Larry Hancock: Someone Would Have Talked

[James Richards]

Hi, James & John

The Citizen Committee For a Free Cuba was another 'paper only' front{a tool}

of The John Birch Society members and followers, as always designed to put

heat on Kennedy and his policies.

Just dug up a photo you requested, showing me in a rural, Cuban Government store, 1960. How do I get it to you, as I never learned to use my scanner? (Harry Dean)

Thanks, Harry.

As to the photo, the next time you pass an Internet cafe, maybe they can scan it for you and sent it to your computer. From there you can send it to - james1410@bigpond.com

Maybe one of the more technically minded members may have a better suggestion.

Cheers,

James

[David Boylan]

I think I posted something like this before:

CITIZENS COMMITTEE FOR A FREE CUBA

617 Albee Building, 1426 “G” Street NW, Washington 5, D.C.

Tel. 783-7507

DECLARATION OF PURPOSE

The Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba has been formed in response to a statement issued by the Freedom House, on March 25, 1963 calling upon Americans to unite in a movement for a free Cuba.

The Committee is nonpartisan. It believes that Cuba is an issue that transcends party differences, and that its solution requires the kind of national unity we have always manifested at moments of great crisis. This belief is reflected in the broad and representative membership of the Committee.

The Committee holds, with Freedom House, that a “Communist Cuba is intolerable,” not only for reasons which bear upon our security but also because “it has betrayed six million people who won their freedom from the Batista Dictatorship.”

[stuff deleted]

The first Executive Secretary was Daniel James. He was also the editor or their newsletter called “Free Cuba News”. Paul Bethel took over during the fall of ’63.

[John Simkin]

I have received this message from Debra Conway at JFk Lancer about the latest edition of 'Someone Would Have Talked':

"I know that a lot of your forum members are from overseas and both Larry & I appreciate your steadfast support of his work so we are offering this to your forum members: If they go to the Lancer website and click on the donation icon, they can donate $10 and I will send them the pdf file for the Update. This will save them shipping and the wait."

[John Simkin]

In your book, you mention that Henry Luce was involved in funding anti-Castro operations. I recently came across some information that might link Luce with the assassination.

According to Drew Pearson, during the summer of 1960, Luce “secretly assigned ace reporter Herbert Solow to dig up the facts about… Johnson’s radio and television holdings”. Solow came back with a report that… Johnson radio-television empire had prospered while Johnson served on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee which votes out funds to the Federal Communications Commission.” The story never appeared in Luce’s magazines. Pearson speculated that as Luce was supporting Nixon, the Solow material was only going to be used if Johnson won the nomination.

There is another possibility. This information was used to control Johnson during the period following the assassination.

Do you know anything about Solow's report? Did it ever appear in the public domain?

You will find details of this story appeared in Robert Dallek's, Lone Star Rising (1991) page 571.

[Larry Hancock]

John, given the Luce's aggressive conservatism (both husband and wife) I find it very consistent that they would have been doing deep background exploration on any potential democratic candidates. I suspect that they saved the "ammunition" as you speculate - but simply because Kennedy was the primary candidate in 1960 and by 1964 when he was running as a war candidate over Viet Nam they may not have been that opposed to him.

In regard to the Luce's, LIFE and the war against Castro it is certainly true that the Luce's kept up the "get Castro" drumbeat but the more I study this subject the more indications I find that Luce was probably no more an ongoing source of a call to get rid of Castro than was RFK and at times there may even have been more mutual interest than I might have imagined. An example is the TILT mission, where I once viewed it to be an almost rogue operation by JMWAVE personnel I have recently been reviewing correspondance between Pawley and Marshall Carter which clearly gave the go ahead for LIFE's involvement on the chance that the mission might provide proof of Russian and Cuban duplicity and demonstrate missiles still in Cuba. This occurs at the same time that the Kennedy administration was itself moving to a formal position that the agreement with the Russians for non-intervention was null and void since the UN inspections which were part of that agreement had run into a stone wall and were obviously not going to happen.

On another point, due to the research of Wallace Millam, we now know that LIFE magazine reopened and conducted its own investigation of Lee Oswald and a possible conspiracy in the President's assassintion over an extended period circa 1966. Many of the records of that investigation are housed in a university and we still have not had an in depth study of that investigation....

