DARK WHISPERS
“There’s so much bitterness I thought they would get one of us, but Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it. I thought they would get me.”
– Robert F. Kennedy on the afternoon of JFK’s assassination
“I asked (CIA Director) McCone if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me.”
– Robert F. Kennedy
“RFK said that (CIA Director) McCone thought there were two people involved in the shooting.”
– Kennedy Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
A week after the assassination, Bobby and Jackie Kennedy delivered an extraordinary message to Soviet Chairman Khrushchev, behind the back of the State Department and at the height of the Cold War.
“Dallas was the ideal location for such a crime. Perhaps there was only one assassin, but he did not act alone. Despite Oswald’s connections to the communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents.”
Publicly, Bobby and Jackie Kennedy endorsed the lone nut theory. Privately, they rejected it.
“We have not been told the truth about Oswald.”
– Warren Commissioner Richard Russell
“(FBI Director J. Edgar) Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission – on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the guns, you name it...”
– Warren Commissioner Hale Boggs
“On what basis is it claimed that two shots caused all the wounds?... It seemed to me that Governor Connally’s statement negates such a conclusion. I could not agree with this statement.”
– Warren Commissioner John Sherman Cooper
“I told the FBI what I had heard (shots from behind the grassy knoll fence), but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.”
– Kennedy Special Assistant Ken O'Donnell to Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill
Kennedy aide Dave Powers rode with O'Donnell in the Secret Service follow-up car, and also heard shots from behind the grassy knoll fence.
William Attwood was key in the backchannel talks to Castro that JFK was encouraging in the summer and fall of 1963, behind the back of his own State Department.
“If the CIA did find out what we were doing, this would have trickled down to the lower echelon of activists, and Cuban exiles, and the more gung-ho CIA people who had been involved since the Bay of Pigs... I can understand why they would have reacted so violently. This was the end of their dreams of returning to Cuba, and they might have been impelled to take violent action. Such as assassinating the President.”
– Former UN Ambassador William Attwood
“Undoubtedly if word leaked of President Kennedy’s efforts (backchannel talks to Castro), that might have been exactly the kind of thing to trigger some explosion of fanatical violence. It seems to me a possibility not to be excluded.”
– Kennedy Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
When asked whom he believed was behind the assassination of President Kennedy...
“We were at war with the national security people.”
– Kennedy Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Less than two months before the assassination...
“The Kennedy White House has concluded that if the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government it will come from the CIA.”
– Arthur Krock, The New York Times, 3 October 1963
“We know the CIA was involved, and the Mafia. We all know that.”
– RFK’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Richard Goodwin
“Look into this (New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation), read everything you can, so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know.”
– Robert F. Kennedy to Press Secretary Frank Mankiewicz
“I came to the conclusion that there was some sort of conspiracy, probably involving the mob, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and maybe rogue CIA agents... Every so often I would bring this up with Bobby. I told him who I thought was involved. But it was like he just couldn’t focus on it. He’d get this look of pain, or more like numbness, on his face. It just tore him apart.”
– RFK Press Secretary Frank Mankiewicz
McHugh: “Do you agree with the Warren Report on the number of bullets that entered President Kennedy’s body?”
Burkley: “I would not care to be quoted on that.”
– Admiral George Burkley, President Kennedy's White House physician
Admiral Burkley later told investigative reporter Henry Hurt that he believed there had been a conspiracy. In 1977, Burkley had his lawyer contact the House Select Committee on Assassinations with the message that “others besides Oswald must have participated.”
“The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial... Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or... a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists. Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat – too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.)...”
– RFK’s Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach’s memo of November 25
“My own feeling was that Bobby was worried that there might be some conspiracy and that it might be his fault... It might very well have been that he was worried that the investigation would somehow point back to him.”
– Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach
Publicly President Johnson endorsed the lone nut theory. Privately, he told Atlantic magazine writer Leo Janos...
“I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger.”
– President Lyndon Johnson
“Johnson was now convinced there was a plot in connection with the assassination. LBJ’s chief of staff Marvin Watson stated the President felt the CIA had something to do with this plot.”
– Deputy Director of the FBI Cartha DeLoach
“We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there're fingerprints of intelligence.”
– Senator Richard Schweiker, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
“Had Oswald been convicted twelve years ago, he would be entitled to a new trial today based upon the FBI and CIA coverup.”
– Senator Richard Schweiker, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
“The more I have learned, the more concerned I have become that the government was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
– Victor Marchetti, Executive Assistant to CIA Director Richard Helms
Bob Richter produced a 1967 CBS special on the assassination. Richter wrote a memo that same year in which he passed along the comment of Dr. James Humes, who performed the autopsy on President Kennedy, that photos had been taken at the autopsy with a probe connecting the back and neck wound. When asked if he would complain publicly if he was pressured to make the CBS special end up one-sided:
“You’re asking me if I want to spend the rest of my career working for the Paducah Weekly Journal.”
– CBS Producer Bob Richter
“We really blew it on the Kennedy assassination.”
– CBS Anchorman Dan Rather to Robert Tanenbaum, Deputy Chief Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations
During an intense moment of pain, in the aftermath of Robert Kennedy’s murder, Ted Kennedy let down his guard a bit, as he talked to NBC correspondent Sander Vanocur about the “faceless men” with no apparent motive charged in the slaying of both his brothers and Martin Luther King.
“There has to be more to it.”
– Senator Edward M. Kennedy
President Charles De Gaulle of France survived several assassination attempts against him. After being briefed by a reporter on the “lone-nut theory” of the Kennedy assassination he blurted:
“Vous me blaguez! (You're kidding me.) Cowboys and Indians!”
– French President Charles DeGaulle
After being told the “official story”...
“What really happened?”
– Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev
A successor of Khrushchev’s, Mikhail Gorbachev, visited Dallas in 1998, and wrote the following in the guest book at the Sixth Floor Museum:
“He looked far ahead and he wanted to change a great deal. Perhaps it is this that is the key to the mystery of the death of President John F. Kennedy.”
– Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev
Based on Whispers from the Silent Generation by Rex Bradford, and Top 6 Washington insiders who suspected a JFK plot by Jefferson Morley.