Be sure to catch the 20/20 on Miz Julia tonight as you’re getting a head-start on Cinco [pass the chips!] Or record it so your early-bird celebrations don’t cost you a laugh or two.
Looking at the GOP presidential lineup [Stupid White Men comes to mind] and their continued interest in God, gays and guns while the critical issues of the day go begging, it’s not much of a stretch to think of a few of them calling on Miz Julia to send over a nakid, college-educated honey or two for a discreet message, is it? The only thing missing from the debate was the Viagra commercials. You can watch it here, if you’re of a mind.
Some fun reads on the DC Madam and what we can expect.
[Now pass the salsa.]
Jude
ps — you may think I’m preoccupied with drinking, today; I’m just missing the moment. It’s tough on a California girl living in the Pea Patch — if you don’t cotton to beer and pork rinds, you’re pretty much out-scout. Hey, homeys — lift one for me!
ABC ID’s 1000+ names from ‘DC madam’ list
Raw Story
5/3/07
(Update at bottom: DC law firm suspends woman who worked for madam)
In its ongoing investigation into Washington’s latest sex scandal, ABC News has reportedly identified more than 1,000 alleged clients of the so-called “DC madam,” Debra Jean Palfrey. But the heavily promoted 20/20 special to air this Friday apparently isn’t aiming for a full release of the names.
The Washington Examiner’s gossip column reported Thursday that investigative reporter Brian Ross will be revealing names of just two of Palfrey’s clients, much to his chagrin. “Sources tell Yeas & Nays that Ross, who had anticipated a far juicier piece, is none too happy with the final results, especially after he and the network promoted this story for weeks,” the Examiner reports. On Fox News Thursday morning, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican, said, “There is a very nervous question going around Washington this morning, and that question is, ‘Are you on the list?’” The following video clips are from Fox’s Fox & Friends. [open link for video]
DC law firm suspends woman who worked for madam
“A legal secretary at one of Washington’s most prominent law firms, Akin Gump, has been suspended after telling her bosses she secretly worked at night for the escort service run by the so-called D.C. Madam, Jeane Palfrey,” ABC’s The Blotter reports.
According to ABC, Palfrey said that the unidentified “woman both serviced clients and, at times, helped to run the business,” in the interview to be aired Friday.
In addition, an email from the woman sent to Palfrey suggested that they restart Pamela Martin and Associates from the Akin Gump offices.”‘It is a shame to basically throw away over a decade of hard work and contacts,’ she wrote last October, just before federal agents raided Palfrey’s operation,” ABC reports.
The woman added, “I think that handling the phones 4 to 5 nights a week is a very fair offer and would be something that I could easily do, even with my paralegal duties as they could pretty much be done simultaneously in front of a computer.”
Excerpts from ABCarticle:
#
According to e-mails the woman sent to Palfrey on her Akin Gump account, she “enjoyed and even missed” the work she did at night for Palfrey, who has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a large scale prostitution ring.
….
The woman, who worked directly for one of the firm’s many prominent lawyers, has been placed on administrative leave.The firm has a policy prohibiting full-time employees from holding any other jobs. “She did not seek approval for that particular job and would not have been given it,” McLean said.
McLean said the woman told the firm she was a government witness in the D.C. Madam case, and the firm was hesitant to dismiss her because of that.
FULL BLOTTER ARTICLE AT THIS LINK ++
‘Family-Values’ Cloak Lifted From GOP
Bonnie Erbe, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Friday, May 4, 2007
President Bush’s budget-busting, spendthrift tactics have robbed the GOP of its claim to the title, “Party of Fiscal Conservancy.”
Now the perverse antics of some high-level Bush appointees and his party’s power elite are lifting the cloak of “family values” from the GOP, too.
The “D.C. Madam” scandal is the latest in a string of stories revealed during Bush’s second term showing that the private lives of some of his most powerful appointees bear little resemblance to the Ozzie-and-Harriet-like ideal the party tries to mimic.