-- Larry

[John Simkin]

On another point,  due to the research of Wallace Millam, we now know that LIFE magazine reopened and conducted its own investigation of Lee Oswald and a possible conspiracy in the President's assassintion over an extended period circa 1966.  Many of the records of that investigation are housed in a university and we still have not had an in depth study of that investigation....

Are you aware of this passage from Jim Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins (1988):

About this time, in early 1967, we had an unexpected lucky break Dick Billings, an editor from Life magazine, arrived at the office. He was a slender man with a quick mind and delightful wit. After talking with me at some length, he informed me confidentially that the top management at Life had concluded that President Kennedy's assassination had been a conspiracy and that my investigation was moving in the right direction. Inasmuch as Life was conducting its own investigation Billings suggested that we work together. The magazine would be able to provide me with technical assistance, and we could develop a mutual exchange of information.

The offer came at a good time. I had been wanting to increase my stakeout coverage of David Ferries home but did not have the personnel to spare, particularly an expert photographer. We had succeeded in establishing a friendly relationship with the couple who lived directly across the street from Perrie on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. Like him they lived on the second floor of a duplex and also had a screened porch in the front. I described this situation to the Life editor, and within days a top-flight photographer arrived in town. We promptly installed him at his observation post on the second-floor porch across the street.

Of course Billings was attempting to find out what Garrison knew. He also tried to direct Garrison towards the idea that the assassination was carried out by organized crime. When he refused to accept this, Billings wrote stories suggesting that Garrison was in the pay of organized crime.

Billings later joined up with G. Robert Blakey to write The Plot to Kill the President. Of course they argued that it was done by organized crime. Blakey and Billings are still friends. However, they both refuse to answer questions on the Kennedy assassination.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbillings.htm

[Larry Hancock]

John, I am awere of Billings activities with Garrison - actually I found it informative to read Billings personal log which you can find at:

http://www.jfk-online.com/billings2.html

Billings was not the individual I was referring too; that individual (whose name eludes me at the moment) was a senior Luce staff member in Texas. The documents I referred to were donated by him as part of his professional and personal collection and are at a small university in Tennessee. I understand from remarks by Robert Chapman that much of it will be made available at some' point for online access via the Mary Ferrell foundation.

This Texas Life staffer was a personal friend of Clay Shaw and although his investigation (and Life's) apparently begun before Garrisons'. Wallace's presentation seemed to indicate that some of the material that they had found was personally turned over to Shaw's defence team by his old friend.

I think I should point out that there were many serious conspiracy resarchers - first generation folks - who were personally very supportive of Garrison for some time and who went to New Oreleans to work with him but eventually became disenchanted and decided that his focus on Shaw not only a mistake but was taking

everyone in the wrong direction. In the end they withdrew their support....for all I know Billings may have gone through the same process. Certainly I do think that Garrison "cut the trail of the conspiracy in New Oreleans and threatened to expose the "real" Lee Oswald. Why and how he was taken in the wrong diection by people like Howard, Hemming, Hargraves, De Torres, Santana and others probably also has some real meaning. They certainly worked as hard at "sterring" him as the Justice department did at covertly aiding Shaw's defense team and the CIA did at making sure Garrison could not have legal access to their people. The FBI and CIA actions are not fully documented in records releases for anyone who wants to investigate that example of federal obfuscation.

However I can't simply go along with the speculation that everything we see is evidence of a grand conspiracy.....without somebody connecting the dots. Certainly I think someone should dig in and study Billings materials and what Millam found on the Life investigation - that might help settle it one way or another. As far as I know not a single person has yet to follow up with or publish on the LIFE materials that Wallace first identified several years ago in his Lancer presentation?

-- Larry

[Larry Hancock]

The "secret" Life investigation I mentioned in an earlier post was headed by Holland McCombs out of Texas and the documents relating to it are contained with his huge personal papers collection at the Paul Meek Library at the University of Tennessee Martin, UTM. McCombs was Life Bureau manager in Dallas and apparently very close to Henry Luce of Life. The JFK section contains 399 documents with almost 7,000 pages.

The secret Life investigation extended over 1 year however McCombs apparently pursued the subject for the remainder of his own life.

During the war McCombs had served as Mexico Bureau chief and conduced espionage activities for both Luce and ONI. He was also apparently very well acquainted with Johnson.

