and to review newly-acquired technology that renders Oswald’s culpability a virtual certainty. In addition, the Warren Commission had enough evidence to establish, even to most critics’ satisfaction, that Oswald was involved to some degree in the crime. To wit, a sampling of the damning evidence:

  Oswald’s rifle, with three spent cartridges and one unfired bullet, was found in the building behind the assassination’s victims. The rifle was clearly Oswald’s because: 1) his handwriting was on the order form, 2) a thread from the shirt he was arrested in was found on the rifle, 3) his palm print was found under the rifle barrel, and 4) as it was learned in 1993, his fresh fingerprints were on the metal guard one inch from the trigger.