EPILOGUE

In July, 1995, almost a year after I finished the rough draft of this manuscript, my friend Andy Winiarczyk gave me a copy of the then only recently published book by Carlos Lechuga , In the Eye of the Storm (Ocean Press, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia). It has the subtitle Castro, Khruschev , Kennedy and the Missile Crisis. Correctly, I believe, Lechuga does not refer to that crisis as "Cuban." It was in all respects a world crisis. Not only was that book not published in the United States, distribution inside the United States had to be improvised outside the usual channels for distributing books.

But as we refer and have always referred to that crisis as "Cuban" when in fact it was potentially the most serious of all the crises in world history, we also do not want to know of any other account or version of it than that of our government at the time of that crisis. That is a version that has us as innocent bystanders in the crisis with we we had nothing at all to do when in fact we precipitated it and made it virtually inevitable unless the Soviet Union was willing to thereafter be regarded as a second-rate power whose word was worthless, as the paper tiger of the Chinese description at the time of their rupture in what had been close and friendly relations.

It happened that at the time I read Lechuga 's personal memoir of his involvement in that crisis and the later beginning of negotiations Kennedy initiated with Castro I was working on three book manuscripts. Coinciding with that my wife and I developed additional medical problems (when between is we had accumulated 165 years) and the college students who were retyping those manuscripts on their computers found continuing that work impossible or just decided that they did not want to work their summer away.

With all those interruptions and confusions and with what Lechuga wrote also being appropriate for another of those three manuscripts, Tragedy and Travesty: John Newman and "Oswald and the CIA," I became confused and instead of using only excerpts in it from Lechuga 's final chapter I mistakenly used all of it. With the beginning of the new academic year I heard from another student who wanted typing work. When a student who was visiting us said she knew this student who wanted the work and I'd never seen, I asked her to take to this new student that Epilogue to the book on Newman and his book that in more than 600 pages does not connect Oswald to the CIA.

Ordinarily, and properly, correcting this mistake would require extensive rewriting. But because of my age and the state of my health, because of what I still want to get onto paper while that is possible for me and because in this writing I seek to make a record for history and have neither plans for publication nor the means of it, I use Lechuga 's final chapter in both book manuscripts in both of which it is appropriate. If by any chance in the future either is to be published, that will be the time for the editing.

What Lechuga wrote speaks for itself. It is, as the publisher's blurb says, "The inside story of Cuba's former UN ambassador." It was edited by Mirta Muñiz and it was translated by Mary Todd. Here is what his Australian publisher says of Lechuga :

Carlos Lechuga Hevia was Cuba's ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the Missile Crisis and took an active part in some of the negotiation and statements in that world forum.

After the crisis, he participated in the contacts Kennedy made with Fidel Castro — which many analysts consider were aimed at opening up channels for détente in U.S. relations with Cuba and which may have been one of the reasons for Kennedy's assassination.

Lechuga has carried out many diplomatic missions and has represented Cuba in numerous international conferences and activities.

He was Cuba's last ambassador to the Organization of American States and also served as ambassador to Chile, Mexico and Portugal.

Lechuga represented Cuba in several United Nations specialized agencies in Geneva in 1971-78 and 1984-89. He has served as Vice-Chairman of the Human Rights Commissions, Deputy Chairman of the First Commission of the General Assembly, President of the Disarmament Conference, elected President of the Negotiating Group on Radiological Weapons, member of the Consultive Board of Disarmament Studies (twice, under UN Secretaries-General Kurt Waldheim and Javier Perez de Cuéllar ), and member of the Group of Governmental Experts on Constitutional Disarmament Arrangements.

In 1994, he was reelected a member of the Committee of the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and was elected Vice-Chairman of the Committee.

He was Coordinator of two UNCTADs of the Group of 77, in Manila and Geneva.

He was President of the National Council of Culture and, as such, a member of the Cuban Council of Ministers.

Journalist , diplomat and writer, his work has been published in Cuba, other Latin American countries and the United States. His book Itinerario de una farsa [Itinerary of a farce] won the 1992 critics award in Cuba.

Background on that 1962 crisis and on the tripartite symposium on it in Cuba in January, 1992, are provided in the editor's preface by Mirta Muñiz :

It all began at 6:00 in the evening of October 22, 1962, when the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union sent a letter to the Kremlin. The fateful letter informed the Soviet leadership of the discovery by U.S. U-2 planes of the nuclear missiles in Cuba, and declared the imposition of a naval blockade of the island. From that moment, the discovery of the presence of Soviet strategic weapons in Cuba erupted into the gravest crisis of the Cold War — a crisis which took the world to the edge of an unprecedented catastrophe.

The installation of the atomic missiles in the Carribean was determined by two factors: the imminent invasion of Cuba by U.S. military forces and the USSR's attempt to reduce the great imbalance in nuclear capability.

This is the history that, in intimate detail, is told in this book by the author, Carlos Lechuga , who as well as being a witness, actively participated in the diplomatic negotiations that took place to resolve the crisis.

For Cubans, the Missile Crisis did not have a satisfactory outcome following Moscow's decision to withdraw the missiles, leaving the island vulnerable to continued U.S. aggression that — even today, after more than 30 years — is an expression of Washington's policy toward Cuba.

The topic has lost none of its relevance and continues to be the subject of analysis by military figures, government leaders and diplomats from Cuba, the United States and the former Soviet Union. Several international symposiums have been held in recent years, with participants from the three countries. Fidel Castro participated personally in the Havana conference in 1992 as the only one of the three heads of state who were protagonists and who today is able to reflect on the crisis over the distance of 30 years.

Another important figure in the Missile Crisis, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy administration, also participated in these symposiums, along with military officers and diplomats of the former Soviet Union. Many of their testimonies are collected in this volume. Also, for the first time some of the principal debated documents are published, presenting the Cuban point of view — a point of view not always adequately reflected in the analyses published in both the United States and Russia.

This book also describes a previously unknown episode in U.S.-Cuban relations — conversations initiated between a White House official and the author, Havana's representative at the United Nations. This attempt at opening a dialogue came after the Missile Crisis when President Kennedy was apparently exploring the possibility of a normalization of the relations between the two countries. It was an initiative that was abruptly bought to a halt with the assassination of the U.S. leader in 1963. There remain many clues, but no solution, to the continuing mystery of the Dallas crime. Basing his view on well-founded speculation, Carlos Lechuga suggests that these conversations in which he participated could have precipitated the assassination in order to block any thawing of relations between the two countries.

Whether or not as Lechuga suggests the negotiations between Kennedy and Castro in which he represented Castro precipitated the assassination we may never know. We ought not disregard what he believes merely because it is a Cuban belief. While there are those who may automatically refuse to trust what Lechuga says, what he says should be known to Americans, as it is not, whether or not those who read it are familiar with those events of unprecedented danger to the world and the beginning of negotiations for restoration of normality in relations, they were ended by the assassination. What this Cuban participant in these events says about them we should know and, evaluate it, to the degree each of us can as individuals evaluate it.