The Life study began on October 27, 1966 and apparently used lots of media people including Josia Thompson and Hugh Aynesworth; in 1967 the project was abandoned during the Garrison investigation although it appears that McCombs may have fed information from it to his friend Clay Shaw. Wallace Millham, who located the collection and presented on it at a JFK Lancer Conference stated that it appears that Dick Billings may have shut it down when Garrison actually brought charges specifically against Shaw.

The Life team did reseach on Arcacha Smith, Brennan, Craig and made very detailed notes on the Ruby trial. They also did some unique research on the Hidel alias and found a witness who reported a heavy set man leaving the rear of the TSBD and going towards a railway car; that witness seems never to have surfaced anywhere else. And Wallace felt that some of the notes expressed a real fear that Garrison would go after the Anti-Castro Cubans successfully. He also mentioned that the notes appear to indicate that Life supported Josiah Thompson initially but then turned against him.

All in all John, I think this material has been woefully ignored and could be the grist for a truly insightful study; when combined with the papers we actually have on the Justice Department interference in the Garrison trial it could make a really interesting book and might indeed connect the dots to show Billings full role in the Garrison investigation.

[John Simkin]

There is another interesting story about LBJ and the press. In 1956 there was an attempt to end all federal price control over natural gas. Sam Rayburn played an important role in getting it through the House of Representatives. This is not surprising as according to John Connally, he alone had been responsible for a million and a half dollars of lobbying. (1)

Paul Douglas and William Langer led the fight against the bill. Their campaigned was helped by an amazing speech by Francis Case of South Dakota. (2) Up until this time Case had been a supporter of the bill. However, he announced that he had been offered a $25,000 bribe by the Superior Oil Company to guarantee his vote. As a man of principal, he thought he should announce this fact to the Senate.

Johnson responded by claiming that Case had himself come under pressure to make this statement by people who wanted to retain federal price controls. Johnson argued: “In all my twenty-five years in Washington I have never seen a campaign of intimidation equal to the campaign put on by the opponents of this bill.” (3)

Johnson pushed on with the bill and it was eventually passed by 53 votes to 38. However, three days later, Eisenhower, vetoed the bill on grounds of immoral lobbying. Eisenhower confided in his diary that this had been “the most flagrant kind of lobbying that has been brought to my attention”. He added that there was a “great stench around the passing of this bill” and the people involved were “so arrogant and so much in defiance of acceptable standards of propriety as to risk creating doubt among the American people concerning the integrity of governmental processes”. (4)

Senators called for an investigation into the lobbying of the oil industry by Thomas Hennings, the chairman of the subcommittee on Privileges and Elections. Johnson was unwilling to allow a senator not under his control to look into the matter. Instead he set up a select committee chaired by Walter George of Georgia, a member of the Southern Caucus. (5) Johnson had again exposed himself as being in the pay of the oil industry. (6)

Drew Pearson of the Washington Post picked up on this story and wrote a series of articles about Lyndon Johnson and the oil industry. (7) Pearson claimed that Johnson was the “real godfather of the bill”. Pearson explored Johnson’s relationship with George Brown (8) and Herman Brown (9). He reported on the large sums of money that had been flowing from Brown & Root, the “big gas pipeline company” to Johnson. He also referred to the large government contracts that the company had obtained during the Second World War.

Pearson also quoted a Senate report that pointed out there was “no room for a general contractor like Brown & Root on Federal projects”. Nevertheless, Johnson had helped them win several contracts including one to build air-naval bases in Spain.”

Johnson was now in serious trouble and sought a private meeting with Pearson. He offered the journalist a deal, if Pearson dropped the investigation, he would support Estes Kefauver, in the forthcoming primaries. Pearson surprisingly accepted this deal. He wrote in his diary: “I figured I might do that much for Estes (Kefauver). This is the first time I’ve ever made a deal like this, and I feel unhappy about it. With the Presidency of the United States at stake, maybe it’s justified, maybe not – I don’t know.” (10)

Drew Pearson was of course the leading investigative journalist in America. It was vitally important that Johnson compromised Pearson and his colleague, Jack Anderson. The Johnson tapes showed that he tried to use Pearson to smear Don Reynolds during the Bobby Baker scandal. He refused but Jack Anderson agreed to do it. Anderson, of course, later played an important role in spreading the story that JFK had been killed by organized crime. The same story promoted by Dick Billings in his book (with Blakey) The Plot To Kill the President.

