His inquiry, Draznin went on, continued "on and off for over a year"---longer, ironically, than the work of the Warren Commission, the august group established by President Johnson to investigate the assassination. Draznin spoke once a week or so to Walter Sheridan, a Justice Department expert on organized crime. By early 1964, Draznin said, "we talked much less," and he fell out of touch with his Justice Department contact. Eventually, Draznin met privately in Chicago with Bobby Kennedy and told him, he said, that Jack Ruby had acted alone in killing Oswald. "Ruby thought [killing Oswald] was a patriotic act," Draznin told me. "I believe it to this day. I picked up nothing at all tying it to Chicago mob men."
Over the next thirty-five years, the nation would remain obsessed with the Kennedy assassination. Hundreds of books would be written, full of feverish speculation about Oswald and Ruby and their possible links to organized crime or Soviet intelligence. In five years of reporting for this book, I found nothing that would change the instinctive conclusions of Julius Draznin, or the much more detailed findings of the Warren Commission---Oswald and Ruby acted alone.
Bobby Kennedy seems to have kept his deepest fears about his brother's murderers to himself. In interviews for this book, his closest aides offered differing opinions, based on their conversations with Kennedy, about the possibility of conspiracy. Kennedy told some friends that he accepted the Warren Commission's conclusions; to others, he suggested that the full story might never be known.
Kennedy was much more forthcoming with Georgi Bolshakov, his old back-channel colleague, who had been sent home to Moscow after the Kennedy brothers thought he had betrayed them during the Cuban missile crisis and stopped talking to him. Soviet files made available in the mid-1990s to Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali for their book "One Hell of a Gamble" revealed that Bobby Kennedy sent an emissary to Moscow in late November of 1963. The emissary was William Walton, an abstract painter and former journalist who was a family insider and had stayed close to Jack Kennedy after he got to the White House. Walton, who died in 1994, had been scheduled to fly to Moscow on November 22 to meet with Soviet artists. But he flew a week later, with a different mission: to find Bolshakov and urge him to advise the Soviet leadership to remain resolute during the regime of Lyndon Johnson. Bobby Kennedy would one day return as president.
Walton told Bolshakov, according to the Soviet files, that the Kennedys believed that a major political conspiracy was behind Jack Kennedy's murder. Walton also dramatically described how the crime devastated the Kennedy circle and threw Washington into confusion; only McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, had the presence of mind to run the affairs of state. When the grief-stricken Bobby Kennedy finally got to bed on the night of November 22, Walton told Bolshakov, he spent the next few hours weeping, unable to sleep. According to Walton, wrote Fursenko and Naftali, "the Kennedy clan considered the selection of Johnson [as vice president] a dreadful mistake. 'He is a clever timeserver,' Walton explained, who would be 'incapable of realizing Kennedy's unfinished plans.'" The one hope for the future of U.S.-Soviet relations was Robert McNamara, who would remain in the Johnson cabinet as secretary of defense. Bobby Kennedy, Walton told Bolshakov, would stay on as attorney general through the end of 1964 and then run for governor of Massachusetts before beginning a campaign for the presidency. "Walton, and presumably Kennedy," Fursenko and Naftali wrote, "wanted Khrushchev to know that only RFK could implement John Kennedy's vision and that the cooling that might occur in U.S.-Soviet relations because of Johnson would not last forever." It was explained that, contrary to what some in the Kremlin might think, Robert Kennedy shared all his brother's progressive views. "If Robert differed from Jack," the Soviet files said, "it was only in that he is a harder man; but as for his views, Robert agreed completely with his brother and, more important, actively sought to bring John F. Kennedy's ideas to fruition."*
By early Saturday, November 23, John F. Kennedy's most important papers---official and unofficial---had been moved intact by the Secret Service to the most secure room in the White House complex: suite 300 of the Executive Office Building, in a hallway that housed offices of the National Security Council staff. The hallway was under twenty-four-hour armed guard.