Deborah Jeane Palfrey is in court battling charges of running a high-class prostitution ring from California. She maintained a 46-pound Rolodex that has caused the resignation of one State Department potentate and reportedly contains the names of more elite administration officials and Republican Party donors. The first resignation was that of Randall Tobias, who last week fled a top State Department perch. While there, he not only managed foreign-assistance programs but also, according to The New York Times, “ran agencies that required foreign recipients of AIDS assistance to explicitly condemn prostitution, a policy that drew protests from some nations and relief organizations.”
As “AIDS czar,” Tobias alienated many AIDS-plagued, developing nations by requiring recipients of U.S. foreign aid to sign a pledge against prostitution. Donee nations complained the pledge effectively prevented organizations from befriending sex workers so as to teach them HIV/AIDS prevention. Tobias also promoted faithfulness and abstinence over condom use to prevent AIDS transmission.
Now the joke’s on Tobias, who has the gall to claim his patronage of the D.C. Madam’s women involved “no sex” and that he paid a reported $300 per session for “the gals” (as he put it) to give him massages. Yeah, right.
Even in pricy Washington, in my humble opinion, $300 seems like an awful lot for a garden-variety massage. And Bush is a uniter, not a divider.
Would that the D.C. Madam scandal were the only example of family-unfriendly behavior by powerful GOP Washingtonians. Let’s ignore, for the moment, the congressional page scandal in which disgraced former Rep. Mark Foley traded lewd e-mails with young male pages. Let’s ignore, too, the resignation of former Food and Drug Administration appointee — and evangelical Christian gynecologist (whatever that is) — Dr. W. David Hager.
Hager urged his female patients to pray for relief from medical conditions. Worse yet, The Nation Magazine reported that Hager’s ex-wife said that while he publicly sermonized and moralized on sexual matters, he repeatedly sodomized her without her consent over a seven-year period.
Let’s focus, instead, on the post-resignation antics of the man Bush appointed to lead the Office of Population Affairs. This office is in charge of doling out almost $300 million worth of contraceptives to low-income women. Yet appointee Eric Keroack once described contraceptives as “demeaning to women.” And he came to the administration’s attention due to his management of an affiliation with a string of crisis-pregnancy centers. These are the “centers” that lure pregnant women in by masquerading as women’s health service providers. Instead, they proselytize and show women ultrasound images of fetuses to dissuade them from having abortions.
Keroack resigned abruptly about a month ago, after less than five months in the job, because (as The Boston Globe reported) he was “notified that the state’s Medicaid office had launched an investigation into his private practice.”
Don’t get me wrong. Democrats have their famous foibles, too. I still say former President Clinton should have resigned for having oral sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, rather than drag the nation through the trauma of impeachment proceedings. But the lesson of Bush’s GOP and its agglomeration of perverse appointed and elected officials is that neither party should ever lay claim to that mantle again. ++
Bonnie Erbe is a TV host and writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service.
DC Sex Scandal: Couldn’t Happen to Nicer Bunch of Guys
A couple names have been leaked already and we shouldn’t feel bad for any of them.
Liza Featherstone of the Nation
May 3, 2007
I’m amused that none of my Nation colleagues have commented on the Washington, D.C. sex scandal. Time to break this high-minded code of delicacy. Alleged madam Deborah Jane Palfrey is about to release her client list, and ABC News plans to release her phone records on Friday.
To those who think they are are above reveling in something so sordid: hold your high horses. I feel sorry for people whose names are dragged through the mud over personal behavior — but not if they are right-wing hypocrites who have supported policies interfering with other people’s private lives. A couple names have been leaked already, and we shouldn’t feel bad for any of them.
Particularly deserving of his current humiliation is Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias, Bush’s former AIDS czar, whose job was to promote abstinence and monogamy rather than condoms. In his current job, he was supposed to make sure that groups getting U.S. money to fight HIV and AIDS were opposed to prostitution. (Tobias, who claims he only got massages from these call girls — bizarre, if true, but isn’t that what they always say? — had to resign last weekend over Palfrey’s disclosure.)
This is not just about hypocrisy: conservatives seem to be more often at the center of such scandals — though of course we can all think of some liberals and moderates, including Barney Frank and of course Bill Clinton — because they embrace a repressive morality that seems to drive people to act out, often in weird, alienated ways.
