The Posthumous Assassination of JFK
Judith Exner, Mary Meyer, and Other Daggers
By James DiEugenio
Probe, From the September-October, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 6)
Current events, most notably a past issue of Vanity Fair, and the upcoming release of Sy Hersh’s new book, extend an issue that I have dealt with in a talk I have done several times around the country in the last two years. It is entitled “The Two Assassinations of John Kennedy.” I call it that because there has been an ongoing campaign of character assassination ever since Kennedy was killed.
In the talk to date, I’ve dealt primarily with the attacks on Kennedy from the left by Noam Chomsky and his henchman Alexander Cockburn which occurred at the time of the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK. But historically speaking, the attacks on the Kennedys, both Jack and Robert, have not come predominantly from the left. The attacks from the right have been much more numerous. And the attacks from that direction were always harsher and more personal in tone. As we shall see, that personal tone knows no limits. Through papers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the attacks extend into the Kennedys’ sex lives, a barrier that had not been crossed in post-war mainstream media to that time. To understand their longevity and vituperativeness, it is necessary to sketch in how they all began. In that way, the reader will be able to see that Hersh’s book, the Vanity Fair piece on Judith Exner, and an upcoming work by John Davis on Mary Meyer, are part of a continuum.
The Right and the Kennedys
There can be no doubt that the right hated the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. There is also little doubt that some who hated JFK had a role in covering up his death. One could use Secret Service agent Elmer Moore as an example. As revealed in Probe (Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 20-21), Moore told one Jim Gochenaur how he was in charge of the Dallas doctors testimony in the JFK case. One of his assignments as liaison for the Warren Commission seems to have been talking Dr. Malcolm Perry out of his original statement that the throat wound was one of entry, which would have indicated an assassin in front of Kennedy. But another thing Gochenaur related in his Church Committee interview was the tirade that Moore went into the longer he talked to him: how Kennedy was a pinko who was selling us out to the communists. This went on for hours. Gochenaur was actually frightened by the time Moore drove him home.
But there is another more insidious strain of the rightwing in America. These are the conservatives who sometimes disguise themselves as Democrats, as liberals, as “internationalists.” This group is typified by men like Averill Harriman, Henry Stimson, John Foster Dulles and the like. The common rubric used to catalog them is the Eastern Establishment. The Kennedy brothers were constantly at odds with them. In 1962, Bobby clashed with Dean Acheson during the missile crisis. Acheson wanted a surprise attack; Bobby rejected it saying his brother would not go down in history as another Tojo. In 1961, JFK disobeyed their advice at the Bay of Pigs and refused to add air support to the invasion. He was punished for this in Fortune magazine with an article by Time-Life employee Charles Murphy that blamed Kennedy for the failure of the plan. Kennedy stripped Murphy of his Air Force reserve status but — Murphy wrote to Ed Lansdale — that didn’t matter; his loyalty was to Allen Dulles anyway. In 1963, Kennedy crossed the Rubicon and actually printed money out of the Treasury, bypassing that crowning jewel of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Board. And as Donald Gibson has written, a member of this group, Jock Whitney, was the first to put out the cover story about that Krazy Kid Oswald on 11/22/63 (Probe Vol. 4 No.1).
Killing off the Legacy
In 1964, author Morris Bealle, a genuine conservative and critic of the Eastern Establishment, wrote a novel called Guns of the Regressive Right, depicting how that elite group had gotten rid of Kennedy. There certainly is a lot of evidence to substantiate that claim. There were few tears shed by most rightwing groups over Kennedy’s death. Five years later, they played hardball again. King and Bobby Kennedy were shot. One would think the coup was complete. The war was over.
CONTINUED...
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Part of a pattern.
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