Deep Background LeMay & JFK

President Kennedy visits SAC Command Post.

Deep Background: The Rift between President Kennedy and General LeMay
- by Douglas Horne, Chief Analyst for Military Records (ARRB)

General LeMay and President Kennedy shared a barely concealed, mutual contempt for each other which was widely known in Washington, and John F. Kennedy had more than once walked out of a meeting with LeMay in a fit of pique. President Kennedy was so upset when first briefed in September 1961 by General Lyman Lemnitzer (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) about America’s inflexible plan for total, world-wide nuclear war, SIOP -62 – the ‘Single Integrated Operational Plan’ for Fiscal Year 1962 – that he spent most of the meeting tapping on his teeth with his thumbnail, a sign of irritation in him, and said in disgust to Secretary of State Dean Rusk at the conclusion of the meeting, “And we call ourselves the human race.” (Although the target list in the fist SIOP had been developed in 1960 – and was officially the brainchild of LeMay’s protégé and replacement as head of SAC, General Power – it was at heart really LeMay’s plan, even though briefed by Lemnitzer, for it reflected LeMay’s personal philosophy of massive and continuing retaliation for several days, in the event of nuclear war).

At that time, the SIOP essentially called for the massive and overwhelming destruction of the entire Communist bloc – [National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy called SIOP-62 and its predecessors “a massive, total, comprehensive strategic attack…on everything Red.” It allowed for no flexibility once nuclear hostilities began.] – both military bases and major civilian targets (cities) – in the event of nuclear war with any one of its members. [For example, in a war with the Soviet Union, all major strategic targets in Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, and North Vietnam would have been destroyed.]. It was overkill on a grand scale, and greatly upset President Kennedy, who was already preoccupied about the danger – even the likelihood – of accidental nuclear war through mistakes or miscalculation, to the point where after this briefing, he ordered the SIOP revised to allow for a more flexible response by the Commander-in-Chief than the obligatory destruction of half of the planet in the event of a nuclear conflict. The revised plan, called SIOP-63, went into effect just prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

LeMay, for his part, considered Kennedy a ‘weak sister,’ and was angry with JFK for not immediately bombing, and then invading Cuba during the Missile Crisis in October 1962.

General Thomas Power, an ‘extreme personality’ who himself sometimes made General LeMay look like a reasonable man, commanded the Strategic Air Command (SAC) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. On Wednesday, November 24, 1962, General Power not only took the dangerous and provocative step of moving SAC from DEFCON-3 to DEFCON-2 (one stage short of nuclear war) without Kennedy’s permission during the crisis, but made two unencrypted radio transmissions about this change in status to all of SAC, undoubtedly to ensure that the USSR knew what the U.S. Air Force was doing. (There was a great nuclear weapons imbalance at this time in favor of the Untied States, and both the United States and the Soviet political and military leadership knew this.)

Kennedy and his advisors were not only furious that this had happened, but actually horrified, because putting SAC at DEFCON-2 could have been interpreted by the Soviets as the prelude to a pre-emptive “first-strike” by the United States, and thereby increased the risk of general war.

General LeMay, as Chief of Staff of the Air Force, was not only responsible for Power’s actions, but he supported them after the fact, even though Power had acted independently. (Thomas Power, Curtis LeMay’s former Chief of Staff when LeMay commanded SAC, was the handpicked replacement chosen to take over the powerful organization LeMay himself had succored and nurtured through its childhood and adolescence, into the maturity of adulthood.) LeMay, furthermore, had given what new Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Maxwell Taylor later called “half-assed” recommendations during the Cuban Missile Crisis, including telling President Kennedy that the Soviet Union would not respond with military force anywhere in the world – not even in Berlin – if the U.S. attacked Cuba, destroyed its missiles, and killed large numbers of its troops and technicians.

Shortly after the Missile Crisis ended, President Kennedy met with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Cabinet Room at the White House to thank them for their efforts, after achieving a negotiated settlement with the Soviet Union that both guaranteed removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba and avoided war. President Kennedy tried to put a good face on what had been a difficult and stressful two weeks with his military leadership, saying that he wanted to tell them how much he admired them and had benefited from their advice and counsel.

President Kennedy said, “Gentlemen, we’ve won. I don’t want you to ever say it, but you know we’ve won, and I know we’ve won.” At this point the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral George Anderson, exclaimed, “We’ve been had!” LeMay’s own emotional outburst followed immediately thereafter. LeMay – who was enraged that the United States had not bombed and invaded Cuba – pounded the table in the Cabinet room and blurted out, “Won, Hell! We Lost!” We should go in and wipe them out today!” LeMay then proclaimed the resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis to be “the greatest defeat in our history,” and ejaculated, “Mr. President, we should invade today!” - leaving President Kennedy stunned and stammering in amazement.