This is what he says about those so tragically aborted negotiations (pages 195-211):

The Unknown

As stated in the preceding chapter, McGeorge Bundy, who was closely linked to Kennedy, proposed in early 1963 that a rapprochement with the Cuban government should be considered. The first document mentioning that possibility was issued while the negotiators in New York were discussing the drafts of the documents to be submitted to the Security Council. By that time, Washington had already refused to support the protocol, rejected the individual declarations reflecting the positions of the three countries, turned down the idea of multiple inspections and was threatening to break off the dialogue with the Soviet Union if it insisted on having the Cubans participate in the final phase of the discussions. Dated January 4, this memorandum contained the initiative, which was mentioned only in passing and was lumped with others that called for interfering in matters that were strictly Cuba's business. The suggestion was repeated on April 24.

I don't know what happened in the White House when the proposal was examined, because the documents which might throw some light on this matter haven't been declassified. Therefore, I don't know who supported the idea and who didn't, though it is clear that the military elements and the members of the intelligence community were continued to the subversive plans that would lead to a military invasion of Cuba. It is also clear that they nearly always prevailed over those who favored a more intelligent, less irresponsible policy that was more in accord with détente . Nor do I know what stand the President took in those months, for no revelations have been made showing what he was thinking.

The only sure thing is that the attacks on Cuba continued throughout the year, the State Department and the Executive stepped up their diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Cuba politically, and the economic blockade was tightened with new measures. The alternatives to those who encouraged hostility were never publicized and didn't have enough weight to influence the established policy. It wasn't easy to take a new path. Enmity toward the Cuban revolution was deeply entrenched in the more reactionary sectors, which had enormous resources, political power in the Republican and Democratic parties and the last word in the mass media. They could mold public opinion to suit themselves, not only in the United States but also outside it, especially in Latin America, where most of the governments nearly always followed their northern neighbor's dictates.

The way in which the Missile Crisis was resolved stimulated those elements to continue with their aggression, pushing the subversive plans and closing off all possibilities of change. Those who favored modifying the policy that had been followed since the Eisenhower era weren't strong enough to oppose this. Moreover, they had the same strategic aims of military domination, economic advantages and ideological penetration as the others, though by other means. This is why, when evaluating those internal contradictions in the light of historical events, it is difficult to say just what effect they might have had.

The step that Kennedy took toward exploring a rapprochement with Cuba was surprising in view of the prevailing situation, but it showed that, in some way, he wanted to crack the solid wall of intransigence toward revolutionary Cuba. He was taking a serious political risk, which is why the steps he took were known to only a small group of his closest collaborators; something that further indicates his uncertainty. The next year, he would be seeking reelection, and he didn't know who the Republican Party candidate would be— only that whoever it was would have a powerful weapon to use against him. Moreover, he would have to seek reelection not knowing how most of the voters would react, and the hawks in the military establishment would certainly oppose him. One thing that may have influenced his decision — all this is in the realm of speculation — was that the crisis was over and the path to détente with the Soviet Union was clear. The international situation was changing, even though the United States always viewed the question of Cuba differently from the way it viewed the rest of the world.

The General Assembly of the United Nations began its new session on the second Tuesday in September 1963. That was the setting he chose for initiating a rapprochement with the Cubans. People of all kinds wandered through the halls of the United Nations building next to the East River in New York. Diplomats, journalists, politicians and the curious filled the building. The Delegates Lounge was one of the most crowded places. At midday on September 23, Lisa Howard, a friend of Kennedy who worked for ABC television and had interviewed Fidel Castro in Cuba, came up to me and told me that Ambassador William Attwood of the U.S. delegation wanted to talk with me and that it was urgent, as he was going to Washington the next day. The journalist invited me to a party at her home that evening and said that it would be the best opportunity I would have for meeting with Attwood .

At that time, William Attwood was ambassador to Guinea and was in New York to advise the U.S. delegation. He was on very close terms with Ambassador Adlai Stevenson and had been one of his speech writers when Stevenson had run for president on the Democratic ticket. He also had close ties with President Kennedy — for whom he had also written speeches during his electoral campaign. He was close to those who wielded power. An outstanding journalist with long service, he had been an editor of Look magazine and then on Newsday, and he had interviewed Fidel Castro shortly after the 1959 triumph of the revolution.

The U.S. ambassador was introduced to to me in the living room of Lisa Howard's home, in the midst of cocktails, sandwiches, diplomats and journalists. He lost no time in saying why he had wanted to meet me. He said that Stevenson had authorized him to do so and that he would be flying to Washington in a few hours to request authorization from the President to go to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro and ask about the feasibility of a rapprochement between Havana and Washington. He would go incognito and warned that he was speaking only as a private citizen, pending the instructions he would be given. He said that the situation was abnormal and that the ice would have to be broken sometime. He was very loquacious, and I could see that he wanted to establish an atmosphere of frankness to let me know that he was sincere. I told him that I, too, was speaking only as a private citizen but that I would tell my government and wait for its decision concerning his proposal. I added that, in view of the situation that existed between his country and mine and the fact that the United States policy of aggression had not abated, what he was telling me came as a surprise and that I would listen to him with great interest.

Attwood went on to say that he had two photos in his office in the U.S. embassy in Guinea: one of Fidel Castro waving from a plane and one of Fidel and his wife. One day, he invited the Soviet ambassador to dinner, and the Soviet diplomat had been surprised that the representative of the United States would have a picture of the Cuban leader in such an important place. He said that he had written two articles on Cuba which had been published in Look magazine in 1959 and that he had an idea that Havana hadn't been very pleased with the second one. He explained that, when he wrote it, he was influenced by a talk he'd had with Julio Lobo, a Cuban sugar magnate who lived in New York, who had invited him to the Savoy Plaza Hotel after Attwood had arrived back from Cuba. Lobo had told him he thought it would be good if Fidel Castro were assassinated — to which Attwood had replied that it would be a serious mistake, for it would result in a bloodbath, because Castro was very popular. From that conversation, Attwood had concluded that there was a large opposition movement in Cuba, which was what he reflected in his article.

He asked what the chances were that the Cuban government would allow him to go to Havana. I remember that I said I couldn't give him an official answer but that it was very possible. He then inquired if I felt the chances were 50-50. "That may be a good guess," I commented. He wanted to know what conditions would be required for negotiating. At that time, I couldn't tell him anything specific, but I said that my own view was that it would be difficult to negotiate in a situation of great pressure, such as there was in Cuba, with the economic blockade, the infiltration of saboteurs and the illegal flights. That atmosphere would have to be changed if the two parties were to discuss things on an equal footing, although, I repeated, everything would depend on what the United States wanted. He agreed that the situation was very complex, and he understood my point of view. He added that, someday, a process of rapprochement would have to begin, and he was convinced that it was useful to hear what I was telling him, even though I wasn't speaking in any official capacity.

