PRESS: J.F.K.-R.I.P
Powers, Thomas
There was a time when I thought it would be a good idea to conduct another official investigation of the death of John F. Kennedy. A good deal of my motive was simple curiosity. Every other...
...Back during Nixon's first administration, I think it was, someone pointed out that he's the kind of guy who always tells you more about himself than you wanted to know...
...That he had done nothing wrong, but somehow everything had gone wrong--that he had done nothing wrong, but it had all come out as if he was guilty anyway, so he was sorry...
...The residue of these stories is not an ever-clearer record of what happened, but an evermurkier suspicion things are not what they seem, a swamp of possibilities, a miasma of promising leads, a fact-smog of open questions and lost trails...
...Questions about the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with this...
...It was as if there were a gap between the two sides of the conversation...
...Frost's interview became a rerun of the "Checkers" speech...
...The inevitable questions would have been asked of fate itself, if they had not been asked of the Warren Commission...
...There is hardly an aspect of the assassination which has not been called into question at one time or another, and whenever a new document or rumor or shadowy Cuban intelligence officer or CIA memo contradicting an FBI memo comes up it makes its way into print in grey paragraphs dense with names and dates and reports and chains of X told Y that Z heard such-and-such...
...I don't say it's impossible there was a conspiracy, only that I haven't seen any positive evidence of one...
...At one meeting in mid-March they even discussed the best "choreography" or "scenario" for capturing and sustaining the public attention without which the committee might have been allowed to die at the end of the month...
...Commonweal: 339...
...But by the end Frost looked dazed, like someone about to dribble on himself...
...March 31, 1977: Widespread stories out of the House Select Committee saying that a woman who worked for Jack Ruby claimed Ruby had introduced her to Oswald, and that a nurse at the Dallas hospital where Kennedy died claimed to have-seen four or five bullet fragments, not the single, nearly unmarked bullet which the Warren Commission said had wounded both Kennedy and John Connally...
...You kept expecting to find in the next shot that his tie was pulled to one side, his collar ripped open and his hair mussed...
...But a lot of other people, clearly, have been tossing and turning for years...
...They should illustrate the importance of the age, whatever it may be...
...Only there could he make Watergate into something personal rather than legal...
...Stories about the Kennedy assassination have been a staple of journalism for nearly 14 years now, of course, swelling and ebbing with a kind of cyclical regularity like the tide...
...Faced with discrepancies I tend to shrug...
...and let John F. Kennedy rest in peace...
...What the reporters will write about will be the pieces that don't fit, and whenever a reporter suggests that the Committee doesn't seem to be coming up with something new, the Committee will probably come up with something new--anything newmand there will be one more report of a discrepancy, and one more question 27 May 1977:338 to undermine the Committee's conclusions even before they are reached...
...The theory that Oswald acted* alone had the virtue of simplicity...
...In Nixon's hands it really is a medium, an art form mediating between politics and life...
...Why else would he have made them, if not for the hazard, the masochistic joy, of risking their release...
...By the end, however, Nixon had bridged all gaps, even the one which has always lingered in Napoleon's formulation that politics is what modem man has instead of tragedy...
...Of course it's only fair to repeat that reporters can't help themselves...
...It was one of those places where art, life and politics met, and brought home to us how diminished our sensibilities have become...
...Things could probably be no other way...
...As Nixon talked about how he cried in the Oval Office before resigning, and how he feels he let his friends down, let the American people down, cut-away shots caught Frost hunched forward with his eyes vacant and mouth slack looking completely desolated, completely helpless...
...Sprague also said the CIA had admitted erasing the tapes of Oswald's call to the Cuban Embassy (see November 26 above), that FBI agents who had listened to the tapes did not think it was Oswald's voice, and that Santo Trafli~ant, who had refused to answer clueslions before the House Select Committee, "absolutely has useful information" on the Kennedy assassination...
...THOMAS POWERS THE LAST SYLLABLE OF RECORDED TIME 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MEDIA It was a central event of our time, and all the more depressing for being such...
...This does not strike me as a healthy situation, revealing as it does a slippery sense that the most terrible crimes are possible, the most violent and direct intervention in the nation's life, without the guilty being more than dimly suspected, much less brought to justice...
...One wants the central events of one's time to be enlarging...
...February 5, 1977: The Associated Press reports that the CIA used its propaganda assets around the world to discredit conspiracy theories about the Kennedy Assassination...
...I am quite content to rely on the Law of Economy, which says that the simplest theory which explains all the facts is the correct one...
...I said before that one of the most odious men of the age had turned himself into a tragic hero, but the case is really worse than that...