President Kennedy and General LeMay no doubt both considered themselves patriots, but they were very different kinds of patriots – the type of men who were so far apart in their respective views of the world that they could not help but despise each other. LeMay was crude, bull-headed, profane, inflexible, demanding, and used to getting his way; President Kennedy was, more than anything else, flexible and open to new ideas, and his World War II experiences had made him very skeptical of the so-called wisdom of senior military officers. The animus between Kennedy and LeMay was real, and quite serious.

LeMay, who had earned his stars in the European Theater during World War II as a B-17 bomber unit commander (in the European ‘daylight precision bombing’ campaign of the Eighth Air Force) before moving to the Pacific and initiating the firebombing campaign against the Japanese cities with the high-tech B-29 Superfortresses, was the ultimate Cold Warrior. He was a strong advocate of nuclear deterrence, and had spent 8 years, from 1949 to 1957, building up the Strategic Air Command (America’s extremely efficient and formidable organization established for the purpose of delivering long range nuclear weapons) into the greatest fleet of destruction ever assembled. In doing so he had ushered into service the B-36, B-47, and B-52 bombers, and a huge fleet of tankers to support worldwide operations. Curtis LeMay was the pre-eminent symbol of America’s nuclear warfighting capability, in the era before the advent of the Polaris ballistic missile submarine. He was upset that JFK had decided the United States only needed a future projected total of 1000 ICBMs instead of the 3,000 nuclear-tipped missiles that LeMay wanted.

Some military historians actually believe that LeMay attempted to provoke a violent response from the Soviet Union during the mid-to-late 1950s – through repeated, provocative overflights by SAC aircraft – and that he wanted to use the hoped for Soviet knee-jerk response as a pretext for an annihilating “first strike” against the USSR. During the 1950s, LeMay was certain that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was not only survivable, but easily winnable, and apparently believed that since nuclear war with the Soviets was inevitable, the U.S. should consider striking first, before the USSR developed effective long-range delivery systems in large numbers. Robert McNamara has said that “LeMay believed that ultimately we were going to confront these people [meaning the Soviet Union] in a conflict with nuclear weapons, and by God, we’d better do it when we have greater superiority than we will have in the future.”

In 1962, the number of U.S. nuclear warheads outnumbered what the Soviets had by a ratio of 17 to 1, and the respective numbers and reliability of our long-range delivery systems was equally superior. LeMay knew all this, of course, and he knew President Kennedy had ‘blown’ his best political opportunity to launch a justifiable pre-emptive first strike against the Soviet Union, and “win” the nuclear conflict LeMay felt was inevitable.

President Kennedy was so upset with LeMay’s unsophisticated, bellicose response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his failure to adequately control General Thomas Power and SAC during those events, that he wanted to fire LeMay afterwards, along with the Chief of Naval Operations, George Anderson, who had openly quarreled with McNamara in the Pentagon. Kennedy was dissuaded from replacing both men by his advisors, because it would have been a public admission of serious friction between President Kennedy and his military leadership, and in the end, he only got rid of George Anderson (by appointing him as Ambassador to Portugal), and hoped to keep Air Force Chief of Staff LeMay “inside the tent pissing out,” rather than have him “outside the tent pissing in.”

[Author Richard Reeves reported in President Kennedy: Profile of Power that JFK had “a kind of a fit” every time someone mentioned LeMay’s name, and once stated to an aide, “I don’t want that man near me again,” after another frustrating exchange with America’s foremost Hawk. His extreme frustration was no doubt exacerbated by the fact that he himself had promoted LeMay from Air Force Vice Chief of Staff to Chief of Staff in June 1961. Kennedy felt obligated to do this for two reasons: first, he could not afford to have LeMay out of uniform making anti-administration speeches about how weak the President was; and second, if the U.S. did get into a major war, LeMay was clearly the kind of commander you wanted in charge of your Air Force. June 1961 was a period of extreme tension with the USSR over Berlin, and no doubt promoting LeMay to Air Force Chief of Staff was an intentional signal which the Soviet military leadership took note of.]