He agreed that the political climate wasn't very propitious, since quite strong words had been exchanged, and he cited a recent speech of Fidel Castro. I replied that the words weren't strong at all but that the actions, hostility and harassment to which Cuba was subjected were. I recalled that after Kennedy's inaugural address, Fidel Castro had made some statements to the effect that there might be hope that Washington would give up its policy of aggression but that Kennedy had kept on attacking Cuba and had then launched the Bay of Pigs invasion. I recalled Kennedy's recent speech at American University which had had a conciliatory tone, and then the violent attacks he had made later in a Berlin speech against the socialist countries, which was a contradiction. I mentioned that, two months earlier, the Treasury Department had frozen Cuba's funds in the United States and had even frozen the funds of the Cuban Mission to the United Nations. I reminded him that, after a partial nuclear test ban treaty had been signed in Moscow, the CIA had stepped up its infiltration of terrorist agents in Cuba and its spy flights and that it was trying to mobilize forces in Central America to use them in an attack. He agreed that all that was true and that it was an absurd situation.

I asked him if the United States thought it could destroy the revolution. He replied that many members of the government were convinced of this. "The revolution is irreversible," I told him, and he replied that he didn't have any doubts about that and that many revolutions had taken place in the world. He said that he wasn't making any specific proposal, but that he was speaking with me because Stevenson had authorized him to do so and that he would see Kennedy the next day and didn't know if the President would authorize him to continue the dialogue or not. He said that Kennedy had inherited the problem of Cuba from Eisenhower and had no alternative but to follow the same policy, just as he had also inherited the problems of China and Vietnam. The situation on China was frozen, and even though he understood that it was absurd, it would take many years to change it. He added that Kennedy had often confessed in private conversations that he didn't know how he was going to change U.S. policy on Cuba, and that neither the United States nor Cuba could change it overnight because of the prestige involved. However, Kennedy said something had to be done about it and a start had to be made.

Attwood then made some interesting comments about U.S. domestic policy. He recognized that it wasn't easy for the Democrats to change course on Cuba, because the Republicans always had them on the defensive on the issue. He said that Barry Goldwater would probably be Kennedy's opponent in the next election, since Nelson Rockefeller had made many mistakes. Teasingly, he told me that if we thought Kennedy was our enemy, we should just imagine what Goldwater would do if he got to the White House.

Then he spoke of Robert Kennedy, saying that he held very strong positions but was a good politician and viewed things objectively. He said that the President's brother always wanted to win and that, if he thought the prolongation of the Cuba policy would have negative results, he would change his position.

Attwood thought that Kennedy would be reelected, but admitted that it would be a tough battle and that if he won by a narrow margin he wouldn't be able to carry out many of his projects. Attwood was worried about the racial problem, which at that time took the form of protest demonstrations, police repression and acts of violence by right-wingers. He said that in spite of the statements Kennedy had just made in defense of civil rights, he was being accused of not having acted effectively in the case of six young people in Alabama who were killed while participating in a memorial service. He was worried that the Republicans would take an intransigent position, with elements of the extreme right supporting Goldwater, and said that, in that case, the Democrats would be forced to take a position midway between the right and left, running the risk that the liberals might abstain from voting, which would benefit their opponents.

Returning to the subject of our meeting, Attwood referred to a talk that Averell Harriman, then Deputy-Secretary of State, had given not long before to the members of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, in which he had said that many agreements would be reached with the Soviet Union in the next 10 years. Even though he didn't mention Cuba by name, it was clear that he was referring to Cuba — at least, Attwood thought so because Harriman had said that the agreements with Moscow would lead to understandings in other areas. Attwood then commented favorably on a speech that Gromyko had given recently, saying that peaceful coexistence was a positive thing.

At the end of our meeting, we spoke of his work in Guinea. He said that Sekou Touré was a good leader, a nationalist, who tried to be on good terms with everybody. He said he wasn't what many people in Washington thought him to be — a Soviet satellite or pro-West — and that people in the United States tended to see everything in terms of black and white, with no shadings.

Attwood always insisted that he had contacted me on his own initiative, and he repeated this in two books that he published, but it is hard to believe that he would undertake such a delicate mission without having been asked to do so by people high up in the government. Be that as it may, Kennedy immediately came up in the conversation, and now that I know of the proposals made by Bundy, a very important figure in the White House, it is logical to think that the contact was the result of discussions in the inner circle around the Executive.

Attwood has said that he consulted with Harriman about meeting with me and that Harriman was interested and asked him to send a memo on the meeting. Later, Attwood discussed the possibility of the meeting with John Kenneth Galbraith, who was in New York after finishing his term as ambassador to India and was on his way back to Harvard to take up reaching again. Galbraith advised him to keep on talking with Harriman instead of Stevenson, because it was more likely the President would pay attention if he did so. [William Attwood , The twilight struggle. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. 258] In any case, Attwood showed Stevenson the memo the next day, and Stevenson said that, "unfortunately, the CIA is still in charge of Cuba." [ Attwood , The twilight struggle, 259] Stevenson offered to speak with Kennedy to see if he would authorize the meeting with me. Attwood suggested that the best time for the encounter would be while the General Assembly was in session, since it was natural that he would speak with the Cuban ambassador, as he had visited Cuba in 1959. [ Attwood , The twilight struggle, 259] On September 19, he gave a copy of the memorandum to Harriman, who was still in New York. Attwood reiterated that at the moment what he needed was authorization to meet with me, and Harriman offered to keep an eye on the project and advised him to speak with Robert Kennedy, because it was essential to get his approval. Then Attwood telephoned Robert Kennedy in Washington, and Kennedy told him to see him on September 24 (the day after the evening we met at Lisa Howard's house).

Meanwhile, Stevenson had already spoken with the President on the 20th, when he arrived in New York to address the General Assembly, and Kennedy had told him that Attwood should go head with the plan. Attwood said that for some reason Stevenson didn't want him to speak with Robert Kennedy, but he placed more trust in Harriman's instincts. Attwood flew to Washington on September 24, gave the memorandum to Robert Kennedy and told him about the meeting he'd had with me the night before. The President's brother told Attwood that his trip to Cuba, as he proposed it, was risky because news of it could leak out, and the least that might happen would be that the Republicans would accuse them of being appeasers and demand a Congressional investigation. Robert Kennedy encouraged him to continue his contacts in the United Nations and said he would discuss the matter with Harriman and Bundy.

I had another meeting with Attwood on September 27, in the Delegates Lounge of the United Nations. He told me it was very difficult for him to go to Cuba because of his official post but that he was authorized to continue the talks. On October 2, Bundy called Attwood and told him that Gordon Chase, one of his deputies on the National Security Council, would be his contact in the White House and asked him to keep him informed about the progress of his talks with me. [ Attwood , The twilight struggle, 260]

At that point, by chance, Jean Daniel, a French journalist who was then editor of the weekly L'Observateur and was an old friend of Attwood , joined the project. The two had lunch together on October 3, and Daniel commented that he was in New York on his way to Washington and Havana. At that point, it occurred to Attwood to have Daniel talk with President Kennedy before going to Cuba and meeting with Fidel Castro as he proposed to do. He called Ben Bradlee, Newsweek magazine's Washington correspondent, who was a friend of the President and visited the White House frequently and who also knew Daniel, and asked him to try to set up a meeting for Daniel with Kennedy, which he did.