...March 24, 1977: Jack Anderson says John Rosselli, murdered in July last year, had told him that he, Rosseni, thought Castro had captured and then turned agents sent to kill him, and used them to kill Kennedy instead...
...Those aren't stories...
...In a situation like this one reporters can't really help themselves, which is no doubt a defense of sorts, but that does not seem to me to alter the fact that the press is helping the House Select Committee to elicit and even lend a kind of authority to every mystery, discrepancy, possible conspiracy and nutty theory to be found in all the vast literature on who killed Kennedy...
...So there he was on the first of the Frost-Nixon interviews once again telling us more than we wanted to know--dealing with his psychological needs the way he always has, by making Freudian slips, saying "yet" when he meant "again" or, best of all, "forget" when he meant "remember...
...With the exception of one fiveminute period late at night back in 1965, I have never doubted that Oswald did it all by himself...
...The responsibility for this process is partly the ComZmittee's since its members have deliberately fed the public's expectations in order to ensure its own funding...
...I'm not sure the mind of man can any longer encompass the whole...
...The mind simply retreats from this awful mess, and one retains only a blurred doubt...
...What was he saying to us in the interview, after all...
...shortly after the assa.~ination...
...November 26, 1976: the Washington Post says the CIA has a transcript of an Oswald phone call to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City in late September, 1963, and that only a part/o/transcript was turned over to the Warren Commission...
...March 31, 1977: the Post reports that Charles Nicoletti, involved in the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Castro, had been murdered in Chicago...
...It would have been far more amazing had someone been able to keep him off...
...But it would be nice if everyone could simply step back even at this late date and say look, this isn't leading anywhere, there's no point to it, the hell with it...
...Commi~ion members, however, deny ever seeing the memo...
...My own files on this subject are scanty indeed compared to those of dedicated newspaper clippers, but without even trying I have collected the following: --October 22, 1975: the Washington Post says that two hours after Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby, the FBI office in Dallas secretly destroyed a threatening note from Oswald delivered about November 8, 1963...
...His odiousness is the very thing which qualified him for the role...
...It gave us the terrible feeling that life itself must somewhow be more limited than it once was...
...That Frost allowed the editing to present him thus on his own program was a clear concession of defeat, as was the program's ending with a slow fade-out from Nixon...
...Never before quite so equivalent as Napoleon claimed, politics and tragedy were bridged that night by television...
...March 22, 1976: stories in the Times and Post say a Cuban defector told the CIA that Oswald had been in contact with Cuban intelligence officers before the assassination...
...March l, 1976: Hank Greenspun in the Los Vegas Sun says he has information that Castro was behind John F. Kennedy's murder and "very probably" was responsible for Robert F. Kennedy's death as well...
...These stories and others like them--there have been hundreds over the years--have a kind of numbing specificity...
...Nixon has always reminded us too much of that other Richard who was "sent into the world misshapen thus," that other crippled body politic, Richard III...
...A p r i l 11, 1977: Stories that Richard A. Sprague, the recently resigned chief counsel for the House Select Committee, hoped President Carter would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the assassination...
...But questions beget questions and the refusal to blame the man with the gun has so irritated and inflamed a wound to the mind that it has become a permanent, suppurating cancer of doubt...
...Commonweal: 337 N Jnne 25, 1976: a Times story cites two Cuban agents who slipped out of the U.S...
...I do not know of any facts which the Oswald Alone theory does not explain...
...Eighty percent think others were involved, with suspicions focusing, in order, on Cuba, the Mafia, "the Communists," and the CIA...
...That's their job...
...Some people feel the earth shift beneath their feet when they read that a CIA memo referred to Lfe Henry Oswald...
...It explained all the facts, or did to me, and no one had ever come up with anything more compelting by way of disproof than discrepancies...
...In its absence the Oswald Alone theory lets me sleep a'nights...
...So I thought, as I say, that it would be a good idea to conduct another investigation in order to put people's minds to rest...
...Perhaps fault is the wrong word, since it implies some sort of culpability or avoidable error and the role of the press in raising rather than settling doubts seems almost fated...
...But now it is as if our Richard III has turned out in the last act to be our Hamlet too...
...Frost would ask Nixon to admit criminal guilt, and Nixon would deny that he had used bad judgment...
...No one could have imagined then how true that would be--how Nixon would stumble into revealing those tapes whose disclosures would make us cringe at every turn...
...Hunt, Jack Ruby and Cuban exiles had all been involved in the Kennedy assassination, and that Mohrenschildt had known about it beforehand...
