Echoes of Dallas - the JFK assassination fifteen years later

The gunshots that cut down Presiident Kennedy 15 years ago still echo through American history, still haunt the national imagination. In the weeks and months after the murder President Johnson urged the Warren Commission towards its definitive verrdict. That commission, which included congressman - later President - Jerry Ford, reviewed the testimony of hunndreds of people. Among them were Marina Oswald, Governor John Connally and Mrs. Connally who had been in the same car as Kennedy himself. The Commmission, as we all know, concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin.
A decade and a half later, in these last weeks, Ford and Connally and Marina have been testifying before a special Congressional committee in Washington about these same events. In the committee room were schoolchilldren not even born in 1963, listening to the bewildered footsteps shuffling down the same interminable labyrinth, purrsuing the same questions: how many shots were there, where did they come from, who were Lee Harvey Oswald's friends, who were Jack Ruby's friends? Who? How? Why?

There are scholiasts of the assassinaation so versed in its mysteries that their explanations and theories defy the commprehension of ordinary mortals. They are adepts speaking in an allusive idiom presupposing a dedicated expertise as great as their own. They speak of the "two Oswalds" theory, the "umbrella man", the three hundred and thirteenth frame of the Zapruder film (stills of which are reproduced on pages 48,49 and 50). Behind each allusion lies the preferred solution: it was the Mafia, or Big Oil, or the Cubans, or the CIA, or the CIA, or. ..

Five years ago I had occasion to visit I Dallas and arranged to meet a local connspiracy buff. He took me to what he reeferred to as "the place". There were the features familiar from a hundred thoussand photographs: the book depository, the overpass, Dealey Plaza, the grassy knoll in front of which a man called Zapruder raised his home movie camera and levelled it at President Kennedy at 12.30 in the morning of November 22, 1963. Everything was on a smaller scale than I had imagined. The distance from the fifth floor window to the turn on Main Street seemed almost as negotiiable as that in a fairground shooting booth.

I asked the buff for a full, expert's tour of the terrain and the theories that have flourished on it like weeds. The tour took three hours. A gouge in the pavement became a fifth shot, a nick in the overpass wall another. There were shots from here, and here, and there, too. Over there was where three "tramps" had been espied at the same time of the shots. Here was the wall beehind which yet another "marksman" had been spotted. So how many shots had there been, I finally asked. Thirteen or fourteen. And how many people innvolved in the ambuscade? At least half a dozen.

At home the buff showed me his archive of photographs. He had names for many of the denizens of Dealey Plaza on that day. The "umbrella man" because the person in one photograph gazing at the limousine a minute before the shots was carrying an umbrella; the "babushka woman", so called because this unidentified person was wearing a shawl. All these. people were, in the buff's view, co-conspirators. Behind them, in his fevered and anti-semitic immagination, lay the true sponsors: big business, the eastern banks, and (here he lowered his voice) THEM. (The Jews.)

This was five years ago. Last month an investigator from the Congressional committee finally unearthed the famous "umbrella man". He was now working as a garage attendant in Dallas. He had indeed been in Dealey Plaza that day. So why had he waved his umbrella? Was this a signal for a fusillade? The garage attendant explained himself. He had dissapproved of the Kennedy family's poliitics. He had gone to Dealey Plaza to wave his umbrella in the belief that this gesture would in its symbolism remind the President of Neville Chamberlain and the perils of appeasement. Old Joe Kennedy had appeased the Nazis. Young Jack was appeasing the Commuunists. This was the view of the umbrella man and he stated it firmly fifteen years later.

Thus are small mysteries cleared up. (Though not fully, of course, since buffs so inclined continue to view the ummbrella man's explanation as pitiably thin and indeed as virtual confirmation of some darker cornplicity.) But what of the larger mysteries? Are there answers to them too?

To describe the "state of art" in asssassination theory would be a task far too gargantuan for these pages. There are some simple assertions that can be made, which would be controoverted only by the most refractory of scholiasts. There is no doubt that Oswald himself fired the MannlicherrCarcano out the window of the schoollbook depository, and that bullets from this gun killed the President. It has never been satisfactorily demonstrated that anyone else fired shots at the Presiident that day. Thus the most elemenntary of the Warren Commission's finddings - that Oswald was the assassin holds;

But was he the "lone" assassin, in the sense that he had no sponsors or accommplices, whether present or not at the scene? For many years, attention, in this matter, was focussed on Jack Ruby, the man who publicly killed Oswald on November 24 and who died of cancer four years later.

Ruby, so a common theory ran, was an agent in the conspiracy whose task had been to eliminate its primary agent and thus snap the chain of evidence. But no evidence has ever been produced to link Ruby with Oswald. Ruby himself owned a sleazy nightclub and thus had contacts with criminals. It is a leap commmonly made by conspiracy theorists to assume that these criminals were a more potent entity, in the form of "organised crime", which wished to kill Kennedy as revenge for the federal persecution of the Mafia.