JFK made a final public jab at LeMay in his famous “Peace Speech” at American University in June 1963, encouraging Americans to “reevaluate our attitude towards the Soviet Union,” saying that if these two peoples could not agree on everything, that the world would be at least made “safe for diversity,” and publicly disavowing those who called for “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”

[As author Dino Brugioni states in Eyeball to Eyeball, LeMay loved to discuss how Roman strength had produced Pax Romana; how the British , through their naval and military strength, had achieved Pax Britannica; and with unabashed gall, how ‘his bombers’ had achieved ‘Pax Atomica.’ Once, during a lecture, LeMay resorted to the term ‘Pax Americana,’ and it was to this that JFK was responding in his commencement address at American University.]

...Finally, JFK’s then Top Secret order to withdraw completely from Vietnam by the end of 1965, passed on initially to the Joint Chiefs in Honolulu in May of 1963 by Secretary of Defense McNamara, and formalized by National Security Action Memo 263 on October 11, 1963, was anathema to military zealots who had been longing to defeat Communism on the battlefield ever since the Korean War ended in a stalemate and frustration in 1953. These facts did not sit well with Cold War Hawks.

All of the above is a prelude to what is admittedly an ‘urban legend,’ but at any rate is a believable one. Former Navy Hospital Corpsman Paul K. O’Connor, whom I have dubbed the ‘original body bag and shipping casket’ witness because of his historic interview with the HSCA staff in August 1977, told an anecdote for many years about something he witnessed during the autopsy on President Kennedy at the Bethesda morgue.

The anecdote’s essentials are that Dr. Humes, smelling cigar smoke in the morgue, loudly ordered whoever was smoking a cigar to ‘put the damn thing out,’ and told O’Connor to ‘see to it,’ or words to that effect. According to O’Connor, while Humes had his back turned to the gallery and was busy conducting the autopsy on the President’s body, he (O’Connor) went over to the gallery to enforce Humes’ dictate, only to run into the Air Force Chief of Staff, Curtis LeMay, who arrogantly blew smoke in O’Connor’s face. When O’Conner informed Dr. Humes of the identify of the culprit, so the story goes, Humes turned quite pale, stuck his tail between his legs, and that was the end of the matter. According to O’Connor, when he saw LeMay the General had removed the four-star insignia from his uniform, but O’Connor recognized him nevertheless.

[This is not at all a farfetched possibility. LeMay was an extremely well-known military man who had a very efficient public relations machine of his own, second only to J. Edgar Hoover’s; for example in 1955, he had been glorified in a Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson Cold War film called “Strategic Air Command,” where he was appropriately portrayed by a character named “General Hawks” by actor Frank Lovejoy. Many Americans knew who the real Curtis LeMay was in 1963, and knew what he looked like. As Brugioni wrote, “his beetle brows, jutting jaw, sagging jowls, shock of slicked down black hair, and ubiquitous brown cigar,” gave him the visage of a bulldog. He was a living icon to many in 1963, especially former and active members of the military. ]

While O’Connor’s anecdotal evidence certainly does not prove LeMay was present, the behavior described sounds very much like the real Curtis LeMay. The entries in the log book rescued by Chuck Holmes prove that LeMay had more than enough time to get to Bethesda from National Airport before President Kennedy’s body arrived from Andrews AFB; LeMay landed 48 minutes prior to Air Force One, and Washington National Airport is much closer to Bethesda than Andrews Air Force Base.

Did LeMay go to Bethesda to gloat over the corpse of his nemesis, a man he considered dangerously misguided and weak? Was he the four-star general that Custer recollected giving orders, or instructions from the gallery? And if so, was he doing more than just gloating – was he a 'known integral player in a domestic conspiracy to remove the Chief Executive and replace him with ‘known quantity’ who was going to ‘play ball’ with Hawks in the government? After Custer’s deposition was over, I asked him in private if the uniform shirt of the general in the gallery was green or blue – and he said he thought it was light blue. [Air Force personnel wore light blue shirts; Army personnel wore light green shirts.]

One final item of possible corroboration for Custer’s claim is the testimony of Pierre Finck at the Shaw trial in 1969 in New Orleans. The exchange went like this;

Finck: “Well, I heard Dr. Humes staying that, he said, “Who is in charge here?” and I heard an Army General, I don’t remember his name, stating, “I am.” You must understand that in those circumstances, there were law enforcement officers, military people with various ranks, and you have to coordinate the operation according to directions.”

...Humes claimed during his ARRB testimony that the “I am” comment was a statement made by the Army General commanding the Military District of Washington (ie. General Wehle)...before the body arrived. If Finck's testimony was true, then Humes’ sworn testimony to the ARRB cannot possibly be true, and in fact constitutes perjury...

