Richard Nixon's Greatest Cover-Up:
His Ties to the Assassination of President Kennedy
by Don Fulsom
October 15, 2003
(updated 05/28/07)
Don Fulsom covered the Nixon White House for United Press
International. He has written about Nixon for The Washington Post, The
Chicago Tribune, Esquire, Los Angeles, and Regardie's.
Seared into the memories of all Americans who lived through the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy is exactly where they were
on November 22, 1963. Yet private citizen Richard Nixon, who -- believe
it or not -- was in Dallas, could not recall this fact in a post-
assassination interview with the FBI.
The interview dealt with an apparently false claim by Marina Oswald
that her husband --alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald -- had
targeted Nixon for death during an earlier trip to Dallas. A Feb. 28,
1964 FBI report on the interview said Nixon "advised that the only
time he was in Dallas, Texas, during 1963 was two days prior to the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy."
While Nixon eventually came clean regarding his whereabouts on that
fateful day, he seemed touchy whenever the matter was raised. For
example, in a 1992 interview with CNN's Larry King, Nixon interjected
he was in Dallas "In the morning!" when King cited the presumed
geographical coincidence. Nixon left Dallas on a flight to New York
several hours before Kennedy's noontime arrival at Love Field.
Not only did Nixon misremember where he was on November 22nd, he made
at least two conflicting statements about how he first learned his
archrival had been shot. In a 1964 Reader's Digest article, he
recalled hailing a cab after his Dallas-New York flight: "We were
waiting for a light to change when a man ran over from the street
corner and said that the President had just been shot in Dallas." In
November of 1973, however, Nixon said in Esquire that his cabbie
"missed a turn somewhere and we were off the highway...a woman came
out of her house screaming and crying. I rolled down the cab window to
ask what the matter was and when she saw my face she turned even
paler. She told me that John Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas."
In yet another curious twist, a November 22nd wire service photo of
Nixon indicates he might even have learned of the shooting before his
cab ride. In the photo, a glum-looking Nixon, hat in lap, is sitting
in what appears to be an airline terminal. The caption on the United
Press International photo reads: "Shocked Richard Nixon, the former
vice president who lost the presidential election to President Kennedy
in 1960, is shown Friday after he arrived at Idlewild Airport in New
York following a flight from Dallas, Tex., where he had been on a
business trip."
In the 1992 King interview, Nixon maintained he'd never had any
interest in digging into the JFK assassination: "I don't see a useful
purpose in getting into that and I don't think it's frankly useful for
the Kennedy family to constantly raise that up again."
Nixon's professed disinterest doesn't ring true, however, for it came
from one of our snoopiest chief executives -- a politician who just
relished investigations, spying, secrets, and conspiracies. As Nixon
aide John Ehrlichman once observed: "He was a conspiracy buff. He
liked intrigue, and he liked secret maneuverings of the FBI, and he
liked to hear about what the CIA did, and so on. He just couldn't
leave that stuff alone."
As for Nixon's stated compassion for the Kennedys, let's not forget
that he deeply despised them. So much so that, as president, he
ordered chief White House spy E. Howard Hunt to forge diplomatic
cables to make it look like President Kennedy ordered the murder of
South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. He sent another spy, Anthony
Ulasewicz, to Chappaquiddick, Mass., to investigate the 1969 crash of
a car driven by Edward Kennedy that killed the senator's female
companion. He placed Sen. Kennedy under a 24-hour-a-day Secret Service
surveillance in an effort, in Nixon's phrase, "to catch him in the
sack with one of his babes." And Nixon pressed aides to plant a false
story in the press linking Sen. Kennedy to the 1972 assassination
attempt against Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
What did Nixon do in Dallas? He arrived on Nov. 20 to attend a board
meeting of the Pepsi Cola Company, one of his law clients. Dallas
reporter Jim Marrs says Nixon and actress Joan Crawford, a Pepsi
heiress, "made comments to the effect that they, unlike the president,
didn't need Secret Service protection, and they intimated the nation
was upset with Kennedy's policies. It has been suggested that this
taunting may have been responsible for Kennedy's critical decision not
to order the Plexiglas top placed on his limousine on Nov. 22."
When adviser Stephen Hess saw Nixon that same afternoon at the former
vice president's New York apartment, he said Nixon was "pretty shook
up." Hess later portrayed his boss to political reporter Jules
Witcover as unusually defensive about his pre-assassination comments
in Dallas: "He had the morning paper, which he made a great effort to
show me, reporting he had held a press conference in Dallas and made a
statement that you can disagree with a person without being
discourteous to him or interfering with him. He tried to make the
point that he had tried to prevent it ... It was his way of saying,
'Look, I didn't fuel this thing.'"
