There were three horrible public executions in 1963. The first came in February, when the prime minister of Iraq, Abdul Karim Qassem, was shot by members of the Ba’ath party, to which the United States had furnished money and training. A film clip of Qassem’s corpse, held up by the hair, was shown on Iraqi television. “We came to power on a CIA train,” said one of the Ba’athist revolutionaries; the CIA’s Near East division chief later boasted, “We really had the Ts crossed on what was happening.”
The second execution came in early November 1963: the president of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, was shot in the back of the head and stabbed with a bayonet, in a coup that was encouraged and monitored by the United States. President Kennedy was shocked at the news of Diem’s gruesome murder. “I feel we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it,” he said. “I should never have given my consent to it.” But Kennedy sent a congratulatory cable to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the ambassador to South Vietnam, who had been in the thick of the action. “With renewed appreciation for a fine job,” he wrote.
The third execution came, of course, later that month, on November 22. I was six when it happened. I wasn’t in school because we were moving to a new house with an ivy-covered tree in front. My mother told me that somebody had tried to kill the president, who was at the hospital. I asked how, and she said that a bullet had hit the president’s head, probably injuring his brain. She used the word “brain.” I asked why, and she said she didn’t know. I sat on a patch of carpeting in an empty room, believing that the president would still get better, because doctors are good and wounds heal. A little while later I learned that no, the president was dead.
Since that day, till very recently, I’ve avoided thinking about this third assassination. Any time I saw the words “Lee Harvey Oswald” or “grassy knoll” or “Jack Ruby,” my mind quickly skipped away to other things. I didn’t go to see Oliver Stone’s JFK when it came out, and I didn’t read DeLillo’s Libra, or Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation, or Posner’s Case Closed, or any of the dozens of mass-market paperbacks—many of them with lurid black covers and red titles—that I saw reviewed, blamed, praised.
But eventually you have to face up to it somehow: a famous, smiling, waving New Englander, wearing a striped, monogrammed shirt, sitting in a long blue Lincoln Continental next to his smiling, waving wife, has his head blown open during a Texas parade. How could it happen? He was a good-looking person, with an attractive family and an incredible plume of hair, and although he wasn’t a very effective or even, at times, a very well-intentioned president—he increased the number of thermonuclear warheads, more than doubled the budget for chemical and biological weapons, tripled the draft, nearly got us into an end-time war with Russia, and sent troops, napalm, and crop defoliants into Vietnam—some of his speeches were, even so, noble and true and ringingly delivered and permanently inspiring. He was a star; they loved him in Europe. And then suddenly he was just a dead, naked man in a hospital, staring fixedly upward, with a dark hole in his neck. Autopsy doctors were poking their fingers in his wounds and taking pictures and measuring, and burning their notes afterward and changing their stories. “I was trying to hold his hair on,” Jacqueline Kennedy told the Warren Commission when they asked her to describe her experience in the limousine. She saw, she said, a wedge-shaped piece of his skull: “I remember it was flesh colored with little ridges at the top.” The president, the motorcade he rode in, the whole country, had been, to use a postmortem word, “avulsed”—blasted inside out.
Who or what brought this appalling crime into being? Was it a mentally unstable ex-Marine and lapsed Russophile named Oswald, aiming down at the back of Kennedy’s head through leafy foliage from the book depository, all by himself, with no help? Many bystanders and eyewitnesses—including Jean Hill, whose interview was broadcast on NBC about a half an hour after the shooting, and Kennedy advisers Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, who rode in the presidential motorcade—didn’t think so: hearing the cluster of shots, they looked first toward a little slope on the north side of Dealey Plaza, and not back at the alleged sniper’s window.
A young surgeon at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Charles Crenshaw, who watched Kennedy’s blood and brains drip into a kick bucket in Trauma Room 1, also knew immediately that the president had been fatally wounded from a location toward the front of the limousine, not from behind it. “I know trauma, especially to the head,” Crenshaw writes in JFK Has Been Shot, published in 1992, republished with updates in 2013. “Had I been allowed to testify, I would have told them”—that is, the members of the Warren Commission—“that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the bullet that killed President Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll area.”