Before the reader dismisses this possibility, ask yourself two things: why would Humes use words like “hysterical” and “three ring circus” over the years to describe the atmosphere in the morgue, if he really was in charge of the autopsy, as he has always claimed; and why would the Air Force Chief of Staff ignore instructions from the Secretary of the Air Force to land at Andrews Air Force Base, where everyone in America knew the President’s body was being flown?....END OF EXCERPT.

ARRB Search for AF1 Radio Tapes

Douglas Horne, the senior analyst for military records for the Assassination Records Review Boad (ARRB) writes about the Air Force One radio tapes in his book Inside ARRB (Chapter 13) The "Air Force One" Audiotapes.





HORNE: One of the most intriguing, and frustrating, records of the assassination are the heavily edited "Air Force One" audiotapes available from the LBJ Presidential Library in Texas. Colleague Joan Zimmerman, who was as curious about the autopsy and the role of the Secret Service the night of the autopsy as I was, spent two whole days with me at the Archives II facility in College Park, Maryland—October 10-11, 1995—studying the tapes. The result was my first ARRB "research memo," completed on October 17, 1995. I am referencing it now as I write up this brief section.

The tapes were recorded by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), which is responsible for coordinating all Presidential communications. The total length of the edited conversations on the three audiocassettes is approximately 2 hours; a disclaimer at the beginning says the tapes are "edited and condensed," but does not indicate who did the editing or how much material was deleted.

The tapes are recordings of in-flight conversations that occurred on November 22, 1963 between SAM 26000 (Air Force One), SAM 86972 (the aircraft carrying several Cabinet officials and Press Secretary Pierre Salinger from Hawaii to Japan when JFK was assassinated), Andrews AFB, "Liberty" (the "Fish Bowl," run by Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—the outfit patching all of the radio calls back and forth between the different parties), and "Crown" (the White House Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House).

The purpose of the 2-day visit to the Archives was to determine whether there were any significant reasons to pursue the unedited, full length version of the recordings. There were; we did; and neither the Air Force nor the White House Communications Agency exhibited any interest or cooperation whatsoever. The ARRB's inability to locate the unedited recordings was my second biggest

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disappointment while working there. (My biggest disappointment, of course, was not taking the depositions of the Dallas doctors in the presence of the autopsy photographs.) Four frequencies were identified on the tape as being in use that night, and a memo written by USAF Master Sergeant John C. Trimble (the radio operator aboard Air Force One on 11/22/63) stated that he "...had three phone patches going simultaneously for much of the time..." during the flight back to Andrews AFB from Love Field. Since the flight time from "wheels up" to "on the blocks" at the final destination was 2 hrs. 17 min., it is possible that the total duration of recorded conversation, on all four channels, was anywhere from seven to nine hours long. One of the problems when listening to the tapes is that the listener does not know which "patch" he is listening to at any one time, or whether or not the various conversations on the edited tapes are recorded in the right time sequence in relation to each other (since there were three circuits in use almost continuously).

Some of the 'investigative leads' I noted in my memo of October 17, 1995 are summarized below:

• Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman, and later U.S. Army General Ted Clifton (Military Aide to President Kennedy) make it clear on the radio that their desire is for an ambulance and a limousine to take President Kennedy's body to Walter Reed (not Bethesda) for autopsy "...under guard...," as specified by General Clifton.

• Gerald Behn, Head of the Secret Service White House Detail (speaking from "Crown"), counters that a helicopter has been arranged to take the President's body to the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda for autopsy, and that all other personnel will be choppered to the south grounds of the White House.

• Ultimately, Dr. Burkley (onboard Air Force One) sides with Gerald Behn (at the White House) in support of a Bethesda autopsy, and persuades General Heaton (the Surgeon General of the Army, in Washington) to cancel arrangements for a Walter Reed autopsy.

• After Bethesda has been selected as the autopsy site, the mode of transportation to Bethesda is discussed. Burkley and Clifton insist that JFK's body be transported by ambulance (vice helicopter), even though JFK's Naval aide, CAPT Shepard, has assured Behn that it would be no problem for a helicopter to carry the heavy casket.

• Unaccountably, even though ambulance transport had been selected for JFK's body, Gerald Behn directs Kellerman on the radio: "You accompany the body aboard the helicopter." [Question: Was Behn aware that the bronze Dallas casket was empty and that JFK's body was in the forward luggage compartment?]

