The Forever Conspiracy and the Family Jewels

No, not those family jewels, sunshine…

This week, the CIA announced that it was releasing files that had been long-held classified called “The Family Jewels”, supposedly shedding light on some of the more unsavory CIA activities of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s… all kinds of stuff about assassination plots, coups, and other black arts of spy-vs-spy skullduggery. I’m not sure what the point of all this is at this point in time. Are they trying to make us think they aren’t into anything shady right now?

My 60’s reminiscing continues… Sam Cooke, my playlist, Martin Luther King…. About a week or two ago, I was browsing in a bookstore, and came across a new book by David Talbot called Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.

A lot of people look at an older, bloated, and somewhat dissipated Teddy Kennedy today and see him as a comical figure. The Wizard of “Uhs” who can’t put a coherent thought together without a prepared script (which is unjust, because TK will go down in history as one of the most titanic figures in the history of the U.S. Senate, and I’m not talking about his girth). This is a shame, because it makes people who should know better forget what sharp minds of great acuity JFK and RFK had. In addition, they were fearless and had great toughness. The downside was that they could be secretive and quite ruthless, especially Bobby.

November 22, 1963, the day that JFK was assassinated, was one of my earliest conscious memories. I was over in my friend’s sandbox across the street, and my mother called me home, very agitated. I stayed glued to her side, watching the drama unfold on television over the next few days as she tearfully explained to me as best as she could what was going on. When I saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

That day was one of those turning points in history (there’s a term for it, I can’t recall right now what it is). It marked a complete paradigm shift. The world after 1963 was never the same as it was before 1963. It was the end of naïve optimism that things would always get better, and it was the end of unquestioning trust in the government.

Getting back to Talbot’s book… I did one of those standing 20-minute first chapter reads and I was fascinated. When Bobby Kennedy got the call from FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover that his brother had been shot, he was at his suburban home in Hickory Hill Virginia.

Talbot writes…

On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, Robert F. Kennedy--J.F.K.'s younger brother, Attorney General and devoted watchman--was eating lunch at Hickory Hill, his Virginia home, when he got the news from Dallas. It was his archenemy, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, of all people, who phoned to tell him. "The President's been shot," Hoover curtly said. Bobby later recalled, "I think he told me with pleasure."

Later on, Hoover called and told him just as bluntly, “The President is dead.”

It has been known for a long time that Bobby Kennedy never thought much of the Warren Commission Report, and had his own theories about what happened, but according to Talbot, Bobby sussed the whole thing out with his quick analytical mind right there that afternoon in Hickory Hill, with a series of quick rapid-fire phone calls and a backyard interrogation of CIA Director John McCone. He was like a whirlwind that day and all that night, breaking the news to his mother and the rest of the family, meeting Jackie and holding it all together for her sake, being present at and supervising several aspects of his brother’s autopsy, and removing some personal effects of his brother’s from the WhiteHouse that could have proven embarrassing. What I hadn’t known and found interesting (according to the author’s claim), was that by the end of the afternoon he had reached a conclusion on the conspiracy he thought was responsible for his brother’s death. His conclusion was that it was a combination of rogue elements of the CIA working with certain alienated Cuban exiles (those who had felt betrayed by JFK in the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and elements of the Mafia who had been enlisted in efforts with the former two groups to assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba. Bobby, of course, was in a better position to know than almost anyone, because he himself had coordinated some of those efforts. A classic case of “blowback”. The guilt haunted Bobby, and he changed profoundly in the next few years as a result. The RFK who was assassinated himself in June of 1968 was a very different man from the tough, combative Attorney General in November of 1963.

There is a whole cottage industry, of course, over the JFK assassination and various conspiracy theories and rebuttals. I used to read some of these books around the time I was in High school. I still find it interesting. My own opinion? I think there was a conspiracy of some kind, probably along the lines that the author claims RFK held to. That’s why I’ve never had too much respect for “Mr. Single-Bullet Theory”, Arlen Specter, a member of the Warren Commission… I do think Lee Harvey Oswald was involved as one of the shooters. Lee Harvey Oswald himself said to police and reporters. “I’m just a patsy.” I think he was… Not in the sense that he was not involved, but to me had the look of a man who knew he'd been had. Who knew he’d been set up to take the fall.

This week in Time Magazine, there are dueling interviews on whether or not the assassination was a conspiracy; one by David Talbot, and one by Vincent Bugliosi, the well-known crackerjack prosecutor of the Charles Manson murder case and author of Helter Skelter. In his book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy , he claims to prove that there was no conspiracy, and that Oswald was in fact the lone gunman. I don’t think the controversy will ever die down.

On a lighter note, here is one of my favorite scenes from the indie movie Slackers.. The JFK assassination buff…