The office was a fitting place for the president's papers: its previous occupant had been General Maxwell Taylor and the top-secret files of his Special Group for Counterinsurgency. The president's papers would remain in locked files and under armed guard in the Executive Office Building until they were moved for safekeeping to the National Archives. "I secured the place," James R. Dingeman, an army major who was then executive secretary of the Special Group, told me in a 1993 interview for this book. "Nobody came in except one Saturday morning" in early 1964, he said, "when Mrs. Kennedy and Bobby came."
Sometime early in the year, said Dingeman, a navy yeoman named George E. Dalton, who had demonstrated his loyalty to the family while on assignment at Hyannis Port, was transferred to Washington and put in charge of the documents. "He used to call me down to read some of Kennedy's writing, because I write as badly as Kennedy did. [Dalton] was going through all the papers." The papers were still in room 300, Dingeman said, when he was reassigned to Europe in the summer of 1964.
Dalton, who later would join Senator Ted Kennedy's personal staff after retiring from the navy, stayed on, culling and removing documents from the Kennedy papers. He also did a preliminary review of the Oval Office tape recordings and prepared transcripts. There was nothing subtle about Dalton's mission: to screen the tapes and papers for sensitive materials that were to be erased or removed. Dalton bragged in the mid-1970s to Richard Burke, a colleague in Ted Kennedy's office, that his mission with the tape recordings was to edit out "anything that would reflect badly on the family." Burke, who spent ten years as a personal aide to Senator Kennedy (and wrote a controversial and bestselling book in 1992 about those years), told me in a 1994 interview that he had read some of the Oval Office transcripts prepared by Dalton, which had been left on file in Ted Kennedy's office safe. The transcripts included a series of Oval Office telephone conversations between Jack Kennedy and two important women in his life, Judith Exner and Marilyn Monroe. There was much explicit talk of a sexual nature with Monroe, Burke said. The transcripts also revealed presidential talk of "cash payments" to various people and discussions of "federal grants and payments." Dalton told him, Burke said, that he had erased all of the references to cash payments from the tapes.
John F. Kennedy's papers and tapes were eventually transferred to the Federal Archives and Records Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, where the fledgling Kennedy Library began a custodial and processing activity. The Kennedy family formally deeded the president's papers and the White House tape recordings to the federal government in May 1976, and the Kennedy Library assumed physical control of the materials. By then, George Dalton and other Kennedy family insiders had had nearly thirteen years to do what they wished with the documents and recordings.
Dalton's transcripts, as a Kennedy Library archivist told me in 1994, were "ineptly done---riddled with errors and omissions---and hence useless for content research." Some of the tapes included what the archivist, who wished not to be named, depicted as "puzzling anomalies," with sections apparently spliced and removed. The library acknowledged to a reporter for the Boston Globe in 1993 that other tapes had been wound backwards, and at least nine tape boxes, as numbered by the Secret Service at the time of the recordings, were empty. In a history of its collection of presidential recordings, published in 1985, the library acknowledged that it could not be doubted "that at least some items were removed." The history also said that a preliminary survey of the tapes, made at the time the library took possession, "did not reveal tampering." George Dalton, who according to the Globe is today the owner of a string of gas stations in the Washington area, moved in the late 1980s to a home in a luxury area in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. He has refused all interview requests in the past five years.
Over the next few
weeks, as the reality set in---and the reality included the fact that Lyndon Johnson was president---the toll it took on Robert Kennedy began to show. In early 1964 Frank Mankiewicz, then working for the Peace Corps, was ordered by his superiors to discuss the pending War on Poverty with the attorney general, who had championed the legislation. "I must say," Mankiewicz told me in a 1994 interview, "I have never been as appalled at the sight of a human being since seeing a concentration camp as a nineteen-year-old infantryman. He was so wasted, like he disappeared into his shirt." Kennedy was "haunted" and "thin-wristed," Mankiewicz added. "He seemed out of it. The only thing he said was, 'Is this the program President Kennedy had in mind?' My thought was that this guy is not going to be a figure in American life again. He was going to get smaller and smaller and disappear. I've always thought that may be the reason he didn't talk about it [his brother's murder]. He knew talking could not bring him back to life, so why talk? I felt so sad." Kennedy recovered in time to win a tough campaign in the fall of 1964 for a seat in the Senate from New York, and Mankiewicz eventually became his press secretary.