• General Clifton insists upon, and then repeats, in great detail, orders for the following ground support at Andrews AFB upon arrival: a forklift and platform at the left rear of the aircraft for the casket; a personnel ramp at the left front of the aircraft for the debarkation of President Johnson and the other passengers; and another personnel ramp at the right front of the airplane (the dark, unlit side where there is a galley door)for the departure of Jacqueline Kennedy. [Mrs. Kennedy did not use the forward starboard galley door to leave the aircraft in secret; she insisted on staying with the Dallas casket, which threw a monkey wrench in the conspirators' likely plans to reunite JFK's body with the Dallas casket at Walter Reed hospital prior to taking the bronze coffin to Bethesda.]

•At one point Roy Kellerman says to Gerald Behn: "I'm sure the Volunteer boys will go over his car and so forth." ("Volunteer" was the WHCA code word used for LBJ.) Late in the flight, as Air Force One nears Andrews, someone is heard discussing the status of the flight carrying the two vehicles—the Presidential limousine and the Queen Mary—back to Washington. [The "Volunteer boys" is surely a reference to Secret Service agents assigned to LBJ; I wonder whether Kellerman was discussingan impending search of the Presidential limousine, in an attempt to remove any of the 'wrong' kind of evidence—such as evidence of shots from the front striking the automobile?]

• Background chatter can be heard at one point, discussing a "limousine and ambulance at Andrews," and at another juncture, as part of this same background chatter, the phrase "black Cadillac" can be heard. [A hearse is a black Cadillac.]

• During the flight, "SAM Command Post" (undefined) calls Air Force One and a Colonel 'Arnbuck' (phonetic spelling) expresses a concern from the Chief of Staff (almost certainly Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay) as to whether President Johnson and Mr. Kennedy's body are onboard the aircraft.

• During the flight, several players make plans to separate Mrs. Kennedy from JFK's body [i.e., the Dallas casket] after landing. General Clifton is the person who asked for a personnel ramp after landing at the forward starboard galley door for Mrs. Kennedy's debarkation. Gerald Behn attempts on two occasions to separateall passengers aboard Air Force One from JFK's body after landing (desiring to send 'the body' to Bethesda via helicopter, and all other passengers to the south grounds of the White House via helicopter also). [Since we now know—thanks to the Boyajian document—that the Dallas casket had to be empty when it was offloaded from Air Force One, the repeated interest in separating JBK from the Dallas casket indicates an intention to reunite the body with the casket prior to the autopsy.]

• Immediately after Behn ordered Kellerman to "...accompany the body aboard the helicopter," the following exchange took place:
Kellerman: I was unable to get ahold of Payne and Bob Burke (names are phonetic approximations).
Kellerman or Behn: ...Payne and Burke at the ranch...
Unidentified: ...Payne and Burke were not notified...

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• Finally, "Wing" (Kennedy's Air Force aide, General Godfrey McHugh) asks "Crown"(the White House situation room) to contact "Slugger" (USAF Captain Cecil Stoughton), and to direct him to meet the aircraft as soon as possible on the ground at Andrews. A reason is not given, but the urgency and importance of the matter to General McHugh is quite clear because of his tone of voice. "Crown" later informs "Wing" that "Slugger" remained on the ground in Dallas. [Cecil Stoughton took the now infamous photo of Congressman Al Thomas of Houston smiling and winking at LBJ immediately after Johnson had been sworn in as President onboard Air Force One, just prior to takeoff from Love Field. Could LBJ have been concerned about the possibility of the 'wink' photo getting published? He need not have worried;

Cecil Stoughton had better discretion than that. However, he was aware of the political significance of the photograph. When David Lifton called him to ask him about the photo just prior to its publication inBest Evidence, Stoughton expressed surprise and alarm, and asked Lifton how he knew about it. Apparently, the LBJ Library had printed it for Lifton by mistake; Stoughton clearly thought it had been suppressed. Author Richard Trask writes (on page 47 of Pictures of the Pain) that the negative of the 'wink photo' has now disappeared from the LBJ Library.]


DOUG HORNE IARRB p. 1660

THE AIR FORCE ONE TAPES: MORE EVIDENCE OF A U.S. GOVERNMENT COVERUP

In his 1996 book History Will Not Absolve Us, author E. Martin Schotz writes of Vincent Salandria's discovery in 1966 of an extremely early Government attempt at a simplistic whitewash, placing the sole blame for the assassination on a lone malcontent, Lee Harvey Oswald, before Air Force One even landed at Andrews Air Force Base on November 22, 1963. Salandria's discovery came from Theodore H. White's book The Making of a President, 1964 – in which White wrote on page 20:

There is a tape recording in the archives of the Government which best recaptures the sound of the hours as it waited for leadership. It is a recording of all the conversations in the air, monitored by the [Army] Signal Corps Midwestern center "Liberty," between Air Force One in Dallas, the Cabinet plane over the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs' Communication Center in Washington.