Four days after that meeting between Attwood and Daniel, I gave Cuba's main address in the General Assembly. It was the first General Assembly after the crisis, and 10 months had passed since the messages had been sent to the Security Council concluding the negotiations. I reviewed all the items on the agenda and said that the Cuban delegation would have liked to join in the prevailing optimism concerning the international situation, but that the realities with which Cuba was confronted didn't allow us to do so. The atmosphere of intrigues and conspiracies which pervaded the Caribbean, as in the previous, year, led us to a different viewpoint — the result of tangible facts and lamentable circumstances that adversely affected Cuba's independence and sovereignty , for Cuba was still the victim of covert intervention in its internal affairs and of attacks by the United States.

I then read the long list of attacks that had been made against Cuba during the year and set forth Cuba's position on the Treaty of Moscow — the one on the partial banning of nuclear testing. I should note here that the Soviet government wanted Cuba to sign it, and the White House exhorted the Soviet diplomats to convince Havana to sign. In an interview Gromyko had with Kennedy five days after my address in the General Assembly, the President told hin- i that his government would welcome the Cubans signing the Treaty; the Soviet Minister replied that Cuba had already stated its position in the United Nations.

Why didn't Cuba sign that pact? These were the reasons I gave on behalf of the revolutionary government

•Cuba couldn't sign it because one of the signing, powers had created a state of undeclared war against our country. During the Missile Crisis, the Cuban government had warned that there would be no real peace for its people as long as the government of the United States persisted in grossly violating the Cuban people's most basic rights.

•The U.S. government maintained the economic blockade and was continuing to take measures all over the world to commercially and economically harass our country; it was continuing its subversive activities of dropping and landing weapons and explosives by air and sea and of infiltrating spies and saboteurs; it was still systematically violating Cuba's airspace and territorial waters; and it maintained the Guantánamo Naval Base, in defiance of our sovereignty.

Cuba wouldn't sign the Treaty as long as the government of the United States continued those activities, even though its refusal to sign wouldn't, of course, affect the practical results of the Treaty. Cuba was not a nuclear power and lacked the resources to become one, but it was duty-bound to take a moral stand in the United Nations based on the inviolable principles of its international policy.

...On October 21, Gordon Chase, the contact in the White House, called Attwood in New York to ask if his efforts had borne any fruit. Attwood told him that he hadn't yet received any reaction from Havana. On October 28, I met again with the U.S. diplomat in the UN Delegates Lounge and told him that Havana was considering his proposal, but that it wasn't going to be possible for a high-ranking functionary of the Cuban government to go to the United States, even though somebody from Washington — possibly Attwood himself — would be welcome in our country.

As Attwood stated in his memoirs, Washington was giving more and more attention to talks with Cuba. Attwood kept Stevenson and Chase informed of all his contacts and was called to the White House on November 4 to talk with Bundy, who told him that the President was more interested in the matter than the State Department and asked him to write a memorandum describing, in chronological order, the contacts he had had , starting with his first conversation with Lisa Howard. Later, on November 12, Bundy called New York reminding him' that the President was in favor of a preliminary discussion of the agenda for any meeting that might be arranged between an envoy of his and one of Fidel Castro's, either in Cuba or in the United Nations.

Without my knowledge, it seems that Lisa Howard — who had met Commander René Vallejo, aide to Prime Minister Castro, when she had been in Cuba — contacted him and asked him to take a call from Ambassador Attwood . In his memoirs, Attwood said that he spoke with Vallejo on November 18 and that Vallejo told him that the Prime Minister would send me instructions for discussing the agenda with him in New York. Attwood informed Bundy of that conversation, and Bundy told him that as soon as the agenda was agreed upon Kennedy himself would speak with him to decide what he should tell Castro. He added that Kennedy was making a brief trip to Dallas but would be back in Washington soon.

A few days before that trip to Texas, the French journalist Daniel met with Kennedy at the White House. Daniel has written that he began the interview by asking the President if the ideas contained in his statements when he was a senator supporting the Algerian revolution had been faithfully applied in Saigon and in Havana. [National Guardian, December 19, 1963] The President said that he didn't have time to talk about Saigon, but that he wanted to talk about Cuba and continue the discussion when Daniel returned from Cuba. Kennedy commented that the European press accused the United States of being blind to the real situation in Cuba, but said that he was perfectly aware of what was going on there. He criticized U.S. policy at the time of the Batista dictatorship and added that the problem was no longer a Cuban one but had become international — that is, a Soviet problem.

Daniel went to Cuba in November. In January 1992, in the meeting held in Havana, Fidel Castro revealed that he spoke with Daniel, who told him he had been very favorably impressed by Kennedy and that he brought a message from him. The talk with the Prime Minister took place at Varadero Beach.

It wasn't a message in the formal sense of the -word. Rather, Kennedy told him he wanted him to come to Cuba. He talked extensively about the crisis, about the enormous dangers that war would break out, the consequences of such a war and the fact that he wanted Daniel to talk with me and analyze the matters and he asked him to ask me if I was aware of just how great the danger had been. The essence of the message was that Daniel should talk with me at length about all these things and then go back to the United States and report to him about our talk. Therefore, the journalist interpreted it as a gesture, as a wish to establish contact, a wish to explore what we thought about all this and also to establish communication. He told him to come here, talk, analyze this problem and go back. That was the essence.

The journalist barely finished telling me everything he had to say. It was very early - I think it was 11:00, Dallas time. It wasn't even midday; we were going to have lunch, and, while we were talking, making those assessments, the news came over the radio that Kennedy had been seriously wounded in all assassination attempt.

I interpreted Daniel's visit as a gesture to try to establish communication, a bridge, a contact, because Kennedy had so much authority inside his country after the crisis that he could do things he might not have been able to do before. I think he had the courage to do it — it took courage to defy established ideas on all those things.

Later on, Fidel Castro commented:

Look at the paradox, the contradictions and coincidences: on the same day and at the same hour that Jean Daniel was giving me Kennedy's message, an agent of the United States was handing over a fountain pen with a poison dart to be used in an assassination attempt against me. Look how many paradoxes and how many crazy things there are in the world! [Fidel Castro, Tripartite Conference, fifth session, January 11, 1992, 13-15. Translated from Spanish.]

Fidel Castro was referring to Desmond FitzGerald , a high-ranking CIA officer who had replaced the ridiculous William Harvey as head of the CIA's center of subversion in Miami, and who gave the lethal pen to Rolando Cubela , a Cuban counterrevolutionary known as agent AM/LASH, whom the CIA was paying to commit the crime.

After Kennedy's death, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson moved into the White House. On November 29, Lisa Howard sent me a message from Attwood saying that the efforts hadn't been called off yet, that nobody in the White House had instructed him to break off the contacts. I spoke with Attwood on December 2, and he repeated what the journalist had told me. Gordon Chase told Attwood that he should be patient, as all policies were being reviewed. On returning to the United States from Cuba, Daniel saw Bundy and told him about his talk with Fidel Castro. On December 12, Attwood called me to say that Washington hadn't made a decision yet. That was the last time I spoke with him until some years later when we met in Havana, where he had come with his wife on an unofficial visit.