Notes

1. Alfred Steinberg, Sam Johnson’s Boy, 1968, page 432

2. Francis Case, speech in the Senate (3rd February, 1956)

3. Lyndon Johnson, speech in the Senate (3rd February, 1956)

4. Dwight Eisenhower, diary entry (11th February, 1956)

5. Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising (1991) page 498

6. Alfred Steinberg, Sam Johnson’s Boy, 1968, page 433

7. George Brown: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbrownG.htm

8. Herman Brown: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbrownH.htm

9. Drew Pearson, Washington Post (26th 27th and 28th April, 1956)

10. Jack Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker (1979) page 315

[Tim Gratz]

John,  there are a great many things in the Johnson tapes over a period of several months that are extremely relevant to the cover-up - I covered as much as possible in my book from the material I had available but I certainly do not have complete transcripts for the period nor have I listened to the tapes myself.

To your question though,  first to my knowledge there are no "missing" tapes for the period - there is at least one sign of an attempt to erase content on a Johnson library tape;  Rex Jackson covers that in a paper he presents on his history matters site (in that case a small part of a tape appears to be erased however the transcript gives the clue)....that is a conversation dealing with Mexico City.

On the larger question though,  I doubt that Johnson ever gave any thought of the tapes being out of his control or released to the public during his life time without his approval.  He kept the system to provide background for future historical treatment of his Presidency.   Until Watergate,  I doubt any President gave any thought to the tapes being used against them in any fashion,  much less being released in totality to the public.

The tapes are another fine area of primary research work that could be done by JFK researchers though;  I know of nobody with conspiracy interest  who is working them directly.   There has been some controversy as to the quality of some of the transcription work done to date to produce the transcripts we do have.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I believe this debate is of vital importance and I have started a new thread on the subject:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=1909

LBJ telephone transcripts raise several questions:

. . . .

8. According to William Kelly/Rex Bradford, the most significant JFK/Hoover tape was destroyed. Do you have any details on this?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

* * * * * * *

The story of the deliberate erasure of the 11/23/1963 phone call between LBJ and Hoover (about 10:00 a.m.) is discussed in Holland's The Assassination Tapes.

A transcript (complete?) of the call exists but not the actual recording which was deliberately erased.

There are also two good essays on it on the Rex Bradford History Matters web-site. Go to Index to Essays, then to 1) The Fourteen Minute Gap; and 2) The Fourteen Minute Gap: An Update.

[Tim Carroll]

John,  given the Luce's aggressive conservatism (both husband and wife) I find it very consistent that they would have been doing deep background  exploration on any potential democratic candidates.  I suspect that they saved the "ammunition" as you speculate - but simply because Kennedy was the primary candidate in 1960 and by 1964 when he was running as a war candidate over Viet Nam they may not have been that opposed to him. 

In regard to the Luce's,  LIFE and the war against Castro it is certainly true that the Luce's kept up the "get Castro" drumbeat but the more I study this subject the more indications I find that Luce was probably no more an ongoing source of a call to get rid of Castro than was RFK and at times there may even have been more mutual interest than I might have imagined.  An example is the TILT mission,  where I once viewed it to be an almost rogue operation by JMWAVE personnel I have recently been reviewing correspondance between Pawley and Marshall Carter which clearly gave the go ahead for LIFE's involvement on the chance that the mission might provide proof of Russian and Cuban duplicity and demonstrate missiles still in Cuba.  This occurs at the same time that the Kennedy administration was itself moving to a formal position that the agreement with the Russians for non-intervention was null and void since the UN inspections which were part of that agreement had run into a stone wall and were obviously not going to happen. 

--  Larry

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I believe that Bobby Kennedy was continuing support for anti-Castro efforts to a degree that would not have been approved by JFK. I understand that it is always assumed that they were of one mind on everything, but not during 1963. Thus, what was a rogue operation to one may have had the approval of the other. As for the lack of UN inspections, it was clear from the beginning that Castro did not agree to them, and JFK did at one point pay some lip-service to that fact. However, he was not going to jeopardize his secret deal with the Soviets over this, as they had provided evidence of the removal of the weapons by pulling the tarps back and showing the missiles when surveillance planes overflew the departing Russian cargo ships. Luce's hell-bent attitude is revealed in the following:

"In the spring of 1963 Life began a one-magazine campaign to congeal American jingoism behind the military adventures of the Cuban exiles. One blood-and-guts cover memorialized with a tilt toward hagiography the men who had fought in the Bay of Pigs. Another fighting Life front page heralded Andrew St. George's Caribbean theater-of-war report on the Commandos L attack on the Russian freighter Baku. Publicity of this sort swelled the non-CIA-controlled exiles. It was against this background that Kennedy invited the Luces to lunch at the White House. Luce said later that he would never have gone had not Joe Kennedy been such a good friend of his; he accepted the invitation in respect of the father, not the son.