A group called the Sex Workers Project which provides legal services and advocacy to sex workers, pointed out, in a statement, the “irony… that Tobias was the chief enforcer and mouthpiece of the Anti-Prostitution Pledge” which cost Brazil $40 million in USAID money, and stripped funding from services like drop-in centers and English classes — which could help people move on to other lines of work — for sex workers in Cambodia and
Bangladesh.
Condemning — and, especially, refusing to help — sex workers is stupid policy: prostitutes who insist on protecting themselves through condom use can play a valuable role in halting the spread of HIV/AIDS. Tobias’s connections to an escort agency, the Sex Workers Project notes, “provide an opportunity to reflect on the ineffective and morality-driven policies he enforced.” ++
Sex, politics and rock & roll
Doug Thompson, Capital Hill Blue
May 3, 2007
In 1982, I hitched a ride on Air Force One from Washington to New Mexico. My boss, Congressman Manuel Lujan, was getting help from President Ronald Reagan.
As I settled into my seat, I noticed a White House aide taking off his wedding ring and putting it in his wallet.
“First rule of life on the road,” he said. “Wheels up, rings off.”
Later, in the bar of the Regent hotel, I saw that same White House aide leave arm-in-arm with a shapely female staffer.
He wasn’t the only married man or woman who paired up with a willing bedmate for the night. At atmosphere in the bar seemed more like a frat party than a trip by those working for the most powerful man in the free world.
Over the next 22 years in Washington, I watched Presidents and other elected officials come and go, along with the staff members who worked for them but while the philosophies and “values” that these temporary holders of power espoused changed with the political winds, the one thing that didn’t change was the sex drive of those in power and the availability of others willing to indulge that drive.
During a two-year stint as a chief of staff for another Congressman, I managed a staff that included one woman having an affair with a top, married, political aide to President Reagan, another who appeared in Playboy and still another screwing at least two married Congressmen that I knew about and probably others.
“Washington is a very horny town,” says former lobbyist Paula Parkinson, who also appeared nude in Playboy in November 1980. She should know. She carried on a longtime affair with Illinois Congressman Tom Railsback and spent a weekend in Florida servicing the needs of several members of Congress, including then Senator Dan Quayle who later served as Vice President under George H.W. Bush.
Twenty years later, blogger Jessica Cutler found her 15 minutes of fame writing about her bedtime antics with Congressional staffers and administration hotshots. Cutler, at the time, worked for Ohio Sen. Mike DeWine, another holier-than-thou “family values” Republican.
Cutler was “outed” by blogger Ana Marie Cox, whose Wonkette blog talked openly about the sex habits of the politically-connected and powerful along with a particularly fascination on anal sex.
An example:
What!?!?! Jenna (Bush) on “all fours” shaking her weapons of mass destruction for all of the reality-based community to see!!?!?! Is this just another heart-breaking rumor on the internets? The NY Post says that video evidence is being shopped around. We’d bid, but we blew our entire photo budget on what turned out to be doctored photos of Dick Cheney’s wang!
Silver lining: The videologist apparently didn’t capture the actual can-banging (a.k.a. “Da Butt Dance”). However, eyewitness reports that Jenna was totally flashing thong, and that the club she was hootchie-ing it up at displays a replica of Monica’s blue dress. There’s some fancy literary term for that but we’re too drunk to remember it!
Cox later moved on to writing a novel before landing her current gig as a Washington columnist for Time where she went public apologizing for appearing on Don Imus’ radio show after the shock jock got canned for racist comments. As with everything else in Washington, hypocrisy rules the world of racy bloggers and mainstream columnists.
So no one should be surprised that the morally-hypocritical administration of George W. Bush is caught up in not one, but two, old-fashioned sex scandals - one involving good buddy and Iraq-war architect Paul Wolfowitz giving a fat raise and promotion to his bed mate and the other a high-priced call girl ring that has cost one high-ranking Bushie his job and threatens to encircle others in the administration and on Capitol Hill.