In his memoirs, Attwood said that when the new President went to New York to address the General Assembly he had lunch with the members of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. He took the opportunity to tell Attwood that he had read with interest his memo on the efforts with Cuba, but he didn't make any other comment. In January, Johnson named Attwood as ambassador to Kenya. While Attwood was in Washington preparing for his trip, Chase told him that the President's team of advisers didn't seem to be interested in doing anything with regard to Cuba in an election year.

He should have added that the government didn't want to do anything positive in line with international law, because Johnson immediately arranged for another country to join the economic blockade against Cuba. On December 24, Johnson went to Texas to spend the Christmas holidays on his ranch, and Ludwig Erhard , the new Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, visited him there on the 28th and 29th. They hunted deer. Johnson sold him a lot of military equipment in "payment" for having six divisions of the U.S. Army in Germany and wound up his negotiations with the German Chancellor by asking him to join the economic blockade against Cuba. The Chancellor agreed. [Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The exercise of Power New York: The New American Library, 1966, 389.]

The mystery surrounding Kennedy's assassination still remains. Many clues indicate a conspiracy to eliminate him before he could be reelected, and well-founded speculation has it that the crime was moved forward because, as I have reported, he sought a rapprochement with the revolutionary government of Cuba, which might have resulted in a normalization of relations and the end of the U.S. policy of aggression. That may have tipped the scales in the decision to assassinate him. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, a collaborator of Kennedy's in the White House, thinks that the President's gesture of peace with Cuba was a factor in the death sentence that was decreed against him, and he refers to this in one of his books. Attwood , too, came to that conclusion. Three of the elements that are invariably mentioned as instruments in the assassination - the CIA, the Mafia and the Cuban counterrevolutionaries at the service of the CIA — were dead set against the normalization of relations with Cuba, Those three elements had already given abundant proof of their lack of scruples for undertaking all action of that kind and were irrevocably committed to the plans to destroy the revolution and to assassinate Cuban leaders.

As Schlesinger described it, "Though the Attwood plan was closely held, it seems inconceivable that the CIA knew nothing about it. American intelligence had Cuban UN diplomats under incessant surveillance. It followed their movements, tapped their telephone calls, read their letters, intercepted their cables. Suspecting, as it must have, that Attwood and Lechuga were doing something more than exchanging daiquiri recipes, the CIA, in pursuing the AM/LASH operation, must be convicted either of abysmal incompetence, which is by no means to be excluded, or else of a studied attempt to wreck Kennedy's search for normalization."[Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 601.] Robert Kennedy, the murdered President's brother, suspected the CIA of having had a hand in the assassination. When Jim Garrison, District Attorney of New Orleans, began making sensational accusations about a conspiracy, Schlesinger asked Robert Kennedy what he thought of those accusations, and Kennedy replied, "Garrison might be onto Something." [Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 665.] NBC television sent journalist Walter Sheridan to New Orleans to investigate Garrison's accusations against the CIA, and Robert Kennedy talked with him and told him that he had asked CIA Director John McCone if the CIA had killed his brother. "At the time I asked McCone . . . if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn't lie to me, and they hadn't." [Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 665.] But suspicions remained of the CIA's involvement.

In the memoirs he published in 1987, Attwood also said that the CIA must have found out about the efforts he was making and that later on information was fed to the frustrated veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, who hadn't lost hope of carrying out another attack protected by the CIA. Kennedy's feelers for normalizing relations with Cuba ended all their illusions. [ Attwood , The Twilight Struggle, 264.] Moreover, the Mafia had lost its gambling casinos, drug business and brothels when the revolution triumphed in Cuba, so the CIA had used it in the numerous attempts to kill Fidel Castro. Therefore, the Mafia, too, had a stake in preventing an agreement between the two countries.

More than 30 years have passed since the assassination in Dallas, and there is just as much speculation now as on the first day. Thus, the unforeseen consequences of the Missile Crisis claimed the life of the President of the United States.

This is the Cuban view, the Cuban version of those aborted efforts to begin to restore normailty in our relations with Cuba. That this did happen and that it was on Kennedy's initiative is amply confirmed. It is a fact. There is nothing less likely, much as Castro wanted normalization, which required the ending of all those United States actions against Cuba, and much as that was the urgent need of Cuba, than that Castro wanted or was in any way involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

There likewise is no reason to believe that with Kennedy his only real protector Castro would have wanted him killed; would have ahd anything to do with that; or preferred the inevitable with Kennedy killed, the known hawk Lyndon Johnson as President instead of Kennedy.

We have been considering who had the motive, the means and the opportunity to assassinate the President. Clearly, Castro did not have the motive. Like him Khruschev also did not have motive for killing Kennedy. Each knew very well that his relations with the United States would suffer with Johnson the President, as did happen. Each also was negotiating with Kennedy behind the scenes looking toward improvement in relations and toward peace in the world. Each wanted very much for Kennedy to continue to be President of the United States of America. Having him assassinated was very much against the personal and political interests of both Castro and Khruschev .

It is only the story-book mind of the politically ignorant novelist that can believe that either Castro of Khruschev had both the means and the opportunity to assassinate Kennedy. In story books anything can happen and be made to seem to appear to be reasonable. Then, too, most of those evolving these story-book concepts do that with the most determined ignorance of the actuality of the official evidence itself. Much as the government was determined not to investigate the crime itself and, as I prove with the once-suppressed official records themselves at the beginning of NEVER AGAIN!, it decided as soon as Oswald was dead to make him the lone assassin. The official records of that effort by both the FBI and the Commission in particular do prove more than that Oswald was not the assassin. Those records actually prove that he could not have been and that officialdom knew he could not have been.

With the unquestioning support of the official assassination mythology by our media this truth will startle most Americans but it is not only the truth, it is the official truth.

In addressing Gerald Posner's monument to mendacity for money, Case Closed , a dishonest book that was in effect a cheap prosecutor's brief, I used the little known but actual official evidence as a defense counsel would have used it. That official proof proves Posner to be a propagandist and a liar and in doing that it also proves, for the first time, that the official evidence means and says exactly the opposite of the official and unofficial representations of it says, Posner's in particular. When my Case Open was published in 1994, that part of the manuscript, by far most of it, was simply eliminated. I was given no reason or explanation. But it does exist as a record for history and I have distributed copies to friends who are college professors here and abroad. There is a copy of it in the files that will be public of the Assassination Records Review Board appointed under the 1992 Act that supposedly requires all assassination records to be made available. That Act requires that board to make all its files public, so a copy of the defense of Oswald, really of his exculpation, will also be an official and available record.

This is not the place for a review of that book-length collection of the actual, official evidence but that mustering of it, while not having that intent, also establishes what the actual assassins had to have both the means and opportunity to do.