White continued on page 48:

On the flight the party learned that there was no conspiracy, learned of the identity of Oswald and his arrest; and the President's mind turned to the duties of consoling the stricken and guiding the quick.

Corroboration for White's claim can be found in the 1993 oral history edited by Gerald S. and Debroah H. Strober, Let Us Begin Anew: An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency. On pages 450-451, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Manning – who was aboard the Cabinet plane to Japan with Secretary of State Rusk and Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger – is quoted as saying that the White House situation room was in continuous voice contact with the Cabinet aircraft, and not only informed Rusk that "Lancer [the President] is dead," but also told the editors of the book: "The news then came in that someone named Oswald who had been in the Soviet Union had done this."

This is most curious, since on November 23, 1963 (the next morning) the Dallas Morning News printed the following, quoting District Attorney Henry Wade from the previous day:"…preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting…the electric chair is too good for the killers."

For the Dallas District Attorney to say that preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting was quite understandable, given that the suspect's rifle was found in the Book Depository (behind the motorcade at the time of the shooting), and yet numerous eyewitnesses indicated shots had unmistakenly come from the Grassy Knoll, to the right front of the vehicle at the time of the shooting. What is truly strange is that anyone in the White House Situation Room could pass on a solution to the crime while Air Force One was in the air enroute from Dallas to Washington the day of the assassination – before the sun had even set – when no one in Dallas had solved the crime, or had even yet claimed to have solved the crime. At the time the information White and Manning referred to was passed to Air Force One, suspect Oswald had not even been charged with the murder of the President. If the White House Situation Room had been an honest broker in all of this, its report should have said: "a suspect has been arrested in the shooting of a policeman, and a rifle has been found in a building along the motorcade route." Either someone was feeding the White House Situation Room the desired "legend" about the assassination, or someone in the White House Situation Room was in on the conspiracy.

What was unclear then, and remains unclear now, is whether journalist Theodore H. White listened to these tapes himself, or whether he was indirectly fed some of the information on the tapes by LBJ aids while researching and writing his book. White tries to give the impression that he was privy to the tapes himself, but as subsequent events revealed, this was extremely unlikely. It is much more likely that he was simply told what was on the tapes by an LBJ aid 'on background.' Vincent Salandria's dogged attempts to obtain access to these audio recordings – through Theodore White, the National Archives, Pierre Salinger, and ultimately, the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) – were fruitless.

The White House Communications Agency turned out to be the correct point of contact, but WHCA only hinted at this, neither confirming nor denying that such a tape from 11/22/63 existed, and simply replied to Salandria that any such tapes would not be made available to US citizens:

January 2, 1968

Dear Mr. Salandria:

I have been asked to respond to your letter, addressed to the White House Communications Agency, concerning a tape recording to [sic] Air Force One, November 22, 1963.

Logs and tapes of the radio transmissions of military aircraft, including those of Air Force One, are kept for official use only. These tapes are not releasable, nor are they obtainable from commercial sources.

I am sorry my response cannot be more favorable.

Respectfully,
(Signed)
James U. Cross
Armed Forces Aide to the President"

This response – which undoubtedly was coordinated with LBJ – makes it a virtual certainty that Theodore H. White never listened t the tapes himself, but instead was given a summary account of some of the content material in the recordings by an insider who had listened to them.

As a member of the Military Records Team on the staff of the Assassinations Records Review Board, I did my best to locate the original, unedited Air Force one tapes; ultimately, I had no more success than Vincent Salandria. But by this time – by 1995, when I first became involved in the search – the landscape had changed considerably.

A commercial version – a heavily edited version – of the tapes of in-flight recordings made on 11/22/63 by the White House Communications Agency had surfacedsubsequent to Salandria's search, so the existence of the tapes was no longer subject to question. I visited Archives II on October 10-11, 1995 with colleague Dr. Joan Zimmerman, and listened to the version of the Air Force One tapes released by the LBJ Library. The NARA recordings available at Archives II in College Park, Maryland – sent to them by the LBJ Library – appeared to be identical to what I had purchased through the mail a few years previously through a small Texas bookstore. The very first voice audible on the tape is a member of the Army Signal Corps, who announces that the recording is "edited and condensed." Large portions of the 3 cassette tapes at Archives II consist of blank space, but I would estimate that the total length of spoken material on the 3 cassettes is somewhere between 110-120 minutes, or a maximum of two hours. The information reported below is from the staff memo I wrote about the experience on October 17, 1995.