Sex is, and probably always will be, a driving force in Washington. Whether it is GOP Rep. Mark Foley chasing young male pages or former President Bill Clinton letting an intern nosh on the First Member, Washington is ruled by those who believe they are above the laws of man, God and morality.In the end, however, it is the rest of us who get screwed - and we don’t even get dinner first. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
May 4th, 2007
JFK was my guy, I was just 17. Coming on the heels of Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex, none of us expected to be startled awake by the stunning cruelty of that sunny day in Dallas.
To my mind, this is where it all went sour … and its been steady decline since.
Happy Cinco de Mayo, by the way — tequila, up, salt … party!!
Jude
“Brothers”
The exclusive story of Robert F. Kennedy’s secret search for the truth about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. From the new book by Salon’s founder and former editor in chief.
David Talbot, Salon
May. 02, 2007
One of the most intriguing mysteries about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that darkest of American labyrinths, is why his brother Robert F. Kennedy apparently did nothing to investigate the crime. Bobby Kennedy was, after all, not just the attorney general of the United States at the time of the assassination — he was his brother’s devoted partner, the man who took on the administration’s most grueling assignments, from civil rights to organized crime to Cuba, the hottest Cold War flashpoint of its day. But after the burst of gunfire in downtown Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, ended this unique partnership, Bobby Kennedy seemed lost in a fog of grief, refusing to discuss the assassination with the Warren Commission, and telling friends he had no heart for an aggressive investigation. “What difference does it make?” he would say. “It won’t bring him back.”
But Bobby Kennedy was a complex man, and his years in Washington had taught him to keep his own counsel and proceed in a subterranean fashion. What he said in public about Dallas was not the full story. Privately, RFK — who had made his name in the 1950s as a relentless investigator of the underside of American power — was consumed by the need to know the real story about his brother’s assassination. This fire seized him on the afternoon of Nov. 22, as soon as FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, a bitter political enemy, phoned to say — almost with pleasure, thought Bobby — that the president had been shot. And the question of who killed his brother continued to haunt Kennedy until the day he too was gunned down, on June 5, 1968.
Because of his proclivity for operating in secret, RFK did not leave behind a documentary record of his inquiries into his brother’s assassination. But it is possible to retrace his investigative trail, beginning with the afternoon of Nov. 22, when he frantically worked the phones at Hickory Hill — his Civil War-era mansion in McLean, Va. — and summoned aides and government officials to his home. Lit up with the clarity of shock, the electricity of adrenaline, Bobby Kennedy constructed the outlines of the crime that day — a crime, he immediately concluded, that went far beyond Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old ex-Marine arrested shortly after the assassination. Robert Kennedy was America’s first assassination conspiracy theorist.
CIA sources began disseminating their own conspiratorial view of Kennedy’s murder within hours of the crime, spotlighting Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union and his public support for Fidel Castro. In New Orleans, an anti-Castro news organization released a tape of Oswald defending the bearded dictator. In Miami, the Cuban Student Directorate — an exile group funded secretly by a CIA program code-named AMSPELL — told reporters about Oswald’s connections to the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. But Robert Kennedy never believed the assassination was a communist plot. Instead, he looked in the opposite direction, focusing his suspicions on the CIA’s secretive anti-Castro operations, a murky underworld he had navigated as his brother’s point man on Cuba. Ironically, RFK’s suspicions were shared by Castro himself, whom he had sought to overthrow throughout the Kennedy presidency.
The attorney general was supposed to be in charge of the clandestine war on Castro — another daunting assignment JFK gave him, after the spy agency’s disastrous performance at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. But as he tried to establish control over CIA operations and to herd the rambunctious Cuban exile groups into a unified progressive front, Bobby learned what a swamp of intrigue the anti-Castro world was. Working out of a sprawling Miami station code-named JM/WAVE that was second in size only to the CIA’s Langley, Va., headquarters, the agency had recruited an unruly army of Cuban militants to launch raids on the island and even contracted Mafia henchmen to kill Castro — including mob bosses Johnny Rosselli, Santo Trafficante and Sam Giancana, whom Kennedy, as chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee in the late 1950s, had targeted. It was an overheated ecosystem that was united not just by its fevered opposition to the Castro regime, but by its hatred for the Kennedys, who were regarded as traitors for failing to use the full military might of the United States against the communist outpost in the Caribbean.