Ruby, submitted to extensive interroogation and. polygraph testing to the day of his death, never uttered a word to buttress such notions; and indeed the evidence is fairly persuasive that he was the lone, assassin Of Oswald, acting without allies or sponsors.

No convincing evidence has ever been produced. either to support the view that Oswald was backed by right-wing Texan oilmen - people who admittedly were not overly distressed to hear of the President's demise. The bizarre claim, made in the late 1960s at the height of the Vietnam war, that President J ohnnson might somehow have been implicaated, merely underlined the wishing motivation behind the big oil/big business theory.

But if the years have vanquished these theories, they have brought in their passing far greater illumination on matters ignored or suppressed in the findings of the Warren Commission: namely the personality of Oswald himmself and the conduct of the two main agencies concerned with him - the FBI and the CIA.

Earlier this year there, appeared a book by Edward Jay Epstein - one of the first and most lucid critics of the Warren Commission - called Legend: the Secret Wurld of Lee Harvey Oswald. Epstein; backed by half a million dollars from the Reader's Digest, set out to penetrate the opaque career of Oswald himself. After two years of interviewing Oswald's associates in the US Marines, friends in Texas, acquaintances during his sojourn in the Soviet Union, Epstein painted a startlingly novel picture.

Oswald in his adolescence was a larrgely self-taught socialist. In his spell in the Marines he was stationed on a U-2 base in Japan. It was at the time the Soviet Union was ardently seeking ways of shooting down these high-flying spy planes. Epstein produced much convinncing evidence that Oswald was recruited by the KGB to furnish details of the U-2s performance, which later led to the successful downing of the plane flown by Francis Gary Powers. Subsequently Oswald def~cted to the Soviet Union.

It is "Epstein's contention that Oswald's residence in the Soviet Union was sponsoredtby the KGB and that he returned to the United States in the hopes that he could perform further serrvices for the Soviet Union. Epstein adds that from the Russian point of view Oswald may have been a burned-out case, with no further practical usefullness.

In the weeks before the assassination, Oswald made repeated attempts to reach Cuba and publicly identified himmself with movements supportive of Fidel Castro. Now it is Epstein's stated view that Oswald was not incited to the assassination by either the Soviet Union or Cuba but that his sudden lone explosion into murder on November 22 placed at least the former country in a hideous dilemma.

If it were ever to emerge that Oswald had been a spy for the Soviet Union, the international consequence would have been dire in the extreme. Thus it was that two months after the assassination a KGB officer claiming to have been in charge of the Oswald file in Moscow deefected in Geneva. In subsequent debrieefing sessions he made one consistent claim - that Oswald had never worked for the KGB.

His claim fell on willing ears both in the CIA and the FBI. Almost immediaately after November 22, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, realised that in all probability his organisation would emerge gravely discredited from the affair. Indeed he wrote in a memoorandum that delinquencies in the invesstigation of Oswald "have resulted in forever destroying the Bureau as the top level investigative organization." He was right. The FBI had failed to monitor Oswald after his return from the Soviet Union, even though he was a known deefector. It had failed to follow up eviidence linking him to the attempt on General Walker. Someone - almost cerrtainly Oswald - had tried to shoot this John Bircher earlier in 1963. And the FBI had not placed Oswald under surrveillance when Kennedy came to Dallas.

Three years ago it emerged that Oswald had sent a threatening note to the FBI in Dallas, threatening to blow up its offices there. This note was ignored and on Hoover's orders Agent Hosty destroyed it after the assassination.

Thus it was absolutely in the FBI's interest to take at face value the story of the Soviet defector. The two security bureaucracies had a community of innterest in innoculating Oswald from any outside influences - in making him "lone". And this community of innterest was joined by the CIA, which had a similar desire to avoid exposure of its own incompetence in adequately trackking Oswald or - to take things to a more complex level - to conceal deallings it may have had with him in Texas, either as a double agent or an agent from the very start.

Despite passionate objections from within its own ranks - a savage intraaagency row which continues to this very day - the CIA joined with the FBI in asserting to the Warren Commission that Oswald had no intelligence connections and no suspicion of foreign sponsorship present or past.

Behind the CIA's discretion lay a far more savage irony. On the very morning that Kennedy was shot, a high CIA offiicer in Paris was handing a Cuban doubleeagent named Rolando Cub ella a lethal hypodermic disguised as a fountain pen. The implement was to be used to murrder Castro.

Thus those schoolchildren listening . to the proceedings of the congresss.lOn~1 committee in Washington today live 111 a more sophisticated and sadder world than that of 1963. President Kennedy, the fallen hero, almost cerrtainly knew of the attempts to kill Castro. Those respected agencies, the FBI and CIA, which were almost immmune to criticism in 1963 and whose testimony to the Warren Commission was attended with respect, have been exposed as self-serving bureaucracies sponsoring deception, cover-ups, desstruction of evidence and murder ittself.

