AUGUST 30
Johnson signs the Economic Opportunity Act, declares “war on poverty.”
Give him credit: he pushes legislation through faster than Jack ever did.
SEPTEMBER 5
Load the car. Pick up the blazers we had altered —Cord was to take them shopping, but of course he didn’t. Radio on loud all the way up the turnpike; by Newark, I knew the words to most of the top 40. Stopped in New York to say good-bye to my mother and for the boys to collect $10 bills from her—she called it “mad money.”
Dinner at Howard Johnson’s. Spent the night in a motel in Connecticut. Very American.
Apparently no fourteen-year-old wants an artist for a mother—before we got to each school, I was instructed to put on makeup and heels.
I’ve been feeling distant from the boys—I see Cord in their faces, and I stiffen—but after each drop-off I cried.
SEPTEMBER 7
Lunch with Cicely.
Of course, I asked her if she knew any gossip about the Warren Commission.
- Not a word.
- Not surprised. The CIA has this locked down.
- Last week you were sure it was the Cubans.
- Now I think the CIA had the Cubans do it.
- Good movie plot. But Cubans couldn’t have done it.
- Why not?
- Cubans can’t keep secrets.
- I’ve heard that the Mafia delivered bags of cash to Jack before the West Virginia primary.
- So?
- Bobby hired dozens of lawyers and went after the Mob. And if they handed West Virginia to Jack, this was a betrayal of an “understanding.”
- Mary, we know nothing about the Mafia. Nothing. Why don’t you think Oswald did it?
- Do you?
- Yes.
- Alone?
- If that’s what the Commission says.
- What does James say?
- He says what everyone in the government says: We need to put the assassination behind us, and if there’s more to find out…well, it will be revealed in time.
- But not in the Warren Report.
And we both laughed.
SEPTEMBER 15
Met LL in New York.
The best kind of date: the Met.
The best game: show me your two favorites, I’ll show you mine.
Mine: Manet’s Dead Christ with Angels, not only for the power of the image, but because nobody would associate Manet with religious art. And Caravaggio’s Denial of St. Peter, so dark that you have to get close to see their faces—and the dirt on Peter’s forehead.
LL: Cézanne’s Card Players, because the models were farmhands. De la Tour’s Fortune-Teller, because it’s satisfying to see a rich young fool get fleeced.
Then he took me to look at Garden Gathering, a story told in wall tiles. From Iran. Around 1640. Shah Abbas the First moved the capitol to be closer to the Silk Road. The seductive woman on a chaise in the center is a prostitute, sent by the Shah to greet merchants and make them feel welcome. The burns on the concubine’s arms symbolize lovers.
I thought: just the sort of tidbit I would have brought to Jack.
We went to bed.
After, he told me how much fun it is to be together.
I can see myself spending more time in New York.
SEPTEMBER 27
Warren Commission report published.
912 pages.
SEPTEMBER 28
No loose ends: a “magic” bullet, an assassin who wanted his name in the history books.100
Nothing about the CIA and Oswald.
No explanation why Oswald, a Marine, defected and came back but wasn’t arrested and jailed.
SEPTEMBER 29
Finished reading. First take: Most of it is filler. Hundreds of pages are a biography of Oswald. It’s very detailed, but nothing about his contacts with US intelligence. Maybe 10 percent is about the assassination.
The report has no criticism of the CIA or FBI.
I remember hearing a rumor that started with Douglas Dillon101: Jack wanted the crowds in Dallas to have an unobstructed view of him and Jackie, so he told the Secret Service guards to ride on the rails of his limo, and his people asked the Dallas police motorcycles to hang back.
Implication: The Secret Service didn’t fail Jack. Jack failed Jack. Jack’s vanity was partly responsible for his death.
OCTOBER 2
Phone call from Cord, snotty and angry, as usual.
- Of course you read the Report.
- Yes.
- A lot of pages to read in just a few days.