A so-called "transcript" of the 3 cassette tapes is available in the JFK Records Collection, 67 and is not to be trusted, since it is incomplete, and is not verbatim.

Any interested researcher is advised to request copies of the audiotapes themselves from the audiovisual branch of Archives II in College Park, Maryland (or the LBJ Library itself). One Warren Commission document, a typed statement signed by the radio operator on Air Force One on 11/22/63 – Master Sergeant John C. Trimble, USAF – reveals that four radio frequencies for voice communications had been set up by him the day of the assassination for the flight from Love Field back to Andrews AFB, and that 3 of them were in almost constant use. I quote from his statement: "I ….had three phone patches going simultaneously most of the time."

As an ARRB staff member I was very concerned with determining whether or not a significant portion of time had been excised from the original recordings. Anyone concerned with this exercise must begin with the flight time from Love Field to Andrews AFB: 2 hours 17 minutes. Next, since Trimble had written that he had "three phone patches going simultaneously most of the time," it is wise to take a conservative approach to his statement "most of the time." I interpreted "most of the time" as 2 hours out of the total flight time of 2 hours, 17 minutes. Continuing with this calculation, the reader should multiply 2 hours ('most of the time') times 3 radio circuits ( 'going simultaneously'), i.e., 2 x 3 = 6, which conservatively yields six hours of unedited voice conversationsas the length of the unedited Air Force One tapes

67 In LBJ Library box # 19

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from November 22, 1963. Since the tapes at Archives II are a maximum of two hours in length, approximately 4 hours have been excised. It appears safe to say, then, that the amount of time edited out of the existing tape is twice as long as the length of the information released by the LBJ Library.

This is extremely disturbing.

Furthermore, there is no mention on the edited version of the Air Force Once conversations (with either the White House Situation Room, or the Cabinet plane), of the crime being solved, or of the assassin being captured and identified, as referenced by Theodore White and Robert Manning. I can only conclude from this that the information passed to Air Force One was premature, in that it was too detailed for the information available on the ground in Dallas at the time, and therefore had to be excised from the historical record to protect the conspirators who passed along this information. To have released the unedited tapes would have revealed, directly or indirectly, the identity of one of the conspirators.

One prominent voice that is present on the tapes is that of Gerald Behn, the Head of the White House Detail of the U.S. Secret Service, who had chosen to take leave during the President's trip to Texas, but was nevertheless present in the White House Situation Room coordinating arrangements. In one conversation that did survive on the edited version, Behn is heard ordering ASAIC Roy Kellerman (who was in charge of the Dallas trip, who was in the front right-hand seat of the limousine in Dallas, and who subsequently monitored and partially controlled entrance to the morgue during the autopsy), "You accompany the body [of the President] aboard the helicopter." This is particularly interesting, since the Dallas casket was transported by a Navy Ambulance, containing Greer, Kelleman, RFK, JBK, and others. 68.

There can be heard on the existing tape what appear to be crude edits and breaks in the conversation, as well as references to other conversations which are not on the tape available today. The indecision, or rather tug-of-war, over whether the President's autopsy should be performed at Walter Reed Hospital or Bethesda Naval Hospital is one of the subjects of interest on the edited tapes, as is interest by the White House in the limousine and follow-up car being transported back to Washington D.C. in a C-130 aircraft. In another tantalizing fragment of a conversation on the edited tapes, there is discussion of a "limousine and ambulance at Andrews," and an indistinct reference to a "black Cadillac" at one point. It is unclear whether this is a reference to a hearse (which is indeed a black Cadillac), or to the follow-up car in the Dallas motorcade, the so-called Queen Mary, which was itself a black Cadillac convertible. In one fragment of conversation, a Colonel from OPS expresses a concern from the Chief of Staff (General LeMay?) as to whetherPresident Johnson or Mr. Kennedy's body is onboard the aircraft. One would have expected the Chief of Staff of the Air Force to be concerned with the overall DEFCON status, or the alert status of SAC's bombers and ICBMs, not the whereabouts of JFK's body. This seems to me

[68 It is still unknown today whether JFK's body was helicoptered from Andrews to the grounds of Bethesda and then placed in a black hearse, or whether a black hearse spirited it at high speed, uninterrupted, directly from Andrews to the loading dock outside the Bethesda morgue. The fact that President Kennedy's body actually arrived at 1835 (6:35 PM) at the loading dock outside the Bethesda NNMC morgue, whereas the Andrews motorcade did not arrived until about 6:55 PM (twenty minutes later), strongly implies that a helicopter was used to transport it to the Navy complex, and that it was united with the Gawler's hearse containing Hagen and Robinson a short distance from the hospital complex itself. ]

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a pretty damning statement, given the fact that LeMay disobeyed orders from the Secretary of the Air Force to proceed to Andrews AFB; instead proceeded to the Natinoal Airport near downtown Washington D.C.; and was reported by autopsy technician Paul O'Conner to have been at President Kennedy's autopsy.