This Miami netherworld of spies, gangsters and Cuban militants is where Robert Kennedy immediately cast his suspicions on Nov. 22. In the years since RFK’s own assassination, an impressive body of evidence has accumulated that suggests why Kennedy felt compelled to look in that direction. The evidence — congressional testimony, declassified government documents, even veiled confessions — continues to emerge at this late date, although largely unnoticed. The most recent revelation came from legendary spy E. Howard Hunt before his death in January. Hunt offered what might be the last will and testament on the JFK assassination by someone with direct knowledge about the crime. In his recent posthumously published memoir, “American Spy,” Hunt speculates that the CIA might have been involved in Kennedy’s murder. And in handwritten notes and an audiotape he left behind, the spy went further, revealing that he was invited to a 1963 meeting at a CIA safe house in Miami where an assassination plot was discussed.
Bobby Kennedy knew that he and his brother had made more than their share of political enemies. But none were more virulent than the men who worked on the Bay of Pigs operation and believed the president had stabbed them in the back, refusing to rescue their doomed operation by sending in the U.S. Air Force and Marines. Later, when President Kennedy ended the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 without invading Cuba, these men saw not statesmanship but another failure of nerve. In Cuban Miami, they spoke of la seconda derrota, the second defeat. These anti-Kennedy sentiments, at times voiced heatedly to Bobby’s face, resonated among the CIA’s partners in the secret war on Castro — the Mafia bosses who longed to reclaim their lucrative gambling and prostitution franchises in Havana that had been shut down by the revolution, and who were deeply aggrieved by the Kennedy Justice Department’s all-out war on organized crime. But Bobby, the hard-liner who covered his brother’s right flank on the Cuba issue, thought that he had turned himself into the main lightning rod for all this anti-Kennedy static.
“I thought they would get me, instead of the president,” he told his Justice Department press aide, Edwin Guthman, as they walked back and forth on the backyard lawn at Hickory Hill on the afternoon of Nov. 22. Guthman and others around Bobby that day thought “they” might be coming for the younger Kennedy next. So apparently did Bobby. Normally opposed to tight security measures — “Kennedys don’t need bodyguards,” he had said with typical brashness — he allowed his aides to summon federal marshals, who quickly surrounded his estate.
Meanwhile, as Lyndon Johnson — a man with whom he had a storied antagonistic relationship — flew east from Dallas to assume the powers of the presidency, Bobby Kennedy used his fleeting authority to ferret out the truth. After hearing his brother had died at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Kennedy phoned CIA headquarters, just down the road in Langley, where he often began his day, stopping there to work on Cuba-related business. Bobby’s phone call to Langley on the afternoon of Nov. 22 was a stunning outburst. Getting a ranking official on the phone — whose identity is still unknown — Kennedy confronted him in a voice vibrating with fury and pain. “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?” Kennedy erupted.
Later that day, RFK summoned the CIA director himself, John McCone, to ask him the same question. McCone, who had replaced the legendary Allen Dulles after the old spymaster had walked the plank for the Bay of Pigs, swore that his agency was not involved. But Bobby Kennedy knew that McCone, a wealthy Republican businessman from California with no intelligence background, did not have a firm grasp on all aspects of the agency’s work. Real control over the clandestine service revolved around the No. 2 man, Richard Helms, the shrewd bureaucrat whose intelligence career went back to the agency’s OSS origins in World War II. “It was clear that McCone was out of the loop — Dick Helms was running the agency,” recently commented RFK aide John Seigenthaler — another crusading newspaper reporter, like Guthman, whom Bobby had recruited for his Justice Department team. “Anything McCone found out was by accident.”
Kennedy had another revealing phone conversation on the afternoon of Nov. 22. Speaking with Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams, a Bay of Pigs veteran who was his most trusted ally among exiled political leaders, Bobby shocked his friend by telling him point-blank, “One of your guys did it.” Who did Kennedy mean? By then Oswald had been arrested in Dallas. The CIA and its anti-Castro client groups were already trying to connect the alleged assassin to the Havana regime. But as Kennedy’s blunt remark to Williams makes clear, the attorney general wasn’t buying it. Recent evidence suggests that Bobby Kennedy had heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald long before it exploded in news bulletins around the world, and he connected it with the government’s underground war on Castro. With Oswald’s arrest in Dallas, Kennedy apparently realized that the government’s clandestine campaign against Castro had boomeranged at his brother.
