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by Gore Vidal


  FIFTY-FIVE

  I shall now borrow Publishers Weekly’s nice précis of this long highly detailed book, which states that Gerald Posner’s polemic, Case Closed(1993),

  took the CIA’s lack of involvement for granted, and that, according to this mammoth and painstakingly researched account, was a big mistake. It is Waldron and Hartmann’s…contention—bolstered by access to many previously unavailable files, and interviews with little-known as well as prominent figures—that the CIA knew a great deal about the assassination. But the agency couldn’t admit what it knew because that could uncover the existence of a U.S. plan for a coup in Cuba, run by JFK’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The assassination, say the authors, was carried out by hired gunmen on the orders of three noted Mafia dons whose lives were being made miserable by RFK’s ruthless pursuit—and these Mafia men knew about the planned invasion because they had worked with the CIA on previous efforts to topple Castro. Oswald, long a hidden CIA agent, was set up as the patsy, and it had always been Jack Ruby’s job to eliminate him if he wasn’t killed at the scene of Kennedy’s shooting. How do the authors make their case? With a relentless accumulation of detail, a very thorough knowledge of every political and forensic detail and the broad perspective of historians rather than assassination theorists.

  Ultimate Sacrifice describes how the Kennedy C-Day plan was penetrated by three Mafia godfathers—Carlos Marcello (New Orleans), Santo Trafficante (Tampa, Florida), and Johnny Roselli (out of Chicago). All three were being vigorously pursued by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, along with a dozen of their associates of whom six were also working on the Castro murder case. The crime bosses then used parts of the C Plan, aka AMWorld, to arrange JFK’s assassination in a way that would prevent a thorough government investigation in order to protect the Coup Plan, its participants, as well as, naturally, national security by invoking the secrecy surrounding the C Plan. The Mob bosses targeted JFK twice before Dallas, once in Chicago on November 2 (JFK called off his motorcade) and then in Tampa on November 18 (he survived unscathed). Ultimate Sacrifice reveals and details why Robert Kennedy later told several close associates the name of the godfather (Carlos Marcello) who had ordered his brother killed—but he couldn’t do anything about it for fear the Soviets might go to war: Irony in tragic action…I recall when over the years I’d be asked why what happened at Dallas happened, I’d answer: “Because Bobby had broken a truce made with the Mob by Joe Kennedy in 1960. Bobby, seeking glory, broke it by hounding Teamster boss Hoffa, and going after the Mob bosses”: in the case of Carlos Marcello of New Orleans (and sometimes Havana), Bobby had him deported to Guatemala. Trafficante, a Florida boss, was recorded as telling Marcello that they must kill Bobby but Marcello said no. “When a dog bothers you, you don’t cut off its tail.” Thus was the murder of JFK ordered and carried out by the same team that his brother was assembling to murder Castro and prepare the way for an invasion of Cuba at the request of a Kennedy-selected provisional government. This is classic irony and on the bloodiest scale. Had word leaked out, the Soviets in order to avenge Castro might have used its nuclear-tipped missiles against some fifty U.S. cities. Hence, the use of Oswald as patsy and his murder by a fellow CIA agent Jack Ruby: the transcript of Ruby’s later quizzing by a clueless Chief Justice Earl Warren is worthy of that non-ironist Samuel Beckett.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Professor Marcie Frank has flattered me by a comparison to Pope. So, in ending, let me quote the last lines of the Dunciad, lines that I learned, voluntarily, as a schoolboy:

  Nor public flame nor private, dares to shine;

  Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!

  Lo! thy dread empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;

  Light dies before thy uncreating word;

  Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall,

  And universal Darkness buries all.

  In 1943 when I recited this to a classmate at the Phillips Exeter Academy, he was bewildered. “Why did you learn that?” he asked. “Because,” I said, “it’s bound to be apt one of these days.” And so it is today, January 1, 2006.

  Much time over thirty years was spent on the balcony overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Ulysses, more than usually off course, was believed to have sailed…well, rowed on the scenic route back home to Ithaca. Several miles to the back of my head are the temples of Paestum.

  PHOTO CREDITS

  Photography research by Ann Schneider

  Chapter Five: Warner Brothers/Photofest

  Chapter Six: Photofest

  Chapter Seven: Collection of Gore Vidal

  Chapter Seven: Gerald Bruneau/Grazia Neri/Polaris

  Chapter Nine: Everett Collection

  Chapter Eleven: U.P.I. Bettmann/CORBIS

  Chapter Twelve: A.P. Images

  Chapter Fourteen: Fred R. Conrad/New York Times

  Chapter Fourteen: Collection of Gore Vidal

  Chapter Sixteen: Everett Collection

  Chapter Nineteen: Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos

  Chapter Twenty: Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Sotheby’s

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Paramount Pictures/Photofest

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Keystone/Gamma

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Collection of Gore Vidal

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Everett Collection

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Phillips Exeter Academy Archives

  Chapter Thirty: Bettmann/CORBIS

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Bettmann/CORBIS

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Collection of Gore Vidal

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Collection of Gore Vidal

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Collection of Gore Vidal

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Polaris

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Collection of Gore Vidal

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Roddy McDowall

  Chapter Forty-Two: Collection of Gore Vidal

  Chapter Forty-Five: Eamonn McCabe/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Bettmann/CORBIS

  Chapter Fifty-Two: Collection of Gore Vidal

  Chapter Forty-Six: Eamonn McCabe/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-five novels, six plays, many screenplays, more than two hundred essays, and the critically lauded memoir Palimpsest. Vidal’s United States: Essays 1952–1992 won the 1993 National Book Award.

  ALSO BY GORE VIDAL

  NOVELS

  Williwaw

  In a Yellow Wood

  The City and the Pillar

  The Season of Comfort

  A Search for the King

  Dark Green, Bright Red

  The Judgment of Paris

  Messiah

  Julian

  Washington, D.C.

  Myra Breckinridge

  Two Sisters

  Burr

  Myron

  1876

  Kalki

  Creation

  Duluth

  Lincoln

  Empire

  Hollywood

  Live from Golgotha

  The Smithsonian Institution

  The Golden Age

  NONFICTION

  Inventing a Nation

  SHORT STORIES

  A Thirsty Evil

  Clouds and Eclipses

  PLAYS

  An Evening with Richard Nixon

  Weekend

  Romulus

  On the March to the Sea

  The Best Man

  Visit to a Small Planet

  ESSAYS

  Rocking the Boat

  Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship

  Homage to Daniel Shays

  Matters of Fact and of Fiction

  The Second American Revolution

  At Home

  Screening History

  United States

  The Last Empire

  Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

  Imperial America

  MEMOIR

  Palimpsest

  *1Diana Phipps’s collages (minus color) have b
een used as endpapers for this edition.

  Return to text.

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2007

  Copyright © 2006 by Gore Vidal

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.vintagebooks.com

  This book contains excerpts from How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal by Marcie Frank. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press. Reprinted with the kind permission of Duke University Press.

  Photo credits appear on Back Matter.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vidal, Gore, 1925–

  Point to point navigation : a memoir, 1964 to 2006 / Gore Vidal.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Vidal, Gore, 1925–2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3543.I26Z475 2006

  818.5409—dc22

  [B]

  2006011644

  eISBN: 978-0-307-38770-7

  v3.0

 

 

 


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