The White House Communications Agency played 'dumb' with the ARRB on the subject of the Air Force One tapes, as did the LBJ Library. Neither entity professed to having any knowledge as to who edited the tapes, when they were edited, or the whereabouts of the unedited version, if it even existed (which I seriously doubt).

As the Final Report of the ARRB states:

The Review Board sought to locate any audio recordings of voice communications to or from Air Force One on the day of the assassination, including communications between Air Force One and Andrews Air Force Base during the return flight from Dallas to Washington, D.C. As many people are now aware, in the 1970s, the LBJ Presidential Library released edited audio cassettes of unsecured, or open voice conversations with Air Force One, Andrews Air Force Base, the White House Situation Room, and the Cabinet aircraft carrying the Secretary of State and other officials on November 22, 1963. The LBJ Library version of these tapes consists of about 110 minutes of vice transmissions, but the tapes are edited and condensed, so the Review Board staff sought access to unedited, uncondensed versions. Since the edited version of the tapes contains considerable talk about both the forthcoming autopsy on the President, as well as the reaction of a government in crisis, the tapes are of considerable interest to assassination researchers and historians.

Given that the LBJ Library released the tapes in the 1970s, the paper trail is now sketchy and quite cold. The LBJ Library staff is fairly confident that the tapes originated with the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). The LBJ Library staff told the ARRB that it received the tapes from the White House as part of the original shipment of President Johnson's papers in 1968 or 1969. According to the LBJ Library's documentation, the accession card reads: "WHCA?" and is dated 1975. The Review Board staff could not locate any records indicating who performed the editing, or when, or where.

The Review Board's repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communication Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes.

I was the person on the staff driving the effort to find the original, unedited Air Force Once tapes, and I do not mind admitting that our inability to obtain any information whatsoever from WHCA was extremely frustrating, and disappointing. Not only was the paper trail extremely old (and cold), but the attitude of the WHCA official responsible for ARRB liaison was one of amusement, and barely concealed contempt for the Review Board's concern over this issue.

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FINAL REPORT OF THE ARRB, CHAPTER SIX

6. White House Communications Agency

WHCA was, and is, responsible for maintaining both secure (encrypted) and unsecured (open) telephone, radio, and telex communication between the President and the government of the United States. Most of the personnel that constitute this elite agency are U.S. military communications specialists; many, in 1963, were from the Army Signal Corps. On November 22, 1963, WHCA was responsible for communications between and among Air Force One and Two, the White House Situation Room, the mobile White House, and with the Secret Service in the motorcade.

The Review Board sought to locate any audio recordings of voice communications to or from Air Force One on the day of the assassination, including communications between Air Force One and Andrews Air Force Base during the return flight from Dallas to Washington, D.C. As many people are aware, in the 1970s, the LBJ Presidential Library released edited audio cassettes of unsecured, or open voice communications with Air Force One, Andrews Air Force Base, the White House Situation Room, and the Cabinet Aircraft carrying the Secretary of State and other officials on November 22, 1963. The LBJ Library version of these tapes consists of about 110 minutes of voice transmission, but the tapes are edited and condensed, so the Review Board staff sought access to the unedited versions. Since the edited version of the tapes contains considerable talk about both the forthcoming autopsy on the President, as well as the reaction of a government in crisis, the tapes are of considerable interest to assassination researchers and historians.

Given that the LBJ Library released the tapes in the 1970s, the paper trail is now sketchy and quite cold. The LBJ Library staff is fairly confident that the tapes originated with the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). The LBJ Library staff told the Review board staff that it received the tapes from the White House as part of the original shipment of President Johnson’s papers in 1968 or 1969. According to the LBJ Library’s documentation, the accession card reads: “WHCA?” and is dated 1975. The Review Board staff could not locate any records indicating who performed the editing, or when, or where.

The Review Board’s repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes.

FINAL REPORT ARRB Chapter Six p. 116