- I can’t be the only reader who did that.
- What did you learn?
- How much wasn’t there.
- Like what?
- Oswald was a radar operator in the Marines. With a “Crypto” clearance. Isn’t that higher than Top Secret?
- It doesn’t exist.
- You have to say that.
- You want to consider a conspiracy?
- I’m sitting down now, Cord. Please say it again.
- What?
- From your office in Langley, you uttered the word “conspiracy.”
- Oswald and another shooter—look into the Mafia.
- Do you think I haven’t?
- That’s my girl.
- I have more questions. May I ask a few?
- It’s not finding the answers that’s the problem, Mary. You will never find the answers. The problem—your problem—is asking the questions.
- Are you threatening me?
- What you do think?
- Not overtly.
- Not at all.
- I didn’t ask to be involved.
- You got involved the first time you took off…
I hung up.
Shaking.
OCTOBER 4
I’m thinking Oswald was never a Marxist, never a traitor—that was his cover story. He was really an agent of one of our intelligence agencies.
But what was Oswald’s motivation to kill Jack?
According to the Warren Commission: “He sought for himself a place in history—a role as ‘the great man.’”
That’s too easy.
He had to be a government agent who shot Jack at the direction of a government agency.
OCTOBER 5
The Zapruder film: Jack was shot between Frames 210 and 225. Connally was hit no later than Frame 240.
So, the shots were no more than thirty frames apart.
How often could Oswald’s rifle be fired?
FBI tests say once every 2.25 seconds—on Zapruder’s camera, that meant 40 or 41 frames.102
Come up with any theory you like, there just wasn’t enough time for Oswald to fire three shots.
Later: A piece of Jack’s head blew backward. Doesn’t that suggest there was a gunman firing from the grassy knoll?
OCTOBER 6
Oswald’s rifle: In World War II, Italian soldiers called the Mannlicher-Carcano “the humanitarian rifle” because it couldn’t hurt anyone “on purpose.”103
OCTOBER 7
Different day, different mood.
Today I think Anne was right: it’s a snipe hunt.
Castro and the Mafia? The CIA and the Mafia? Oswald and the CIA and the Mafia? Oswald, lonely loser, alone?
Today I’m tired of all this reading, thinking, talking.
Today I don’t want more time with Jack. Or to have the time we had back.
Today I wish I’d had a better use for these almost three years.
I wish I’d done something else.
OCTOBER 9
My new shrink tells me: “Never make a man a priority in your life when you are only an option in his.”
This sounds so smart. But what if you kiss a hundred frogs who won’t commit and then one guy does, and because you’re looking for a guy like that, you commit to him—and he turns out still to be a frog?
Isn’t it maybe better to recognize that we’re all options in other people’s li
ves and our most important priority is our independence?
Anne had told me, echoing something Jack said, “The cost of independence is an unspeakable loneliness.”
Anne is married. I’m not. I know better: there is nothing lonelier than waking up day after day with the wrong man, making his meals, listening to his chatter, taking him into your body.
Virginia Woolf said that when Leonard walked into the room she never knew what he was going to say—that’s the ideal marriage.
I never knew what Jack was going to say—but if we’d married, would that still have been true?
Is this shrink not really so smart?
OCTOBER 10
I need to rethink my art.
Flatness—one dimensionality—is a limitation. I want to locate brightness and have it burst out of the canvas.
Jung: “You are not what has happened to you. You are what you choose to become.”
I choose this: La vie est belle.
OCTOBER 11
Birthday dinner menu (subject to change): smoked salmon on dark bread…squash soup…roast chicken, French beans…chocolate cake/vanilla ice cream.
Order: case of champagne, four bottles red, four bottles white, Scotch.
Guests: Tony/Ben, Joe/Susan. LL?
Pleasing to think about this party.
Pleased even about forty-four.