No, the convergent gunfire leads one to conclude that the shooting had to have been a group effort of some kind, a preplanned, coordinated crossfire: a conspiracy. But if it was a group effort, what affiliation united the participants? Did the CIA and its hypermilitaristic confederates—Cold Warrior bitter-enders—engineer it? That’s what Mark Lane, James DiEugenio, Gerald McKnight, and many other sincere, brave, long-time students of the assassination believe. “Kennedy was removed from office by powerful and irrational forces who opposed his revisionist Cuba policy,” writes McKnight in Breach of Trust, a closely researched book about the blind spots and truth-twistings of the Warren Commission. James Douglass argues that Kennedy was killed by “the Unspeakable”—a term from Thomas Merton that Douglass uses to describe a loose confederacy of nefarious plotters who opposed Kennedy’s “turn” towards reconciliatory back-channel negotiation. “Because JFK chose peace on earth at the height of the Cold War, he was executed,” Douglass writes.
This is the message, also, of Oliver Stone’s artful, fictionalized epic JFK: Kennedy shied away from the invasion of Cuba, he wanted us out of Vietnam, he wouldn’t bow to the military-industrial combine, and none of that was acceptable to the hard-liners who surrounded him—so they had him killed. “The war is the biggest business in America, worth $80 billion a year,” Kevin Costner says, in JFK’s big closing speech. “President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy that was planned in advance at the highest levels of our government, and it was carried out by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors in the Pentagon and CIA’s covert-operation apparatus.”
Well, there’s no question that the CIA was and is an invasive weed, an eyes-only historical horror show that has, through plausibly deniable covert action, brought generations of instability and carnage into the world. There is no question, either, that under presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, the CIA’s string of pre-Dallas coups d’état—in Africa, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America—contributed to an international climate of political upheaval and bad karma that made Kennedy’s own violent death a more conceivable outcome. There’s also no question that the CIA enlisted mobsters to kill Castro—Richard Bissell, who did the enlisting, later conceded that it was “a great mistake to involve the Mafia in an assassination attempt”—and no question that the CIA’s leading lights have, for fifty years, distorted and limited the available public record of the Kennedy assassination, doing whatever they could to distance the agency from its demonstrable interest in the accused killer, Oswald. It’s also true, I think, that there were some CIA extremists, fans of “executive action,” including William Harvey and, perhaps, James Jesus Angleton, that orchid-growing Anubis of spookitude, who were secretly relieved that Kennedy was shot, and may even have known in advance that he was probably going to die down south. (“I don’t want to sober up today,” Harvey reportedly told a colleague in Rome. “This is the day the goddamned president is gonna get himself killed!” Harvey also was heard to say: “This was bound to happen, and it’s probably good that it did.”) We are in debt to the CIA-blamers for their five decades of work, often in the face of choreographed media smears. They have brought us closer to the truth. But, having now read less than one-tenth of one percent of the available books on the subject, I believe, with full consciousness that I’m only a newcomer, that they’re barking up the wrong conspiracy. I think it was basically a Mafia hit: Kennedy’s death wouldn’t have happened without Carlos Marcello.
The best, saddest, fairest assassination book I’ve read, David Talbot’s Brothers, provides an important beginning clue. Robert Kennedy, who was closer to his brother and knew more about his many enraged detractors than anyone else, told a friend that the Mafia was principally responsible for what happened November 22. In public, for the five years that remained of his life, Bobby Kennedy made no criticisms of the nine-hundred-page Warren Report, which pinned the murder on a solo killer, a “nut” (per Hoover) and “general misanthropic fella” (per Warren Committee member Richard Russell) who had dreams of eternal fame. Attorney general Kennedy said, when reporters asked, that he had no intention of reading the report, but he endorsed it in writing and stood by it. Yet on the very night of the assassination, as Bobby began his descent into a near-catatonic depression, he called one of his organized-crime experts in Chicago and asked him to find out whether the Mafia was involved. And once, when friend and speechwriter Richard Goodwin (who had worked closely with JFK) asked Bobby what he really thought, Bobby replied, “If anyone was involved it was organized crime.”
To Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby was (according to biographer Jack Newfield) even more specific, ascribing the murder to “that guy in New Orleans”—meaning Carlos Marcello, the squat, tough, smart, wealthy mobster and tomato salesman who controlled slot machines, jukebox concessions, narcotics shipments, strip clubs, bookie networks, and other miscellaneous underworldy activities in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and, through his Texas emissary Joe Civello, in Dallas. In the early sixties, the syndicate run by Marcello and his brothers made more money than General Motors; the Marcellos owned judges, police departments, and FBI bureau chiefs. And when somebody failed to honor a debt, they killed him, or they killed someone close to him.