...This is not an opinion based on intimate knowledge of the Warren Commi.ssion's volumes of evidence, much less on the now staggering corpus of assassination literature...
...The rest of the fault belongs to the press...
...Only by dragging himself like a slug through all the lies, perfidy, pos_9 turing, perjury, evasions, self-pity and bad acting of the show's first half could Nixon have arrived at the tragedy of his final speech...
...You can get an idea of the sort of thing the Select Committee must deal with by reading even a sprinkling of recent news stories about the Kennedy assassination...
...Anyone who wondered how Frost had induced Nixon to come on TV again was crazy...
...At the moment the tide is comin~ in with the House Select Committee, and before it be~e/n~ to ebb again with the scheduled completion of the new investigation in two years' time the public is going to read more stories about awful possibilities than can ever be put to rest by any final report, however sober, thorough or voluminous its findings...
...It's a temperamental thing...
...There it would simply add to the opaque fact-smog...
...It is hard to remember the details from one minute to the next...
...They're supposed to hover about, cultivate sources, ask questions, and report the answers...
...In other words, a tragedy...
...A Gallup Poll last December found that only 11 percent of the American people think Oswald killed Kennedy for his own reasons, without help...
...J u l y 9, 1976: the Boston GlObe says Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis claims that Jack Ruby met with Castro in September, 1963: --November 13, 1976: the Times says a Hoover memo to the Warren Commission has been discovered saying a highly reliable informant told the FBI that Oswald told the Cubans he was going to kill Kennedy...
...Earlier there were times when Frost and Nixon didn't even seem to be having the same conversation...
...This was a silly reason and I'm sorry for it now, but I also thought another, final, definitive study of the assassination would be good for the country...
...It was just that the conspiracy theories with their Oswald doubles and switched rifles and shadowy figures on the grassy knoll seemed too strained and intricate to persuade...
...Maybe the tapes were just an elaborate means to blurt out disappointment in public, the way he did after his 1962 defeat in California...
...The fault is partly that of the investigating body, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which has already had three chairmen and is looking for a second chief counsel...
...The assassination was too sudden, its consequences too great, and its cause--the sullen, twisted, righteous anger of one man---too trivial to be understood easily, cried over, and then forgotten...
...Despite all the cover-up and "stonewalling" that surround Watergate, all the efforts n o t to tell, you can't help wondering whether he didn't have a compulsion to end up in a position where he would have to tell after all--where he would have to surrender the tapes...
...But the blame must also rest on the reporters who will be hovering about the investigation for the next two years, looking for stories...
...It made us see that our imaginations now live, like some maiden aunt of history, in reduced circumstances...
...For whatever the intention of all that trickiness earlier, its effect was that he humiliated himself, and having humiliated himself, he became, like some Fellini hero, pathetic...
...No one is going to report that Oswald bought the rifle, or that the rifle was found in the Texas Schoolbook Depository, or that Oswald shot Officer Tippit...
...Nixon had Frost utterly spellbound...
...How else can we explain what happened on TV May 4, when one of the most odious men of our time turned into a tragic hero fight before our eyes...
...I'm not one of them...
...Every other investigation had turned up intriguing new stuff about the CIA and I figured another would probably come up with some more...
...What had happened was not that a crime had been committed, but that a man in high office had been laid low...
...Nixon's psychological needs were always greater than his political needs anyway...
...The headline of the New York Post that day was "Cubans, Oilmen Tied to Oswald," whic h ought to make it eligible for some sort of award...
...N April I, 1977: Widespread stories that William Oltmans, a Dutch journalist, claimed to have been told by George de Mohrenschildt, an Oswald friend who had committed suicide two days earlier, that the FBI, Texas oilman H.L...
...At first Frost gave the impression of being a real adversary, a match for Nixon in toughness and insistence...
...I can't think when the tragic dilemma has been more classically stated...
...The CIA reported this to the Warren Commi~ion, but the Commission declined to pursue it...
...The sixth investigation is underway, filfully but probably irreversibly, and it seems to me to stand fair to add immeasurably to the confusion and doubt, muddying the waters perhaps for all time...
...Maybe he is our Oedipus Rex as well, our true Nixon Agonistes, as Garry Wills saw him, and the only tragic figure we are capable of...
...October 30, 1975: the New York Times says the FBI bugged Marina Oswald's room after the assassination but never told the Warren Commission about it...
...It was stupid of me ever to think that a mere investigation of the assassination might cure that open sore, and it was doubly stupid of me not to see that every trace scent of conspiracy which reached the House Select Committee would, inevitably, find its way into print...
...Now I think I must have been crazy...
...But this made one feel instead the triviality of the age...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 11