Kennedy exercised all his considerable charm to convince the Luces that their publications should curtail their coverage of the exile commandos. The President did not confide in the beetle-browed king of the weeklies that he had his own plans for military action against Cuba; JFK wanted his Secret War kept secret.

Luce took the opposing view; that the exiles needed transfusions of the ink of the free press to encourage them in their resolve to overthrow Castro. (the talk around the water cooler at Life was that Luce had been persuaded by an Italian fascist friend - a man of his social circle - that Castro could be toppled if his opposition didn't become discouraged.)

The luncheon conversation became heated. At one point the nasty nine-letter word "warmonger" was used. This led to Mr. and Mrs. Luce leaving before they had touched their desserts.

Luce went directly from the White House to the High Arctic of Time-Life's corporate headquarters in New York, where he convened an extraordinary meeting of all his editorial brass. If the United States of America was being chicken, Time, Inc., was declaring war on Cuba. The Founder said that despite a corporate austerity program then in effect, they were going all out to assist the exiles in military actions against Cuba. Contact was to be made with principal exile groups to arrange for reporters and photographers to go along on raids. Time, Inc., would provide logistical and financial assistance where necessary, but he did not want the company ripped off the way the CIA had been. [authors' interview with St. George]

With this directive, Luce, the great editorial innovator, invented a new form of journalism for which he is yet to be credited in standard histories of the printed word. The Founder was taking his gremlins beyond the familiar world of checkbook journalism into the nether reaches of paramilitary journalism.

Life's feuding editorial duchies - the national desk, Miami bureau, and others - took the master's fiat as a competitive call. They constantly tried to upstage one another, spying, usurping credit, and striving to get the most dramatic pictures of the commandos wreaking havoc. Andrew St. George, who went along on most of the raids as Life's unofficial chief war correspondent for the Caribbean theater, estimated that the magazine spent close to a quarter of a million dollars during 1963-1964, a sizable sum in the pioneer era of paramilitary journalism. The Hungarian said that he himself ws paid some $50,000 in expenses as Life's main contact with exile groups such as Alpha 66.

The front-line command post was Life's regional bureau office in the DuPont Plaza Hotel in Miami, a magnet which quickly attracted hell-bent-for-action types like Gerry Hemming and Eddie Bayo, who belonged to Commandos L. St. George used the hotel bar as a watering hole for his exile contacts. "They drank brand-name brands," he said. At first his financial orders were strictly beer budget: "you will give these people money in very small amounts - buy them fried chicken, beer, things like that. Help out as you can, but do not finance the raids as such." Apparently Life's legal department was familiar with the Neutrality Act.

But the expenditures soon became more substantial. Life purchased ship-to-shore radios for Alpha 66 and paid commandos for exclusive stories - money often plowed back into the raids. The magazine became so deeply involved that it provided life insurance for commandos and correspondents. To make a claim, the next of kin had to fill out forms referred to by Life staffers as "widow papers"....

In the early summer of 1963, Life became involved in a plot to kidnap two Russian officers from Cuba [Operation Tilt]. This scheme was the product of a trinity of conspiratorial interests - frustrated exiles, Luce's increasingly rabid anticommunism, and a CIA cabal - bent on inflicting severe political damage on John F. Kennedy by showing him up as either a dupe of the Soviets or a supreme commander oblivious of a new missile threat in Cuba.... The plan was to debrief them privately at the Gettysburg farm of Pawley's old friend Dwight Eisenhower, then to call in the press and embarrass JFK by displaying the Russkies as living proof that Soviet missiles were still on Cuba.*

In the month preceding the assassination, Clare Boothe Luce wrote in Life: "What is now at stake in the decision for intervention or nonintervention in Cuba is the question not only of American prestige but of American survival."** Stong stuff indeed!