And that evidence, the actual official evidence, leaves it without any real question that not only did Castro, Khruschev or others not have the means and the opportunity. It also leaves it without reasonable question that only government at some level had both the means and the opportunity.

This applies to both the official established fact of the assassination to the degree it could not be avoided in framing Oswald and to what was done as well as what was not done to frame him.

To a large degree the record of this exists in books I have been able to publish or to have published, but it is not put together in them in this form. Most recently this is abundantly clear although it is not stated this way in my NEVER AGAIN! However, it is also clear in the very first book on the Warren Commission, the first of my WHITEWASH series, which was completed in 1965. In the more than thirty years since it was written, and this is also true of all my books that followed it, I have not gotten any letter or phone call from any one of the many I named and of whom I was critical protesting that I had written about him unfairly or inaccurately. By a series of FOIA lawsuits I obtained about a third of a million pages of once-withheld government records and I have gone over them. There is not a single actual factual error in any of my work alleged in any of those records. Rather they were written to defame me and, with those defamations distributed throughout the government, particularly to the White House. They were written to make those who read them believe that what I wrote could not be believed. But in fact there is not a single such allegation proven in any of that great volume of official records that were denied the people when the Report was issued.

Even these defamations are dishonest and of dishonest intent. They range from deliberate corruption of the truth to outright lies.

The fact is that the Department of Justice and the FBI told the federal courts that I am "more familiar with the events surrounding the investigation of President Kennedy's assassination than anyone now employed by the FBI."

It made this statement in the first FOIA lawsuit filed under the act after it was amended in 1974. That was C.A.75 -226. When the Congress amended the Act in 1974, to be effective in 1975, it was FBI mendacity in an earlier version of that same lawsuit that was cited in the Senate debates as requiring the amending that in the end was passed over the veto of President Gerald Ford, who is now the only surviving member of the Warren Commission.

The reason for this unusual if not unique and unprecedented bestowal of credentials on me, the reason totally ignored by the media, is that I had stated under oath, making myself subject to the penalties of perjury if I lied, that the FBI committed perjury to be able to continue to withhold assassination information that under the law it could not be withheld.

While the credentials official bestowed upon me are not an explanation of or a justification for official perjury, the court accepted it as justification and, the defendant in that lawsuit being the prosecutor himself, no perjury charges were filed against the officially admitted perjurer, the FBI, or against me.

It is with these credentials and with the knowledge I acquired in earning them that I state the truth about the official records of the assassination, published and unpublished, establish that neither Castro not Khruschev had either the means or the opportunity of getting President Kennedy assassinated. Neither had the motive and each had the desire that he not be assassinated and that he not be succeeded by Lyndon Johnson, which is what that assassination made inevitable.

What had to be done by the successful conspiracy to kill the President was possible, from the official evidence itself, only to some element or elements of government.

In this study we have examined some elements who had the motive, the means and the opportunity. The motive, the means and the opportunity others did not have.

While the assassination of any president has the effect of a coup d'etat, when John Kennedy was assassinated there was an intended coup d'etat.

It was intended to change policy and as history since then makes apparent beyond reasonable question, it did make the most radical changes in national policy.

Perhaps forever, we will not know who did it. But what was done is visible, lingering and it will continue because the coup d'etat did result in the changes in national policy it was intended to bring about.

The immediate official decision not to investigate the crime is itself and to hold Oswald to be the lone assassin need not have been and I believe it was not part of the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. However, with that immediate official decision, agreed to on the highest levels as soon as Oswald was dead and it was known there would be no trial at which evidence would be examined and cross-examined, also saw to it that the crime would be unsolved and that it would be impossible for private investigators to solve it.

Thus the only was responsibility for this most terrible crime in our history and the most subversive of terrible crimes can be addressed and assessed is in the traditional means employed by lawyers, by examining motives, means and opportunity.

In this unsolved and unsolvable subversion, the assassination of President Kennedy.

AFTERWORD

Long after I had this written, retyped and had distributed copies of it to a few of my friends, Dave Wrone sent me a June 19, 1995 New Yorker article that, while sitting and thinking after I read it, brought a bit more back to mind.

I remembered that at the time of the Cuba Missile Crisis I had decided to do a book with the working title, Aesop in the State Department. I had done some of the research and when it became clear that I'd not be getting to writing it because of my work on the assassination, I gave that research to Dave.

This New Yorker article, about which more in a moment, turned my mind back to the time of the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis. I had evolved my contemporaneous analysis of it before the Wednesday preceding the solution to that crisis. That day I articulated it twice, as indicated in what I wrote last year. The name of the Post's foreign editor as I now recall it was Homer Thornbury. And, a reminder, the book on it that I had planned had the working title, Tiger to Ride, with the thrust of the book to say the Khruschev in precipitating that crisis gave John Kennedy his own Tiger to Ride to avoid World War III. If there now still be any doubt about the correctness of that analysis, I recommend to doubters the article Dave sent me.

It is by Richard Rhodes.

The major magazine title is The General and World War III.

Above this is "Annals of the Cold War."

Below it, in smaller type, is the headline, "Curtis LeMay believed that the only sure defense was to launch a preemptive first strike. During the Cuban missile crisis he almost did it."

As a note to myself I wrote another title: "Our Would-Be and Almost-Was Hitler."

Rhodes' account is of almost World War III, LeMay 's, an account of how perilously close it was and how devastating it would have been.

Rhodes also reports what to me is for the first time some of the Hitlerian accomplishments for which LeMay struggled so hard and finally succeeded in North Korea.

Of LeMay 's killing of civilians in Japan in World War II, Rhodes again quotes LeMay himself as saying of the fire-bombing of Tokyo that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man." From his nocturnal fire-bombings "sixty- three Japanese cities had been totally or partially burned out and more than a million Japanese civilians killed."

At the beginning of the Korean war LeMay asked to "turn SAC loose with incendiaries" but this blitzkrieg of civilians with fire from the air was denied him. Later, he was able to do it "piecemeal, and carried" it out "brutally, burning out cities and breaking big agricultural dams, scouring an entire valley of peasant villages and rice paddies as far as twenty-seven miles downstream. ... More than two million Korean civilians died in that campaign..."

He later claimed that "we killed off - what - twenty percent of the population of [North] Korea."

Civilians. Women, children and old men.

In 1954 he estimated that "virtually all of Russia would be a smoking radiating ruin at the end of two hours."

When he outlined what he had in mind to a committee appointed by President Eisenhower and was told, "But, General, that's not national policy," he responded, "I don't care. It's my policy. That's what I'm going to do."

That was followed by Khruschev sending his nuclear missiles to Cuba.

Rhodes writes that "During the Cuban Missile crisis, the determination of LeMay and some of his subordinates to follow military logic, subverting Presidential authority to do so, nearly led to full-scale nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The United States came closer to self-inflicted nuclear destruction at that time than most Americans realize."

But Kennedy did end that unimaginable disaster with peace. On leaving a joint chiefs of staff meeting with him after the crisis, which we won by getting those missiles out and with the peace that came from it, as Rhodes writes, " LeMay came out saying, 'We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock 'em off!'"