What Nixon apparently failed to tell Hess was that the major story
from his meeting with reporters in Dallas was certain to fuel the
anger of some Texans toward Kennedy. The headline in the Dallas
Morning News on November 22 said: "Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop
Johnson." Vice President Lyndon Johnson was, of course, a Texan.
On the morning after the assassination, Nixon convened a meeting of
Republican leaders at his New York apartment. Those assembled were
"already assessing how this event would affect or recreate the
possibilities of Nixon running for president," according to Hess.
Cont'd
http://crimemagazine.com/03/richardnixon,1014.htm
Dirty Politics --
Nixon, Watergate, and the JFK Assassination
by Mark Tracy
http://mtracy9.tripod.com/kennedy.html
"I suppose really the only two dates that most people remember where
they were was Pearl Harbor and the death of president Franklin
Roosevelt." --John F. Kennedy
Richard Nixon claimed to remember where he was during another
momentous event -- the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November
22, 1963. Nixon said that he first heard about Kennedy's death during
a taxi ride in New York City. However, a United Press International
photo taken that day tells a different story. The photo shows a
"shocked Richard Nixon" (as the caption reads) having already learned
of Kennedy's assassination upon his arrival at New York's Idlewild
Airport -- in other words, before his alleged taxi ride. Perhaps Nixon
was trying to deflect attention from the fact that the plane he had
arrived on had originated from Dallas, Texas. Indeed, Nixon (as he
later admitted) had been in Dallas from November 20 to the 22. While
in Dallas, Nixon had attended meetings with right-wing politicians and
executives from the Pepsi-Cola company.
Journalist Jim Marrs gives this account: "With Nixon in Dallas was
Pepsi-Cola heiress and actress Joan Crawford. Both Nixon and Crawford
made comments in the Dallas newspapers to the effect that they, unlike
the President, didn't need Secret Service protection, and they
intimated that the nation was upset with Kennedy's policies. It has
been suggested that this taunting may have been responsible for
Kennedy's critical decision not to order the Plexiglas top placed on
his limousine on November 22." [Note: The Pepsi-Cola company had a
sugar plantation and factory in Cuba, which the Cuban government
nationalized in 1960.*]
Other facts linking Nixon to the JFK assassination emerged years later
during the Watergate conspiracy, some of which were revealed by
Nixon's former chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. In his book, The Ends
of Power, Haldeman cites several conversations where Nixon expressed
concern about the Watergate affair becoming public knowledge and where
this exposure might lead. Haldeman writes:
"In fact, I was puzzled when he [Nixon] told me, 'Tell Ehrlichman this
whole group of Cubans [Watergate burglars] is tied to the Bay of
Pigs.' After a pause I said, 'The Bay of Pigs? What does that have to
do with this [the Watergate burglary]?' But Nixon merely said,
'Ehrlichman will know what I mean,' and dropped the subject."
Later in his book, Haldeman appears to answer his own question when he
says, "It seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of
Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination."
If Haldeman's interpretation is correct, then Nixon's instructions for
him to, "Tell Ehrlichman this whole group of [anti-Castro] Cubans is
tied to the Bay of Pigs," was Nixon's way of telling him to inform
Ehrlichman that the Watergate burglars were tied to Kennedy's murder.
(It should be noted that many Cuban exiles blamed Kennedy for the
failure to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs, pointing to Kennedy's
refusal to allow the American military to launch a full-scale invasion
of the island.)
Haldeman also links the CIA to the Watergate burglars and, by
implication, to the Kennedy assassination. Haldeman writes, "...at
least one of the burglars, Martinez, was still on the CIA payroll on
June 17, 1972 -- and almost certainly was reporting to his CIA case
officer about the proposed break-in even before it happened
Cont'd
http://mtracy9.tripod.com/kennedy.html
If anyone has a problem with the contents of this post, don't complain
that I don't know what I am talking about. This is not my work and it
is possible that I do not agree entirely with its contents.
It is the authors of these pieces that you should either complain too
or bitch about.
Often, articles appear that may not be accurate. However, the purpose
of these posting groups are to offer opinions and provide other data
that may even contradict the original piece.
I have posted on Dr. Cyril Wecht's argument that JFK was shot from the
front and he is allegedly an expert on the event. Yet, I do not agree
with him and have told him so and provided him with my reasons. I did
not write a one liner remark saying he does not know what he is
talking about. I am not that arrogant. And, I don't control the site
where I am able to censor a person's opinions or even reject them
completely like I see on moderated sites.
That is how we learn the truth . Even atheists read the Bible seeking
some sense to the reason for it all.
alt.assassination.jfk.uncensored
|
