The J.F.K. Files and the Problem of Trust

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.

All this helps to explain the intense interest in what was supposed to be the release, after twenty-five years, of the last heretofore classified, and/or redacted, government documents on the subject, in accordance with the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, on October 26, 1992. Donald J. Trump, the current U.S. President, said at first that he intended to “lift the veil,” but the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. apparently pushed him to continue withholding, and redacting, some documents. Then, over the weekend, he promised to release everything but the names and addresses of living people. Very likely he was emboldened by Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who had called the latest delay “ridiculous,” and tweeted, “YeGods u had fifty yrs NOW CIA WANTS FURTHER COVERUP/POTUS STOP.” Trump, being Trump, may yet reverse himself, but it’s hard to imagine what could justify another delay.

How, then, to explain the passion of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and other agencies to keep suppressing some records? Was there a secret too terrible to be exposed? John Tunheim, a U.S. district judge, who chaired a first review of the files, told Politico, “I just don’t think there is anything in these records that require keeping them secret now.” Was the American psyche regarded as a flower so fragile that, after the murders of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King; the lies that led to the escalation of the Vietnam War; the Watergate scandals; and, more recently, possible interference by Russia in our last Presidential election, the nation could not face its own history?

Perhaps the real fragile flowers are agencies determined to hide their documented incompetence: leads that were ignored, witnesses not listened to, murderous plots against foreign leaders concealed for years. In February, 1964, Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was leading the official investigation, was asked if the full record would be released, and he replied, “Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your life­time. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security.” More than a half century later, it might be argued that secrecy itself shares the blame for fomenting so many conspiracy theories, paranoidal movies like “J.F.K.,” and so much suspicion that, according to the Pew Research Center, only nineteen per cent of Americans say that they trust the government to do what’s right. (In 1958, when the question was first posed, seventy-three per cent trusted the government.) In a democracy that relies on trust in its institutions, and the consent of the governed, that diminishment of faith is a national tragedy on the level of the murder of a President.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Jeffrey Frank