These are but a few highlights of a dozen pages like it.

If there remain any who question my use of " Strangelovian " referring to some of our military, I refer them also to this Rhodes article.

This book was written in haste for the stated purpose of doing what had never been done in any of the plethora of books ostensibly on the assassination, which almost none really are, or in the relatively few serious and responsible works, to address motive, means and opportunity.

It was written in haste because then 81 years old and in impaired health I did not know how much time remained to me. It does not draw on all the information that was available. I did not try to make it exhaustive, and it isn't, not by any means at all. It does not draw on all I had at hand and I made no effort to determine what else was available. There are other fine books on which I did not draw. I believe the content is enough to make a minimum case of the kind lawyers seek to make when they are limited to what does address motive, means and opportunity.

Then Dave Wrone sent me the New Yorker article. I decided only a brief bit of it is enough to amplify what I had written that did say a little more about General Curtis LeMay .

And then I got Carlos Lechuga 's In the Eye of the Storm. Believing that a Cuban view would be appropriate I then wrote the Epilogue.

I had no more than finished it than Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb appeared. It was published by Simon and Schuster. Dave sent me excerpts from it. It is a truly horrifying book that more than justifies Rhodes' earlier Pulitzer for his The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It turned out that Rhodes' New Yorker article is a quieter version of what he has in his new book, mostly in its last chapter, "Scorpions in a Bottle." Quieter and much shorter. It is on LeMay and the Cuba missile crisis and it does add to what was known about that.

While it adds enormously to the "motive" element of this book I do not regard that as essential and I add but little to what I wrote after reading his article. It is, however, greatly understated compared with what Rhodes has in this one chapter alone.

It is in every sense a remarkable book, a remarkable literary and historical achievement. Although it is not uncommon for publishers to exaggerate in puffing books up on their dust jackets the blurbing on this one does not exaggerate. It sometimes understates and it includes a rough guide to the contents. I therefore quote some of it.

In this brilliant, riveting, major work of history, science and politics, Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, tells for the first time the secret story of how and why the hydrogen bomb was made; traces the path by which "the Bomb," the supreme artifact of twentieth-century science and technology, became the defining issue of the Cold War; and reveals how close the world came to nuclear destruction before the United States and the former Soviet Union learned the lesson of nuclear stalemate — a stalemate, Rhodes makes clear, that forced the superpowers to tenuous truce for more than four decades, in the end bankrupting and destroying the Communist state and foreclosing world-scale war.... the week of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Curtis LeMay goaded President Kennedy to attack the USSR with everything in the US arsenal, this book is full of unexpected — and sometimnes hair-raising — revelations based on previously undisclosed Soviet as well as US sources: ...

The Soviet Union was essentially defenseless against atomic bombing until at least 1960.

Building the Strategic Air Command, Curtis LeMay made persistent attempts to acquire control of US nuclear weapons independent of presidential authorization.

SAC flew daily intelligence missions over the Soviet Union throughout the 1950s , including deliberately provocative overflights of Soviet cities by squadrons of aircraft in broad daylight.

At the height of the Korean War, President Truman traded the US Joint Chiefs of Staff nine atomic bombs for General Douglas MacArthur's head....

Not Robert Oppenheimer, as he was accused, but physicist and superhawk Edward Teller delayed the development of the hydrogen bomb; but for Teller's obsession with megaton yields, the US could have tested a half-megaton thermonuclear by 1949.

During the Cuban missile crisis, SAC put 7,000 megatons into the air, menaced the Soviet Union with an unauthorized missile launch and deliberately flew bombers toward Soviet targets. The first and only direct nuclear confrontation between the superpowers was also very nearly the last.

As Rhodes writes and proves, LeMay and other generals did in fact have control over nuclear weapons independent of presidential control. Scary enough with generals like LeMay and not him alone?

Scary that a President like Truman had to bargain with his military to be able to fire an insubordinate general who had needlessly caused thousands of American deaths through his insubordination and could have started World War III?

The last quoted dust jacket excerpt is, as we see, understated greatly, perhaps not to frighten possible buyers away from the book.

That part, the last two paragraphs of Rhodes' text is all of it I here add to what I wrote after reading The New Yorker article. It is quite modest compared with "The Scorpions in the Bottle" but it is, I believe, enough for present purposes. Eliminated here is the first part of page 444 of his chapter "Relieving McArthur ":

The war dragged on for three years despite all the burning, blasting and killing — and ended, of course, in stalemate, the line dividing the two devastated countries remaining precisely where it had been before the North Korean invasion, at the 38th parallel. Besides at least 1.5 million military dead, wounded or missing on the UN and the South Korean side (including 158,000 Americans) and two million North Korean and Chinese casualties, more than two million civilians died in North Korea, almost as many as fire and atomic-bombing killed in Japan during the Second World War.

Conventional bombing in Korea was destructive enough. The United States also came much closer than most Americans realize to using the atomic bomb in the Korean War. At the first meeting he attended with the Joint Chiefs and Acheson after the North Korean invasion, Truman ordered a study of atomic bombing in case the Soviet Union entered the war. The JCS Plans Division complied with a study of "utilization of atomic bombardment" in Korea. Two weeks later, on July 9, 1950, a message from MacArthur led the Joint Chiefs "to consider whether or not A-bombs should be made available to" the Far East commander; the JCS thought some ten to twenty bombs could be spared from the strategic arsenal. MacArthur had grandiose plans to block a Chinese or Soviet intervention if it came. The inner North Korean border abuts both China and the Soviet USSR; MacArthur pointed out to an emissary from the Joint Chiefs that the routes that led into the country from Manchuria and Vladivostok had "many tunnels and bridges. I see here a unique use for the atomic bomb — to strike a blocking blow — which would require a six-month repair job."

To prepare for the possibility that the JCS might send atomic bombs to Korea, a teletype reached SAC headquarters from Washington on July 30 requesting transfer of "ten planes and crew with bombs less nuclear component," as LeMay 's aide recorded it. LeMay had no intention of giving up control of atomic-capable aircraft or of atomic bombs to anyone without a fight;...

Here are the last two pages of "Scorpions In a Bottle":

The President's instincts were sharper than the general's. The blockade worked; the crisis passed; Khrushchev capitulated. LeMay was outraged. Daniel Ellsberg , then a member of the ExCom staff under McNamara, says LeMay chewed Kennedy out. McNamara confirms the story: "After Khrushchev had agreed to remove the missiles, President Kennedy invited the Chiefs to the White House so that he could thank them for their support during the crisis, and there was one hell of a scene. LeMay came out saying, "We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock 'em off!"

At the height of the crisis, according to a retired SAC wing commander, SAC airborne alert bombers deliberately flew past their turnaround points toward Soviet airspace, an unambiguous threat which Soviet radar operators would certainly recognized and reported. "I knew what my target was," the SAC general adds: "Leningrad." The bombers only turned around when the Soviet freighters carrying missiles to Cuba stopped dead in the Atlantic.