Robert Kennedy did nothing to pursue the truth behind his brother's death in 1964. He would have done nothing even if he had won the Democratic nomination in 1968 and the presidency. The price of a full investigation was much too high: making public the truth about President Kennedy and the Kennedy family. It was this fear, certainly, that kept Robert Kennedy from testifying before the Warren Commission.
In a letter dated June 11, 1964, Earl Warren, the head of the commission, who was also Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, asked Kennedy whether he was "aware of any additional information relating to the assassination ... which has not been sent to the Commission." Two months later Kennedy sent Warren a reply stating that he knew of no evidence suggesting that his brother had been murdered by "a domestic or foreign conspiracy." He added, "I have no suggestions to make at this time regarding any additional investigation which should be undertaken by the Commission prior to the publication of its report." He was not asked to testify.
* * *
* Over the next few months, Jack Kennedy's grieving admirers continued to undercut Lyndon Johnson with the Soviet Union, according to Fursenko and Naftali. In early 1964, they wrote, Charles Bartlett approached a Soviet intelligence source in New York and warned him that Johnson was not to be trusted. Soviet intelligence files quoted Bartlett as saying that Johnson was "a pragmatic and experienced politician who would change Kennedy's course with regard to the achievement of agreements with the USSR if it seemed advantageous to him." The new president, Bartlett added, "would never equal Kennedy in terms of the consistency and sincerity of his thinking on relations with the USSR." The Soviet fears about the new man in the White House turned out to be unfounded, as Johnson quickly reassured Moscow that he would continue Kennedy's open-door policy. The Soviets were further informed, however, according to their intelligence files, that the new president would no longer pass messages through Ambassador Dobrynin. Even the most sensitive of communications were now to be relayed, as they had been prior to the Kennedy administration, through the American ambassador in Moscow and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The back channel was over.
CHAPTER NOTES
1. November 22
The best account of November 22 remains William Manchester's The Death of a President, published in 1967 by Harper and Row. Charles Spalding was interviewed by telephone and then at his home in Hillsborough, California, in May 1997. Martin E. Underwood was interviewed in Baltimore in July 1996 and January 1997. Charles Bartlett provided the author with some of his memoranda to John F. Kennedy and other documents during an interview at his Washington office in March 1994; other documents were provided in many subsequent interviews. Bartlett was interviewed on camera for Lancer Productions at his office in June 1997. Robert Bouck was interviewed at his home in suburban Virginia in December 1995. The John F. Kennedy Library at Columbia Point in Boston published a detailed memorandum on the White House taping system in April 1985; copies are available from the library. Philip Bennett of the Boston Globe wrote a series of penetrating articles on the taping system in March and April of 1993. Julius Draznin was interviewed four times for this book, beginning in April 1994 in Los Angeles and continuing in Chicago, where he moved, through the fall of 1997. He was interviewed at his home for Lancer Productions in June 1997. Evelyn Lincoln was interviewed three times in her suburban Maryland apartment, beginning in March of 1994. Tony Sherman of the Secret Service was interviewed twice, in March 1995 in Green Valley, Arizona, and again in March 1997 at his new home in Salt Lake City. Sidney Mickelson was interviewed by telephone and over lunch near his art gallery in downtown Washington in April 1996.