The assassination of President Kennedy has not been "solved". Had, for example, Castro sponsored a "get Kennedy" bid before Kennedy could get him? A tape-recording of Castro vehemently protesting such a notion, saying somewhat persuasively that it would have been "an act of madness", was played in the committee room last month. Many mysteries persist. Why did Officer V.D. Tippit stop outside Oswald's house just after the assassinaation and hoot his horn? Why did Oswald kill him? If it had not been for this act Oswald would have not been arrested in the Texas Theatre. It must be rememmbered that up until this moment Oswald had engineered a most professional murrder. The ambush site was well chosen, at a point where the president's car was bound to be virtually stationary as it made the turn. Oswald had efficiently escaped from the book depository and made his way home. Many detectives think that he was on his way to a hideeout in Dallas where he could have stayyed for three weeks, grown a beard and ultimately escaped. The shooting of Tippit is the inexplicable termination of his venture, well accomplished to that point.

It is impossible to say that Oswald ultimately acted alone, even if one may surmise that he did so out of ideological conviction, a desire to "prove" himself as an agent in history as he had been in the U-2 case. These are mysteries that endure. But the ongoing national obsesssion with the murder of this President is like some generation-long act of selffanalysis, summoning a return of the reepressed. Was it the right-wing millionnaires, the Mafia, the FBI, the CIA, a lone paranoid? All elements of Ameriican civilisation, all revealed over the years as linked in horrible ways. Kennedy used the Mafia to try to kill Castro .. .ironies on ironies. The murder is not solved, but attempted solutions have explained much else .•

*****
JFK: A reassessment

Is the obsession with his assassinaation merely an index of a larger sense of loss: of President Kennedy himmself? Is he still as cherished an object of grief and admiration as in the months that followed his death?

The answer is obviously no. No huuman being could possibly retain such a halo. And the years have not been kind with his political testament.

First and most evidently there is the matter of Vietnam. It was Eisenhower and Dulles who began the escalation there. It was Johnson who finally superrintended the dispatch of half a million US troops to South East Asia. But Preesident Kennedy was the active intermeddiary between premonitory Armagedon and its final realisation under LBJ and Nixon. Under Kennedy came the murrder of Ngo Dinh Diem. Under Kennedy the best and the brightest entered the valley of the shadows.

And President Kennedy presided over that first debacle, the Bay of Pigs. Not his initiative, say his apologists, but disaster did not bring repentance. The secret war against Castro, replete with US sponsored assaults on Cuba from Florida, and numerous attempts at asssassination, were approved by Kennedy and his brother Bobby. The New Fronntier was often - with the crisp talk of counter insurgency and the like - scarrcely a blessing to the world on which it was inflicted.

Apologists claim that Kennedy, in the days before his death, was planning withdrawal from Vietnam: that gung-ho crusading was yielding to saner policies. There is some evidence for this, but to say what might have been does Hot canncel what was.

Similarly, apologists point out that the LBJ of the Great Society and the civil rights achievements of the mid 1960s would not have won these triummphs had not such an age and climate of reform been inaugurated by Kennedy. There is more truth here. Some nostallgic spirits these days praise the comforrtable years of Eisenhower. The bigotry and conservative complacency of the 1950s are nonetheless palpable and inneradicable and the contrary spirit of the 1960s was indeed one which did form the better part of that New Frontier innvoked by President Kennedy.

Watergate brought downfall to Nixon but also tarnished the memory of a forrmer President. Indeed, a conservative propagandist gleefully wrote a book called It Didn't Start With Watergate, by which he meant that Kennedy had done things as bad as Nixon. This is ridicullous. But revealed in unwholesome detail in the post-Watergate blood-letting were Kennedy's own seedier traits: the ambit of his sexual enthusiasm which includded, in the tritest of cliches, a gangster's moll (Judith Exner); and when people were asking in 1972 and 1973 whether Nixon stole an election there were bound to be questions, never answered satisfactorily, as to who stole what in 1960, particularly in the Illinois bastion of JFK's great ally, Mayor Daley.

Kennedy was not a great president.

He did not have time to be, and at the moment of his death - that visit to Texas being a prudent piece of fenceemending with southern conservatives Hit is not clear whether the electorate would have allowed him those extra four years.

These days, in the unadventurous conservatism of the 1970s, with a latter day equivalent of Hoover in the White House, there are many enthusiasts for Camelot; much yearning that one of its surviving denizens, in the form of Teddy Kennedy, rebuild the kingdom, even if on a more modest, less imperial style.

(Conservatives, it should be added, in the present tax cutting frenzy sweeping the United States, fondly evoke Presiident Kennedy's tax cuts as the symbol for their present campaign.)

Kennedy's presidency was on the cusp of so many contrary acts and inntentions: of vaulting often specious rheetoric (Ask not, etc.), of modest political performance, of reforming hope and tactical compromise. His tenure was the beginning of an education for a new political generation, just as the inspecction of. his assassination has, in many strange and unpalatable ways, continued this education even until today. AC.