According to an FBI informant, Carlos Marcello confessed to the assassination. Some years before he died in 1993, Marcello said—as revealed by Lamar Waldron in three confusingly thorough books, the latest and best of which is The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination—“Yeah, I had the little son of a bitch killed,” meaning President Kennedy. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself.” As for Jack Ruby, the irascible strip-club proprietor and minor Marcello operative who silenced Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police station, Bobby Kennedy exclaimed, on looking over the record of Ruby’s pre-assassination phone calls, “The list was almost a duplicate of the people I called before the Rackets Committee.” And then in 1968, Bobby Kennedy himself, having just won the California primary, was shot to death in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles by an anti-Zionist cipher with gambling debts who had been employed as a groom at the Santa Anita racetrack. The racetrack was controlled by Carlos Marcello’s friend Mickey Cohen. The mob’s palmprints were, it seems, all over the war on the Kennedy brothers. Senator John Kennedy, during the labor-racketeering hearings in 1959, said, “If they’re crooks, we don’t wound them, we kill them.” Ronald Goldfarb, who worked for Bobby Kennedy’s justice department, wrote in 1995, “There is a haunting credibility to the theory that our organized crime drive prompted a plan to strike back at the Kennedy brothers.”
Lamar Waldron’s Hidden History is a primary source for a soon-to-be-produced movie, with Robert De Niro reportedly signed to play Marcello and Leonardo DiCaprio in the part of jailhouse informant Jack Van Laningham. Other new books that offer the Mafia-did-it view are Mark Shaw’s The Poison Patriarch—which contains an interesting theory about Ruby’s celebrity lawyer, Melvin Belli, and fingers “Marcello in collusion with Trafficante, while Hoffa cheered from the sidelines”—and Stefano Vaccara’s Carlos Marcello: The Man Behind the JFK Assassination, which has just been translated. “Dallas was a political assassination because it was a Mafia murder,” writes Vaccara, an authority on the Sicilian Mafia. “The Mafia went ahead with the hit once it understood that the power structure or the ‘establishment’ would not be displeased by the possibility.” Burton Hersh, in his astute and effortlessly well-written Bobby and J. Edgar, a revised version of which appeared in 2013, calls the Warren Commission Report a “sloppily executed magic trick, a government-sponsored attempt to stuff a giant wardrobe of incongruous information into a pitifully small valise.” Carlos Marcello, Hersh is convinced, was “the organizing personality behind the murder of John Kennedy.”
The second execution came in early November 1963: the president of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, was shot in the back of the head and stabbed with a bayonet, in a coup that was encouraged and monitored by the United States. President Kennedy was shocked at the news of Diem’s gruesome murder. “I feel we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it,” he said. “I should never have given my consent to it.” But Kennedy sent a congratulatory cable to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the ambassador to South Vietnam, who had been in the thick of the action. “With renewed appreciation for a fine job,” he wrote.
The third execution came, of course, later that month, on November 22. I was six when it happened. I wasn’t in school because we were moving to a new house with an ivy-covered tree in front. My mother told me that somebody had tried to kill the president, who was at the hospital. I asked how, and she said that a bullet had hit the president’s head, probably injuring his brain. She used the word “brain.” I asked why, and she said she didn’t know. I sat on a patch of carpeting in an empty room, believing that the president would still get better, because doctors are good and wounds heal. A little while later I learned that no, the president was dead.Since that day, till very recently, I’ve avoided thinking about this third assassination. Any time I saw the words “Lee Harvey Oswald” or “grassy knoll” or “Jack Ruby,” my mind quickly skipped away to other things. I didn’t go to see Oliver Stone’s JFK when it came out, and I didn’t read DeLillo’s Libra, or Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation, or Posner’s Case Closed, or any of the dozens of mass-market paperbacks—many of them with lurid black covers and red titles—that I saw reviewed, blamed, praised.
But eventually you have to face up to it somehow: a famous, smiling, waving New Englander, wearing a striped, monogrammed shirt, sitting in a long blue Lincoln Continental next to his smiling, waving wife, has his head blown open during a Texas parade. How could it happen? He was a good-looking person, with an attractive family and an incredible plume of hair, and although he wasn’t a very effective or even, at times, a very well-intentioned president—he increased the number of thermonuclear warheads, more than doubled the budget for chemical and biological weapons, tripled the draft, nearly got us into an end-time war with Russia, and sent troops, napalm, and crop defoliants into Vietnam—some of his speeches were, even so, noble and true and ringingly delivered and permanently inspiring. He was a star; they loved him in Europe. And then suddenly he was just a dead, naked man in a hospital, staring fixedly upward, with a dark hole in his neck. Autopsy doctors were poking their fingers in his wounds and taking pictures and measuring, and burning their notes afterward and changing their stories. “I was trying to hold his hair on,” Jacqueline Kennedy told the Warren Commission when they asked her to describe her experience in the limousine. She saw, she said, a wedge-shaped piece of his skull: “I remember it was flesh colored with little ridges at the top.” The president, the motorcade he rode in, the whole country, had been, to use a postmortem word, “avulsed”—blasted inside out.