Then, the very night of the assassination, Clare Boothe Luce received the famous phone call from one of her anti-Castro beneficiaries whom she admitted to knowing well (well enough to have her home phone number), informing her of Oswald's trips to Mexico City, accompanied by the familiar litany that Oswald had claimed he was "a crack marksman and could shoot anybody - including the Pesident or the Secretary of the Navy." Ironically, Governor Connally had been Secretary of the Navy in 1961, when Oswald wrote him asking that his undesirable discharge be reversed. By the time of the assassination, the Secretary of the Navy was Fred Korth, who had been Marguerite Oswald's divorce lawyer.***

Luce may well have supported the effort to produce proof of conspiracy - Cuban conspiracy. I've stated that I did not think Life, which kept the Zapruder film from the public for 12 years, would have been interested in truly solving the JFK case for the same reason I've speculated why Bobby Kennedy wasn't interested in solving it: some activity with which they were involved had backfired (possibly Operation Tilt), resulting in the president's assassination. That is just my own interpretation.

Tim

*Warren Hinckle & William Turner, Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro And The Assassination Of J.F.K., (New York: First Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993; originally published as The Fish Is Red by Harper and Row, 1981), 186-188.

**Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy And His Times, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978), 506.

***Anthony Summers, Not In Your Lifetime, (first published as Conspiracy by McGraw-Hill Books in 1980), 322-324.

Edited December 15, 2004 by Tim Carroll

[Tim Gratz]

John,  given the Luce's aggressive conservatism (both husband and wife) I find it very consistent that they would have been doing deep background  exploration on any potential democratic candidates.  I suspect that they saved the "ammunition" as you speculate - but simply because Kennedy was the primary candidate in 1960 and by 1964 when he was running as a war candidate over Viet Nam they may not have been that opposed to him. 

In regard to the Luce's,  LIFE and the war against Castro it is certainly true that the Luce's kept up the "get Castro" drumbeat but the more I study this subject the more indications I find that Luce was probably no more an ongoing source of a call to get rid of Castro than was RFK and at times there may even have been more mutual interest than I might have imagined.  An example is the TILT mission,  where I once viewed it to be an almost rogue operation by JMWAVE personnel I have recently been reviewing correspondance between Pawley and Marshall Carter which clearly gave the go ahead for LIFE's involvement on the chance that the mission might provide proof of Russian and Cuban duplicity and demonstrate missiles still in Cuba.  This occurs at the same time that the Kennedy administration was itself moving to a formal position that the agreement with the Russians for non-intervention was null and void since the UN inspections which were part of that agreement had run into a stone wall and were obviously not going to happen. 

--  Larry

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I believe that Bobby Kennedy was continuing support for anti-Castro efforts to a degree that would not have been approved by JFK. I understand that it is always assumed that they were of one mind on everything, but not during 1963. Thus, what was a rogue operation to one may have had the approval of the other. As for the lack of UN inspections, it was clear from the beginning that Castro did not agree to them, and JFK did at one point pay some lip-service to that fact. However, he was not going to jeopardize his secret deal with the Soviets over this, as they had provided evidence of the removal of the weapons by pulling the tarps back and showing the missiles when surveillance planes overflew the departing Russian cargo ships. Luce's hell-bent attitude is revealed in the following:

"In the spring of 1963 Life began a one-magazine campaign to congeal American jingoism behind the military adventures of the Cuban exiles. One blood-and-guts cover memorialized with a tilt toward hagiography the men who had fought in the Bay of Pigs. Another fighting Life front page heralded Andrew St. George's Caribbean theater-of-war report on the Commandos L attack on the Russian freighter Baku. Publicity of this sort swelled the non-CIA-controlled exiles. It was against this background that Kennedy invited the Luces to lunch at the White House. Luce said later that he would never have gone had not Joe Kennedy been such a good friend of his; he accepted the invitation in respect of the father, not the son.

Kennedy exercised all his considerable charm to convince the Luces that their publications should curtail their coverage of the exile commandos. The President did not confide in the beetle-browed king of the weeklies that he had his own plans for military action against Cuba; JFK wanted his Secret War kept secret.

Luce took the opposing view; that the exiles needed transfusions of the ink of the free press to encourage them in their resolve to overthrow Castro. (the talk around the water cooler at Life was that Luce had been persuaded by an Italian fascist friend - a man of his social circle - that Castro could be toppled if his opposition didn't become discouraged.)