92 Very soon after the assassination, Jackie created a story about her marriage that she would never revise: “It took a very long time for us to work everything out, but we did, and we were about to have a real life together.”
93 A French phrase, origin unknown: “The sea has risen with tears.”
94 In The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power, Garry Wills describes a note in Kennedy’s writing, scrawled just before the invasion of Cuba and found in the Kennedy Library in 1974: “Is there a plan to brief and brainwash the press within 12 hours or so?” A list followed: the New York Times, Walter Lippmann, Marquis Child, and Joseph Alsop.
95 In The Devil’s Chessboard, which details Dulles’s influence on the Commission, David Talbot quotes Earl Warren: “I don’t think Allen Dulles ever missed a meeting.” In Washington, insiders often spoke of the Warren Commission as the “Dulles Commission.”
96 At the Quorum Club in the spring of 1963, one of Jack Kennedy’s friends asked Bobby Baker who the Elizabeth Taylor look-alike was. He was pleased to learn that Ellen Rometsch was a professional. Soon she was servicing Kennedy, who told Baker that she was “the most exciting woman he had been with.” He wasn’t alone in that sentiment. As Baker told Seymour Hersh, “I must have had fifty friends who went with her, and not one of them ever complained.” At a time when Jackie was pregnant and Kennedy’s romance with Mary was becoming more serious, Kennedy entertained Rometsch “at least ten times,” occasionally at parties in the White House pool, with “everybody running around naked.”
In June, the Profumo scandal was headline news in Great Britain, triggered by the revelation that Christine Keeler, a prostitute, had been having affairs with John Profumo, the minister of war, and Yevgeny Ivanov, a Russian naval attaché. Other prostitutes were named. Two of them—Suzy Chang and Maria Novotny—had visited the United States in 1960; Kennedy had taken Chang to dinner in New York. He now feared, correctly, that he could be drawn into the Profumo story.
On July 3, J. Edgar Hoover told Robert Kennedy about Ellen Rometsch. She was more than a party girl, he said; she was from East Germany and had worked for Walter Ulbricht, one of the founders of the Communist Party in East Germany. A month later, as the FBI began investigating Rometsch, she was deported, flying to Germany on a US Air Force transport plane, accompanied by La Verne Duffy, Robert Kennedy’s longtime investigator. According to Seymour Hersh, the Kennedys sent Rometsch, through a Kennedy loyalist, between $5,000 to $50,000. Records of Rometsch’s deportation have been lost or destroyed—if they ever existed.
97 Quotations from Jacqueline Kennedy are from interviews with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. She died in 1994. The book, with an introduction by her daughter, was published in 2011.
98 Dorothy Kilgallen (1913–1965) was the best-known female newspaper reporter and columnist in the United States and a panelist on What’s My Line? from its first broadcast in 1950 until her death. Her column in the New York Journal-American was syndicated to 200 American newspapers. Ernest Hemingway called her “the greatest female writer in the world.”
Kilgallen praised JFK often in her Journal-American column. In 1962, Pierre Salinger arranged for her and her eight-year-old son to visit the White House and meet the president.
In a column published a week after the president’s assassination, Kilgallen wrote: “I’d like to know how, in a big, smart town like Dallas, a man like Jack Ruby…can stroll in and out of police headquarters as if it was a health club at a time when a small army of law enforcers is keeping a ‘tight security guard’ on Oswald. Security! What a word for it!”
Later Kilgallen columns were bluntly dismissive of the FBI belief that Ruby shot Oswald for personal reasons. Ruby, she wrote, was a gangster with ties to local police, and his murder of Oswald was a Mafia hit.
In March 1964, Kilgallen went to Dallas to report on Jack Ruby’s murder trial. She was the only reporter to privately interview Ruby. Twice, each time for ten minutes.