Who or what brought this appalling crime into being? Was it a mentally unstable ex-Marine and lapsed Russophile named Oswald, aiming down at the back of Kennedy’s head through leafy foliage from the book depository, all by himself, with no help? Many bystanders and eyewitnesses—including Jean Hill, whose interview was broadcast on NBC about a half an hour after the shooting, and Kennedy advisers Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, who rode in the presidential motorcade—didn’t think so: hearing the cluster of shots, they looked first toward a little slope on the north side of Dealey Plaza, and not back at the alleged sniper’s window.
A young surgeon at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Charles Crenshaw, who watched Kennedy’s blood and brains drip into a kick bucket in Trauma Room 1, also knew immediately that the president had been fatally wounded from a location toward the front of the limousine, not from behind it. “I know trauma, especially to the head,” Crenshaw writes in JFK Has Been Shot, published in 1992, republished with updates in 2013. “Had I been allowed to testify, I would have told them”—that is, the members of the Warren Commission—“that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the bullet that killed President Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll area.”
No, the convergent gunfire leads one to conclude that the shooting had to have been a group effort of some kind, a preplanned, coordinated crossfire: a conspiracy. But if it was a group effort, what affiliation united the participants? Did the CIA and its hypermilitaristic confederates—Cold Warrior bitter-enders—engineer it? That’s what Mark Lane, James DiEugenio, Gerald McKnight, and many other sincere, brave, long-time students of the assassination believe. “Kennedy was removed from office by powerful and irrational forces who opposed his revisionist Cuba policy,” writes McKnight in Breach of Trust, a closely researched book about the blind spots and truth-twistings of the Warren Commission. James Douglass argues that Kennedy was killed by “the Unspeakable”—a term from Thomas Merton that Douglass uses to describe a loose confederacy of nefarious plotters who opposed Kennedy’s “turn” towards reconciliatory back-channel negotiation. “Because JFK chose peace on earth at the height of the Cold War, he was executed,” Douglass writes.
This is the message, also, of Oliver Stone’s artful, fictionalized epic JFK: Kennedy shied away from the invasion of Cuba, he wanted us out of Vietnam, he wouldn’t bow to the military-industrial combine, and none of that was acceptable to the hard-liners who surrounded him—so they had him killed. “The war is the biggest business in America, worth $80 billion a year,” Kevin Costner says, in JFK’s big closing speech. “President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy that was planned in advance at the highest levels of our government, and it was carried out by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors in the Pentagon and CIA’s covert-operation apparatus.”
Well, there’s no question that the CIA was and is an invasive weed, an eyes-only historical horror show that has, through plausibly deniable covert action, brought generations of instability and carnage into the world. There is no question, either, that under presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, the CIA’s string of pre-Dallas coups d’état—in Africa, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America—contributed to an international climate of political upheaval and bad karma that made Kennedy’s own violent death a more conceivable outcome. There’s also no question that the CIA enlisted mobsters to kill Castro—Richard Bissell, who did the enlisting, later conceded that it was “a great mistake to involve the Mafia in an assassination attempt”—and no question that the CIA’s leading lights have, for fifty years, distorted and limited the available public record of the Kennedy assassination, doing whatever they could to distance the agency from its demonstrable interest in the accused killer, Oswald. It’s also true, I think, that there were some CIA extremists, fans of “executive action,” including William Harvey and, perhaps, James Jesus Angleton, that orchid-growing Anubis of spookitude, who were secretly relieved that Kennedy was shot, and may even have known in advance that he was probably going to die down south. (“I don’t want to sober up today,” Harvey reportedly told a colleague in Rome. “This is the day the goddamned president is gonna get himself killed!” Harvey also was heard to say: “This was bound to happen, and it’s probably good that it did.”) We are in debt to the CIA-blamers for their five decades of work, often in the face of choreographed media smears. They have brought us closer to the truth. But, having now read less than one-tenth of one percent of the available books on the subject, I believe, with full consciousness that I’m only a newcomer, that they’re barking up the wrong conspiracy. I think it was basically a Mafia hit: Kennedy’s death wouldn’t have happened without Carlos Marcello.