That evening, Kennedy zeroed in on the Mafia. He phoned Julius Draznin in Chicago, an expert on union corruption for the National Labor Relations Board, asking him to look into a possible mob angle on Dallas. More important, the attorney general activated Walter Sheridan, his ace Justice Department investigator, locating him in Nashville, where Sheridan was awaiting the trial of their longtime nemesis, Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa.
If Kennedy had any doubts about a Mafia involvement in his brother’s murder, they were immediately dispelled when, two days after JFK was shot down, burly nightclub owner Jack Ruby shouldered his way through press onlookers in the basement of the Dallas police station and fired his fatal bullet into Lee Harvey Oswald. Sheridan quickly turned up evidence that Ruby had been paid off in Chicago by a close associate of Hoffa. Sheridan reported that Ruby had “picked up a bundle of money from Allen M. Dorfman,” Hoffa’s chief advisor on Teamster pension fund loans and the stepson of Paul Dorfman, the labor boss’ main link to the Chicago mob. A few days later, Draznin, Kennedy’s man in Chicago, provided further evidence about Ruby’s background as a mob enforcer, submitting a detailed report on Ruby’s labor racketeering activities and his penchant for armed violence. Jack Ruby’s phone records further clinched it for Kennedy. The list of men whom Ruby phoned around the time of the assassination, RFK later told aide Frank Mankiewicz, was “almost a duplicate of the people I called to testify before the Rackets Committee.”
As family members and close friends gathered in the White House on the weekend after the assassination for the president’s funeral, a raucous mood of Irish mourning gripped the executive mansion. But Bobby didn’t participate in the family’s doleful antics. Coiled and sleepless throughout the weekend, he brooded alone about his brother’s murder. According to an account by Peter Lawford, the actor and Kennedy in-law who was there that weekend, Bobby told family members that JFK had been killed by a powerful plot that grew out of one of the government’s secret anti-Castro operations. There was nothing they could do at that point, Bobby added, since they were facing a formidable enemy and they no longer controlled the government. Justice would have to wait until the Kennedys could regain the White House — this would become RFK’s mantra in the years after Dallas, whenever associates urged him to speak out about the mysterious crime.
A week after the assassination, Bobby and his brother’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy — who shared his suspicions about Dallas — sent a startling secret message to Moscow through a trusted family emissary named William Walton. The discreet and loyal Walton “was exactly the person that you would pick for a mission like this,” his friend Gore Vidal later observed. Walton, a Time magazine war correspondent who had reinvented himself as a gay Georgetown bohemian, had grown close to both JFK and Jackie in their carefree days before they moved into the White House. Later, the first couple gave him an unpaid role in the administration, appointing him chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, but it was mainly an excuse to make him a frequent White House guest and confidant.
After JFK’s assassination, the president’s brother and widow asked Walton to go ahead as planned with a cultural exchange trip to Russia, where he was to meet with artists and government ministers, and convey an urgent message to the Kremlin. Soon after arriving in frigid Moscow, fighting a cold and dabbing at his nose with a red handkerchief, Walton met at the ornate Sovietskaya restaurant with Georgi Bolshakov — an ebullient, roly-poly Soviet agent with whom Bobby had established a back-channel relationship in Washington. Walton stunned the Russian by telling him that the Kennedys believed Oswald was part of a conspiracy. They didn’t think either Moscow or Havana was behind the plot, Walton assured Bolshakov — it was a large domestic conspiracy. The president’s brother was determined to enter the political arena and eventually make a run for the White House. If RFK succeeded, Walton confided, he would resume his brother’s quest for détente with the Soviets.
Robert Kennedy’s remarkable secret communication to Moscow shows how emotionally wracked he must have been in the days following his brother’s assassination. The calamity transformed him instantly from a cocky, abrasive insider — the second most powerful man in Washington — to a grief-stricken, deeply wary outsider who put more trust in the Russian government than he did in his own. The Walton mission has been all but lost to history. But it is one more revealing tale that sheds light on Bobby Kennedy’s subterranean life between his brother’s assassination and his own violent demise less than five years later.