The luncheon conversation became heated. At one point the nasty nine-letter word "warmonger" was used. This led to Mr. and Mrs. Luce leaving before they had touched their desserts.

Luce went directly from the White House to the High Arctic of Time-Life's corporate headquarters in New York, where he convened an extraordinary meeting of all his editorial brass. If the United States of America was being chicken, Time, Inc., was declaring war on Cuba. The Founder said that despite a corporate austerity program then in effect, they were going all out to assist the exiles in military actions against Cuba. Contact was to be made with principal exile groups to arrange for reporters and photographers to go along on raids. Time, Inc., would provide logistical and financial assistance where necessary, but he did not want the company ripped off the way the CIA had been. [authors' interview with St. George]

With this directive, Luce, the great editorial innovator, invented a new form of journalism for which he is yet to be credited in standard histories of the printed word. The Founder was taking his gremlins beyond the familiar world of checkbook journalism into the nether reaches of paramilitary journalism.

Life's feuding editorial duchies - the national desk, Miami bureau, and others - took the master's fiat as a competitive call. They constantly tried to upstage one another, spying, usurping credit, and striving to get the most dramatic pictures of the commandos wreaking havoc. Andrew St. George, who went along on most of the raids as Life's unofficial chief war correspondent for the Caribbean theater, estimated that the magazine spent close to a quarter of a million dollars during 1963-1964, a sizable sum in the pioneer era of paramilitary journalism. The Hungarian said that he himself ws paid some $50,000 in expenses as Life's main contact with exile groups such as Alpha 66.

The front-line command post was Life's regional bureau office in the DuPont Plaza Hotel in Miami, a magnet which quickly attracted hell-bent-for-action types like Gerry Hemming and Eddie Bayo, who belonged to Commandos L. St. George used the hotel bar as a watering hole for his exile contacts. "They drank brand-name brands," he said. At first his financial orders were strictly beer budget: "you will give these people money in very small amounts - buy them fried chicken, beer, things like that. Help out as you can, but do not finance the raids as such." Apparently Life's legal department was familiar with the Neutrality Act.

But the expenditures soon became more substantial. Life purchased ship-to-shore radios for Alpha 66 and paid commandos for exclusive stories - money often plowed back into the raids. The magazine became so deeply involved that it provided life insurance for commandos and correspondents. To make a claim, the next of kin had to fill out forms referred to by Life staffers as "widow papers"....

In the early summer of 1963, Life became involved in a plot to kidnap two Russian officers from Cuba [Operation Tilt]. This scheme was the product of a trinity of conspiratorial interests - frustrated exiles, Luce's increasingly rabid anticommunism, and a CIA cabal - bent on inflicting severe political damage on John F. Kennedy by showing him up as either a dupe of the Soviets or a supreme commander oblivious of a new missile threat in Cuba.... The plan was to debrief them privately at the Gettysburg farm of Pawley's old friend Dwight Eisenhower, then to call in the press and embarrass JFK by displaying the Russkies as living proof that Soviet missiles were still on Cuba.*

In the month preceding the assassination, Clare Boothe Luce wrote in Life: "What is now at stake in the decision for intervention or nonintervention in Cuba is the question not only of American prestige but of American survival."** Stong stuff indeed!

Then, the very night of the assassination, Clare Boothe Luce received the famous phone call from one of her anti-Castro beneficiaries whom she admitted to knowing well (well enough to have her home phone number), informing her of Oswald's trips to Mexico City, accompanied by the familiar litany that Oswald had claimed he was "a crack marksman and could shoot anybody - including the Pesident or the Secretary of the Navy." Ironically, Governor Connally had been Secretary of the Navy in 1961, when Oswald wrote him asking that his undesirable discharge be reversed. By the time of the assassination, the Secretary of the Navy was Fred Korth, who had been Marguerite Oswald's divorce lawyer.***

Luce may well have supported the effort to produce proof of conspiracy - Cuban conspiracy. I've stated that I did not think Life, which kept the Zapruder film from the public for 12 years, would have been interested in truly solving the JFK case for the same reason I've speculated why Bobby Kennedy wasn't interested in solving it: some activity with which they were involved had backfired (possibly Operation Tilt), resulting in the president's assassination. That is just my own interpretation.

Tim

*Warren Hinckle & William Turner, Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro And The Assassination Of J.F.K., (New York: First Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993; originally published as The Fish Is Red by Harper and Row, 1981), 186-188.

**Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy And His Times, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978), 506.

***Anthony Summers, Not In Your Lifetime, (first published as Conspiracy by McGraw-Hill Books in 1980), 322-324.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Tim is it just your opinion that RFK was authorizing operations beyond what JFK would have approved?

As you know, I think there is some evidence to support a conclusion that the assassination was orchestrated by Cuban intelligence committed because of continuning US efforts to kill Castro. How tragic it would be if these US assassination efforts had not been, and would not have been, approved by JFK. You have previously suggested (I think this is an accurate paraphrase, but not your exact words) that the depth of RFK's despair over his brother's death could be attributed to his concern that the death was caused by the "blowback" of an operation he had authorized. This would be particularly true if JFK had not approved it.

With respect to the possibility, suggested by some, that certain members of Operation Tilt were involved in the JFK assassination, do you think this scenario fits, albeit loosely, with the Rosselli contention that JFK was killed by assassins who had originally been sent to Cuba to kill Castro (if Operation Tilt was in fact an assassination scheme)?

Edited December 15, 2004 by Tim Gratz

[John Simkin]

In the 1940s a group of right-wing politicians and businessmen in Texas joined what became known as the Suite 8F group. The name comes from the room in the Lamar Hotel in Houston where they held their meetings. Members of the group included Lyndon Johnson, George and Herman Brown (Brown & Root), Jesse H. Jones (multi-millionaire investor in a large number of organizations and chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation), Gus Wortham (American General Insurance Company), Robert Kerr (Kerr-McGee Oil Industries), James Abercrombie (Cameron Iron Works), William Hobby (Governor of Texas), Richard Russell (chairman of the Committee of Manufactures, Committee on Armed Forces and Committee of Appropriations), Albert Thomas (chairman of the House Appropriations Committee) and John Connally (Governor of Texas). Political fixers and LBJ cronies, Alvin Wirtz and Ed Clark, were also members of 8F.

After the war George and Herman Brown (of Brown & Root) joined with other members of 8F to form Texas Eastern Transmission Company. Johnson helped this organization to buy the government owned Big Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines. This gave them control of a considerable amount of the petroleum supply to the East. In fact, this group become involved in all the government contracts obtained by Brown and Root by LBJ.

It was this group that was giving LBJ his orders before 1960. LBJ tried to publicly distance himself from this group when he became vice president. 8F had been opposed to LBJ becoming vice president as they thought it would reduce his power. How wrong they were. The group did extremely well under LBJ as president. For example, Project Mohole and the NASA’s Spacecraft Center in Houston. Albert Thomas played a key role in this success.

I think it is possible that this group might have paid for the assassination of Kennedy. Have you found any links between David Morales or David Phillips and the members of the 8F group?

[Larry Hancock]

John, I can't say that I have found any concrete indication of those kinds of connections. Morales was reportedly associated with certain gambling crime figures and apparently had been since his time in Havana, that had escalated on his return to Florida and involvement in assassination projects including contact with Roselli. Roselli's biographers make a case for Morales having a lot of contacts with folks in Las Vegas.

As to Phillips, he did have contact with rich Texans but those were primarily people who had business interests in Cuba before Castro - Kleberg is an example -perhaps even more connections to the old established Cuba sugar money which had moved to New York City after Castro's revolution. While some of Phillips exile surrogates seem to have tried to collect money from rich Texans there is little sign of Phillips himself doing that sort of thing.

As a general comment on character, its hard for me seeing a very political person such as Phillips "taking a contract"; on the other hand Morales was known to combine doing the right anti-Communist thing with making some money on the side as his due (sort of a high risk bonus), at least that is the way his friend in Arizona describes it.

[John Simkin]

As to Phillips, he did have contact with rich Texans but those were primarily people who had business interests in Cuba before Castro - Kleberg is an example -perhaps even more connections to the old established Cuba sugar money which had moved to New York City after Castro's revolution.  While some of Phillips exile surrogates seem to have tried to collect money from rich Texans there is little sign of Phillips himself doing that sort of thing. 

Earl E. T. Smith was Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Cuba (1957-59). Active in right-wing anti-Castro Cuban Exile groups in Florida, he was also director of U.S. Sugar Corporation. He was also married to the woman who was JFK's long-term mistress (1944-63). Any possible connection?

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKsmithET.htm