The J.F.K. Files and the Problem of Trust [by Jeffrey Frank]

<<<Fifty-three years after the Warren Commission concluded that President John F. Kennedy’s assassin was a lone rifleman, Lee Harvey Oswald, only a third of the nation believes it.>>>

Twenty-three years ago, I was in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, talking with a man named Frank Ragano, whose memoir of sorts, “Mob Lawyer,” contained a sensational claim about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (By sheer chance, no doubt, Richard Helms, the former director of Central Intelligence, was two tables away.) In the book, co-written with the veteran Times reporter Selwyn Raab, Ragano revealed that a client, a Florida Mafia boss, Santo Trafficante, Jr., had admitted being in on the assassination plot. Although attorney-client privilege extends beyond the grave, Ragano ignored that (and whatever claim the Mafia code of silence—omertà—may have had on him) by recounting what he claimed was Trafficante’s admission, uttered in Sicilian, four days before his death, in 1987: “Carlos è futtutu. Non duvevamu a Giovanni. Duvevamu ammazzari a Bobby.” (“Carlos fucked up. We shouldn’t have killed John. We should have killed Bobby.”) “Carlos” was the New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello; Bobby was Robert F. Kennedy, who was his brother’s Attorney General. According to Ragano, the motive was a quid pro quo: the mob killed Kennedy as a favor to Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters boss, and a target of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. In return, the Mob got access to Teamsters’ pension fund, then worth about a billion dollars. It was all about the money, Ragano told me as we sat at the Mayflower—“forget everything else.” Ragano died, of natural causes, four years after his book came out, and there’s no real evidence to substantiate his story.

Many were dismissive, but G. Robert Blakey, a former Justice Department lawyer and the chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, was not entirely so. (As is sometimes the case, things turn up to feed a hungry theory: after Hoffa disappeared—presumably by violent means—in July, 1975, federal investigators discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars had vanished from a Teamster pension fund.) When the committee finished its two-and-a-half-year investigation, in 1979, and concluded that a conspiracy was “likely” behind the murders of Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Blakey (speaking for himself, not for the committee) said that it was a “historical truth” that the mob killed J.F.K. Skepticism, though, is the rational response to almost any theory about the assassination. Fifty-three years after the Warren Commission concluded that the assassin was a lone rifleman, Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-marine who’d once defected to the Soviet Union, only a third of the nation believes it. It’s probably impossible to study the subject without being worn down: by its jumble of possible motives; a cast that included mobsters, anti-Castro Cubans, the stripper Candy Barr, the C.I.A., the K.G.B., Marilyn Monroe, the Pittsburgh coroner who discovered that Kennedy’s brain was missing—and, not least, a chain of seemingly meaningless coincidence. (Consider, for instance, that the White Russian George de Mohrenschildt, the closest friend of Oswald and his Russian-born wife, knew Jacqueline Bouvier, the future Mrs. Kennedy, when she was a young girl, or that Richard Nixon had been in Dallas on the day that Kennedy was shot.) It’s fitting that the best books on the subject have been novels, the best of which is Don DeLillo’s masterpiece “Libra.” My former Washington Post colleague Jefferson Morley once said that the assassination was the Rosetta Stone of postwar American history, and he continues to pursue its mysteries.

Click here to read the rest of this fascinating article by Jeffrey Frank that The New Yorker posted on November 1, 2017. 

Comments

[Sam Well]

Great piece. "The Rosetta Stone of postwar American history" is a resonant phrase, and most apt.

[Rivkah Rubinstein]

What an eye-opener!