Over the years, Kennedy would offer bland and routine endorsements of the Warren Report and its lone gunman theory. But privately he derided the report as nothing more than a public relations exercise designed to reassure the public. And behind the scenes, he continued to work assiduously to figure out his brother’s murder, in preparation for reopening the case if he ever won the power to do so.
Bobby held onto medical evidence from his brother’s autopsy, including JFK’s brain and tissue samples, which might have proved important in a future investigation. He also considered taking possession of the gore-spattered, bullet-riddled presidential limousine that had carried his brother in Dallas, before the black Lincoln could be scrubbed clean of evidence and repaired. He enlisted his top investigator, Walt Sheridan, in his secret quest — the former FBI agent and fellow Irish Catholic whom Bobby called his “avenging angel.”
Even after leaving the Justice Department in 1964, when he was elected to the Senate from New York, Kennedy and Sheridan would slip back into the building now and then to pore over files on the case. And soon after his election, Kennedy traveled to Mexico City, where he gathered information on Oswald’s mysterious trip there in September 1963.
In 1967, Sheridan went to New Orleans to check into the Jim Garrison investigation, to see whether the flamboyant prosecutor really had cracked the JFK case. (Sheridan was working as an NBC news producer at the time, but he reported back to RFK, telling him that Garrison was a fraud.) And Kennedy asked his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, to begin gathering information about the assassination for the day when they could reopen the investigation. (Mankiewicz later told Bobby that his research led him to conclude it was probably a plot involving the Mafia, Cuban exiles and rogue CIA agents.) Kennedy himself found it painful to discuss conspiracy theories with the ardent researchers who sought him out. But he met in his Senate office with at least one — a feisty small-town Texas newspaper publisher named Penn Jones Jr., who believed JFK was the victim of a CIA-Pentagon plot. Bobby heard him out and then had his driver take Jones to Arlington Cemetery, where the newspaperman wanted to pay his respects at his brother’s grave.
At times, this drive to know the truth would sputter, as Robert Kennedy wrestled with debilitating grief and a haunting guilt that he — his brother’s constant watchman — should have protected him. And, ever cautious, Bobby continued to deflect the subject whenever he was confronted with it by the press. But as time went by, it became increasingly difficult for Kennedy to avoid wrestling with the specter of his brother’s death in public.
In late March 1968, during his doomed and heroic run for the presidency, Kennedy was addressing a tumultuous outdoor campus rally in Northridge, Calif., when some boisterous students shouted out the question he always dreaded. “We want to know who killed President Kennedy!” yelled one girl, while others took up the cry: “Open the archives!”
Kennedy’s response that day was a tightrope walk. He knew that if he fully revealed his thinking about the assassination, the ensuing media uproar would have dominated his campaign, instead of burning issues like ending the Vietnam War and healing the country’s racial divisions. For a man like Robert Kennedy, you did not talk about something as dark as the president’s assassination in public — you explored the crime your own way.
But Kennedy respected college students and their passions — and he was in the habit of addressing campus audiences with surprising honesty. He did not want to simply deflect the question that day with his standard line. So, while dutifully endorsing the Warren Report as usual, he went further. “You wanted to ask me something about the archives,” he responded.
“I’m sure, as I’ve said before, the archives will be open.” The crowd cheered and applauded. “Can I just say,” continued Kennedy, “and I have answered this question before, but there is no one who would be more interested in all of these matters as to who was responsible for uh…the uh, uh, the death of President Kennedy than I would.” Kennedy’s press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, long used to Kennedy ducking the question, was “stunned” by the reply. “It was either like he was suddenly blurting out the truth, or it was a way to shut down any further questioning. You know, ‘Yes, I will reopen the case. Now let’s move on.’”
Robert Kennedy did not live long enough to solve his brother’s assassination. But nearly 40 years after his own murder, a growing body of evidence suggests that Kennedy was on the right trail before he too was cut down. Despite his verbal contortions in public, Bobby Kennedy always knew that the truth about Dallas mattered. It still does. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
May 4th, 2007