2. Jack
The most compelling biography of John F. Kennedy is Nigel Hamilton's JFK: Reckless Youth, published by Random House in 1992. Hamilton did not write a planned second volume. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, published by Simon and Schuster in 1987, also was invaluable. Other useful studies include President Kennedy, by Richard Reeves, published in 1993 by Simon and Schuster; Front Runner, Dark Horse, by Ralph G. Martin and Ed Plaut, published in 1960 by Doubleday; and two volumes by historian Herbert S. Parmet, Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (Dial, 1980), and JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Dial, 1983). Jewel Reed was interviewed by telephone in December 1994, and for Lancer Productions at her home in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, in June 1997. Joseph Kennedy's fatalistic comments about his son were cited by William Manchester in Portrait of a President, published by Little, Brown in 1962. Marcus Raskin was interviewed in Washington twice, in December 1993 and April 1994, for this book, and in September 1996 for Lancer Productions. Larry Newman of the Secret Service was interviewed many times by telephone and at home in Fort Collins, Colorado, beginning in February 1995. He was interviewed in February and again in March of 1997 for Lancer Productions. Gloria Emerson was interviewed for this book and for Lancer Productions in New York City in June 1997. Hugh Sidey was interviewed in his offices at Time magazine in January 1995, and for Lancer Productions in May 1997. Joe Naar was interviewed at his home in Brentwood, California, for this book and for Lancer Productions in March 1997. Mrs. Betty Spalding was interviewed many times by telephone, beginning in January 1995, and at her home in Hartford, Connecticut, in May 1997. Dominick Dunne was interviewed by telephone from his home in Connecticut in December 1994. Bobby Baker was interviewed many times by telephone and at his home in Washington, beginning in February 1995. He was interviewed by Lancer Productions in Washington in September 1996 and May 1997. Richard Goodwin was interviewed by telephone many times, beginning in March 1994, and by Lancer Productions at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, in June 1997. Ralph Dungan kindly interceded with the Kennedy Library to allow me access to his closed oral history interview. Ben Bradlee was interviewed for this book and for Lancer Productions in Washington in September 1997. Jerry Bruno was interviewed three times by telephone, beginning in March 1994, and at his home in Portland, Maine, in May 1995.
3. Honey Fitz
The most detailed biography of John F. Fitzgerald is "Honey Fitz": Three Steps to the White House, by John Henry Cutler, published in 1962 by Bobbs-Merrill. See also "Honey Fitz," by Richard Russell, in American Heritage magazine, August 1968. The House debate that led to Fitzgerald's ouster from Congress can be found in the Congressional Record for October 23, 1919, beginning at page 7391. Fitzgerald's demise was headline news: see the Boston Herald for October 24, "House Votes to Oust Fitzgerald; Tague Then Takes His Seat." Chester Cooper was interviewed in Washington in December 1994.
4. Joe
There are two excellent biographies of Joseph Kennedy: The Founding Father, a pathbreaking book by Richard J. Whalen, published in 1964 by New American Library, and Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times, by David E. Koskoff, published by Prentice-Hall in 1974 (many of Koskoff's interviews were done a decade earlier). Ronald Kessler's The Sins of the Father, published by Warner
Books in 1996, contains much new information. Cartha DeLoach was interviewed for this book and for Lancer Productions at his home in Hilton Head, South Carolina, in June 1997. Harold E. Clancy was interviewed at his home in Boston in May 1995 and April 1997. Q. Byrum Hurst was interviewed by telephone by researcher Michael Ewing in February 1996. Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz was interviewed for this book and for Lancer Productions in his chambers in Chicago in June 1997. Mark Stuart's biography, Gangster #2: Longy Zwillman, the Man Who Invented Organized Crime, was published in 1985 by Lyle Stuart. The cited biography by Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau is entitled Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob, published in 1979 by Paddington Press. The testimony of Thomas J. Cassara can be found in Part I of the Senate Hearings Before a Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, known as the Kefauver hearings, that took place between May and September 1950. Daniel P. Sullivan and Charles "Joey" Fusco also testified before Kefauver. The Cassara link to Kennedy has received little attention, but was cited by the journalist Stephen Fox in Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America, published in 1989 by Morrow. Sandy Smith provided excellent guidance on organized crime in Chicago in many interviews, beginning in December 1993, on the telephone and at his home in Seeley Lake, Montana. He was interviewed for Lancer Productions in March 1997. Richard Rosenthal was interviewed in his office in Stamford, Connecticut, in April 1995. Milton Gould was interviewed in his New York office in April 1995. Edward K. Linen was interviewed by telephone in May 1995.
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