99 On November 8, 1965, Kilgallen was found dead in a bedroom in her New York City townhouse. Some friends say that was a room she never slept in, and that she was dressed in clothes she never wore when going to sleep. The autopsy report gave the cause of Kilgallen’s death as “Acute Ethanol [alcohol] and [prescription] barbiturate intoxication. Circumstances Undetermined.” Kilgallen was not an alcohol or prescription drug abuser.
Kilgallen sometimes carried a thick folder of documents that she said were about the assassination. “If the wrong people knew what I know,” she said, “it could cost me my life.” After her death, the folder of assassination research was never seen again.
100 Mary didn’t know it, but the “magic” bullet wasn’t universally accepted by the members of the Warren Commission. Although Senator Richard Russell attended fewer hearings than any other commissioner, he didn’t agree with its findings. When the report was published, he called President Johnson to say that.
Russell: “They were trying to prove that the same bullet that hit Kennedy first was the one that hit Connally, went through him and through his hand, his bone, into his leg and everything else.”
Johnson: “What difference does it make which bullet got Connally?”
Russell: “It don’t make much difference. But they said that…the commission believes that the same bullet that hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well, I don’t believe it.”
Johnson: “I don’t either.”
Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate.com on November 14, 2013, addresses the objection to the Warren Commission’s conclusion that one “magic” bullet hit both Kennedy and Connally. He notes: “In November 2003, on the murder’s 40th anniversary, I watched an ABC News documentary called The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy. In one segment, the producers showed the actual car in which the president and the others had been riding that day. One feature of the car, which I’d never heard or read about before, made my jaw literally drop. The back seat, where JFK rode, was three inches higher than the front seat, where Connally rode. Once that adjustment was made, the line from Oswald’s rifle to Kennedy’s upper back to Connally’s ribcage and wrist appeared absolutely straight. There was no need for a magic bullet.”
101 Douglas Dillon (1909–2003) was secretary of the Treasury from 1961 to 1965; the Secret Service reported to him. He was a patrician, with an extraordinary Establishment life for a man whose paternal grandfather, Samuel Lapowski, was a Jewish immigrant from Poland; Dillon’s father, a Harvard graduate, changed his name to Dillon, his mother’s maiden name. His career trajectory was impeccable. Groton. Harvard. Chairman o
f Dillon, Reed, the Wall Street firm named for his father. Ambassador to France. Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. President of the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum. Government rules prevented Treasury officials from owning alcohol-beverage companies, so he gave the Pessac-Léognan estate—which owned Château Haut-Brion, the only French estate of prominence owned by Americans—to his children.
In The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot writes: “Over the final months of JFK’s presidency, a clear consensus took shape within America’s deep state: Kennedy was a national security threat. For the good of the country, he must be removed… In the case of Doug Dillon—who oversaw Kennedy’s Secret Service apparatus—it simply meant making sure that he was out of town. At the end of October, Dillon notified the president that he planned to take a ‘deferred summer vacation’ in November, abandoning his Washington post for Hobe Sound until the eighteenth of the month. After that, Dillon informed Kennedy, he planned to fly to Tokyo with other cabinet members on an official visit that would keep him out of the country from November 21 to November 27.”
Out of town. Out of touch.
102 In 1975, CBS News hired a tech firm to make a high-resolution analysis of the Zapruder film, using recently developed instruments. The firm discovered that, on Frame 312, Kennedy’s head slammed a tiny bit forward and, an instant later on Frame 313, much more quickly jolted backward. The implication: the bullet hit his head from behind, pushing him forward, then a nerve exploded, which happened to push him backward.
103 In Testing the War Weapons: Rifles and Light Machine Guns from Around the World, Timothy J. Mullin—who served in the US Army for almost seven years, first as an infantry officer and later as an officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps—writes that he fired more than a hundred different military weapons. He found Oswald’s rifle one of the five best rifles he tested: “The M91 Italian Carcano carbine with fixed sights…was the best rifle fielded by the Italians during the war and much better than any other bolt action rifle used in the two world wars…”
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