The best, saddest, fairest assassination book I’ve read, David Talbot’s Brothers, provides an important beginning clue. Robert Kennedy, who was closer to his brother and knew more about his many enraged detractors than anyone else, told a friend that the Mafia was principally responsible for what happened November 22. In public, for the five years that remained of his life, Bobby Kennedy made no criticisms of the nine-hundred-page Warren Report, which pinned the murder on a solo killer, a “nut” (per Hoover) and “general misanthropic fella” (per Warren Committee member Richard Russell) who had dreams of eternal fame. Attorney general Kennedy said, when reporters asked, that he had no intention of reading the report, but he endorsed it in writing and stood by it. Yet on the very night of the assassination, as Bobby began his descent into a near-catatonic depression, he called one of his organized-crime experts in Chicago and asked him to find out whether the Mafia was involved. And once, when friend and speechwriter Richard Goodwin (who had worked closely with JFK) asked Bobby what he really thought, Bobby replied, “If anyone was involved it was organized crime.”
To Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby was (according to biographer Jack Newfield) even more specific, ascribing the murder to “that guy in New Orleans”—meaning Carlos Marcello, the squat, tough, smart, wealthy mobster and tomato salesman who controlled slot machines, jukebox concessions, narcotics shipments, strip clubs, bookie networks, and other miscellaneous underworldy activities in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and, through his Texas emissary Joe Civello, in Dallas. In the early sixties, the syndicate run by Marcello and his brothers made more money than General Motors; the Marcellos owned judges, police departments, and FBI bureau chiefs. And when somebody failed to honor a debt, they killed him, or they killed someone close to him.
According to an FBI informant, Carlos Marcello confessed to the assassination. Some years before he died in 1993, Marcello said—as revealed by Lamar Waldron in three confusingly thorough books, the latest and best of which is The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination—“Yeah, I had the little son of a bitch killed,” meaning President Kennedy. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself.” As for Jack Ruby, the irascible strip-club proprietor and minor Marcello operative who silenced Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police station, Bobby Kennedy exclaimed, on looking over the record of Ruby’s pre-assassination phone calls, “The list was almost a duplicate of the people I called before the Rackets Committee.” And then in 1968, Bobby Kennedy himself, having just won the California primary, was shot to death in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles by an anti-Zionist cipher with gambling debts who had been employed as a groom at the Santa Anita racetrack. The racetrack was controlled by Carlos Marcello’s friend Mickey Cohen. The mob’s palmprints were, it seems, all over the war on the Kennedy brothers. Senator John Kennedy, during the labor-racketeering hearings in 1959, said, “If they’re crooks, we don’t wound them, we kill them.” Ronald Goldfarb, who worked for Bobby Kennedy’s justice department, wrote in 1995, “There is a haunting credibility to the theory that our organized crime drive prompted a plan to strike back at the Kennedy brothers.”
Lamar Waldron’s Hidden History is a primary source for a soon-to-be-produced movie, with Robert De Niro reportedly signed to play Marcello and Leonardo DiCaprio in the part of jailhouse informant Jack Van Laningham. Other new books that offer the Mafia-did-it view are Mark Shaw’s The Poison Patriarch—which contains an interesting theory about Ruby’s celebrity lawyer, Melvin Belli, and fingers “Marcello in collusion with Trafficante, while Hoffa cheered from the sidelines”—and Stefano Vaccara’s Carlos Marcello: The Man Behind the JFK Assassination, which has just been translated. “Dallas was a political assassination because it was a Mafia murder,” writes Vaccara, an authority on the Sicilian Mafia. “The Mafia went ahead with the hit once it understood that the power structure or the ‘establishment’ would not be displeased by the possibility.” Burton Hersh, in his astute and effortlessly well-written Bobby and J. Edgar, a revised version of which appeared in 2013, calls the Warren Commission Report a “sloppily executed magic trick, a government-sponsored attempt to stuff a giant wardrobe of incongruous information into a pitifully small valise.” Carlos Marcello, Hersh is convinced, was “the organizing personality behind the murder of John Kennedy.”
by Nicholson Baker, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Michael Duffy
[ed. Sorry for all The Baffler articles lately... they've been putting out some really great stuff (lately and pastly). See also: Stephen King's 11/22/63, one of his best.]