Nuclear crises are not poker games. What Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power did not know — what no one in the US government knew until it was revealed at a conference between Soviet and US missile crisis participants in Moscow in 1989 — was that, contrary to CIA estimates, the Soviet forces in Cuba during the missile crisis possessed twenty nuclear warheads for medium-range R-12 ballistic missiles that could be targeted at US cities as far north as Washington, DC, as well as nine tactical nuclear missiles which the Soviet field commanders in Cuba were delegated authority to use — the only time such authority was ever delegated by Soviet leadership. The medium-range missiles would probably been launched as well, McNamara believes. "If they'd been NATO missiles without PALs , then the NATO officers, acting without Presidential authorization, would have been likely to use them rather than lose them." The fear that Soviet or Cuban officers might have reacted the way NATO officers might have was one reason I was extremely reluctant to risk the air strike."

In 1954, when LeMay calculated that he could deliver a Sunday punch of 750 atomic bombs to targets in the Soviet Union overnight, the Defense Department Weapons Systems Evaluation Group estimated that Soviet and Soviet bloc casualties would total seventeen million dead. In 1962, Power was prepared to deliver almost three thousand strategic nuclear weapons, many of them thermonuclear bombs, with yields totaling seven thousand megatons. Under such a rain of destruction, the United States would have killed at least 100 million human beings* in pursuit of the small group of Soviet leaders, as LeMay said, "[who] have as their primary goal the...retention of power inside the USSR in the few hands in which it now resides." If the Soviet field commanders in Cuba had launched their missiles as well, more millions of Americans would have been killed. Seven thousand megatons was also more than enough fire and brimstone to initiate a lethal nuclear winter over at least the Northern hemisphere, freezing and starving yet more millions in Europe, Asia and North America — a phenomenon that scientists had not yet identified and that neither SAC nor Washington had yet assessed. How extraordinary that Curtis LeMay believed that for the rest of his life that the United States "lost" the Cuban missile crisis and the Cold War. If John Kennedy had followed LeMay 's advice, history would have forgotten the Nazis and their terrible Holocaust. Ours would have been the historic omnicide .

The Soviet Union never went to full nuclear alert in all the years of the Cold War. After the Cuban missile crisis, the United States never did again. Nor did the two nations ever again directly confront each other.

At the point indicated by the * Rhodes has this footnote.

One hundred is an extremely conservative estimate; in 1984, the World Health Organization estimated that a ten-thousand-megaton nuclear exchange would account for 11.15 billion dead and 1.1 billion injured. International Committee (1984).

What could have been is what would have been had it not been John Kennedy who was President, had he not had the insight and understanding that saved the world from his generals his brother told the Soviet ambassador he feared might overthrow him. As in the end he was overthrown by being assassinated.

Who had — could have had — stronger motiv than those of the LeMay mind?

The books that get the great major-media attention are not those of the few Rhodeses who record how John Kennedy saved us and the world from the LeMays he feared would revolt and take control of the country and of the world and do to it what Rhodes puts so starkly quoted above.

The LeMay mind was not that uncommon in the upper echelons of the military, as we have seen. Also long after this was written Wrone found a second-hand copy of Dino A. Brugioni 's book Eyeball to Eyeball. This title comes from Dean Rusk's description of the situation at the time of the Cuba missile crisis. Brugioni 's subtitle is The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That 1990 book was published by Random House. Brugioni was in the top ranks of the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center. It then was directed by Arthur C. Lundahl . Brugioni dedicates his book to Lundahl . As Brugioni also makes clear, he was a dedicated cold-war believer and enthusiast. In it he tells this story (pages 59-60):

The President, on April 22, 1961, appointed General Maxwell Taylor to head an investigation of the CIA's role in the Bay of Pigs disaster and the next day asked Attorney General Bobbby Kennedy to assist Taylor in that investigation. Other members of the Taylor probe panel included CIA director Allen Dulles and Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, the chief of naval operations. Information from their report was leaked to Charles J. V. Murphy, Washington bureau chief for Fortune magazine. Murphy wrote an account of the Bay of Pigs invasion highly critical of President Kennedy and thereby incurred the President's wrath. The President was furious. Suspecting that General Cabell had leaked the information, he asked for his resignation. Cabell tried to explain to the president that he was not the source of the leak, but to no avail. On January 31, 1962, he resigned as deputy director and retired from the Air Force. He was replaced by Lieutenant General Marshall "Pat" Carter. A number of years after President Kennedy's death, Murphy was doing another story related to intelligence and Lundahl and I were directed to cooperate with him. He revealed to us that Admiral Arleigh Burke had been the source of the Bay of Pigs information. The admiral felt that the President had "chickened out" in not calling for Navy fighter aircraft to cover the Bay of Pigs invasion. Murphy said that Burke had nothing but disdain for President Kennedy and his "bagman" at the Department of Defense, McNamara.

Insubordination and opposition to the President's policy, when the President alone is elected to decide what policy should be, open opposition to his policy and interference with it was not at all uncommon in the high command of all branches of the military.

Little attention as it gets from the major media that usually ignores it.

What the major media loves and sees to it gets the widest possible attention is the revisionism, the rewriting of history to obscure the truth, the reality, the unimaginable, unprecedented virtual end of the civilized world JFK prevented. Had it not been for him our generals would have bombed us and our allies, not only those in eastern Asia they hated, back into the Stone Age. Those few who would have survived.

They failed, thanks to Kennedy and to him alone.

But their work is carried on by them and by those who keep ours a military society and economy regardless of the costs and by those who rewrite our history, his history in particular, a profitable literary whoring that makes for fame and fortune and makes the wealthy who are famous, more famous and wealthier.

These kinds of books have no problem finding publishers and publishers promote them and the major media willingly adds to this profitable commercial endeavor, profitable to all but the misled and misinformed people. Another by a justly honored investigative reporter is being prepared as I write this.

What we have three decades after his assassination is the corruption of all of our society. It is not just by the military. It is also by those whose careers in political life are made possible and are advanced by keeping ours a military-oriented society with a bankrupting military economy. It is too, by all of the media which supports the military, military policy and orientation and the rewriting of our history and that of John Kennedy and is unended in its unquestioning support of the official mythology of his assassination and in its refusal to publish the known and established truth about that assassination. For all else to be without popular question the official mythology about his assassination must be believed to be only what the major media lets the people know.

Were this to change the people most of whom have doubts would be asking questions not only about the assassination but about all that followed it.

In this sense the difference between our media and that of the authoritarian systems we abhor is a difference in degree only. In this sense, too, the people do not begin with the understanding that their media is controlled by the government, which it isn't. Thus our people do not have the reasons the people in the authoritarian systems have for not believing what the elements of their media tells them.

But the result is the same.

And thus it is that our people have not had the motive, the means and the opportunity of the assassination presented to them by our media.

But at least to the severely limited capability I have I do make this record of it that may perhaps in the future be added to and made available to the people so that our corrupted system may again work as visualized by those greatest of political thinkers who in establishing our democratic society could not visualize how totally it could be corrupted by the exploitation of the means for corrupting that would emerge and be developed by those corrupters of it.